Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It started in Paris, with two simple words: fuck Batman.

He didn’t know where he was anymore. He had gotten lost about five fucking blocks and six-hundred winding alleys ago, because fuck European cities and their organically grown network of roads when all he was used to were fucking American cities that had been carved out with a ruler and pencil.

No. ‘Lost’ was not the right word. ‘Lost’ would have implied that he had somewhere, a home, to get back to, but he didn’t, and the sudden realization, the finality of this emotional punch to his gut was what finally brought Jason to his knees, somewhere in the godforsaken alleys of St. Denis in the middle of the fucking night, and forced tears into his eyes.

He had no home anymore. No family. How naïve he had been to think that he could just ditch Talia’s goons and run back to Gotham! The scene unfolded in his head like a particularly bad, kitschy movie from the 60s – knocking on the front door of the manor, Alfred opening it and greeting him with tears of joy, Bruce running up to him, hugging him, holding him tight, telling Jason that he loved him and missed him and didn’t blame him – never had – and that everything was going to be okay now and that he was just so happy Jason’s back, and—BULLSHIT.

It was all bullshit. It was a fairy tale conjured up by his fucked up, traumatized brain to deal with everything he remembered and everything he didn’t, but had been told by Talia.

How he had died.

How he had come back.

How he had spent almost a year on the streets of Gotham, a mindless husk that had lived off instinct.

How Bruce had failed to find him.

How Bruce had failed to avenge him.

Joker. The fucking clown. The fucking, living clown.

He remembered reading the newspaper article. The one about Batman delivering Joker back into Arkham Asylum for the fifteen-hundredth fucking time. He remembered the sudden pain, like a mine detonating inside his chest and tearing him apart from the inside out. The simplest truths always hurt the most.

Jason had been allowed to be murdered, buried, and forgotten.

Joker had been allowed to murder, live, and make good use of Arkham’s revolving door.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it was all Bruce’s fault.

And then the metal can clicked.

Jason whirled around instantly, sharply-honed instincts forcing him out of his misery and back to the situation at hand. St. Denis. One of Paris’ worst neighborhoods. At night. Alone. Unarmed. What a fan-fucking-tastic idea! In a dingy, piss-smelling alley to his left, a boy’s whimpering and pleading started morphing into pained screams as boot upon boot came down on his ribs, accompanied by a cascade of colorful insults. Somewhere in there, the words ‘chauve-souris’ reached his ear and suddenly he was seeing red.

He jumped straight in and dealt with the biggest guy first, using his own momentum and the young man’s bulk to send him flying into the nearby brick wall face first. He evaded the swing for his head with practiced ease and delivered a kick right into his attacker’s crotch, then grabbed the third guy by the arm that had procured a knife and forced him down to the ground in the swift circle motion Bruce had taught him in his very first Aikido class. Bruce would have stopped there. Jason grinded the bastard’s face into the dirt until he was howling in pain.

The big guy was back for round two, but Jason was ready. He dodged two punches, then wrapped himself around the thug in a motion so quick and seamless, it had those huge, unskilled hands grasping for limbs that were no longer there. It ended with Jason’s thighs around the man’s head, pulling him down and sending him hard into the pavement.

They scrambled only a few seconds later. Jason gave one of them a kick in the rear as they ran, then turned to help the kid they had been beating on back up. There was black and silver paint on his hands and clothes, little sprinkles and smears like from a pressurized nozzle. A graffiti kid. Technically illegal. Practically, Jason couldn’t have given less of a fuck. Not after everything that had happened. Tonight. And before.

At least some of his anger must have shown in his eyes, because suddenly the kid spooked. He turned tail and ran as fast as he could, uneven steps pattering off the ground and indicating injury to at least one leg. Jason took a look at the wall he had been tagging and felt his body froze from head to toe.

The words ‘il nous faut un Batman’ glared at him in big, bold, ugly-ass letters above a crude bat symbol. Suddenly the pain from before was back, sharp and hot as ever.

No one needs a fucking Batman, because Batman is fucking useless.

He found the silver can thanks to what little light came in from the street reflecting off the metal. Jason shook it hard, then aimed carefully and painted over the entire thing in swift, clean strokes that tapered off at end.

FUCK BATMAN

***

Getting away from Talia’s goons was easy. Getting away from Ra’s and his blood hounds… not so much. Jason cursed as he dodged another group of suspiciously unsuspicious gunmen and headed out of Port Adams and into the city. It would be easier, now that he was back in familiar territory, now that he knew where the fuck he was and where the hell he would be able to hide.

He started in the Bowery, scooping out abandoned buildings that would make for good hiding places. It was a skill he had learned many, many, many years ago. Back then, ‘has a roof and a safe place for a fire’ would have been good enough for him and he would have had hundreds of buildings to choose from. This time, Jason was pickier.

It took him the better part of the afternoon to find a good place, but eventually he did. The building had been condemned not too long ago and while there were signs of obvious wear-and-tear, it was strong enough to withstand Gotham’s average March weather. The fire escapes on the outside of the building were old and rusty, but there were telegraph poles and other buildings’ balconies within reach, should he have to make a run for it. Most importantly, though, the ground floor was already occupied by other squatters, which meant that if someone came to raid the place from below, he’d have plenty of warning shouts. It would be alright, so long as he could be silent.

And if Jason had learned one thing under Batman’s wing, it was how to be silent as a shadow.

The food was next. No perishables, just cans and dried and packaged food. Jason had learned that lesson the hard way, too. The first night he had woken up with rats scurrying through his hard-earned supplies, he had screamed like a little girl. He would not repeat those mistakes now that he was older and wiser. He hid most of it in a sealed bag underneath the old, rotten wood in the fireplace of the bedroom, but made sure to keep enough for two meals in the backpack he used for a pillow at all times. In case he had to run.

The hardest parts were the gadgets. He no longer had a home and despite having found a place to sleep, Jason was nowhere near foolish enough to believe it would make for a good base of operations. Safe storage was not an option and that meant he had to travel light. If it didn’t fit into his jacket, it had no business being with him. He cursed softly under his breath as he took apart the supplies he had bought at the nearest home depot and recombined them into a grappling hook and little smoke pellets.

The remaining essentials – blankets, soap, a tooth brush, tape, and re-sealable bags – were easy enough to come by. Talia had been generous enough to give him a bunch of credit cards after all (and Jason had been generous enough to only use them once, for the biggest cash withdrawal he could get while still in France, before tossing them into the Seine). He counted the money when he was done arranging his supplies. Jason smiled. Even subtracting what he would expect to be the highest price for spray paint, he would still have cash to go on for months. It was a luxury he hadn’t had the last time he had lived on the streets, and he was determined to keep it. He portioned it into three dozen separate bags and set out to find enough nooks and crannies in Gotham to hide them all.

By the time he returned to his hideout, the sun was coming up above the horizon. On the ground floor, his early warning birds flocked into the house slowly. He waited until they were asleep, then counted to six-hundred as he surveyed the perimeter. He had seen some of Ra’s’ men earlier in the night, but they had not seen him. Now, the coast was clear. Once he finished his count, Jason took a deep sigh and burrowed into the make-shift bed he had laid out for himself.

Tomorrow, the real work would begin.

***

The home depot was almost deserted when he walked in just before closing time, which was probably for the best. Jason pointedly ignored the despaired looks of the attendants as he waltzed through the door with literally three minutes to spare – this would not take long, because he knew exactly what he needed. He took four of the black cans – black as a bat – and, purely on a whim, - one of each red, yellow, and green – Robin’s colors – and headed for the register. He wondered if he’d have to delve into those, or if Bruce would find him before.

Then again, he apparently hadn’t found Jason, not even once, in all the months he had supposedly wandered Gotham’s streets before. Jason was not going to hold his breath.

His first target was Crime Alley. It was where everything had begun. Where he had begun. Where Batman had begun. Where Bruce had found him, all those years ago. It seemed an appropriate place to start.

He worked counter-clockwise, starting in an alley near Sheldon Park. FUCK BATMAN. The letters were big and bold and black against the red bricks of the old warehouse. He stayed just long enough to spray paint the same words all over every window and some of the bigger patches of uninterrupted wall on the first floor, before creeping into the shadows on the other side of the street. From the distance, it almost looked like ‘ROMANI ITE DOMUM’ from The Life Of Brian. It almost made him want to laugh. Perhaps, if he would run out of patience, he should start writing ‘BRUCE I DOMUM’ instead.

Newton was next, then Burnley. FUCK BATMAN. He made his way inwards each time, moving from the edges of the bordering district closer to the center of Crime Alley. Sometimes he managed to paint an entire wall, sometimes he actually had company, leaving him to tag only a window or a door, before dodging and moving on to the next abandoned place. At the corner to Burnley and the Bowery, a mugger with infinitely more brawn than brains tried his luck. Jason made quick work of him and used the idiot’s shoelaces to tie his wrists to the nearest rainwater pipe before moving on.

By the time he had reached the center of Crime Alley, his right hand was starting to cramp. He discarded the third can and was just about to tag the rotting remains of Ma Gunn’s – and good fucking riddance to the fucking place! – when he noticed the glow from a nearby alley. Jason shoved the fourth can of black back into his backpack and went to investigate.

The mosque was on fire, flames licking at the sky and belching thick, black smoke. Yellow and red danced in front of his eyes. Somewhere in the distance, someone was shouting. Then, something inside the building, something even more flammable than the woodwork, must have dropped into the blaze, because suddenly there was a noise as if something had dived right into the inferno head first. The flames rushed in around it, squeezing roars out of the accelerant.

Then, the fire was on his skin.

He could feel it flowing around his skin like water, but cutting deep like a knife. It burned hotter than a hundred suns, gnawing deeper and deeper into him, before pushing into his lungs, inflating them with a burst to gasp for air he couldn’t have. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t reach. He couldn’t swim. He couldn’t escape.

Not real! Jason grasped at what little sanity he felt he had left and ran. The mosque was over there. He was right here. It couldn’t be real. He was not on fire. He was not dying. He was alive and—

The next wave came crushing down hard and slammed him into a nearby concrete wall. His backpack slipped from his shoulders, spilling the cans to his feet, and he knew what he had to do.

He started with the yellow, because the yellow was everywhere, in every flame, every wave that touched him.

No. Not yellow. Gold.

He added a layer of red, then another of yellow and the color was so close to the hell his mind had for some fucked up reason decided to unleash upon him that it forced a hysterical laugh from his throat. He painted wave upon wave as they whirled around him, dragging him under and tossing him around like a ragdoll. Jason followed their movements with his hand, guiding the cans along the wall long after they had been depleted and the spray had stopped. It wasn’t until the sound of sirens pierced through the noise of the illusion that his feet finally followed his brain again.

Jason grappled up into the darkness, into the air, out of the waves, and ditched the depleted cans the moment his feet hit the roof. Then, he started running, hoping the inferno would not follow.

***

It was a slow night. Cassandra was not sure how a night could be slow. Dark. Long or short. Cold or warm. Those made sense. But Oracle had said ‘slow’. Words were weird.

“Oracle?”

“Yes, Batgirl?”

“How can a night be slow?”

Oracle laughed. Cassandra could not see her, but she could tell from the laugh. Oracle was not mad. She was not making fun of her. The laugh was... harmless. Like a newborn puppy without teeth.

“It is a figure of speech,” Oracle finally explained. “A common phrase. It means there is not much happening. Not much to do.”

“You are right.” Cassandra grappled up onto a nearby gargoyle and melted into the shadows. “Tonight is slow.”

It really was. She had been patrolling all the way from the Clock Tower to Crime Alley tonight and she had stopped three muggers, one thief, and two vandals. Six criminals in all of Gotham. That was nothing.

Even Crime Alley was quiet tonight. Cassandra did not know why. It was warm outside. It had rained during the day, but not anymore. The sky was cloudy. Half the street lamps were broken. Good conditions for crime, but there was no crime. She had been patrolling this part of the city for almost an hour now and nothing had happened. It was... strange.

“I’m as surprised as you are, Cassie,” Oracle pitched in and Batgirl raised an eyebrow at the name. She was wearing the suit. No one should call her ‘Cass’ or ‘Cassie’ now. “But trust me: you will come to like slow nights. It’s nice to have breaks from the madness once in a while. You know... like little breaks between training sessions.”

“Nice for you,” Cassandra lobbed back and hopped to the next rooftop. She started running, aimed the grappling hook, and shot off into the night like a bullet, then stretched her cape out to glide.

Cassandra hated breaks. Breaks were useless. They made her feel useless. Cain never let her have breaks. Batman did, but she had a feeling that was Barbara’s doing. Oracle. She always wanted her to take breaks. Cassandra just wanted to work. To save lives. To make all of it mean something.

She landed on top of Leslie’s clinic, softly as a cat. There were no sirens. No shouting. Leslie did not seem to be busy either. That was good. There had been a fire in a nearby mosque last night. If Leslie was not busy tonight, that meant not many people had been injured.

“I will investigate the mosque.”

Cassandra didn’t wait for confirmation. It was a slow night. There was nothing better to do.

“Cassie...” That tone again. Barbara wanted her to take a break. “Bruce already looked into it yesterday. So did GCPD. Why don’t you say hi to Leslie instead? She’ll be happy to see you again.”

Cassandra suppressed the urge to snort at the pathetic ruse. “Slow night.”

She was halfway to the mosque when a flash of yellow in the alleys below caught her eye. Cassandra shot out her grappling hook and banked hard. She landed on the edge of a roof, an inch away from a forty-foot drop. The alley below was deserted, but it seemed... alive. The painting seemed to be... alive.

“Batgirl, is everything alright?” There was an edge of concern to Oracle’s voice. “Your tracker says you stopped rather suddenly. Mosque is still two blocks ahead.”

“There is... something.” She did not know a better word. She was not sure there was a word to describe the feeling in her spine, in her skull. Something was drawing her to that painting. Cassandra activated the lenses of her cowl, checked for unwanted company, and dropped into the alley.

“Okay, Batgirl, I don’t have a direct link into your cowl and there are no cameras in that alley. What are you looking at?”

“A painting. A painting on the wall.”

“Graffiti. A form of vandalism.”

“Beautiful vandalism.”

Barbara laughed, but Cassandra tuned it out. The painting, the graffiti, was beautiful. The colors were flowing like liquid gold. It looked so warm, so soft... She traced one of the curves with her right hand and was almost disappointed that she could not feel flow. It looked so... real.

It was also disturbing. Cassandra took a step back as the feeling in her gut finally shifted. The longer she looked at the painting, the worse she felt. The longer she looked, the more the waves looked like fire. The more she looked, the tighter the ball in her stomach got. This painting was radiating pain.

“Well,” Oracle’s voice broke through the silence of the alley like a fresh gust of wind and Batgirl was thankful. She took a deep breath. “It is a slow night. How about we test your detective skills on something that’s not murder and rape for a change?”

“You want me to find the painter?”

“The vandal,” Oracle corrected. “I doubt we’ll find him, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use this as training. You love training, right?”

Cass drew her lips into a pout. She wanted to say something clever in return, but Oracle was right. She loved training.

“Where do we start?”

“The scene.” She could hear Oracle’s fingers crack on the other end of the line. “We are going top-down. Take a few stills of the painting and the surrounding ground and wall. I can grab them from your cowl’s storage as soon as they are saved.”

Cassandra did as she was instructed. She took every shot twice, as Oracle had taught her, in case the first one did not come out right.

“Good. I’ve got the pictures and—wow.” There was a long pause and Cass could just see Oracle crane her neck this way and that while looking at the pictures. “That really is a beautiful painting.”

“Wait a few minutes.” She was sure Oracle would get the same feeling Cassandra had. Her instincts were good. “What’s next?”

“Tags. Graffiti artists usually leave little signatures called ‘tags’ in the corners of their paintings. Can you see anything?”

Cassandra took a careful look around the edges of the painting. “Nothing.” Then, a thought occurred to her. “Maybe more than one artist. Big painting.” She activated the grid view of her lenses. “Seven by four feet.”

“And graffiti artists can’t stay in one place for long, because they don’t want to get caught,” Oracle said. “So either we are dealing with a team or with one really, really ballsy painter.”

“Vandal,” Cassandra corrected and Oracle sighed loudly. Batgirl smiled. “What next?”

“Prints. Check the painting and the surrounding wall for finger prints.”

Cassandra did. There was nothing. Whoever had done this had been very careful. Or wearing gloves. or both.

“Footprints then.” Oracle cracked her knuckles. “Check the area directly in front of the painting. The rain will probably have washed most of it away, but we can try.”

She did try. Cassandra went over every square inch in front of the wall. Oracle was right. Most prints were gone. There was a partial boot print on a piece of cardboard below the right third of the painting, but that was all. She sent the results to Oracle and took a step back.

“Anything else?”

“Samples. Scrape off some of the paint and we’ll see if we can narrow down the manufacturer.”

Cassandra frowned. It was a beautiful painting. Haunting, but beautiful. She did not want to ruin it, but orders were orders. She took out the little knife and glass from her utility belt and chipped off a few pieces near the edge and in the middle. It felt wrong.

“Done.”

“Alright then. Return to patrol. I’ll analyze what we have and go through the nearby camera feeds. Drop by the tower before you go home and we’ll go over it.”

Batgirl muttered a short ‘understood’ and took one last look at the painting. Beautiful, but haunting.

***

It was early morning when Cassandra returned to the Clock Tower. Barbara was tired. She could tell from the slight sagging of her shoulders and the way her cheeks tensed when she smiled. Still, she made her breakfast – omelets and jasmine tea – before turning back to her computers. Cassandra took off the cowl and cape, accepted her food, and sat down on the chair to Barbara’s left.

The case file opened quickly, spilling out stills of the painting. Even now it looked like it flowed.

“So, bad news first,” Oracle took a deep gulp from her coffee. “The boot print wasn’t good enough to narrow down a brand or model, but that is not your fault. The paint is Ballista Sunflower Yellow and Carmine Red. Widely available in any home depot store. Not the cheapest. Not the most expensive either.”

“Nothing good.”

“No, nothing identifiable,” Barbara admitted, “but here is where things get interesting: style. Each artist has their own style.” Barbara’s fingers raced over the keyboard and a new image appeared on the screens – layers and layers and layers. Barbara pointed with the pencil from her desk. “I tried to extrapolate the layers. Whoever this guy is, he is putting layers upon layers upon layers of paint on there to mix his colors. Some of the more complex pieces of this painting have sixteen layers!”

“And that is unusual?” Cass asked before wolfing down the first half of her omelet.

“It is ballsy,” Oracle mused. “And inefficient. Uses up a lot of paint and, more importantly, time. Every layer this guy put on the wall was another chance to get caught.”

“But he did not.”

“No, he didn’t.” She showed Cassandra the camera feed. “Graffiti is considered an art by many people and someone who, by their own admission, lives in that neighborhood, tweeted pictures of it earlier tonight, saying it hadn’t been there two days ago. So I went back forty-eight hours.”

Barbara fast-forwarded the feeds and Cassandra watched closely. Early in the last morning, a man in a red hoodie had stumbled into the alley from the direction of the mosque. Hours passed. No-one got out. The feed reached her time of arrival, but the man in the red hoodie was nowhere to be seen. Barbara sighed.

“Either this guy is Spiderman or he climbed through a window and out the other side of the building. Camera coverage in Crime Alley is thin. I doubt we’ll find him.”

“We could try.”

“We could,” Barbara agreed, “but I’ll save it for another slow night. Vandalism is really not that awful. Not by Gotham standards at least.”

Cassandra could only agree. Gotham was... bad. That was why it needed Batman and Robin, Batgirl and Oracle. Every night. She finished her breakfast and set the dishes down in the sink, before giving Barbara a short bow.

“Thank you for the food, Barbara. See you tonight.”

“Take care, Cassie. And get some rest!”

Cassandra pulled her cowl and cape back on and grappled out of the tower. ‘Rest’ sounded good, but the moment she thought about sleep, the painting was there in her head. Beautiful and haunting. She doubted she would sleep well today.

Chapter Text

He woke up to the feeling of a jackhammer against the inside of his skull. Jason cursed as he blinked through the glaringly bright light and rolled over, away from the window.

What a fantastic way to start his second life in Gotham.

The pounding in his head continued, but he had had migraines before. Jason exhaled deeply, then searched for the nerve cluster in his neck that linked to the pain center of his brain. He gritted his teeth hard and pinched, swallowing the whine that wanted to come with the sharp, sudden sting. As the hammering in his head finally subsided, Jason felt the tension drain from his limbs. That was the migraine taken care off. At least for now.

His fingers were an entirely different matter. Jason rolled onto his back and stretched his hands out in front of his face, grimacing at the dull ache of over-worked muscles in his right hand and the sting of a cut in the left. How he had gotten that one, he had no idea, but it would need some disinfectant. The aching fingers, though. Yeah. He remembered how he had gotten those. At least partially.

The first half of last night, hell, the first eighty percent of it, were pretty clear in Jason’s mind. He had gone to Crime Alley. He had spray-painted every abandoned building he had come across between Sheldon Park and Burnley. FUCK BATMAN. He had run through three cans of black paint.

The last twenty percent were about as consistent as most of his recent memory though: patchy, holey like Swiss cheese.

There had been a burning mosque. Jason remembered that much. He had seen the building gone up in flames and then something inside him had become unhinged. He remembered the sudden snap as the fire had gone from over there to in here, but after that everything was a blur. Jason sat up slowly and reached for his backpack.

The yellow and red paint were gone and there were smudges on the backpack’s straps where he had gripped them. Now that he saw them, he could also see the faint traces of color on his gloves. So he had used the cans. He had not lost them. He had discarded them after use.

What the hell had he painted that required a full can of red and yellow each? The temptation to go back and see was starting to bubble up inside him, like soda in a badly shaken can, but he pushed the thought down. Returning to the scene of the crime was the rookiest of all rookie mistakes. From here on out, he would not set foot in Crime Alley again. His work there was done.

How he had managed to get back to his hideout was a mystery, but at least it seemed no-one had followed him. All his things were undisturbed. His food stash was in perfect condition. Jason brushed his teeth, dug two of the protein bars out of his food bag, and washed them down with the last bit of fresh water he had left. It was time to go shopping again.

This time, it only took him half the time it had before. He stuck to the alleys and shadows as he headed for the 7/11, the pharmacy, and the DIY store. Batman may not have been a creature of the day, but the League did not rest and he did not need them on his tail. Of course, chances were good that Talia had already found him, that she knew what he was doing and was just observing for now, to see if he would try to come back to her or try to kill Bruce.

Jason wasn’t planning to give her the satisfaction of doing either.

This time he headed for the Bowery. He knew it almost as well as Crime Alley, although it had changed a bit since he had last set foot in Jezebel Plaza or the pier by Sprang River. In contrast to Crime Alley, the Bowery was not yet considered a lost cause. Low income, high crime? Sure. A desolate, lawless wasteland? No. Here, some of the city council still had hope that a few more pennies could be made if they only renovated the buildings properly or tore down the really bad ones and put down some crappy pre-fab apartment complex and maybe run an extra GCPD patrol or two to make people feel safer.

It didn’t work, of course. All the fresh paint in the world couldn’t hide the smell of blood or mold. The rats certainly did not care if a building was old or new, so long as it had holes big enough to squeeze through. And one or two extra patrols were nothing more than a drop in the bucket. The people who actually lived in the Bowery knew that, but then again no-one on the council would have been caught dead in that part of the city.

The mere thought made Jason’s blood boil. Politicians... all a bunch of fucking hypocrites, just like Batman. Fucking hypocrite. He had pretended that Jason was special, but apparently not special enough to put his murderer down like the fucking piece of shit he was. Jason would make him regret it.

He started at the pier near Robbinsville, systematically dodging one CCTV camera after the next until he had finally spray-painted every abandoned building along the river. Some punks with knives had made a grab for the cash he wasn’t carrying halfway through his first hour. He had put them in the river and continued painting. If he was being honest with himself, Jason hadn’t minded the company. It was good exercise, even if they had been far too easy to take out. Once he reached the border to Burnley, he started working his way upwards through the grid.

He got bored halfway through the district.

At first, Jason wasn’t entirely sure what it was that bothered him. His first instinct was that it was the monotonous nature of Gotham’s street planning – cut out with a pencil and a ruler on paper first. He was starting to miss the winding alleys of St. Denis, the labyrinthine mess of Paris’ streets. With that thought in mind, Jason started randomizing his route. After all, who would care if he didn’t get every single building?

Certainly not Bruce, Jason thought bitterly as he used his grappling gun to reach the upper floors of the blank wall where part of an old block had recently been torn down. He doubted Bruce had cared about anything or anyone in a long, long time.

***

The randomized route didn’t help. Jason scowled as he dug into his breakfast while watching the latest news footage on the phone he had swiped from the sicko he had run into just before going home, the fucking bastard who thought Jason was going to give him a good time. Jason doubted he was gonna get many good times in jail.

He had finished his task and that much was good. The Bowery was fully covered now, but that didn’t really help. Somehow, something was missing. Jason closed the GCN podcast and started a custom search instead.

And, holy shit, it was amazing how many people hated Batman.

Jason smiled as he settled back against the wall and started browsing the Batman flaming thread of the ex-convict forum he had landed on. It was always a joy to see how creative people could get when they needed to avoid a spam filter. Every once in a while, a post sounded almost familiar – the choice of words, the grammar, the description of how the writer had met Batman – to the point where he was fairly certain he had read at least half a dozen comments from Nigma.

Still, as entertaining as the little excursion was, it was not what he had been looking for. Jason closed the tab and started a new, more specific search.

This time, he hit the jackpot on the second link.

It was a forum for graffiti aficionados, a safe haven for the appreciation of urban art. The thread itself was called “’Fuck Batman tags in Crime Alley’”. Jason hit the link and started browsing. With every post, frustration grew inside his belly.

The general consensus seemed to be that whoever had done it was very angry, very fast, and very unskilled. The words ‘ugly’, ‘amateurish’, and ‘worthless’ fell at least a few dozen times. Jason felt his fingers coil around the phone case. He was not worthless.

If they wanted art, they’d get art.

***

He started the next week, in the southeastern corner of Burnely, with solid black, but more refined lettering design. If they wanted calligraphy, Jason would give them fucking calligraphy.

He had practiced the new font on paper for the rest of the week, a simple, yet elegant strokes of brushes, based on the ‘Dragonflight’ font, with its strong bases and dynamic sweeps. He had added a thinner line next to each base stroke, as if the base of the pen had a crack in it. On paper, it had looked just fine.

Of course, reproducing it on a wall, with an aerosol can, was an entirely different matter. Jason cursed through his chattering teeth – since when had late March gotten so cold? – as he reproduced each stroke on the grainy plaster. His sweeps were uneven. The bars were wobbly. The capital letters in particular, with their combination of sweeps and bases, all of which had to connect seamlessly, were a headache.

There was no denying it. “This thing looks atrocious.”

“I agree.”

Jason jumped, vaulting onto the nearest street light by sheer reflex, dropping the can, and curling his fingers around the knife by his belt on sheer instinct. He was aware how laughable it must have looked to her.

Talia al Ghul stood in the middle of the alley like a statue made flesh. The sword hanging from her belt was more than enough of a match for his knife and the look on her face may have looked neutral to most other people, but Jason could tell that she was pissed. He could feel it in his spine. Also, the fact that she had managed to sneak up on him was more than just a little concerning. He was clearly out of practice.

“What do you want?”

It was more bark than bite. Jason knew it. Talia likely did, too. She waited for a second, then scowled at him as if he were a particularly ill-behaving child.

“When I gave you a bag full of money and passports, I did not intend for you to return to Gotham start defacing his city.”

Jason bristled. “One: it’s not his city. Gotham doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s a beast of its own. Always has been. Always will be. Two: I don’t give a damn what you wanted me to do with the fucking money. I am not your lap dog.”

“You were never supposed to be.”

“Really?” Jason growled as he dropped to the ground. He was not going to run. Not anymore. Not from Talia. Not from Ra’s. It was obviously not working. “Then what the fuck was I supposed to be, huh? Why go through all this trouble? And don’t tell me it was so you could ‘reunite me with him’, because if that had been the case, you could have done it months ago!”

“I could not.” Talia made no move to draw. Jason didn’t buy it. Al Ghuls could not be trusted. None of them. When he didn’t lower the knife, Talia sighed.

“Months ago you were catatonic, Jason.” Her voice was soft, like the sweeps of his custom font, but they cut as sharply as the bars. “By the time my people had found you, you had been wondering Gotham for five months, almost as long as you had rested in your grave, catatonic and broken. You could not speak. You could not act. All you did was react. If someone tried to attack you, you evaded. If someone handed you food, you ate, but none of it was your own design. I took you in and spent more than a year trying to improve your condition. You would not hit me and you cried when I talked to you about Bruce, but other than that, you showed no signs of improvement. My father wanted to have you shipped off to another facility, where you could continue to exist in unchanged, forgotten comfort. I could not let that happen.”

You could have, was the first thought that came to his mind. You would have, if you had had a better chance at getting to Bruce. But Talia hadn’t. Jason had been her best bet and he knew it. That was the only reason why she was still here, the only reason why they were talking, rather than fighting to the death. Talia had not let Ra’s lock him away. But in that case...

“What did you do to me?” Talia raised an eyebrow in confusion, but there was just enough malcontent beneath it to spark a fire in his gut. Jason froze. He remembered that feeling. It was just like a week ago. “You said I was catatonic. I’m not now. What. Did. You. DO. To. Me?”

For a split second, Talia seemed to contemplate just drawing her sword and cutting him down. There was a certain caution in the way her eyes narrowed that Jason had never seen before. Then, Talia took a deep breath.

“I pushed you into a Lazarus Pit.”

He felt sick. He wanted to throw up. Jason swallowed hard and felt the bitter taste of bile in his throat. It made sense now. The fire in his gut, the way it had crawled through his bones up to his lungs and his brains. Waves of gold. Scorching hot waves of gold. Talia had—

“It was necessary,” Talia said, as if she had simply read his mind. “I had no other choice.”

“You always had another choice!” Jason yelled back at her, loud enough to scare a dozen pigeons off the nearest rooftop. “You could have taken me back to him!” The tears stung almost as badly as the memories of the pit. “You could have taken me back... to my family!”

“I could not.” Talia sounded almost sorry about it. Almost. Jason was not buying it. “Things have changed since you died, Jason. There is a new Batgirl... and a new Robin.”

“LIAR!” It had to be a lie. It just had to. Bruce wouldn’t do that to him. Not killing the Joker was one thing, but replacing Jason? Replacing—no. It couldn’t be. “We’re done, Talia. Stay the fuck away from me and don’t ever talk to me again!”

Jason turned and aimed quickly, firing the grappling gun as soon as he had found an anchor point. He started running immediately, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with practiced ease on sheer automatic. Perhaps he had never gotten better. Perhaps he was still just reacting. He certainly didn’t remember how he got back to his hideout.

He would never have to again.

The words were painted all over the bedroom wall in the green paint he had left behind.

Father knows you’re here. Walk a Mile and you will know.

Jason cursed underneath his breath, turned on his heels and started running again. There was no point in staying and he could not take anything from this safe-house. It was useless now. Talia had probably put trackers all over the damn place.

Fuck this night. And fuck Batman.

***

It took him two days to find a new hideout that he could consider sufficiently safe. The Upper East Side had never been his preferred neighborhood, but that was probably a good thing. People would be less likely to search for him here. And people were searching for him. That much had been perfectly clear from the first part of Talia’s message.

The second part was not hard to decipher either. There was only one Mile in Gotham that mattered: the Amusement Mile in the very north of Gotham. The real question was: did he want to know?

Jason told himself ‘no’. Ra’s was a master manipulator. So was Talia. It was entirely possible, logical, and even probable that she had been lying to get under his skin, to manipulate him further. He would not give her the satisfaction. He. Would. Not.

For two days, Jason focused on perfecting his design. Perhaps coming to this part of town had been a good idea, after all. Everything here was more refined. It encouraged him to try harder. It also made him add Ballista’s Shining Silver to his palette. With more practice and literal silver lining, the font looked gorgeous on the stock exchange.

On the third day, Jason broke his promise.

***

The Amusement Mile was just as ghastly as it had always been: glaring neon signs, noise everywhere, the hustle and bustle of people trying their luck in the casinos or visiting one of the many amusement parks and carnivals.

And underneath it all, the lingering fear, the lingering knowledge that this was the worst part of town.

Joker was out of Arkham. Again. The last time he had been apprehended had been Christmas last year, after he had blown Sarah Essen’s brains out and nearly, NEARLY, got Gordon to kill him. A shame. Both.

Now he was out again and business was rolling. The goons he had hired were good, but Jason was better. He entered the first dark casino back alley he could find and started his work. Not a minute later half the letters were done and the first sharks arrived.

He took them down swiftly, shattering five ribs and three legs in the process. That disabled two of them. The third one got a hit to the solarplexus, giving Jason ample opportunity to grind his face into the wall and interrogate him for information. It felt as if he had never been gone from Gotham.

Apparently, a new shipment was coming in through Rogers Yacht Basin. Jason knocked the thug out and made his way to the docks.

He almost, literally ran into him two blocks from the basin.

His cape was black and gold. His vest was red. The R shone proudly on the chest. The pants were longer, covering his entire legs, but there was no denying. This was Robin. And it was not Jason.

Jason felt his feet grind to a halt and slammed against the nearest wall in pain.

There is a new Robin. A. New. Robin.

He repeated the words over in over in his head, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop them from sounding wrong. That boy was real. He shouldn’t be. But he was. Not even two years since his death and there was. A new. Robin.

A better Robin! Joker crooned in the back of his skull. One can hope at least. You died so fast... it was no fun at all.

“No...”

The pictures came back bright and clear and unbidden, flashes of memory in what had been a gray, murky haze before. Flashes of a crowbar. Of blood. Of a red smile on a white face. Joker’s laughter echoed in his head, an incessant, droning noise that cut out any other sound except for the frantic beating of his heart and the rush of burning, hot waves, as the pit and its madness rolled over him once more and squeezed the air out of his lungs. Jason grasped for his backpack just as desperately as he grasped for air. He had to get this image out of his head NOW.

It was a matter of life or death.

***

The last shakedown had been a bust. Tim cursed softly under breath as he headed out off Rogers Yacht Basin once more. It had been three days since then and he knew he should let it go, but part of him was still seething. Everything had been going according to plan. The goods – weapons, mostly – had come in through the basin, the buyers had been waiting, he had been on his way. Then, something or someone had spooked them and half the buyers had gotten away. Even worse, the merch was gone.

Now he had to start from scratch. More stakeouts. More waiting. Tim prayed he’d get one of those idiots before Bruce was done with... whatever he was doing down in Chinatown. He wanted to prove that he could do this by himself. He had to.

So the fact that today had been another no-show really did not help. No buyers, no sellers, no merchandise, no new intel. Tim reached into his utility belt, took out a batarang and threw it hard in frustration.

It was a sudden gust that knocked the gadget just slightly to the right and into a chimney, where it bounced off the bricks and tumbled into a nearby alley. Tim sighed and grappled down to retrieve the batarang.

The writing was all over the wall. Strong, straight strokes of black, each flanked by a thin, silver line. Long, flowing arches that looked almost too delicate to be graffiti. It was gorgeous. Well... it would have been, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was still vandalism and if it hadn’t been for the message proper: Fuck Batman!

Of course, anti-bat graffiti was nothing new, especially in this part of town. The Amusement Mile was Joker’s territory and nearly every thug operating here had been jailed because of Batman, Robin, or Batgirl at least once. Tim had seen it all – decapitated bats, shot bats, strangled bats, squished bats, every single misspelled profanity under the sun in English, Spanish, or Russian. But this?

This was art and that was new. Someone had put work into this. More importantly, someone must have brought a ladder for the job, because the graffiti was eight feet above the floor.

It was also the wrong color. This was Joker’s territory. Green and purple. The graffiti was black and silver. The only player Tim could think about that used even remotely the same color scheme was Two-Face and Two-Face’s thugs did not usually live long on Joker’s turf.

“Robin, please come in.”

“Robin here,” Tim shook his head as he accepted Oracle’s call. There were more important things to worry about.

“There’s a hostage situation in Newton, Paxton Street. You are nearest.”

Tim rolled his eyes. That was the sixth hostage stand-off this week. What the hell. “On my way.”

***

On the eighth day following the failed shakedown and the third day of April, fortune finally smiled on Tim and he smiled back as he knocked out the last, clown-faced thug with a well-aimed kick to the head and started cuffing everyone to nearby lamp posts. It was a shame he could only leave an anonymous tip to GCPD, but that was the price of vigilantism. No-one would ever know.

It had still been worth skipping date night with Steph. He would make it up to her later.

For now, since he was already two hours late to his date, Tim decided it was time to investigate his second Amusement Mile case.

He had been keeping track of the graffiti ever since he had come across the first one, marking them on a separate map he had drawn up for the casefile. The more of the inscriptions he found, the more unsettling they got.

They always looked almost identical, yet they were clearly not stencils. The shading on the edges was too soft for that.

There were no tags, yet they were clearly done by the same person.

They were in locations no-one had any right of being. One day, he actually found one on the window front of the fifth floor of an abandoned warehouse that was missing half its stairs.

There were no finger prints.

Whoever this new graffiti guy was, he was either very brave or very insane. Potentially both.

There was no discernible pattern to the placements either. He had tried to connect the dots on the map multiple times in different ways, but there was no picture to be found. It was downright infuriating.

Clover square was one of the last places on his map to check. Of course, it hadn’t been a square since 1973, when a strip club had been built in the middle of the green field of clovers. The club had been closed down after a fire two months ago, one of many businesses that had not been able to recover from the earthquake. Tim dropped into the alley, inspected the wall, found nothing, and turned the corner.

He had to blink twice to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

It wasn’t ‘Fuck Batman!’ in fancy letters. This was worse. Tim crept around the corner slowly, trying to keep as much distance at possible. It was still nauseating.

The painting stretched across three floors, which was impressive enough. This must have taken a while. Or it must have involved several people. The latter option was definitely worse.

The first floor showed a gloved hand, muted green, reaching up, as if to stop the oncoming cruelty, and another gloved hand, black with a lining of over-layered red and silver, which made the black look almost purple, reaching down. In the middle, a hideous, long face laughed maniacally. It was a mix of chalk white skin and ebony shadows. Only one color stood out through it all: a blood-red smile. On the third floor, above the shock of poison green hair on the head, another purple hand was wrapped firmly around a shining crowbar, ready to swing down onto the green-gloved hand. It had enough shades, enough accents, to look like an actual, three-dimensional piece of metal.

Green gloves... like Robin’s. Joker. A crowbar.

Jason...

Tim felt his stomach curl into a tight knot.

Jason had always been a... difficult... topic, both in the manor and in the Batcave. He had been dead and buried for six months when Tim had come in, but that nerve had been as raw as ever when Tim had first talked to Bruce. Tim, to his own shame, had to admit he hadn’t cared at first. Dick had been Robin. He had been the first. The best. Jason obviously hadn’t, because it had gotten him killed. Tim had thankfully kept that opinion to himself around the manor. He did not know how Bruce would have reacted, had he not. He had loved Jason, as had Alfred, regardless of all his flaws. Tim could not really relate to that. For the longest time, Jason had been nothing but an empty suit in a glass case to him.

Then he had blurted out his opinion to Barbara one night.

Tim touched a hand to his cheek slowly. It was phantom pain, not real, but the slap Barbara had given him had stung something fierce. She had refused to talk to him for a full week after and to this day Tim lived in fear of bringing the topic up in front of her ever again, even though it had been three months. Either Barbara had been closer to Jason than he knew or Jason hadn’t been quite as much of a hot-headed idiot as everyone claimed.

Whatever was the truth – it didn’t matter now. What mattered was that someone obviously knew. Someone knew and they had used this building to paint a shrine to Joker’s victory over Robin, to his murder of Batman’s ally. Whatever else Tim thought about Jason – this was not right. It made him angry. It made him sick. It made him want to use the voice modulation software on the Batcomputer to make a call in Bruce’s name and have the building torn down.

Instead, Tim started taking pictures and looking for prints. If this painting was a crime, then this was a crime scene and that meant he had work to do.

He could always call in the demolition crew later.

Chapter Text

He had managed to make it back to his safe-house. That was good. That meant that at least some of his instincts had still been intact, that he hadn’t fully lost it yet. Jason took comfort in that.

Unfortunately, the ‘how’ was a giant, gaping black hole in his mind.

He had been to the Amusement Mile. He had seen the new Robin. The. New. Robin. Jason swallowed hard as he pulled the pillow over his face. Those words were so wrong. The fact that he had to say them, that there was even a flicker of truth to them, was just utterly wrong, but they were the truth. There was a new Robin and Jason had seen him. The image had brought back memories, flashes of gray steel and a blood-red smile and the haunting echo of shrill laughter. Memories of the day he had died.

Talia had been right. She had been right about everything. Joker had beaten him, killed him. Bruce had buried him and Jason had dug himself back out. Then there had been Talia. Then the pit. Then Paris. It made sense.

Jason wanted it to stop making sense. He wanted for someone to break down that door and restrain him and tell him that he was clinically insane and needed help. He wanted someone to tell him that it was all just a figment of his imagination. It would be better than having this absolute nothing where his memory used to be.

Well. There was one thing he could do about it.

Jason threw the pillow into the farthest corner of the room and checked the backpack he had taken with him the night before. Just like the other day there were smudges of paint on the backpack. Red. Silver. Black. Green. No yellow this time. He checked the canisters left inside and came to the conclusion that he must have done something with the paint, and as William of Ockham and John Punch had once postulated, the correct answer to any question was usually the one that required the smallest number of assumptions.

What could he possibly have done with aerosol can spray paint... except to paint?

He began in Crime Alley. Yes, criminals returning to the scene of the crime was a rookie mistake, but this was daytime and it had to be done. Jason stuck to the rooftops, hoodie pulled tightly over his head and a red scarf covering the lower half of his face. There were no cameras up here, but he could not be careful enough. The Bats, Oracle especially, had their eyes everywhere.

He started at the mosque, approaching from the same side from which he had seen the building in a blaze before. He had no idea which direction he had gone in then, but one thing he knew for sure: he couldn’t have gotten far. Jason started a block from the building and worked his way outward in a steady nautilus spiral.

It only took him four minutes.

The painting was impossible to miss. Crime Alley was a bleak place, with drab colors, rotting varnish, and crumbling walls. It was dark and dirty. The painting was vibrant, saturated to the nines, polished to perfection and applied with perfect coverage. It was bright and clean. Jason raised an eyebrow at the patch of yellow and orange as his feet hit the ground.

To the unknowing watcher, this painting would mean absolutely nothing. There was no structure to it. No golden section, no algorithm, no symmetry. It was a jumbled mess of red and yellow flowing into one another. In the context of the mosque going up in flames, people might have mistaken it for ordinary fire, but Jason knew better.

It was a liquid fire, hotter than the sun, slicker than oil, and more dangerous than any poison he had ever encountered. Somewhere between Talia dragging him out of the pool and his arrival in Gotham, it had burrowed into every pore of his body, every bone, every vein, setting little fires, and all it took was one match to set them all ablaze. Or, in this case, a burning mosque.

It could have been worse, some half-forgotten, innocent part of him whispered. You could have killed someone.

Could he? He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember the state of mind he had been in, if he had been aware of his surroundings at all. Maybe he would have simply sprayed a dose of red straight into the eyes of whoever approached him. Maybe worse. He couldn’t be sure.

Was that why Bruce had gotten himself a new Robin? Was the nagging doubt of whether Jason had pushed Felipe or not really enough for Bruce to completely replace him? He knew it had been enough to bench to him.

“Does it even matter?” Jason took the closest thing he could get his hands on, an empty, discarded soda can, and threw it against the painting. Batman had a new Robin. There was no way around it, no sugar-coating. The reasons did not change the outcome. Jason felt a sharp sting in his gut as the finality of it all finally sank in and the tears came back. He reached for the black and silver spray cans and started getting to work on covering the pit painting.

“Fuck you, Bruce.”

***

The other painting was in the Amusement Mile, although it had taken him four days to muster the courage to go back there. Perhaps that was a good thing. He had used the time to set up a new safehouse in the part of the Coventry that lay to the west of Robinson Park, near Gotham U. He wanted to keep spray-painting the Upper East Side and it would not be wise to sleep where he worked.

By the time he finally did go back to the Amusement Mile, March was almost over. The weather had gotten better, milder, and the streets were more crowded now. Jason stuck to the rooftops as best as he could, while making his way to the docks.

He found the graffiti just a few blocks from the basin, covering three floors of the abandoned night club on Clover’s Square. His confusion about how he could possibly have risked staying in one place long enough to paint the damn thing evaporated when he saw the picture.

Joker with the crowbar.

Jason turned and ran and he could feel his bones break with every step, every hit. The laughter was right behind him, right above him, and it got louder with every second. Jason grappled up onto the rooftops and slammed hard against the nearest chimney.

There was no point in running. He couldn’t run from the past. It had already happened. Jason breathed heavily through the pain and the resurfacing sounds and images. Sooner or later, he’d have to face this damn thing. He just wished he hadn’t had to do it at a height of forty feet, leaving him to feel utterly small and helpless again.

Perhaps I don’t have to.

The thought hit him out of nowhere, but Jason was grateful. Normally, when his brain surprised him, it was bad. This time, the gray matter inside his skull had actually given a useful solution.

He didn’t have the page bookmarked or cached, of course. Jason frowned. Not leaving a trail had been a useful skill and habit to learn, but now it came back to bite him. Thankfully, there weren’t too many websites or forums online that discussed graffiti art in Gotham.

The first thread he found was titled ‘sick crime alley mosque fire g!’ and apparently the author really meant ‘sick’ in every single meaning of the word. The thread was already a few weeks old, but even so the page count was staggering. Three-hundred and sixteen. That meant at least six-hundred and thirty individual posts, most of which agreed with the op: the painting was both absolutely amazing and yet really fucking inappropriate, given that it had been done just a few blocks away from a burning place of worship. Speculations ran wild. Had the arsonists painted it to mock the Muslim community in Crime Alley? Had someone else painted it as a tribute? As a memorial? As a testimony to what had happened? Or just for kicks? Why was there not even a hint of the shape of the building?

Jason kept on skimming through the posts, thumb swiping quickly over the cold glass. The repeated motions were calming, soothing, in their own way. Part of him wished he had a cigarette to relief the remaining clouds of anxiety in his skull. Some other part of him shuddered in disgust at the mere thought. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t important right now.

After a few days, the discussion had slowly come to a halt. Then, three days ago, it had piqued again. This time, a fresh photo had set it off. The words ‘Fuck Batman’ were as bright and clear on the image as they were in Jason’s head.

Now, the picture was not the only thing that was on fire. The comments seemed to be split rather evenly between people who considered it a travesty that a painting this nice had been defaced with script, even if it was good looking script, and people who thought that it was the work of disgruntled residents of Crime Alley appropriating the picture to send a message to the man who had, as of yet, failed to apprehend the arsonist. Only two of the users on the thread, who claimed to be graffiti artist themselves, even entertained the idea that two images in such wildly different subject matter could be the same thing, mostly because they followed the same style of application.

They were the laughing stock of the remaining commenters, of course, but Jason paused as he processed their analysis. It was true that he had a distinct style in his tags, not just in terms of the shaping of the letters, but also in so far as that he always took multiple layers of paint to each picture, in order to achieve the best color blending.

He wondered if Bruce and the others had found the images yet. He could only suppose they would be low on his priority list. But if he had, had he noticed it yet? Had he seen the similarities? Had he made the connection?

Jason doubted it, but that only meant he had to hammer the point home.

Jason got up slowly, rappelled down into the alley, and forced his feet to march back the way they had come. The closer he got, the more broken and heavy they felt, but this needed to be done.

And the more he thought about it, the more appropriate it was. Jason took the can of black from his backpack as he rounded the corner and the laughing clown once more appeared in his sight lines, smiling down at the fifteen-year-old boy he was beating to death.

He had been dumped into the pit, because Bruce had not found him, even though Jason had spent five months on these streets. And Joker was still out there, even though this, this travesty that he had painted on the wall here, should really have been more than enough to make an exception. Jason mustered the painting once more, swallowed the bile that was threatening to climb up his throat, and grappled up to the third floor.

He wouldn’t spray paint all of it. The thread had been right. It was a shame covering up a really well-done picture with script. But enhancing it? That was more than plausible.

The silver he had used for the crowbar was the same he was using for his script highlights. Jason chose to use that to his advantage, creating negative space from the image that was already there. He had to keep the black strokes tiny, of course, small enough to not stand out at first sight, and it was like trying to do surgery with a hacksaw, but he had learned to have steady hands. Slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, Jason worked his way from the top left to the bottom right, filling in the shining parts of the crowbar.

Fuck Batman!

***

The next step was as obvious as it was frightening. He would need to visit his grave. Jason shuddered.

Finding it would be relatively easy, he supposed. There had been enough paparazzi and journalists around when he had joined the Wayne family. Surely there would have been some when he had left. However, that didn’t mean it would be easy.

Remembering the pit had felt like drowning and burning at the same time. Remembering Joker had been like being crushed and torn apart. Did he really want to know what waking up in a coffin had felt like, much less digging his way back to the surface?

For the first ten days, Jason decided it wasn’t. Then, halfway through tagging the Fashion District, a group of League Assassins nearly caught him.

He didn’t have enough time to check if they were Talia’s or Ra’s’, not with the rain in his face and the thunder in his ears. It didn’t really matter either way. There were too many for him to take on without proper equipment. He needed help and he knew exactly where to get it.

The first time he had seen Ivy’s little garden inside Robinson Park, Jason had been returning from his last paint jobs in the Upper East Side. He had felt good about himself that night. His script had become legend on the forums and the Joker painting in the Amusement Mile had caused an outcry of rage the day it had been demolished. People actually... liked his paintings. It had felt so weird. The praise. The adoration. Robin had always been a thankless job; Bruce had told him so much on his first night out. And Bruce... well, the bastard wasn’t exactly a fountain of laudations, but people appreciated this. They appreciated the tags. In one of the threads he had read, someone had dubbed him “Sky King”, for his habit to place his tags on higher floors with no easy access points, if any at all.

Sky King...

Jason had let the words roll over his tongue when the had jumped from one of the higher bridges in the park onto a little plateau below, straight into a nest of vines and thorns. The plants had reacted immediately, twisting and writhing in a way that seemed almost intelligent, and Jason had been in Gotham long enough to know that this was his cue to run and not look back.

From that point onward, he had made a point of carrying a lighter. Just in case.

Now, he had a group six assassins on his tail, if he had counted correctly. Jason lured them right where he wanted them, to the bridge, and jumped. He kept going into the thicket, deeper until he was sure that even the last man had joined him in Ivy’s domicile. Then he flicked and threw the lighter.

It landed to the feet of the ninja closest to him – still a good six feet behind – and Jason quickly rolled out of the way of an oncoming vine. Somewhere behind him a woman screamed in panic and pain, but Jason knew better than to stop and look. He ran and vaulted through the thicket, careful not to tread on anything that looked like a plant. More screams sounded with every step, more cracking, more screeching, and a cry that could have been human, animal, or Ivy. Or maybe just the thunder. It really didn’t matter.

It took him four minutes to leave the forest of doom and reach the reservoir, with its little gazebos and statues all around. The rain was coming down harsh and cold and Jason kept running for little more than another minute, before ducking into a nearby gazebo. He set down on one of the narrow benches and scanned his surroundings. No pursuers in sight. No movement except for the trees bending and screaming in the storm. He had done it. He had lost them. Jason threw his head back and laughed.

Then the lightning struck.

Suddenly, the roof over his head was no longer beams of white wood converging on a center point. The lines seemed to melt, grow soft, until he could almost feel them, like a heavy curtain hanging directly over his head. A loud clap of thunder sounded. The wood creaked. The white curtain hung even lower, almost suffocating him. He could breathe the fabric, dusty and heavy and not hollow like a curtain at all, but filled like a cushion. He tore through it with his bare hands until he struck the wood and kept tearing. His fingers bleed. His nails splintered. Another clap sounded and all at once the roof caved in on his head, raining down dirt and mud cold as ice and worms as pale as the corpse they had been waiting for.

Jason screamed and started digging.

***

“Fuck Tim!” Stephanie bit her lip as she left the gazebo she had been waiting in. “I’m gonna meet you there at eight, Steph,” Stephanie mocked while kicking a particularly large pebble along the path surrounding the reservoir. “I promise I won’t be late!” Another pebble. This one went off to the side and landed to the water. It only made her angrier. “We’ll have a nice dinner and everything!”

Some days she wondered why she even bothered.

He was always late. Always. Without fail. Tim couldn’t keep a schedule to save his damn life. Okay, Steph was not the most punctual person either... “But at least I goddamn call!” She grabbed a twig from the meadow to her right and started taking her frustration out on whatever was closest. The trees. The benches. Whatever.

Tim never called. Well, almost never. Once or twice he had the decency to actually pick up his phone like a normal human being, but that was rare as a drop of snow in the desert. He always did this. Told her to meet, told her they’d have a date, and then ditched her.

“Steph, honey, why are you still dating this damn idiot?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Stephy B.,” Steph cooed to herself. “Maybe you just have a thing for men that are complete jerks! Maybe that’s your natural talent! Your gift! Huzzah! You win the why-am-I-such-a-moron award!”

The twig finally broke. Steph threw it away and yelled good riddance after it for good measure.

It really was her talent. Surrounding herself with men who absolutely sucked, who were jerks from start to finish. Okay, she hadn’t had much choice with her dad, but Dean? Choice. Tim? Choice. Batman? Choice.

I must be completely cuckoo.

That was another sore spot in more ways than one. There were the sore spots where she ended up getting hit with fists and pipes and crowbars by crooks and there were the sore spots on her ego where Batman and Robin loved to tell her that she was not good enough for this. Well, duh! Steph wanted to take a crowbar to their heads instead. She would be so much better if only they trained her properly! There was only so much she and Cass could do about it.

And for the record, Stephanie was damn glad she had Cass to train with, at least, thank you very much. It was nice to know there was at least one person in the bat-themed vigilante clan who thought she was worth her time.

A fresh gust of wind arrived from the north and before she could even so much as say ‘crap’, Steph’s umbrella folded over and started darting down the path and the meadows. She cursed as she ran after it. The rain plastered her hair to her head, she could barely see what with the water assaulting her face, and her pants and coat were gathering mud like dogs gathered fleas with every step of her boots. Great. Just damn great.

Boy, was she glad that her umbrella was glittery purple!

It came to rest next to one of the gazebos by the shore. Stephanie was almost close enough to jump for it when she heard the sound.

It had nearly drowned in the noise of the wind and the rain, but now that she was right next to the wooden structure, Stephanie could hear the sound of a spray can, clear as church bells. It came from inside the gazebo and it set off the alarms in her head.

Best case scenario, this was some lonely graffiti artist who had gotten stuck out here in the rain. Worst case, someone was tagging the place for a gang and gangs were never good news. Stephanie folded up the umbrella and clutched it securely in her hands. Umbrellas made for damn good bludgeoning tools. If she was gonna have to kick ass outside of costume, she could use all the help she could get. Stephanie took a deep breath, rounded the corner to the gazebo entrance, and jumped up the steps.

“Hey, you!”

Perhaps her words had been swallowed by the rain. She had shouted as hard as she could, but the hooded figure didn’t even look at her. He – she was pretty sure it was a he, from the size and stature of him, although it was hard to tell with him dangling from the freaking ceiling – kept on spraying black paint onto the pale gazebo roof. She dropped the umbrella, grabbed another spray can – bright yellow – from his backpack and was about to hurl it at him when a flash of lightning lit up the place. Stephanie froze.

“Holy antelope on a trampoline...”

The painting was massive. It was all over the ceiling... and beyond. Stephanie felt her pulse quicken as the full extent of the artwork dawned on her. It was above her, below her and on every single wall around her. She stood, mouth wide open, but fingers still clutching the can like a vice, unmoving like a deer in the headlights. As the thunder rolled over them, Stephanie finally regained control of her body. She swallowed hard and raised her voice once more.

“Hey, monkey boy! Get down here or I swear I’ll call the cops!”

He dropped from the ceiling instantly and landed securely on both feet, barely making a sound and in perfect balance. She could not see his face, much less his eyes under the hood, but she could feel his stare. It focused on her eyes first, then her hair.

Then, he lunged.

Stephanie smiled. Cass had taught her. This would be a piece of cake! She stepped to the side and reached for his outstretched arm, only to grasp at the air. Suddenly his hands were around her neck, dragging her down with him as he rolled over the floor. He blocked the knee she brought up to kick him in the groin and pinned her on her back, fingers squeezing tighter. If he felt the way her nails dug into his gloves, it didn’t hurt enough. The growl came from deep inside his throat, threatening and dark and yet so young... so utterly young.

“You...”

He was going to kill her. Steph knew it from the ice in his voice. Cold as the can in her hand. She turned the muzzle and squeezed the trigger.

The spray hit him on the left side of his hood, but at least some of it must have gotten into his nose, mouth, and potentially eyes, because he started coughing, spluttering, and wiping his face with the back of his sleeve. The first thing she did when those ungodly strong hands left her throat was to breathe. The second was to kick him hard in the ribs. He stumbled backward against one of the pillars of the gazebo, but recovered in just about as much time as it took Steph to come back to her feet. She planted herself firmly in the entrance to the gazebo, only to have him grab his backpack and vault over the panels on the lake-facing side.

By the time she had hurried over, there was nothing left but the ripples in the water. Stephanie cursed.

Stood up by Tim, soaked like a poodle, and assaulted by a crazy graffiti ninja. This night sucked.

Another flash of white struck and brought the three-hundred and sixty degree painting back to life once more. Stephanie took a deep breath and rolled up her sleeves. Just because she wasn’t wearing her suit, didn’t mean she couldn’t work.

She started with the physical evidence she could actually carry, dug one of the small shopping bags she always carried out of her purse, and put the yellow spray can into it. The perp had worn gloves, but maybe they could track something about the can – a serial number or the brand and color or whatever. Next was the small spear mint bottle she used as a cover for the migraine pills she always carried. Steph dumped them into her bag, got out her nail file, and started scraping loose fibers from the gloves out from underneath her finger nails. Yes, the container was contaminated, but she didn’t exactly carry evidence bags with her all day.

Next were his footprints. There was only one Stephanie could clearly identify as his – the one on the bench that led over the waterside panel. It was only half a print, but it would have to do. She put her lipstick next to it for size comparison, set her phone to ‘night’ mode, and grabbed two pictures.

That left her with the painting. All of it. Stephanie swallowed hard as she looked around. Now that she was all alone in the darkness and the storm, it seemed even creepier.

It started on the line from the entrance to the center of the floor. Stephanie was about ninety-four percent sure of that. Most of it was only shades of black, applied in different layers to look like anything from light gray to pitch black. It worked off the negative space created by the white wood of the gazebo and it made the floor boards look like linens. Only when another flash struck did she notice that there were two areas that carried a light shade of red.

They looked like fists, pushing apart the sheets.

Stephanie grabbed her phone and waited for more lightning. She grabbed two shots with and without, hoping that at least one of them would come out well, then focused on the walls.

Everything up to the bench tops was a mangled mess. There was no structure. Every once in a while, a streak of white wormed its way through the darkness. There were the two hands again, in the palest red, but with crimson tips this time. It felt... suffocating. Claustrophobic, despite the wide open space just above it and the wind howling through. Stephanie took the pictures, frowned as her phone gave her a storage alert, and deleted some of those stupid pictures she had taken at the aquarium with Tim. He looked like he was gonna fall asleep on her in all of them anyway.

Above the bench tops, the panels still looked dark, but there was a shimmer of white light to their edges now that almost made them look like they were crumbling in on themselves. Seven of the pillars that reached up in the corners of the octagon had been painted to look like dark silhouettes of dead trees. The eighth was pale red once more, but this time the tips were not just crimson. There were chips of broken white and Stephanie shuddered as she recognized them as broken fingernails. Her own hands hurt in shared agony as she forced herself through the pictures. This was getting scarier by the minute.

Then she looked at the ceiling.

The last time Stephanie had seen an angel look so creepy, she had refused to blink for the rest of the evening and had cursed Tim for putting her through that episode of Doctor Who. Its hands were folded as in prayer and its wings were spread wide, as if to protect the person crawling at its feet, but its face was twisted and warped, a grimace of white and black. Lightning cracked over its cheek, both in the image and in the storm around her, and it turned the garbled lips into a deranged and hungry grin.

Stephanie took the last few pictures and ran.

***

She had forgotten her umbrella. Stephanie didn’t notice until Oracle shouted ‘Jesus, Steph what happened to you?’ through the comms before opening the doors for her. Stephanie couldn’t blame her. She probably looked like a drenched poodle right now. She shambled forward, hit the highest number in the elevator and breathed in and out carefully as she ascended to the top floor of the Clock Tower.

Fuck this night.

Cass was there, too, and that made her feel at least a little better. Well, not really better, but it did put a smile back on her face. Where else was the poor thing gonna get some lighthearted goodness? From Batman? Puh-lease!

“Stephanie, you look like hell.” Oracle was on her in a second, taking her handbag and coat off her before she could ask. Stephanie didn’t mind too much. She really was drenched and it felt good to get all that wet weight off her back. Cass handed her a towel and Steph accepted it with a quick smile, then started rubbing out her hair as she sat down on the couch. “How long were you walking around out there like that? What happened?”

Stephanie grinned. Of course Oracle had to know everything!

“Long enough.” She accepted the tea Oracle came back with as well. Batgirl, who was almost completely suited up and had probably been just about to head out, took off her cape and draped it carefully around her shoulders. “Tim stood me up. We were supposed to have dinner at eight.”

Oracle raised an eyebrow. “It’s almost midnight.”

“Jeez Louis, for real, Sherlock?” Steph sipped from her cup and felt fuzzy warmth radiate through her gut. Cinnamon and apples. Oracle really did know everything about everyone. “I waited until ten, then I went to walk home, but...”

She wondered where to start. So much had happened. Her brain was starting to jumble it all up and that was not good.

It’s easy, her inner self mocked. You start at the beginning and finish at the end.

Stephanie rolled her eyes. Sometimes she really was her own worst enemy. Whenever it wasn’t Batman. Or her dad. Or Tim.

“I was walking down the path by the reservoir in Robinson Park when the wind ripped the umbrella out of my hand.”

“No umbrella now,” Cass noted and Steph shook her head.

“It landed next to a gazebo. When I got there...” She shuddered. Her throat still hurt. Was that a phantom pain, or had he seriously damaged something? She knew her voice was rougher than usual. “There was some guy in a hoodie spray-painting graffiti all over the inside of the gazebo. And I mean all over. He was hanging from the mother-trucking rafters when I got there.”

Oracle raised an eyebrow, then shot Cass that look. The one... Steph wanted to strangle her. Batman looked at her like that often enough. She didn’t need this shit now.

“I’m not crazy, damn it! He. Was. Hanging. From. The. Rafters.”

“I believe you,” Cass said like it was the most casual thing in the world and Steph wanted to kiss her feet in thanks. Bless Cass! No hours and days of trying to win her over. She knew when Steph was lying, but she also knew when Steph was telling the truth and right now, that was the greatest blessing.

“I called out to him, but he didn’t answer. I saw his backpack on the floor. Grabbed a spray can from it and was about to throw it at him when he saw me.” Steph shuddered once more and took another sip from her cup. “He dropped down. Looked at me like he wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. Or what he was doing there. Then he looked at my hair and suddenly he went crazy. He...” Steph swallowed hard and it hurt. There was definitely some bruising. “He jumped me. I tried to evade like you taught me,” Stephanie nodded at Cass, “but he was so fast! Almost as fast as you, I’d say. He grabbed my neck. We started fighting. He threw me onto the ground and started strangling me. I tried that pinch you showed me, between the thumb and the metacarpals, but he didn’t even seem to notice. So I aimed the spray can at his head and hit the valve. He backed off, grabbed his bag, and vaulted into the lake.”

Oracle’s hands moved swiftly and with precision, but also with a gentleness Steph hadn’t known she had. They tilted her head slightly upwards and to the right. Oracle’s brows narrowed in anger.

“You’ve got some nasty bruises.”

Cass was gone and back in all of three seconds, a bag of ice in her hand. Steph held her hand up quickly.

“Don’t!” Cass cocked her head to the side. Confusion. Stephanie wanted to laugh. Apparently, there was something she was better at than Cass: treating bruises. She had experience. “That only works if you do it right after the injury. It’s too late now.” Cass didn’t seem to get all the words, but she got the intent. Her face sank. Steph forced a smile onto her lips. “Appreciate the thought, though. Thanks, Cass.”

“Please tell me he was not wearing gloves.”

“He was wearing gloves.” Steph rolled her eyes as Oracle sighed and released her head. “You know, contrary to what the big guy might think of me, I’m not deliberately trying to constantly disappoint you guys.”

“That’s not what I—“ Oracle threw up her hands and pinched her nose. “It’s ok, Steph. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” Steph finished her tea and had barely glanced at her bag on the coat rack when Cass jumped to get it. Stephanie smiled. “I did claw some fibers out of his gloves though. And I got the spray can! And pictures of the graffiti!” She dumped the evidence on the coffee table and started untangling the knots in her wet hair. “If you want to take my witness statement and get a description of the bastard, I can do that, too, Officer Gordon.”

Oracle smiled. “I think that would be a good idea, Miss Brown.”

***

They ended up spending the better part of an hour hunched over Oracle’s computer, trying to reconstruct the crime scene from Stephanie’s description. As expected, the boot print was too incomplete, the paint was too generic, and the fibers had no usable DNA on them, but at least half her pictures had come through. Oracle arranged them neatly on her screens and suddenly the picture came to life with full force. Steph saw Cass flinch and Barbara recoil at the same moment as she let out a quiet ‘oh shit’.

“Am I the only one who thinks that this looks like someone digging themselves out of a grave?”

Barbara shook her head. Cass enlarged one of the pictures, then ordered the computer to bring up two other case files. The first picture looked like a sea of fire. The second was the Joker with a crowbar. Cassandra pointed at some of the spots where the colors faded into one another on each of the paintings.

“Same.”

“Oh my god.” Oracle blew up the respective parts and brought up the charts. “Cass is right. That’s the same technique of application – layers, upon layers, upon layers, from dark to light, rather than light to dark.”

“Wait.” Stephanie frowned. “Are you telling me giant monkey boy from hell who attacked me is just strolling across the city, casually attacking people and painting pictures?”

She hadn’t realized how tall he had been until she had described him to Oracle. She had been more worried about other things like, you know, not getting strangled, but he had been tall. And heavy. Taller than Batman. Maybe stronger, too.

“So far, he hasn’t attacked anyone else,” Oracle admitted. “Well, except maybe Batman. That’s why the case has been low priority until now.”

Stephanie scoffed. “I don’t remember him getting strangled recently. What did this guy do to him? Bruise his almighty ego with the ‘Fuck Batman!’ on that crowbar?”

Suddenly, the warmth was gone from Barbara’s face. It was as if Barbara Gordon was gone and only Oracle was left, a cold, hard woman with zero forgiveness. Even Cass bristled. Steph was quietly counting her exits.

“Stephanie Brown. If you know what’s good for you, you will never, never ever bring that picture up in front of him. Ever. Are we clear?”

“Why?”

Stephanie looked in Cass in feinted confusion. Truth was that her inner self was praising Joseph, Mary, and Jesus for not having been the one to ask first. The look of anger on Oracle’s face softened a little, morphed into something more like bitterness and sadness, until it almost hurt Steph to watch her. Cass fell to her knees and opened her arms wide.

“Sorry, Barbara! What did I do wrong?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Steph threw in sharply. “If you hadn’t asked, I would have. Guess you’re always faster than me...”

Oracle didn’t react to either of them. She pushed her wheel chair away from the computer and over to the kettle, poured herself a coup of chamomile and took a deep draught. “Sit down please. Both of you.”

Stephanie did as she was told and so did Cass. There was a gravity to Barbara’s voice that she had never heard before.

“What I tell you now is between us, okay? I don’t want you to mention this to anyone, especially Batman, Robin, or Nightwing. Understood?”

Cass nodded, but she still looked puzzled. “Secret?”

“No.” Barbara swallowed. “Painful memories.”

Stephanie nodded, too. “Not a word. I promise.”

Barbara took a deep breath.

“Two years ago, Batman and the previous Robin went to Ethiopia on a... personal mission. They ran into the Joker while he was there. Batman chased down a truck carrying Joker gas and told Robin not to engage Joker until he got back.” Barbara swallowed hard. “Robin went ahead anyway. Joker caught him, beat him with a crowbar, and then blew up the warehouse Robin was in.”

Stephanie felt her gut freeze. “You mean.... Robin... died?”

“Robin died.” Oracle nodded. “On April 27^th, two years ago. That’s why Batman doesn’t want you in the field. That’s why he didn’t want Cass in the field until she learned proper defensive martial arts. And that is why neither of you will say a single word to him about this conversation unless you want to hang up your capes for good. Are we clear?”

“Clear,” Cass said solemnly.

All Steph could do was look at the pictures. A picture of flames. A picture of a laughing clown with a crowbar. A picture of someone digging his way out of a grave. Pictures drawn by a young-sounding man who was strong and fast and skilled enough to nearly kill her in spite of how hard she trained, who left no useful evidence behind, and who could climb upside down on the damn rafters. A man who had gone to the trouble of spray-painting ‘FUCK BATMAN!’ onto the crowbar in microscopically small script.

“Maybe this is Robin.”

It slipped out before she had time to think about it, but the moment the words left her lips, Stephanie knew that she had messed up. Oracle ripped the towel off her shoulders and took her cup of apple-cinnamon.

“Get out.”

“Barbara—“

“Right now, Spoiler!”

There were tears underneath the words and Steph knew better than to argue. She sounded like mum, when mum was upset and hurt and vulnerable. You do not poke injured lions.

Cass accompanied her to the door, helping her adjust her scarf so it wouldn’t put unnecessary pressure on her throat. “Not Robin,” Cass argued. “Robin is dead.”

Stephanie suppressed the urge to laugh and buttoned up her coat.

“From what I understand, Cass, that doesn’t always stop people. Especially people in capes.”

Chapter Text

The sun was shining, birds were singing, and his throat felt like vodka and razorblades. Jason coughed as the first deep, conscious breath he took chipped away at the icy wall that were his lungs. He felt cold. So very cold... Jason burrowed deeper into his blanket.

It was a very comfortable blanket and there was a duvet on top of it. Just two feet from his face, the radiator hummed quietly, set to max and probably scorching hot to the touch. I shouldn’t be cold, Jason realized with a sudden jolt. I shouldn’t feel so... beat.

But he did. Everything in his body seemed to hurt, from his toes to his head. Someone was hammering railroad spikes into his brain, or at least it felt like it. A cough crawled up his throat and Jason had to fight to keep the constant scraping at the back of his throat from making him throw up as well. He felt queasy and weak, too.

This was not good.

He was a sitting duck. His limbs still obeyed, but every movement was torture. He still had enough presence of mind to know where and when he was – safe-house near Gotham U, April 10^th – but he was not sure he’d be able to plot an escape route if he had, too. Not with that jackhammer in his skull. He could see, but his eye lids felt like lead. He could hear, but there was an unfamiliar delay between his ears and the respective cluster of his brain that made him sure he’d be just a second too late if someone found him. In short, he was in no condition to go out, much less to try and figure out how he had gotten like this or what he would do about it.

Jason touched the back of his left hand to his forehead and grimaced, then rolled over. He’d deal with it tomorrow. After his body had decided whether it wanted to burn or freeze.

***

The second time he woke, it was dark. How long had he been out? Ten hours? Thirty? Jason grimaced and stretched himself until his fingertips brushed just across the straps of his backpack. His hands were clumsy as they fumbled for his phone and the brightness of the display – once he finally managed to enter the correct code to unlock the damn thing – stung in his eyes.

April 12^th. He had missed an entire day. Fuck. Jason set the alarm for eight in the morning and rolled over again. One more dose of sleep. Then he’d have to get up. Food. Water. Medicine. Priorities.

***

He did manage to drag himself out of bed. He also managed to suppress the urge to grind his phone into ten-thousand plastic splinters.

The alarm still echoed through his skull as he forced the chicken soup into his stomach, spoon by spoon. The cold meds had helped clear his sinuses, but they had left him with the same uneasy haze of uneasiness that all drugs had for him. He knew they would slow down his reaction time. He knew they could be addictive. That was enough reason to take them only if absolutely necessary and today was one of those days.

He had spent the better part of an hour trying to piece together his last excursion, by now. He remembered the Fashion District – done like dinner – and the encounter with Ra’s men. He remembered luring them into Robinson Park, to Ivy. He remembered wind and rain and thunder and lightning. He remembered a gazebo, eight skeletal pillars holding up a curved roof. That’s where the blackout began.

This time there were no smudges of paint on his backpack, meaning he had either painted nothing or he had used black paint exclusively. Black on black would not show. Some of the thicker pieces of the bag were still wet, however, as had his shoes been when he had left for the 7/11. Had he taken a dip in the reservoir? Why? What could possibly have spooked him enough to make jumping into a big, cold lake in the middle of a storm seem like the best option? Bruce? More of Ra’s men? Joker? And why did he remember... blonde hair... for some reason?

Jason groaned into the empty soup bowl and forced his churning stomach back into obedience. He needed his strength. He needed to keep the food down. Most importantly, he had to find out what he had painted.

The forum thread about the ‘Fuck Batman!’ tags had only gained a single page since he had last looked. Jason skimmed it quickly, just to be absolutely sure that there was nothing new or exciting there, then switched over to the painting thread.

The painting had only been discovered thirty hours ago, yet the thread had exploded and almost doubled in word page count since then. There were more than six-hundred pages now and the forum moderators had already announced that they were going to close the thread after fifteen-hundred posts to keep it from crashing the board. He had to skim through almost two-hundred posts, most of which were variations of ‘what the actual fuck???’ before he finally found a good picture. Or, in this case, picture set.

Jason felt like throwing up the moment he saw it.

He could feel the silk beneath his fingers, so soft and yet so tough to get through. Then, underneath it, the thick, stubborn mahogany that just – would – not – come – apart, no matter how hard he scratched and clawed. He could hear the ringing in his ears as he shouted for Bruce, for Alfred, for anyone. For help. He could hear the thunder that was his own breath, growing heavier and heavier by the second.

Jason made it to the bathroom just in time to retch up the soup after all.

The cold water he threw into his face after felt good for all of a minute. Then he remembered that it had been cold that night, too. Cold and wet and windy, just like the day he had painted this latest monstrosity. There had been a thunderstorm, too. He remembered the feeling of wet mud and the occasional worm between his bloody fingers and against his eyelids and inside his mouth. He remembered the pins and needles as his hands had broken through the ground and into a barrage of water drops.

The painting only hinted at it and even the most expressive descriptions of it that he read in the comments did not do one feeling justice: the nagging, underlying dread that he had risen from the dead only to rejoin them again. Because what were his chances of tunneling out of three inches of mahogany and six feet of soil before running out of air, before his aching body finally gave up?

And then there was the angel. Jason looked at the pictures of the gazebo roof in welcome confusion. He didn’t remember the angel being there. He didn’t remember anyone being there. He had dug out of nothing, into nothing. His feet tingled with a distant memory of shuffling along wet mud and grass and finally concrete, moving forward relentlessly, as if, since Bruce was there, it was Jason’s job to find him.

It was bullshit. Jason closed the browser and threw his phone into the farthest corner of the room. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, breathing through the tremors that came with having a cold and having just thrown up his only food in he-did-not-remember-how-long.

He had died and come back to life. He had dug out of his own coffin, his own grave. His job had been beyond fucking done. He didn’t owe Bruce a march to the manor. He didn’t owe anyone anything. But Bruce?

Bruce should have fucking been there, Jason finally decided. He was paranoid about everything and everyone. Surely he must have had motion sensors and security cameras installed near the grave, to avoid tampering. And if Talia was right and there had been months between his resurrection and her encounter with him. Months in which no-one, not even the World’s Greatest Detective, had discovered that he was still alive, that his grave was disturbed. Especially not the World’s Greatest Detective. Months in which no-one, not Bruce, not, Alfred, not Dick, not Barb, had seemed to visit his grave.

Jason couldn’t help but wonder what it looked like now. Had Talia covered it up? Was there any sign at all that there was no longer a body rotting down there, in the depths of the earth?

There was only one way to find out.

***

He waited another two days, until the worst of his cold had finally passed and he had finally managed to keep down two meals in a row. There was a risk in returning to the grave, of course. Even if Bruce didn’t look after it, Ra’s and Talia almost certainly had someone waiting nearby to catch him if he showed up. Then again, there were still twelve days to go until his birthday. With a little bit of luck, he could sneak in unseen and unnoticed.

The backpack remained in his hideout this time, but Jason took the phone and the wallet. He stopped by the flower shop near the Coventry train station on his way to the bus and let them fix him a wreath of pink carnations and white lilies. A single red rose sat in the bottom center of the wreath and Jason thanked the woman at the register as she double-bagged the arrangement for him. The last thing he needed was some idiotic driver splashing mud on his mother’s flowers.

The drive up to Gotham Cemetery was seemingly endless, to the point where Jason could have sworn the bus was going in circles, passing by the same crappy neon sign of the Korean diner on Jackson Street that was actually a front four times, while the rain kept on hammering against the glass without mercy. He almost missed his stop, half asleep from the sheer endlessly depressing overcast of clouds and the remains of disease gnawing at his body.

The rusting gates screeched as he pushed through. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell was ringing. Jason started climbing up the hill, pausing twice to try and remember where the hell he was going. It had been so long since he had last visited her grave. So long...

Catherine Todd was buried in plot ED89. Her gravesite looked just like it always had – blank, but not neglected. No flowers, but no weeds either. An uninteresting grave for a woman who had, by all accounts, been uninteresting to the rest of the world. Jason wondered whether Bruce was aware that he was still paying for the upkeep, as he had promised Jason when he had adopted him and made him Robin. Ten years he had promised. Had he simply forgotten about it in the wake of Jason’s death or had it been a deliberate choice to not cancel that contract?

“Hey mom.”

Jason put the wreath down gently and took a few steps back. It felt... weird... being here. In a way, it felt like he was betraying his mother. Or rather... like he had betrayed her already and he was just rubbing it in her face. Was there an afterlife? Had she been there? Had he been there with her? If so, was she sad now that he was gone again? Confused? Angry?

“So... I haven’t been here in a while,” Jason started. “Here... at your grave. Here in this world... It feels weird.” There really was no other word to describe it. Every day felt weird. “Don’t know if I met you over there, but if I did... I want you to know I didn’t abandon you. I didn’t go by choice.”

He hadn’t gone by choice the first time either, Jason suddenly realized. Dying had been long... and painful. He couldn’t remember all the details, but he knew enough to know that he had fought every step into his grave and every step out of it.

“I hope you like the flowers.” White lilies for innocence and purity. Pink carnations for love, devotion, and gratitude. A single crimson rose for grief. “You always did like pink.”

The grave didn’t answer, of course, but as far as Jason was concerned, that was a good thing. Coming back to life had not been pleasant and for as many faults as his mother had had – her addiction chief among them – she deserved better than that. Jason rubbed the tears out of his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Rest in peace, mom. I really do mean it.”

With that, Jason set out to find the angel. Gotham Cemetery was rather bland, as graveyards went, with few statues and lavish arrangements. It should be easy to find. Besides, if Bruce had any ounce of sense left, he would have buried Jason as close to his mother as possible.

It was a big ‘if’.

He wandered the graveyard for almost half an hour. Up the hill. Down the hill. South to North. East to West. The sun was already starting to sink when he finally found it, hundreds of yards away from his mother’s grave, near a line of trees that were only just starting to grow back their green. Jason frowned.

Either Ra’s had given up the pursuit or Talia had managed to weed out his men. Either way, the place was deserted. Still, Jason approached slowly, keeping a careful eye on his surroundings. It had become habit long ago. He wondered if he was ever going to shake it.

The angel looked sad and that was the first thing that pissed Jason off. Not kind or benevolent, which would have been nice for someone watching over his supposedly final resting place. Not angry or vengefully vigilant, which would have been cool at least. No. Sad. Like the saddest puppy that ever lived, except that it wasn’t a puppy. The face had been shaped in his likeness.

“I should have brought the fucking paint.” He still could. He seriously considered it. Just come back, paint the damn thing in Robin colors and maybe put a Joker smile on it to really fuck Bruce’s shit up. It would be fair.

“‘Here lies Jason Todd’.” That was the second thing that pissed him off. “No, he fucking doesn’t!”

I am right here! He wanted to take a fucking jackhammer to this statue and the pedestal on which it rested. He wanted to get a shovel and dig up that fucking empty coffin. Hell, he would pay to deliver it right to Bruce’s doorstep.

Jason started pacing. There had to be some way he could get the point across. Something that could not be covered up easily by Talia or even the cemetery personnel. Something permanent.

I could tag the pedestal, Jason mused, and paint the angel. I could—

Suddenly, his feet ground to a halt. Jason double- and triple-checked the lettering on the gravestone next to his, but he was not misreading it.

Sheila Haywood

Sheila. Fucking. Haywood. It had taken his brain a few seconds to remember, but now the memory was clear as day and painful as a knife. Sheila Haywood. The woman who had cried him a river over her tragic backstory of how she had given up her love child because of social pressure and some horrible mistakes. The woman who had claimed to be working to help poor people in Ethiopia. The woman who had claimed that Joker was blackmailing her.

The fucking witch who had sold him out to the clown, who had stood by, smoking a fucking cigarette while Joker beat the brains out of Jason’s skull. And Bruce had buried her here. Right next to him. Because she was his mother. His biological mother, the woman he had gone halfway around the world for. The lying snake he had died for.

“You were not my mother.” Jason spit on her grave. “Catherine was a thousand times the woman, the mother, you were!”

And yet I still would have saved you. Jason couldn’t help it. The laugh started deep in his belly, then bubbled up quickly and rose into hysterical howling. Was this how Bruce felt about Joker? Was this why the fucking clown was not dead yet?

It’s no excuse. Jason banished the thought from his mind. If Sheila had killed Catherine or Bruce, he was pretty sure his willingness to go out of his way to save her would be zero by now. He was sure of it.

Did Bruce know? Did he know that he had buried Jason next to the woman who was partially to blame for his death? Jason doubted it.

But he would soon. Jason would make sure of it.

He headed for the hardware store on his way back, regardless of the intense pain building up in his head. This time, he would not let the Pit get to him. This time, he would exorcize the fucking memory before it could take over his brain and we would make Bruce suffer for it.

Jason could not rest easily and so neither would Sheila Haywood.

He did the first drawing the same night with pencil and paper; the second one the day after on paper with spray color and the specially designed caps to put over the nozzle for precision work. It came out shoddy and amateurish, but Jason didn’t mind. He still had eleven days left.

He kept on practicing daily, running through spray cans like other people ran through milk and eggs. It didn’t matter. On April 23^rd, Jason finally felt confident enough in his drawing skills. Also, he was running out of room on the freshly papered walls.

Jason grabbed all his spray cans, including the new colors he had bought, put on his balaclava, and headed out of his apartment at six in the evening, on the dot.

He now had twelve hours to paint a headstone.

***

It was April 25^th when Dick Grayson returned to Gotham City, heading straight to Gotham Cemetery on his motorbike. Every year he arrived a few days early. Every year he brought a present.

And yet, every year he was always too late.

The pain had lessened over the last two years, though not by much, and his guilt had only increased. If only he had not been off-world. If only he had known about what was happening. If only he had spent more time with Jason, made him feel more like he had a family right here. Perhaps he would never have gone looking for another. Perhaps he’d never have died.

It was all hypothetical, of course. Jason was dead and buried and nothing could change that. He hadn’t even been here for the funeral. Bruce had not even bothered to try and contact him. He had had to learn about it through Robin’s file. Dick still hated Bruce for that and he was not sure he was ever going to forgive him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to.

As April in Gotham went, it was a nice day to be outside. Nicer at least than the last two years. The first year it had been raining cats and dogs and the flowers Dick had brought – gladioli for strength and integrity, lilies for innocence, and ivy for eternal peace – had looked like trampled weeds even before he was done crying over Jason’s then very new grave.

The second year Dick had been just as much of a wreck and the weather had been equally horrid, blasting the grave with near hurricane strength winds. Dick had brought a pack of Jason’s favorite cigarettes. He had mostly quit smoking, resorting to it only when he was extremely stressed out or upset and so Dick had thought it appropriate to mimic that reaction and light one for Jason.

Perhaps it was Jason who had sent the storm, because he hadn’t been able to light a damn thing in that weather.

This time, he had brought the same flowers and Jason’s copy of White Fang by Jack London. The school curriculum had only included Call Of The Wild and Jason had been pissed. White Fang had made for interesting enough reading during that camping trip they had taken once, but Dick had kept the copy for the next time Jason would visit him. A next time that had never happened.

There were only twenty-five pages left. Dick was sure he could hold it together for that long at least. He owed Jason that much. Dick climbed to the top of the hill that lead to the graves of Jason Todd and Sheila Haywood and stopped dead in his tracks.

Even from the distance, he could see that something was wrong. There were no fewer than four ground keepers crowded around Sheila Haywood’s grave and even from what little he could hear over the distance, at least one of them was clearly violating the ‘no blasphemy in a graveyard’ rule. Dick hurried down the hill.

“What do you mean ‘we don’t know who did this’?!” The man in the slightly more expensive looking overall was livid. “Johnny, this is one of the very few graves in this entire damn yard that’s got 24/7 video surveillance.”

“We checked the tapes, sir,” one of the other men answered. “The latest verified recording we have is from a month ago.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot onto the other. “It looks like someone looped the footage after that. Tech didn’t notice because there was no suspicious activity on any of it.”

That seemed to be the final straw. “THEN WHAT DO YOU CALL THIS, JOHNNY? HUH? THAT AIN’T SUSPICIOUS ENOUGH?!”

Dick finally got to the row Jason’s grave was in and took a hard right. One of the keepers spotted him and approached him quickly.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but this area—“

“That’s my brother’s grave!” Dick swallowed hard. He didn’t even have to fake the outraged distress all that much. “The grave with the angel. Jason Todd. That’s my brother. The one next to him is his mother’s, Sheila Haywood, and I want to know what’s going on here!”

The man seemed to ponder trying to remove him, but ultimately stepped aside. Dick strode forward quickly and brushed past ‘Johnny’ just as he looked at his boss once more.

“Well, if it’s any consolation: that was not there when we last checked this lane, three days ago.”

Dick finally caught a good look at both graves and felt the blood freeze in his veins.

Jason’s grave was fine and Dick silently thanked the Lord for that. Jason had already suffered so much in life, he didn’t deserve someone disturbing his final rest. But Sheila...

Sheila Haywood’s gravestone had been defaced completely. Every inch of it had been painted with what looked like graffiti spray paint, except that the lines were so fine and the detail so immaculate, it looked like someone had done it with a pencil instead. The picture was a woman in her thirties, no longer young, but still a true beauty, in a snow white blouse with short sleeves. Every wrinkle in the fabric had a realistic shadow to it that had been morphed in such a way that it completely disguised the lettering on the headstone.

Her hair was a soft lemon yellow, flowing gently along her temples and down her neck in short waves. Every hair, every strand, looked like it was just about to float off the gravestone and be gone with the wind. There were highlights and shadows and impurities throughout it all, as if it was a real woman’s head. Her face, shown from a frog perspective was as finely sculpted as a marble statue, each line in its very own dedicated and specific place. The light and shadows played off the rosy skin, darkening and lightening in smooth gradients. Her eyes were the same piercing blue Jason’s had always been and yet they were the only thing in the picture that looked utterly dead and cold. There was no mercy, not a shred of empathy in those eyes.

Last, but not least, there was a cigarette in her hand. She held it leisurely, as if this was an average morning on an average day. Pale, grayish-blue smoke wafted from the softly glimmering end and Sheila Haywood’s mouth. It melted into the natural gray of the headstone around the edges, but crept into every teeny tiny crevice in the center of the painting.

Someone had defaced Sheila Haywood’s headstone... with a picture of Sheila Haywood.

“What the—Who would?” No need to feint his outrage. Dick quickly retrieved the cell phone from his jeans and shot a handful of pictures. Then, he wiped the last traces of shock off his face and turned to the grounds keepers. “Call the cops now and I swear, if either one of you skips out of this before testifying to the police, you are never working anywhere ever again.”

Dick set the flowers down to the feet of Jason’s angel and marched off quickly. He crossed the hill once more, found the nearest bench, and finally let his body slump into a heap of misery.

There were no tears. Dick hadn’t known Sheila at all and Jason’s grave was thankfully undisturbed, but he did feel sick to his stomach. That painting had not just been done by some bored kid with a can of paint. It must have taken hours. Someone had deliberately defaced the grave of Jason’s mother and had potentially been planning to for almost a month. Well, the grave of one of Jason’s mothers.

Catherine Todd was also buried in Gotham Cemetery, although far from Jason, and the thought still felt sour in Dick’s head as he made his way over there. When Jason had died, all the plots around her had been taken already. It had felt wrong, separating them so much, and Dick was sure Jason would have protested, had he had a choice, but it hadn’t been up to him. It hadn’t been up to Bruce either.

Catherine’s grave was thankfully untouched by paint. It looked just as it always did, with the exception of a tiny, pink petal that had gotten stuck where the grass met the stone. Dick lifted it gently and felt his stomach churn as he examined it.

Pink carnations were exactly what Jason had always brought for his mom.

***

The first thing that greeted Dick in the Clock Tower was the smell of roasted duck crawling into his nostrils and turning his stomach over a few more times. The second was thing was Barbara, dressed in one of her favorite dresses and her hair done up nicely. Even a cursory glance told Dick that she had decked the apartment out for a full candle light dinner and that only made it worse. Dick swallowed the whining sound that had been threatening to climb up his throat and wiped the misery off his face. Barb didn’t need to know about this. Dick smiled.

“Hey, gorgeous!”

“Dick, what happened?” Barb’s smile died on her lips. Her eyes narrowed. Whatever sweetness Dick had packed into his words was gone from hers. “And don’t try to play pretend and change the topic, please. I know you too well for that.”

Dick seriously considered it. Bruce would. He had mastered the art of lying to people he cared about and Dick had been a good student. He could fool practically anyone. Except maybe Alfred and Bruce.

“Dick... honey... please?”

Or Barb.

Dick sank into the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands. He still felt sick, only now he had the additional nightmare of oncoming tears to fight off. He was faintly aware that Babs was gently rubbing her hand along his right arm, but it didn’t help. Right now, nothing helped.

“You visited Jason’s grave.” It wasn’t a question. Barbara knew his habits. She knew his tells. She was Oracle and she could read him like an open book. Especially when it came to situations that were painfully familiar to her, too. “I know. You’d think it would get easier after a while, but—“

“Someone defaced Sheila Haywood’s grave.” He pushed the phone into her hand without further comment and watched as Barbara instantly set out to enlarge the picture on her computers. Dick took another minute to catch his breath, then joined her. “Jason’s grave seems untouched, thank God, but someone deactivated the security cameras and looped them almost a month ago.”

That made Barbara bristle. “A month ago?”

Dick nodded. Barbara typed. The picture appeared on screen in all its horrifying glory and he heard her muttering ‘good god’ under her breath before enlarging the image as much as possible. Now, with each pixel laid out, it was somewhat easier to see all the layers upon layers of color.

“This was no rush job, Barb.” Dick crossed his arms and started pacing. “Someone took their sweet-ass time painting this, right next to Jason’s grave!”

“Catherine?”

“No paint,” Dick said softly. “But I found a pink carnation petal there, so someone must have laid down flowers recently.” Dick sighed. “Barb, pink carnations were Jason’s go-to flowers for visits to his mom’s grave.”

“I know.”

Now Barb looked like she was going to be sick as well. Somehow Dick doubted that roast duck was going down anyone’s gullet tonight. More importantly, though, Barbara looked haunted, like she had just seen a ghost or remembered some seemingly insignificant detail that had suddenly become important. There was regret and guilt written all over her.

“Babs?”

“Over the last few weeks, a little more than a month, we’ve been seeing strange new graffiti tags all over Gotham.” She brought up the relevant files and the words ‘FUCK BATMAN!’ appeared on screen in all their black-and-silver glory. Dick recognized some of the pictures. “I really mean, all over Gotham. We’ve seen them from Crime Alley to Robinson Park.”

“Okay,” Dick nodded slowly. “But those are tags. That’s not the same as painting a freaking mural on a headstone.”

A new set of pictures appeared on screen. A raging inferno. Joker with the crowbar. Someone digging their way out of a grave. Dick felt his stomach do failed somersaults again.

“These are from Crime Alley, the Amusement Mile, and Robinson Park, respectively,” Barbara explained. “Cass noticed they seem to follow the same style as the tags. I analyzed them. She’s right.”

“There’s something else you’re not telling me.” That wasn’t a question either. Dick knew Barb just as well as she knew him. She was still hiding something. And she still felt guilty.

“Stephanie suggested that it might be Jason.” Barbara must have caught his oncoming protest out of the corner of her eye, because she held her hand up quickly. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell her any names. Just that the Robin before Tim died in an explosion and that that’s why Batman is so hell-bent on her not being in the field. You know that’s why.”

“I know.” Dick swallowed hard. “Does Bruce know about this? The pictures? Steph’s theory?”

“I’m not sure.” Barbara sighed. At first we had three independent case files on the Batcomputer. I merged them and marked them as active, so Bruce should know they are there. I did tell Steph not to mention a single word about Robin or Joker to Bruce and I think she’s smart enough not to.”

“I think she might be smarter than we think,” Dick conceded. “I’ll need a rain check on this date, Barb. There’s someone I need to see.”

***

Dick had made the call the moment he had stepped out of Barbara’s apartment. Then he had spent the next forty hours telling himself that he had made the right choice, that this was necessary.

It was a crazy theory Stephanie had come up with there. Dead people did not just get up out of their graves and start spray-painting elaborate graffiti all over town. Granted, death was not necessarily irreversible, as Dick had come to learn to his horror throughout his career, but raising the dead was extremely difficult and dangerous and usually ended in a disaster. There was a reason they called it “rest in peace”.

There was also the fact that, even assuming that this was Jason, the messages left all over the city were clearly hostile and that made no sense. Yes, Jason and Bruce had had some rocky times, but overall, Bruce had loved Jason as if he had been his own flesh and blood and Jason had loved Bruce possibly even more. Bruce had been the closest thing to a normal parent Jason had ever had, mad as that sounded, and it seemed strange that he would not try to contact him, if he truly had returned. And even if he hadn’t wanted to see Bruce, there were still Barbara and Alfred.

And me, Dick thought sourly, although I wasn’t half the brother to him that I should have been.

Dick wasn’t sure which thought was worse: that some stranger had so much intimate knowledge about the events surrounding Jason and his death and was now using it to torment all of them, or that Jason had truly come back from the dead, but had become either insane or hateful or both in the process.

There were three ways to find out which scenario was correct.

He could try to catch the perp in the act, but Gotham was a big place, and all records indicated that this man had combat and parkour skills to match any Bat. Catching him would not be easy. It would require either a ridiculous amount of sheer, dumb luck, or a coordinated effort, which would undoubtedly draw Bruce’s attention and complicate things in the face of insufficient evidence. Bruce was never going to believe Stephanie of all people unless he had Jason’s empty coffin in his clutches.

That was the second way. Dig up the coffin. Look inside. Pray for a body. Pray for a positive DNA match. But the plot had been registered in the name of Bruce Wayne and while Dick was confident that he could fake Bruce’s signature any time he needed to, he was not so confident that it would be worth the trouble he’d be in if Bruce found out. And he would find out. He needed something else to convince Bruce.

Bruce would not listen to Stephanie, but, hopefully, he would listen to Dick. Dick needed to convince himself and the number of people he could consider powerful and trustworthy enough to provide the evidence he needed, was a number he could count on one hand.

Her mansion was just outside of Gotham. One of two old houses, positioned on an intersection of Ley lines. The other one was in San Francisco. Dick was grateful that she had agreed to meet here. If that really was Jason running around the city, he wanted to be as close by as possible. Dick grabbed the lion head shaped door knocker and knocked three times.

The door opened automatically, inviting him into a grand entrance hall with a massive chandelier and a really expensive, old rug that could probably clean itself. It closed behind him just as soon as he had entered. A moment later, a cloud of bright blue smoke exploded in the room.

Zatanna stepped out, dressed in full gear and confident as a goddess, the tiniest hint of a smile on her face. She gave a short, curt bow. “Welcome to my mansion, Dick.”

“Can’t have a magician without a proper stage entrance,” Dick tried to quip, but it came out flat and joyless. Somehow that made him feel guilty. He was supposed to be the cheerful one. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. I’m sorry for the short notice—“

“It’s alright, Dick.” Zatanna stepped forward and laid a hand on one of his shoulders. Somehow the touch seemed to drain some of the tension from him, even though she hadn’t said a word. He wondered if it was a new trick. “I could tell this is important to you, but...” Zatanna took a deep breath and looked straight into his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this? It could be emotionally devastating.”

“Zatanna...” Dick wanted to laugh. The hysterical kind of laugh that you could sometimes hear from people who had already hit rock bottom. “Everything about the last two days has been emotionally devastating. I just want some answers. Trust me. I’m ready for this.”

He wasn’t. He doubted he ever could be, but it needed to be done, and Zatanna was perfect for the job. She nodded slowly. “Follow me.”

The mansion was even bigger than it looked from the outside and even with his training, Dick felt like he was starting to get lost after the sixth or seventh turn, as if the house itself was shifting. The room they finally entered was a perfect circle with high walls and an additional circle of runes engraved in the floor. Dick couldn’t decipher them, but he had no doubt Zatanna knew what she was doing.

“They are containment runes," Zatanna explained as if she had read his mind. "Time magic is extremely complicated and dangerous. This circle will make sure that none of its effect will spread any further. It also means that you can leave the spell any time you want. All you need to do is leave the circle.”

“Complicated, huh?” Dick retrieved the book from his pocket – he had decided to go in civvies tonight, if only because he was about eighty percent sure he was going to need a strong drink and a ride home when this was done – and stroked its spine gently. “Is that why you asked me to bring this?”

Zatanna took the book from him and held it almost reverently. “This was his?”

“I bought it for him a little more than two years ago and we started reading it while on a camping trip. Why do you need it?”

“Because the more precise and personal the circumstances, the easier it will be to do the magic. This book links directly to the person we want to see. This date links directly to the date we wish to see. It’s easier this way.”

Easier for you, Dick wanted to lob back, but he swallowed the words. Zatanna was doing him a big favor. Now was not the time to be picky.

“Will the spell damage the book?”

Zatanna smiled. “No, Dick. This spell takes us into a vision of the past. Nothing we see will actually be physically real. It is all in the past.”

Except for the pain. That will be real. Dick nodded and took a deep breath. “Let’s do it then.”

They stepped into the center of the circle, with the book right between them. Dick had one end in his hand, Zatanna the other. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, Zatanna the entertainer was gone. Now there was only Zatanna the magician.

“wohS su woh nosaJ ddoT deid.”

The walls dissolved around them the instant the words had been spoken. The ceiling crumbled. Underneath his feet, the floor had turned to sand. Dick watched as Sheila Haywood emerged from a room to the side, cigarette in hand.

“Mom.” Jason sounded so young and yet so brave. Dick shuddered. Part of him wanted nothing more than to run from this circle, from this house. From this vision of the past. “You’ve got big trouble, mom. I know all about it... the Joker... everything.”

Sheila shot him down. To her, he was just a child. A child who was now son to one of the wealthiest men in the world, but still just a child. She was not taking him seriously. Jason could tell, too. So he revealed his uniform. Dick gasped.

“Oh god, no.” He wished he could say it was stupid. He wished he could say Jason should have known better, but he knew if that had been Mary Grayson, if it had been his mom, Dick would have told her in a heartbeat.

The change was almost instantaneously. Sheila’s surprise lasted for all of two seconds. Then, any and all emotion bled from her voice. ‘Come with me’ were quite possibly the flattest words he had ever heard anybody say. Dick watched in dread as Sheila led Jason to the warehouse and his gut turned to ice.

“Wait! The Joker...”

“Is long gone. There’s nothing to worry about. But I’ve something you should see.

“What? What’s going on here?”

“Just step over here and you’ll understand everything... Robin.”

Dick wanted to scream, but his voice was gone. All he could do was watch, frozen helplessly to the spot as Joker appeared from behind a crate, pointing a gun at Jason. All he could do was watch, as Sheila drew a gun of her own, laid out her own involvement with Joker out in front of him, and taunted him over his misjudgment.

It started with a gun. Then kicks. Then the crowbar. Dick felt his fingers curl into fists, hard enough to almost draw blood from his palms and make his knuckles hurt, as Joker continued to beat Jason. His little brother.

His little brother, who had wanted nothing more than to help his mother.

His little brother, who had been betrayed by his own flesh and blood.

His little brother, who was slowly dying.

Dick tried to step forward, but Zatanna’s hand clamped firmly around his wrist.

“I’m sorry, Dick. But this is only a vision of the past. It’s already done. You can’t save him.”

Zatanna was right. This time he was there and he still couldn’t save Jason, his Little Wing, his little brother. With every thump of the crowbar, he was losing him. Dick felt the shocks reverberate through his bones, drawing tears from his eyes.

And Sheila watched. She stood nearby and watched as Joker beat her own son into the ground. She lit a cigarette and suddenly Dick was overcome with the sense of déjà vu. This was the scene. This was the picture.

This was the woman they had buried next to Jason.

The beating seemed to continue forever. By the time it stopped, Jason had stopped moving and so had Dick. He could feel that the color had drained from his face just as it had from Jason and he wondered if his little brother had felt the same icy chill of despair.

Joker betrayed Sheila. All Dick could think of as the clown tied her to a nearby pillar and placed the explosives near her feet was ‘good riddance’. At least one of Jason’s murderers was no longer in this world.

And yet, Jason dragged himself off the floor, over to that evil witch who had sealed his fate, and freed her.

“I’ll... save you... mom.”

“Save yourself, you little idiot,” Dick found himself muttering, but there was no venom to the words. He didn’t mean it. He just wanted him to live. Was that too much to ask? For his little brother to live? Why?

The door was locked. The past was decided. Dick watched in horror as Jason dragged his broken body over to his mother, shielding her from the blast that turned the vision into an inferno of fire and shrapnel and death. It took the magic with it and by the time the smoke settled, they were back in the room with the rune circle and the high ceiling.

“God, no...” At last, Dick’s knees gave out. He braced one arm against the ground and breathed through the pain as the sobs and tears started to wreck his body.

Two years... for two years he had believed Jason had simply rushed into danger. That it was his occasional temper and impulsiveness that had gotten him killed. That Sheila had been an innocent victim. But instead...

I would have done nothing else, Dick realized in utter horror. Had that been Mary Grayson, he would have believed her without a doubt. He would have trusted her, as Jason had Sheila. He would have followed her, as Jason had Sheila. He would have died protecting her, as Jason had with Sheila.

And if he had then been buried next to her, next to the woman who had been partially responsible for his death, instead of the loving, if flawed woman who had raised him, if the father he had come to love and admire had found a new boy to put in that suit, he would have been angry. Livid. Furious. Vengeful.

He would have been Jason.

“Dick?” Zatanna was kneeling next to him. Dick was faintly aware that she was forcing him to sit up straight, that she was pushing something in his hand. A glass. “It’s just Merlot. Drink.”

Dick did as he was told. It was a simple reflex. Somehow, the wine unclogged his throat and his emotions and quiet sobbing turned into painful wails. Zatanna hugged him tight and he clung to her like a lifeline. Hell, he would have clung to Bane right now, had he been the only person in the room.

“Zatanna...”

“It’s alright, Dick.” One of her hands started stroking his back, trying to sooth the tremors that shook him. “The past is often painful. It’s not your fault.”

“We had it wrong, Zatanna. All of us. We had so much wrong about Jason. He was a hero.” Dick swallowed and forced himself to breathe through the tears. “My little brother was a hero.”

“I know, Dick.” A deep shudder went through her body and stilled her hands. “I saw.”

Chapter Text

Jason felt good. For the first time in a long time, he felt truly good. As the last few drops from the hot five-dollar shower at the Gotham Gas station just south of Gotham Cemetery ran down his spine, Jason wondered whether that said more about him or about Sheila Haywood.

He had expected to feel at least somewhat guilty about spray-painting her grave. It was a big taboo. Let the dead rest. But with every second that had passed, with every layer of paint, the feeling inside his gut, the realization that she did not deserve to rest peacefully next to him, had grown more and more. By the end of it, there had been nothing left except for the urge to wash the last memories of the treacherous harpy who had sold him out to Joker off his skin and out of his mind. Now, an hour later, he felt like a changed man.

Man? Boy? Jason looked at his reflection in the mirror with a slight frown. He had grown in those months since he had dug out of his grave, somehow. He now had a body to match his stocky shoulders, stubble on his chin, and more angular features in general. He had grown up, but no-one had been around to see it, except Ra’s, whom Jason definitely did not want to have to deal with any time soon, and Talia, who was better by miles, but still on the far side of Trust Town. He was on his own, but he doubted that would last for long now. Not if anyone in the bat clan was still worth their salt.

***

The first reports had come in with the ten o’ clock morning news, although Jason hadn’t caught them live. He had come back home feeling satisfied and clean and slightly less heavy, but also tired and apathic to the world around him. After his bout with the cold earlier that week, the rest had been sorely needed. It was half past four when he finally had breakfast and skimmed through the news.

Bruce Wayne had made his move. What exactly that move was could be anyone’s guess, according to Ms Vale, but there was activity at the site of the grave of one Jason Peter Todd. If Jason had to take a guess, the activity was an exhumation. He hoped it was. If all Bruce was going to do was have someone put up a new, clean headstone for Sheila, he was gonna spray-paint the bastard’s lungs.

The painting itself seemed to have gone unnoticed, judging from the relative silence in the forum threads. Jason wasn’t surprised. Graveyards were not a place people commonly looked for graffiti art and with the fresh works around, chances were only a handful of people had seen the painting. He was perfectly fine with that. So long as Bruce had seen it.

That left him with two things to do: re-tracing the rest of his steps since his death, in order to weed out any further, traumatic memories, and continuing the other graffiti streak, the one that was now bordering on occupational therapy – reassuring in its repetitiveness and comforting in its familiarity. Jason brought up the district map of Gotham on his phone and considered his options.

He had already marked half of North Gotham, starting from the inside and leaving aside the shore-facing districts like the Hill, Otisburg, Sheldon Park and Robbinsville. The center of Gotham would have made Harvey Dent proud, split down the middle with one side (west in this case) remaining almost completely untouched. But South Gotham...

South Gotham did not yet have any ‘Fuck Batman!’ graffiti.

It was a terrible mistake that needed to be rectified.

Jason decided to start with the Financial District and City Hall. He had already gone after the stock exchange after all and the mayor was always a good target. It would be good climbing and grappling practice, too – nearly all the buildings in the Financial District were skyscrapers.

The Bank of Gotham was his first target and while not condemned, it was completely deserted at this hour and with its high towering walls and its big, freshly cleaned windows, it was a perfect choice. He almost felt sorry for the people who had just cleaned the glass, but only almost. In a way, he was creating job security for some poor soul doing outdoor work in death-defying heights, while simultaneously pissing off the rich bastards who laundered Gotham’s mob money.

Yeah, on second thought, he was totally cool with this.

He started on the top floor, almost two-hundred feet above the ground, at the executive’s office on the east side of the building. The grappling hook was a familiar weight in his hand and the wind howling all around him was as comforting a sound as any lullaby would be to a child. Perhaps it was the distance from the ground he had escaped from. Perhaps it was the fact that the only thing missing now was a domino mask and a cape. Either way, the sudden feeling of nostalgia that hit him made him feel warm and fuzzy for a few seconds, before his brain reminded him that there was another Robin now and turned it into boiling hot anger.

Fuck Batman!

He wrote out one letter per window, cursing as he went along. Drawing letters that could be completed in one stroke was easy. Drawing them over a five by six feet window was not. It required frequent repositioning that made Jason hope the grappling hook was going to hold as well as he thought it would. Perhaps on his way back, he would go by Wayne Tower and snatch some better materials from Wayne Tech’s R&D labs. Hell, he was tempted to break into the Batcave. He could certainly use access to the computer, but remoting into the database through the office in Wayne Tower was probably a better bet.

The first letter took him almost half an hour to finish, the second only ten minutes. There was something to be said for practice. A little less than two hours in, Jason was finally done with his first artwork of the day.

Merchant Bank was next. The windows here were generally smaller, but there was one giant, mostly uninterrupted front at the very top of the building, for the executive office. Sixty feet of glass with only minimal framing. It was any artist’s dream. This one only took one hour.

At City Hall, Jason decided to take a break. This was hard work, after all. He cased the building for security first – still no alarms, silent or otherwise – for any window above the third floor, in spite of Gotham being THE city of capes and nut jobs – and finally decided to go for one of the smaller offices that did not have 24/7 camera surveillance like the mayor’s.

According to the nameplate on the desk, it was the office of Irvin J. Hudson, city treasurer. He might have known even before looking at the plate. The desk, the entire room for that matter, was absolutely spotless and organized to a point that made Bruce look shoddy. It was beyond meticulous.

“What are you hiding, Irvin, buddy?”

Nobody was that clean and tidy. Either this guy had major OCD or he was hiding something. Falsified records, perhaps. Wouldn’t be the first person in Gotham to defraud the city council. Or, Jason thought to himself as he checked the couch upholstery for zippers, perhaps even a body, judging from the faint, lingering smell of hydrogen peroxide.

The actual answer turned out to be so much better.

The box was hidden beneath a fake bottom board of the glass cabinet with the very delicate-looking glass miniatures. There was a good chance no-one, not even the cleaners, would have dared to touch that for risking Hudson’s ire if they broke anything. The lock on the box itself was laughable for anyone with a halfway decent lock pick – and Jason’s tools and skills were better than that. He wasn’t sure which of the contents would be more humiliating for the treasurer if it ever became public knowledge: the body paint and glitter, or the diverse assortment of sex toys.

And now he knew why there were no cameras in this room.

He took his time after that. The drawers of the desk were tame and boring by comparison, although he did appreciate the free granola bars he got out of it. The computer’s hard drive was spotless, and given that the login password had been ‘MoneyBadger123’, Jason doubted Hudson would have known how to hide evidence of his... interests... in electronic form anyway. Jason opened a quick Word document, printed his ‘thank you for letting me borrow the glitter’ note on Hudson’s printer, and turned everything off once more. He returned the fun box back to its hideout, minus the tin of happy purple sparkles, taped the note to the outside of the cabinet, and left the same way he had come.

His only regret was that he wouldn’t get to see Irvin J. Hudson’s face in the morning.

His last stop was the tallest skyscraper in the Financial District – LexCorp Investment Banking. Three of Jason’s most despised pillars of capitalism in one package, and appalling to look at, too. With its rounded top, the wide base, and the bushes planted in front of it, the building really looked like a giant dick, more than any other skyscraper around.

Jason decided to follow the natural flow of the building and wrote the letters in a vertical row, one floor at a time. The purple glitter stuck beautifully to the silver paint he used for highlights. Come sunrise, this building would be absolutely fabulous. He took his time getting the curves and angles exactly right and ended up spending almost two hours on the design.

And still none of the Bats had shown up. Jason sighed as he finished the last pitch of glitter on the dot of the exclamation mark. It seemed he really had to poke the hornets nest.

***

Wayne Tower had always had good security. Between Bruce, who was rightfully paranoid to begin with, and Lucius, who had seen his fair share of industrial espionage throughout the years, Wayne Tower had become a fortress. Motion detectors, beyond-state-of-the-art alarms, 24/7 audio and video surveillance everywhere but the bathrooms and fire escape routes, outside vents too small for anyone to crawl through, combined keycard and code scans on all the doors. And that was just in the publicly known part of the building.

Jason frowned as he swiped the card straight from the pockets of the security guard on patrol on the outside perimeter – Selina had always said that the weak point in any security system was the guy with the gun – and headed for the door that connected the southwest stairwell and elevator to the smoking area. It was where most of the ground floor employees went on their smoke break, including the security personnel. Here, it would make sense for the guards to use the door. All he had to do was wait.

It took half an hour until one of the guards in the control room went for a break. Jason clung to the shadows, hood drawn tight to conceal his features as the man emerged, lit his cig, and started playing Candycrush on his phone. Eight minutes later, he went back inside. Jason counted to one-hundred and twenty, sprinted over to the door quick and silent as a cat, swiped the card, and entered the code. The door opened with a soft swish.

The elevator was a no-go. Jason knew it would activate a silent alarm if used with an unauthorized card. Thankfully, the stairwell, being a fire escape route, had no such restrictions. Jason ducked into the metal spiral, aimed his grappling gun, took twenty floors at a time, and couldn’t help but curse Bruce for picking what was almost the top floor as he finally made it to floor 125.

Bruce Wayne’s office looked no different from any other top management office, except for its size, but Jason new better. He knew of the thermal imaging cameras, of the silent alarms that went straight to the Batcomputer, and of the extra firewalls. The good news was that he also knew which secret compartment in the office held one of Batman’s hacking devices and he knew that they worked on Bruce’s PC. He had tried it once before, just for fun, while Bruce had been out of the country on some mission or another. He could do it again, only this time, he’d have to be fast. The security guard’s code could get him through the door and past the motion sensors. It would not bypass the silent alarm up here. Jason pulled his scarf up to cover everything below his eyes, took out his phone and started the stopwatch as soon as he used the guard’s keycard to enter the office.

He spray-painted the cameras black first, just to be sure, then went for the goods. The device was locked behind a hidden panel at the back of the bar, the last place anyone would expect super-secret equipment to be, although it was actually quite ingenious. If you knew which tabs to turn and which parts of the panel to push, you did not need any electronic parts, such as fingerprint or retina scanners that could give the location away. And Jason knew which parts to push and turn. He switched on the PC, unlocked the gadget compartment, and retrieved the hacking device and a spare Batarang just in time for the screen to ask him for the password. Jason smiled as he let the gadget do its job and the asterisks filled up the password field.

Access to the Batcomputer was hidden on a ghost drive, behind three separate firewalls, but with the scanner it was a piece of cake. Only thirty seconds later the remote access screen of the Batcomputer glared at him in that hideous blue that Bruce and Dick were both so fond of. Jason had always preferred green or red. The file structure was the kind of familiar that made the tips of his fingers tingle with longing and bitterness. This had been his life and it was still part of him, ingrained in his brain and years of muscle memory. Dying hadn’t changed that. Coming back hadn’t either. Which brought him back to the matter at hand.

Talia had said he had been wondering Gotham for months before her people found him, catatonic and broken, but that implied his physical injuries had been less than he remembered from his nightmares of clawing his way out of his grave and that his mental injuries had been worse. Something else had happened. And he had a hunch what it was.

Getting access to all records of Gotham’s medical hospitals was easy. Filtering was the real problem. He had to keep the search generic enough. Jason frowned as he typed in the parameters. Male. Twelve to Twenty. ID unknown. He wasn’t entirely sure just what kind of injuries he had had. Burns. Multiple fractures. Severe bruising and lacerations on both hands. Those he could be sure of and Jason shuddered at the memory of the wood in his flesh and the fire on his skin. He narrowed down the timeframe to the year between his death and the first anniversary thereof and was happy to see that there were only two handfuls of records that matched the description. He sent them to the online drop box he had set up four years ago without Bruce’s knowledge – in case Bruce ever got brainwashed or cloned or some other crazy thing that made him a liability and required storing evidence elsewhere.

The transfer ended just in time for Jason to catch a glimpse of red and gold descending onto the west balcony. Robin.

The new, fucking Robin that’s not me. Jason felt the rage boil in his gut. Fine then. Let’s see what you’re made of, rookie.

He grabbed his backpack and threw himself through the east side window.

The first time he had jumped off the tower, Jason had been quietly terrified. They had practiced jumping and grappling in less outrageous heights ad nauseam, of course, but jumping off a balcony a thousand feet above the road was still beyond ridiculously suicidal. Jason had swallowed his words with his fear though. He had not wanted to disappoint Bruce. In time, he had learned that Bruce was never going to disappoint him either, at least not when it came to jumping off buildings. Bruce was going to catch him, if necessary. Always.

This Robin? Jason grinned as he watched the boy in the red vest dive after him without a second thought. This one was gonna try. For once, Jason wanted Robin to fail.

He went for the northeast gargoyle first, since it was the closest. It was also going to lead him into the Diamond District, where he could use the gradually diminishing height of the buildings as a good aid to lose speed and land without breaking all his bones. The avenue between Lacey Towers and Dini Heights was also a good spot to turn the tables. Jason counted the swings as he rushed through the night and took a deep breath before connecting his grappling hook to the gargoyle at the southeastern corner of Dini Heights. He turned just as he reached the equilibrium and even at the distance between the two towers he could see the confusion on Robin’s face.

Jason smirked, took out the Batarang he had nicked, and threw it with full force. It cut Robin’s line like a knife would hot butter.

He caught the end of Robin’s fall as he swung back around to Lacey Towers, grappling back the same way he had come. The cape had taken off a lot of his speed before his momentum had sent him onto a nearby balcony and through the glass window there. Judging from the shrill shrieking, Robin 3.0 had startled at least two residents. Still, the fact that he was not a blot of red on the wall was more than good enough for Jason. He hadn’t meant to kill the kid, after all. The bruising was going to be lesson enough.

Try to explain that one to Bruce, ‘Robin’.

Jason smiled as he circled back to the Diamond District subway station, dropped down in a nearby alley, and became lost in the commuting crowd.

***

He moved safe-houses three times that night, before he finally settled down and made his bed for the night. The walls of his new hidey hole – one of the empty apartments of a shabby architectural monstrosity near Millar Harbor that had been erected some time during the industrial revolution – rattled with each passing train, interrupted only occasionally by the droning noise of a ship announcing its entry or departure, but that he could live with. What mattered was that the place was just derelict enough to get no-ones attention, but not so much of a ruin that he had to fear the roof crashing onto his head in his sleep. Even better, all the tabs in the bathroom, though rusty, were still working. As far as Jason was concerned, he had hit the jackpot.

Jason unrolled his blankets on the cleanest spot of floor he could find and got to work.

The data he had saved from the Batcomputer was raw and unsorted and that alone made Jason frown. He hated having only a jumbled mess to work with, but that was just the price he had to pay for hacking into the Batcomputer of all things. He downloaded it onto his phone and deleted the drop box, then started sifting through the reports one by one. This time, the lucky number was six.

John Doe. Cracked skull, shattered sternum, collapsed lung, forty fractures of various bones of the rib cage, arms and legs. Flash burns. Severe lacerations on all fingers. Dirt found under the fingernails. Jason could feel the impact of the crowbar, the resistance of the mahogany, and the uncomfortable, wet slush of the mud, even as he read the words, but that was not what convinced him, nor was it the fact that the measured height of John Doe matched his last measurements before his death to a T. No. What convinced him were the notes scribbled under ‘Next of kin’:

unknown, patient repeatedly asked for father, “Bruce”

“Bruce.” Jason said the word, slowly, deliberately, distorting his voice the way Alfred had once taught him to. Acting was a useful skill in the field, especially if you could make yourself sound like a wounded gazelle, when you were anything but. In this case, a wounded gazelle with a shattered rib cage and collapsed lung. “Bruce... dad...”

He closed his eyes and pictured the scene. Another useful tool for any actor. He pictured the stale white of –Jason double-checked — Gotham Mercy North’s ICU rooms. He tried to recall the smell of disinfectant mingled with the rubbery scent of old linoleum, the same smell every hospital in the poorer, northern districts of Gotham had. He imagined the beeping of the various machines, the subdued, rasping sound of a tube pushing air into his lungs. He tried to recall the feeling of cheap hospital linens and gowns on his skin – a far too familiar feeling, even before he had become Robin – and to imagine the feeling of gauze plastered over his eyes, to prevent any discomfort from sudden light exposure.

“Bruce...” Jason grimaced. “Dad...”

Suddenly, he no longer had to try. Suddenly, it was as if the blanket underneath his back really was hospital linen. There was no loud rattling from the trains, only the beeps of the machines and the rasp of the tube. His limbs felt heavy and incomplete, like someone had torn chunks out of them and filled them up with lead. The blood vessels in his right arm itched with the phantom feeling of an IV pumping medication and nutrients into him, just like his tongue itched with the feeling of two words stuck between his vocal cords and the tube that kept him breathing.

Bruce. Dad.

Jason turned off his phone, removed the battery, and tucked himself into the second blanket as tightly as he could. There was no denying that it would be a rough few hours, but he needed the sleep. Later, in the afternoon, he’d have to go to the store and buy a new burner phone and a new can of spray paint. Deep sky blue, to mix with the silver and black he already had to create gunmetal and hospital gown blue.

And then, he’d have to pay a visit to Gotham Mercy North.

***

“This is Vicki Vale, reporting live for GCN from Gotham’s Financial District, and behind me is the HQ of LexCorp Investment Banking, which has become a victim of vandalism just this night.” The camera panned slightly to focus on the building proper. Across the glass front of the skyscraper, the words “Fuck Batman!” had been painted in giant, black, silver and purple letters. The script shimmered in the lights of a nearby police helicopter, while Vicki’s blonde strands tried to invade the picture thanks to Gotham’s harsh winds. “As you can see, GCPD is currently investigating the matter, although to our knowledge no suspects have been identified yet. In an official statement just a few minutes ago, one of LexCorp’s public relations officers condemned the fresh defacement of the building as ‘a hideous and repulsive act of anti-vigilante activism’ and promised to launch a full scale investigation. Batman, who—“

Bruce hit the ‘x’ on the video feed and sank back into his chair, rubbing his temples. He could deal with metahumans trying to terrorize Gotham. He could deal with insane criminals projecting their psychoses onto the rest of Gotham and trying to lay it to waste. He could deal with the mobs trying to buy its streets and people. He could deal with the muggers, the thieves, the rapists, and the murderers. But this?

This was just vandalism. Just. Vandalism.

It shouldn’t be important. As a matter of fact, it had been unimportant to Bruce for a long time. The first ‘Fuck Batman!’ graffiti he had been informed of had been found by Batgirl and Oracle in Crime Alley, many weeks ago. It had made him grind his teeth a little harder, but compared to some of the other gruesomely graphic and downright disturbing anti-Batman art he had seen plastered onto some of Gotham’s walls, it had been downright tame. He had firmly filed it into the category of ‘can safely ignore’.

But this? This was LexCorp Investment Banking, and while Bruce felt no love for Lex Luthor or any of his creations, there was one factor in play here that elevated this particular piece into a new realm of importance: LexCorp had impeccable security. Bruce knew. He had had to infiltrate their holdings many times and he could safely say that the only buildings in Gotham that had tighter security than LexCorp’s belonged to Wayne Industries.

Which meant whoever had done this had either successfully circumvented the security systems inside and was consequently a master hacker, or they had rappelled off the roof to paint this on the outside, hundreds of feet above the ground in Gotham’s merciless wind and rain. Either way, this was not just an artist with a grudge who only went after abandoned shops and factories. It was not a case Bruce should have had to spend time and energy on, but now it was. Bruce sighed.

“More street art trouble?”

He didn’t need to turn to know that Alfred was coming down the stairs with fresh coffee and tea. It had been a long night. Bruce had to admit he was drained.

No. Not a long night. A terrible day and a short, but intense night.

April 27^th, and the first two or three days to follow, were never good days in Wayne Manor. It still felt like yesterday that he had dug Jason’s lifeless body out of the rubble, searching frantically for a heartbeat that was no longer there. The pain was as real and terrible now as it had been then. He had spent the last week mentally preparing himself for the usual, sour ritual of going to the florist, getting a bouquet of white lilies and red gladioli, and then going to visit Jason’s grave, to mutter apologies that no longer mattered, because no amount of apologizing could bring Jason back. He had tried. God, he had tried... All it did was make him more miserable, but he owed it to Jason. If there was nothing more he could do for his departed son than to shed tears over his grave, then at least he needed to do that.

And then the cemetery management had called.

Vandalism. Graffiti. Not on Jason’s grave, thank God. That one was undisturbed. No. On Sheila Haywood’s and that was bad enough. Bruce had done a very convincing imitation of distressed tears – he had had those in reserve, after all, although the call had quickly shifted his mood from genuine grief to anger – before instructing management to close off the site from any unwanted eyes and replace that headstone as soon as possible. And, no, he was not going to come and inspect the damage himself, because the thought of it just hurt too much.

It was a convenient lie, mostly because people actually believed that. Bruce Wayne was a very convincing, lovably incompetent, sentimental idiot. Batman was not.

He had gotten to work the moment the call was over, skipping sleep and a meeting for analyzing security footage. He had found absolutely nothing, which proved that someone had tampered with the system. He had sent Tim to investigate, to try and isolate any physical evidence, but there had been absolutely nothing. By the time Bruce had crawled into bed, the sun had been high in the sky and his mind had been going crazy, trying to raffle through all the possible perpetrators, all the criminals he could think of who had the knowledge and skill to circumvent his type of security.

Needless to say, there had been no sleep for him this day.

And now? Now there was this.

“More anti-Batman profanity,” Bruce finally answered as Alfred handed him a fresh cup of hot coffee. “This time on the windows of the LexCorp Investment Banking building. Whoever did this is either a skilled climber or a skilled hacker.”

“Or maybe he’s both.”

Bruce nearly choked on his coffee. It took him every ounce of control in his body to stop the muscles in his hands and face from betraying his surprise. Was he really so unfocused tonight that he did not even hear Dick come in after Alfred?

“I didn’t know you had business in Gotham tonight,” Bruce said with a quick glance to the side, but even that much told him he had made a serious mistake. Dick’s face warped from concerned to furious in the fraction of a second.

“It’s April 28^th, Bruce,” Dick snapped back at him. “Of course I am in Gotham this week and you know why! Hell, I’m the one who called the police for that graffiti at the cemetery!”

“That is being dealt with already,” Bruce answered tersely. “The stonemason who did Sheila Haywood’s headstone has confirmed he will have a replacement ready by the end of the week.”

“Then call him tomorrow and tell him not to bother. That woman doesn’t deserve a proper grave!”

Now that was curious. Bruce suppressed the urge to raise his eyebrows. Dick had never cared about Sheila Haywood, for better or for worse.

“If you have something to say, just say it.”

Dick took a deep breath, swallowed whatever jab he had wanted to throw back at Bruce, and squared his shoulders. “That new graffiti artist that’s been plaguing Gotham... that’s Jason.”

Bruce bristled. Against his better judgment, a soft sigh escaped his lips. “You’ve been talking to Stephanie.”

“No, I’ve been talking to Barb.”

“Who got that idea from Stephanie.” He closed his eyes and counted to five before turning to Dick again. “Dick... Jason is dead.”

It hurt. Even now it hurt so very much just to say the words. There was a finality in them that left a hole in his heart each time he used them. The only thing that hurt more was the tantalizing false hope that maybe, by some insane chance, by some wondrous miracle, the universe had decided to return Jason to him. It was a dream he had had many times, but that was all it was. A dream, born out of grief and pain.

“Dick, I know how tempting it is to hope that he might come back after all, but there is no sign of disturbance on Jason’s grave, not to mention that he would have no reason to deface Sheila Haywood’s headstone. I talked to her before she succumbed to her injuries. Jason died trying to save her.”

“Did she also tell you that she’s the reason he died?” If anything Bruce had said had diminished Dick’s anger, he didn’t let it show.

All Bruce managed was a flat: “What?”

“I talked to Zatanna,” Dick said in equally plain words, except the fury swung underneath them, cold and cutting. “Well, first I saw Sheila’s headstone so I went to check on Catherine Todd’s grave. There were pink carnations there. You know who always left pink carnations at Catherine Todd’s grave, right?”

Bruce felt a shiver run down his spine. Thankfully, Dick spared him the agony of having to answer the question, as his cold, calculated anger quickly grew hotter.

“And then I went to Barbara. She told me all about it – the ‘Fuck Batman!’ graffiti. The murals. The fire. The freaking mural of Joker with a crowbar, drawn from the perspective of Robin! The one that looked like someone digging out of a grave!” Dick reached for the Batcomputer and brought up the picture without question, then pointed at the drawing of the angel. “Look at that, Bruce! Look at that and tell me that doesn’t look like the statue we put on top of Jason’s grave!”

He couldn’t. It would have been a lie and a bad one at that. It did look exactly like that angel, only much more haunting and menacing.

“Whoever drew that attacked Stephanie and managed to get some decent hits in,” Dick barreled onward. “And I know you refuse to train her and I know she’s not half as good as any of us, but she is NOT a pushover, Bruce! Whoever drew this has serious combat skills! And now he’s tagged the top floors of LexCorp Investment Banking, which, as you pointed out, means he’s either a really good climber or a really good hacker. I know Stephanie’s theory is wild, but after everything that’s happened... I wanted to know if there would be any reason at all why Jason would vandalize a grave of all things. So I called in Zatanna and asked her to take me back to Ethiopia.”

Bruce flinched. Alfred stared at Dick in abject horror. “Master Richard, you don’t mean to say...”

“Zatanna knows a spell to bring conjure a vision of any past event, provided she knows what she’s looking for and that she has a physical object relating to the person or the event in question,” Dick explained as calmly as he could, but Bruce could tell that it was hard. There were a lot of tears – both of anger and sadness – buried beneath the neutral words. “She showed me what really happened in Ethiopia on April 27^th and I am telling you, Bruce, Jason has every reason to hate Sheila Hayword. She sold him out to Joker!”

Another ‘what’ floated through Bruce’s head, but this time it died en route to his tongue. Why would Sheila Haywood—Jason was her son, her true son. They had seemed so happy to have found one another. Why would she—

“She was working with Joker,” Dick continued, “although she told Jason it was blackmail and he—” He swallowed hard. “Jason trusted her, Bruce! He trusted her because she was his mom and he wanted to help her! He told her he was Robin and she led him straight back to Joker. She even lied to Jason, told him Joker was gone, and then pointed a gun at him when the cat was out of the bag and he tried to get away. She stood there and watched and smoked a cigarette while Joker beat him to a pulp!”

Dick hit the keyboard hard enough to dislodge ‘l’ to ‘4’. At last, the tears had made their way to the corners of his eyes and the sight broke Bruce’s heart all over again.

“Sheila Haywood handed Jason to Joker on a silver platter, Bruce, and he still tried to save her! And then we buried her right next to him! Of course he’s pissed! But he’s alive, Bruce! And he is out there and if he wanted to kill Stephanie that night, he could have, but he didn’t, so he’s obviously not come back wrong like some deranged, Lazarus Pit zombie! We need to find him, Bruce!”

He wanted to say no. Every instinct inside him screamed to say no. Dead was dead. There were, as Bruce had learned, many ways to bring back the dead, but all of them came at hefty prices, usually the sanity of the returned. This. Could not. Be. Jason. It just couldn’t. He—

It was the beeping of the Batcomputer that saved him from having to come up with an answer and that was a relief. He knew how Dick could get when he was truly convinced of something and pushing for a plan. Stubborn. Relentless. Uncompromising.

The good news was that he was now spared that discussion for a few minutes. The bad news was that the alarm signaled an intruder at his office in Wayne Tower. As if this evening couldn’t get any worse.

The intruder looked to be about six feet tall, much taller than Jason had been when he had died. He was shrouded in a red hoodie and scarf and was smart enough to spray-paint all the cameras as soon as he entered.

Then the second silent alarm, the one connected to the secret gadget compartment behind the bar, went off.

Bruce had never hit the comms button so fast before.

“Robin! Get to Wayne Tower, now! We have a break-in. Detain the intruder at any cost!”

He didn’t wait for the answer and he could only hope that neither did Tim. Bruce ditched his coffee on the keyboard, and jumped into the Batmobile, not the least bit surprised when he saw Dick shrug out of his jacket to reveal the Nightwing uniform underneath.

There was a good chance they were still going to be too late.

***

They did arrive too late.

Bruce scowled as he grappled onto the rooftop of Lacey Towers. Tim was picking glass shards out of his compromised cape, cursing as he went along. He went quiet the moment he saw Batman and Nightwing landing on the ledge.

“He got away, Batman. I’m sorry.” Tim held out his hand and Bruce took the grapnel gun slowly. The rope had been cut and that was another damning sign. There weren’t too many blades that could cut his ropes. “This guy is good. He’s got training. Jumped out the window and transitioned into grappling swings like he was born on a trapeze. He turned, just as I passed between here and Dini Heights and threw a Batarang straight at the rope, hit it spot on. All I could do was brace my fall and tumble through a window. By the time I got back to the rooftops, he was gone.”

“How long ago was that?”

Tim shrugged. “Maybe two minutes ago?”

“We’re not gonna find him.”

Tim grinned at Dick’s dejected tone. “Aw, c’mon, Nightwing! We’re better than that! We can get him!”

“We’re not better than him,” Dick snapped back through clenched teeth. “I thought we were, but... we had it all backwards. Batman—”

“Secure the scene up here,” Bruce cut in quickly, facing Tim. A short scan told him that there were no serious injuries and that was good. “Collect any evidence you can find and send it straight to the Batcomputer.” Tim nodded. “Nightwing—”

“Don’t you dare—”

“Head to Wayne Tower and secure the scene. I’ll see if I can pick up his trail.”

He didn’t wait for Dick’s answer. There was no point. Dick was relentless and the argument would go nowhere. As he jumped off the roof to head back to the Batmobile, Robin’s and Nightwing’s voices came softly through his audio receivers, barely more than a whisper.

“Don’t tell me you already figured out who this guy is!” Bruce could all but hear Tim’s pout. He could also all but hear Dick’s teeth grind together.

“You heard Bruce. Let's get to work.”

***

In the end, he did manage to pick up his trail. He just couldn’t follow it.

The Batcomputer logs showed that an investigation had been launched into medical records in Gotham, a search for any records of young John Does with injuries that came eerily close to what Jason had suffered in Ethiopia. Alfred, seeing the opportunity unfold in front of his eyes, had done his best to track the data transfer. The tracks had been carefully covered, though, and by the time they had identified the drop box the search results had been sent to, it had already been emptied and deleted.

Bruce had no doubt Barbara could hack into the records of the drop box provider and find out the IMEI of the phone or the MAC address of the computer the data had been downloaded to, but he also had zero doubts that Jason had destroyed the phone and gotten a new one by now, if it was really him.

And as much as the idea horrified Bruce, it seemed more and more likely that Dick was right, that Stephanie had been right.

Bruce did not speak to Barbara. He did not speak to Alfred. When he returned to the cave, aborting patrol before it had even started, it was only to set up a new search algorithm, scouring the internet for mentions of new graffiti in Gotham, especially uncommonly large and detailed murals that suddenly appeared out of nowhere in ridiculous places.

Then he went to see Superman.

Clark didn’t know of any way that could return the dead to the living in a reasonably capable state of mind. Neither did Diana, although she conceded that necromancers were indeed a thing that actually existed and that he would be better off asking Zatanna for details. Bruce thanked her, skipped Zatanna, and went straight to John Constantine. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he did not want to talk to Zatanna after she had already helped Dick. She was no longer impartial.

He asked the remaining Justice League members, too, but in the end, the common consensus remained: necromancy was possible, but it did not yield results that were sane enough to hack multi-level encryption all on their own.

There was really only one person left he could ask. Well, two, but neither of them was likely to divulge the information without too many strings attached. Even in her most cooperative mood, Talia was a master manipulator who was sure to demand some form of payment that would come back to make his life harder or endanger Gotham or both. Ra’s was even less of a reasonable choice.

No, he was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: through solid, hard detective work, which could sometimes take days and weeks.

All I can do for now, Bruce thought to himself as he finally ditched his clothes and slipped into bed long past noon, is to hope and pray that it is not Jason. And if it is him, that he is safe.

The thought was infuriating. Hoping and praying had never done him much good.

***

The Batcomputer pinged him precisely twenty-six hours and eighteen minutes after he had started the search. When he first saw the message, Bruce thought it was an error.

It wasn’t.

Someone had made a new post on an online forum thread dedicated to the murals popping up all over town. The user’s name was Hare82 and according to her rambling, punctuation-free wall of text, she was a nurse at Gotham Mercy North. She had been going up to the roof for a smoke break – technically illegal since no-one but maintenance personnel was supposed to access the roof, unless in case of emergency – where she had found a graffiti picture that stretched over the entire room. A black-haired boy in a hospital bed.

Bruce felt the color drain from his face.

Gotham Mercy was up north, in the rougher parts of town, overlooking the northwest of the river, with Mooney Bridge in the distance on one side and Wayne Manor in the distance on another. He landed on the tower at the southeast corner of the building, clenched his teeth shut against the sounds of despair that wanted to come out, and started taking pictures of the scene.

Hare82 had been right. The picture stretched over the entire roof, from the west ledge (top) to the east ledge (bottom). It was a boy in a hospital gown that had once been bright blue, but had turned a mottled, green-tinted shade over time. A gunmetal gray tube was shoved down his throat, held crudely in place by a pair of bandages. Two heavy, taped gauze patches concealed his eyes and a smaller tube was stuck into one of the arteries of his throat. The bandage around his head had the same grayish veil to it as the gown, except for the dark red patch where it covered what must have been a substantial head wound.

Bruce tried to picture the boy without the bandage and the gauze and shuddered.

No. It can’t be. It can’t.

He stood, frozen to the banister of the tower, for God only knew how long. Then, the moon crawled out from beneath the clouds just long enough to reveal the tiniest sparkle within the pitch black hole at the center of the valve on the breathing tube. Bruce swallowed hard, jumped down onto the roof and headed for the spot.

There, in the black abyss, was a single word written in a delicate line in fine silver with a hint of purple glitter.

Dad

Bruce knew that handwriting. He knew it like the back of his hand. He had seen it on so many school essays, so many little notes all over the manor, and on the ‘World’s Greatest Dad-tective’ mug he had received on the last father’s day before that fateful April 27^th.

He wanted to throw up. He wanted to faint. Bruce grappled back up to the tower and onto the next building, then to the next and the next and the next. He kept on going all the way back to the Batmobile, where his breath finally caught up with him. He wasn’t sure which came first – the panic or the hyperventilation. He only knew what came last, after he had finally forced his breathing back into a normal rhythm, after he had finally steadied his hands to the point where we was confident enough to drive, after he had shaken the dizziness and dulled the stabbing pain in his chest.

After all was said and done, Bruce opened the comms channel.

“Everyone, meet me at the cave. This is an emergency.”

Chapter Text

There was life in the manor again. Well. Maybe not precisely in the manor, but the cave was close enough to count and Alfred Pennyworth was not willing to push his luck.

Master Bruce’s call had come in less than an hour ago, followed directly by a new graffiti painting that had made Alfred’s blood feel a few degrees cooler. The boy in the picture was a dead ringer for a boy Alfred had never expected to see again, except in the pictures Master Bruce had ordered to be stored in the farthest corner of the attic, as far from his sight as absolutely possible.

For the last two, long, agonizing years, Alfred had always made sure that Master Bruce was out of the house when he had gone up there to reminisce, to grief. Perhaps now the day had finally come that he could stop lying to him.

Master Richard had been the first to arrive, his hair tousled and wet from the wild wind and rain, and the tires of his motorbike covered in mud. He had greeted Alfred with a few short, but polite words, before finding himself the most uncomfortable looking perch on one of the railings near the Batcomputer. Master Bruce was headed for a sermon.

The Batmobile had arrived two minutes later, just shy of a quarter hour after the call had come in. Master Bruce had promptly sat down at the computer, willfully and successfully ignoring Master Richard’s questions. He had jumped straight into an analysis of the new painting, which had yielded results that were unsurprising at this point. The color gradients had been achieved through the use of multiple layers. The colors were of the Ballista brand, same as all the other graffiti that had drawn their attention recently.

Master Timothy had been riding with Master Bruce. Presumably, the churlish silence en route to the manor had already impressed the gravity of the situation on him, and so he had wisely chosen to leave Batman alone and focus on distracting Nightwing instead. It was not working as well as intended, of course. Master Richard was smart and he had worn the red and green, too. He knew how to deal with a chatty Robin. Still, Alfred relished every second. He had spent far too long with nothing but the screeching of the bats in the cave for companion to not appreciate the voice of a young man carrying over the rock and water.

Miss Cassandra had been next. There had been traces of ash on her costume and splinters in her cape, hinting at a recent brush with fiery death, but she had shrugged off his concern with a wave of her hand and – once she had removed the cowl – a quick shake of her head. Then, Miss Cassandra had sat down cross-legged next to the computer, silent and graceful as a cat. She had kept an eye on both Master Bruce and Masters Richard and Timothy, though, interrupting her observation only ever so briefly to thank Alfred with a quick smile for the cup of assam he had brought her.

Miss Barbara and Miss Stephanie had arrived last and they had been the only ones to arrive through the front door. Miss Barbara had apologized for her lateness – forty-three minutes after the call – but taxis in Gotham only drove so fast, even if the driver was a death-defying maniac. Miss Stephanie had concurred. Apparently, they had set out from the Clock Tower together and the ride had been more nauseating than any jump off a skyscraper.

Alfred doubted that what was about to happen was going to improve anybody’s mood, much less the state of their stomachs.

“I have called you all here, because we have a new priority case,” Master Bruce started as he turned to the assembly of young vigilantes in front of him. “Whatever your current cases are – drop them. This one will require our full attention.”

“Thank you all for coming so quickly. I really appreciate it,” Miss Stephanie muttered over the cup of chamomile Alfred had brewed for her upset stomach. She caught Master Bruce’s scowl and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a thing called manners. It generally makes people more agreeable and supportive towards you. Which comes in handy. You know. When asking for help.”

Master Timothy cringed. Miss Barbara’s eyebrows were climbing higher with every word. On the other side of the platform, Master Richard’s lips curved into the slightest hint of a strangely proud smile.

“Man, you two will get along swimmingly—“

“Enough!” Master Bruce sighed. An actual, deep, audible sigh. Most of the people around him bristled. It was not like Batman to show emotion. “This is important.”

He brought up the casefile, flooding the screens with dozens of pictures. The murals were aligned neatly by date from top left to bottom right. Alfred could see several pairs of eyes narrow at the latest addition. In between the brightly colored masterpieces, the script shots looked downright trivial.

“We need to find the boy who made these.”

“What?” Master Timothy blinked, then blinked again. “Not for nothing – I know this guy has insane hacking and grappling skills and can apparently punch pretty hard, too...” He glanced briefly at the spot on Miss Stephanie’s neck where the bruises had only just faded completely two days ago, before turning his attention back to Master Bruce. “But he has never physically harmed anyone, except in self-defense. We currently have dozens of unsolved murders in Gotham, a confirmed eighteen metahumans, and new, violent crime occurring every night. Why should this suddenly be a priority?”

“Because it’s Jason.”

Master Richard’s voice floated through the sudden silence of the cave like a leaf in the wind, twisting and turning until the screech of the bats drowned out the last, faint echo. Suddenly, the cave was quiet again. Quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Quiet as a grave. Miss Cassandra had raised her eyebrows, but she was too busy analyzing everyone’s expressions to ask. Master Timothy and Miss Barbara wore matching looks, mouths agape and eyes wide in shock. In what Alfred could only describe as an uncomfortable bravery born out of ignorance, Miss Stephanie raised her hand.

“Who the cluck is Jason?”

“The second Robin!” Miss Barbara elbowed her hard. “The one I told you about, remember?”

“Oh...” Miss Stephanie lowered her hand, took a sip from her tea, and promptly spit it out again. “Wait, so I was right?!” The smile that suddenly stretched her lips stood in stark contrast to the rest of the assembly. She ditched the tea, clapped her hands and pumped both her fists into the air. “Who called it, huh? Who. Fricking. Called it?”

“This isn’t the time for—“

“It’s never the time for acknowledgment, if we play by your rules, Bruce” Master Richard cut in quickly. The granite-like glare Master Bruce shot him was met by an equally harsh sneer. “And don’t try to give me any crap for breaking field name protocol. What we were about to explain to everyone here was gonna ruin that anyway.”

Master Richard took a deep breath and turned to Miss Stephanie. “You got it before any of us did, Stephanie. Good job. Now please pipe down and let me explain.” He snatched the remote from next to the keyboard before Master Bruce had a chance to complain. If Alfred had had to hazard a guess, he would have said at least a tiny part of Master Bruce was probably relieved that he did not need to have to give the presentation himself.

Master Richard started with the graffiti found at Sheila Haywood’s grave. Miss Stephanie bristled.

“Tagging a tombstone? Jesus, that’s cold!”

“Not just any tombstone.” He opened the file that bore the same face as the picture. An old file, from painful times, completed and archived more than two years ago, then re-opened just last night. “This is Sheila Haywood, Jason’s birth mother. Two years ago, he went to look for her in Ethiopia, where he ran into the Joker, who killed both Jason and Sheila in an explosion. So far, we believed that Sheila was just collateral damage.”

“What makes you think she wasn’t?” Master Timothy sounded skeptical. Alfred did not blame him. There had been much... uncomfortable talk from both Master Richard and Master Bruce about how Jason could have lived, if only he had followed orders. Miss Haywood had only ever been an afterthought.

“After seeing this picture, I talked to Babs, who filled me in on Stephanie’s theory,” Master Richard continued. “So I went to see Zatanna and asked her to take me back in time.” Another pause. Alfred could all but see the question ‘Who is Zatanna?’ floating through Miss Stephanie’s head and so did Master Richard, probably. He chose to ignore it. “She worked her magic, took me back. Sheila Haywood...”

To Master Richard’s credit, he did not choke, but there was a sudden bitterness and anger to his voice that was unmistakable.

“Jason saw Joker threatening Sheila and revealed to her that he was Robin. He was trying to save his mom. What he didn’t know was that Sheila was working with Joker. She handed Jason to him on a silver platter and smoked a cigarette while Joker beat him to a pulp.”

“And we buried her right next to him,” Miss Barbara finished through clenched teeth. Her fingers gripped the arm rests of her chair like a vice. “Forget graffiti – I’m surprised he didn’t take a sledgehammer to the damn tombstone!”

“I don’t know how he came back,” Master Richard said with a clear tone of frustration to his voice. “But every single one of the images we’ve found so far makes sense, if we assume Jason painted them: Joker and the crowbar, the explosion, the angel above the grave, Sheila with her cigarette... It would also explain how so many of these graffiti paintings ended up in death-defying heights with no signs of B&E, meaning someone scaled the buildings from the outside, and why almost all of them were either abandoned places or mega corp skyscrapers.”

“Jason always hated ‘rich bastards in nice suits’...” Miss Barbara chuckled. “I can see why you would believe it...” She turned to Master Bruce. “But unless you went to visit Zatanna as well, I have to wonder what changed your mind.”

“This.”

Master Bruce brought up the latest image and made it fullscreen. Master Richard grimaced. Miss Cassandra leaned forward ever so slightly, studying the picture with an intensity that implied a thousand thoughts racing through her brain.

“Same style. Many layers to blend colors.”

“Same brand of colors, too,” Miss Stephanie noted.

“This picture was painted on top of Gotham Mercy North tonight,” Master Bruce explained. “Yesterday, we had an intruder at Wayne Tower who managed to infiltrate the tower without triggering alarms until he got to my office, removed a number of gadgets from a hidden cache, hacked the Batcomputer and left with search data for boys matching Jason’s general description and injuries following Ethiopia, who were admitted to hospitals in Gotham within a year of Jason’s death. He then fled from the tower pursued by Robin and managed to cut Robin’s line with a Batarang while traversing the rooftops.”

Miss Stephanie grinned at Master Timothy. “You got your ass kicked last night?”

“He took me by surprise.” Master Timothy pouted for all of two seconds, then turned towards the Batcomputer again. “I have to admit... that does look like Jason. I mean, I only know him from his pictures in the Batcomputer, but... you’re sure, aren’t you, Batman?”

Master Bruce flinched. Then, he enlarged the last picture from the same set and sat back as Master Richard, Master Timothy, and Miss Barbara gasped in shock.

“Oh god...”

“What?” Miss Stephanie craned her neck to get a better look. Then her eyes widened. “‘Dad’?”

“Jason may have been my second Robin,” Bruce said quietly. “But he was my first son. I adopted him as soon as I could after taking him in.”

Alfred shuddered at the sudden rush of memories that came with the silence. He remembered those days too well. It had been an enormous decision, so incredibly important and complex, but Master Bruce had never seemed surer of anything in his life. And Master Jason... Master Jason had finally found a home, a father, a family. Safety. Warmth. Love. He had done so well. So very well... He had been the smartest kid in school, despite having missed one year. He had had such... compassion and hope, for someone who had lived with so little good and so much terror before. It hurt so much. Even now – knowing that maybe it hadn’t all ended in tragedy after all – the memories still hurt so much.

“I’m so sorry.” For once, Miss Stephanie’s voice was not bright and bubbly. Perhaps that was what made Master Bruce raise his eyebrows by just a tiny fraction of an inch. Miss Stephanie either did not notice or did not care. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Batman.”

“It’s only a loss if we let this go,” Miss Barbara said. “If this is Jason, we need to find him, asap.”

“If this is Jason, why would he spray-paint ‘Fuck Batman!’ all over Gotham?” Master Timothy snatched the control from Nightwing’s hands and brought up the LexCorp graffiti. “Why go through all this trouble? Why not come back home?”

“Oh, I don’t know...” Stephanie rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe because coming back from the dead might just leave you slightly insane? I mean, he also tried to kill me when I caught him red-handed and that’s no usual Robin MO.”

“And he’s probably also mad because of you,” Master Richard added.

“Me? Why? I never did anything to him!”

“You are Robin now, Tim! You replaced him.” The word dripped from Master Richard’s tongue like a particularly nasty poison. “I know what that feels like – to come back to Gotham and suddenly find someone else wearing your colors. It feels awful. It feels like betrayal of the highest order. Make no mistake: when we find Jason – and we will find him – he will not come quietly. Jason had a bit of a temper even before he died and I doubt all this trauma has made it better. I fully expect him to be everything but cooperative.”

“Which is why none of you will approach him alone,” Bruce added, “but Nightwing is right. We do need to find him, and fast.”

“Split up,” Miss Cassandra suggested and Master Bruce nodded.

“We know he never stays for long in any one district, so we will focus our patrols on the ones he has not been to yet. Batgirl, you are most familiar with the south territory. I want you and Spoiler to patrol the Diamond District and Old Gotham from Moench Row to Tricorner. Nightwing – Chinatown and Upper Westside. Tim – Sheldon Park and Robbinsville. I will take the Hill and Otisburg. Barbara: monitor online channels and GCPD comms. If anyone reports a new, relevant graffiti, I want you to notify me immediately.”

Alfred watched on silently as the flock of bats and birds in front of him nodded quickly. It was a sound strategy, but part of him feared the enthusiasm was not going to last long. Master Jason had always been exceptionally good at disappearing, if he truly did not wish to be found.

“Keep in mind that Jason was Robin,” Master Bruce continued, as if he had read Alfred’s mind. “He is fast, he is strong, and he is smart. He received full Robin training and held the title for three years. He is competent and he is not afraid to defend himself, violently if necessary. He could be dangerous.”

He possibly pushed a man to his death once, Alfred thought, presumably at the same time Master Bruce did, judging from the grim look on his face. He nearly choked the life out of Miss Stephanie.

“If you find him, do not engage. Contact me immediately. Jason is my responsibility.”

***

For the children, work began the next night. For Master Bruce, it began the next morning, at 9am sharp. Master Alfred would not have been surprised if the lawyer’s coffee cup had barely touched his desk when the phone rang. Twenty minutes later, Alfred was readying the smoky gray Aston Martin to take Master Bruce to the cemetery.

The lawyer arrived at the same time as they did. The construction crew was already there. Technically, they were supposed to wait for the court order or at least a waiver first, but few people had the gall to say no to Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham.

Master Bruce stood by silently as the dirt was shoveled off Jason Todd’s grave, inch by inch, foot by foot. The coffin was heavy, but no match for the machinery. Alfred could tell it took him every ounce of control he had to keep on pretending that he did not want any dirt on his shoes, nor any physical contact with a coffin, of all things. The truth was, Alfred could see him eye the crowbar in the foreman’s hands like a lifeline. The man stepped forward, joined by one of his colleagues and popped the lid open in one sharp push.

Through the choir of shocked gasps, Master Bruce’s sigh of relief was barely audible.

He had not imagined things. He had not been wrong. Master Todd was not rotting in a cocoon of silk and mahogany.

More calls followed. To the commissioner, to more lawyers, to Vicki Vale, because sooner or later Master Bruce would have to explain some of this to the press and it was always safer to stick with the devil he knew.

They left the cemetery within an hour of their arrival and returned to cave, where Master Timothy stood sulking in front of the glass case. For once, he seemed invisible to Master Bruce, who returned to the computer immediately, no doubt checking police reports for any unusual activity. Alfred sighed and stepped forward.

“Good morning, Master Timothy.”

“Good morning, Alfred.”

“You are here early today.”

“I couldn’t sleep.” Master Timothy sighed. The deep, exasperated sigh that only truly helpless men were capable of. It was followed by an equally predictable stretch of silence. “I always thought it was his fault.”

“We all suspected as much,” Alfred grudgingly admitted. “A rather hasty and disastrous conclusion. I fear it benefitted neither you nor Miss Stephanie.”

“I’m more worried about Barbara, actually,” Master Timothy said quietly and the way he bristled promised Alfred that there was more discomfort to come. “I whined to her about how I felt like I was never going to be as good as Dick, once. She told me not to worry, because she had said the same thing to Jason once and come to regret it later.” Master Timothy took a deep breath. “I asked her why, because obviously she had been right. Otherwise Jason would still be here.”

Alfred closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, swallowed the disappointment that threatened to jump out of his throat, and focused on the glass case instead. “Exactly how hard did Miss Barbara hit you in return for that remark?”

That drew a hint of a laugh from Master Timothy. “It stung pretty badly, I’ll say that.”

“Not as much as your words, I assure you.” Alfred put a gentle hand on Master Timothy’s shoulder. “Why don’t you drop by the tower and apologize to her tonight?”

“Will do.” Master Timothy took off his cape and domino mask and stared at the costume in the case. “Alfred... I know Jason was legally Bruce’s son, but did he really mean that much to him?”

“More than you know, Master Timothy.”

The boy grimaced. “Then I suggest you remove that plaque before we find him. And move his things back from that corner in the attic to his former bedroom.”

A good soldier.

Alfred felt his brows tighten like bow strings as he studied the words on the immaculate plate. Then he went to find a screw driver.

***

The rest of the day was filled with restlessness. Master Bruce did not even try to sleep. Alfred did not attempt to persuade him. He probably should have, but the sad truth was that so long as Master Bruce was occupied with work, Alfred was free to restore Master Jason’s room without interruption. He washed the linens and the curtains, returned all clothes to precisely the right places in the closet, and made sure to put all of Master Jason’s books back where they had been before that fateful trip to Ethiopia. He put up all the pictures again and hung the electric guitar back on the wall. He put up fresh plants and the old wind chime by the window.

By the time nightfall finally came around – so much later than usual, it seemed – it was as if Jason Todd had never left.

Master Bruce and Master Timothy headed out as soon as the sun had vanished behind the horizon. The remaining comms came online only a few minutes later. Alfred sat down by the Batcomputer and skimmed the dozens of pages of research quickly.

GCPD had been unsurprisingly lax in its reporting in the new priority case. For them, it was no priority. In a city like Gotham, where murder and mayhem were daily routine, vandalism looked almost trite in comparison.

Thankfully, the alternative art scene had a different view of things.

Some called him the Sky King, for his habit of leaving graffiti script in heights that were not easy to work in. Others called him Gotham Banksy for the large, sprawling paintings he had created. In ninety-nine percent of all cases, the two were believed to be two separate artists.

If it wasn’t for the red hood. Many people had claimed to have seen him, but Alfred could tell that Master Bruce had already weeded out the false positives. What remained were reports of a young man, quick and quiet as a shadow, with a red hoodie. The Red Hood.

Alfred wondered if Master Jason knew. He hoped not.

Around 1am, the first graffiti tags for the night were reported in the Coventry, big, bold letters with purple, glittery lining and sharp, crisp edges. Alfred grimaced as he went down the list of assigned districts in his head. They had assigned everything but the Coventry.

Master Bruce and the others moved in quickly, all but quarantining the district. Minutes turned into hours, as Batman and his allies combed through the streets of the Coventry, but it was all for nothing. The search ended fruitless. Alfred allowed himself a rare sigh as he sank back into the chair and studied the fresh images uploaded by Master Bruce and the others. After a few minutes, Alfred got up and began to prepare dinner. Master Jason had slipped away once more. The best he could do now was to provide Master Bruce with enough energy to track him down tomorrow.

The police report came in just two minutes after the Batmobile.

“Ten-thirty-six at Blackgate Correctional Facility. I repeat: ten-thirty-six at Blackgate prison.”

Alfred set down the food and watched as Master Bruce hacked into Blackgate’s internal feed to bring up the images taken of the crime scene by a police helicopter.

There, on the southern side of the most secure prison on the east coast of the United States, above nothing but miles of jagged rock and raging waves, glimmered not just one, but two lines in bright silver.

That was pathetic.

Try harder tomorrow.

***

Sleep did not come to the manor this time either. If anything at all, Master Bruce seemed even more focused on powering through the day, and punishing himself while doing so, than he had had the day before. Alfred watched with growing concern as the children left the cave, one by one, to return to their old roosts, while Master Bruce continued slaving away in front of the Batcomputer, painstakingly trying to follow the trail of a red-hooded figure from one camera near Blackgate to the next.

When he was still there at noon, even though the trail had gone cold two hours and three districts ago, Alfred decided that enough was enough. He comforted himself with the thought that none of the children would blame him for having slipped just enough sedative into Master Bruce’s tea, as he handed over the cup and went upstairs to sweep the hall. By the time he returned, Batman was thoroughly knocked out.

He awoke six hours later, just after the first helper had arrived, on the infirmary bed, shot an accusing glare at Alfred, and dragged himself back to the computer. Alfred did not regret a thing.

Well, at least not until Master Bruce asked what Miss Stephanie was doing in his chair in front of the computer.

“Analyzing the latest crime scene photos.” Miss Stephanie untied the band that held her ponytail in place and started twisting her golden hair around her fingers sharply. “Trying to understand the message.”

“That’s easy. He’s mocking me,” Bruce grunted back at her as he yanked her out of the chair and sat down to update the patrol route grid to include every abandoned warehouse and every business HQ in the remaining districts. On the right side of the screen, the Blackgate graffiti shone like barb wire in the sun. “He’s letting me know that he’s angry with me, most likely for not getting to him in time, back in Ethiopia. He’s letting me know that he knows I’m looking for him. He knows it’s only a matter of time.”

“A matter of time until what?”

Apparently undisturbed by Master Bruce’s rude behavior, Miss Stephanie grabbed one of the folding stools from the nearby infirmary and dragged it over the floor, screeching and creaking with every inch. She settled right next to him and followed his line of sight to the districts map. Only Tricorner needed a patrol route now. Master Bruce kept his eyes on the screen as he muttered back.

“Until I find him.”

“We.” Miss Stephanie crossed her arms in front of her body and put on her best poker face. It needed work, but Alfred had to give her points for courage. Few people would have managed even that much in the face of Batman glowering at them in quietly smoldering anger. “Until we find him,” Miss Stephanie corrected. “If we find him. Also, I don’t think he’s angry with you. Only with Batman.”

Alfred could all but see Master Bruce roll his eyes behind the lenses of the cowl. “I am Batman.”

“You’re also his dad,” Stephanie fired back. “That’s what you supercape testosterone bombs always like to forget. At the end of the day, when the capes are off, you’re still fathers. Or brothers or sons. That...” She pointed at the story-telling pictures that had gotten their attention in the first place. “That’s not an angry Robin who hates Batman. That’s a traumatized kid who wants his dad. You’d better remember that if we find him in time.”

In time... Alfred wanted to cringe at the words. There was a certain... finality to the way Master Jason’s work was progressing. He shuddered to think what would happen if he ran out of districts to embellish with his artwork.

They set out as soon as the rest of the flock had arrived, this time with clear patrol routes mapped out for everyone. Alfred studied the maps on the screen carefully. Every step was carefully planned, every exit covered. The grid was perfect in its efficiency, ensuring maximum coverage with minimal manpower, and yet Alfred couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.

He took a step back and nearly stumbled over his feet.

Somehow it was suddenly painfully obvious from a distance. With just a little bit of a change in perspective, a little less focus on the intricate details, and a little more attention to the obvious, three of the Coventry graffiti pictures looked severely out of place in the line-up of vulgar script.

They were neither abandoned houses nor business skyscrapers. Two of them were bridges. The Davis and Moore Bridges, to be precise, both of which led onto Arkham Island. The third was the entrance to an underpass, conveniently covering the word ‘flood’, but not the word ‘gate’.

Three. Gate. Trigate. Another bridge onto Arkham Island. Another road to madness.

“Master Bruce!” Alfred had never opened a comms line so fast before. “I think I found a clue as to where Master Jason’s next target will be.”

***

The wind was howling tonight. Howling and cutting and biting and just slapping him in the face at every opportunity. Every once in a while, the clouds decided to be assholes, too, and dump a bucket of near-freezing water on him. It soaked through his hoodie and his shirt and pants, and, even worse, it made painting an accurate picture a bitch of a challenge.

And now Saint Peter had decided to send him hail as well. Granted, it was just tiny little pellets, but when you were hanging twenty feet above Gotham’s poison-green, run-off-polluted waters with a grappling hook in one hand and a spray can in the other, even pin-head-sized precipitation was just too much.

Jason rolled his eyes at the sky. “Could you maybe not? I’m trying to work here!”

He really was and this piece – well, it was a lot more ambitious than any of the others before. For starters, this one had both an image and lettering, and not just a single lousy word like the last one either. It also had a wider color palette, which used up pretty much everything in his arsenal, including the purple glitter. Really, his only consolation in all this was that Bruce and the other idiots were busy patrolling The Hill and Otisburg and Sheldon Park and all those other places he hadn’t tagged yet.

Let them, Jason thought as climbed a little lower, to fix the shading on the belt, only for the ice to strike the fresh paint straight off the steel of Trigate Bridge. Jason sighed and scowled at the sky.

“Fine! Let me know when you’re done throwing things at me, you pathetic jerk!”

He grappled down onto the base of the eastern support platform, took a few steps back and inspected his work.

The boy in the pose looked strong and healthy and happy, so full of youthful energy und unbridled joy. The red on his vest had bothered Jason at first – he had wanted it do be dripping, gory, like blood seeping through the material, but instead the rain had washed it down to something more faded. In the daylight – Jason hesitated to think of ‘sunlight’, because that was not usually a thing that happened in Gotham before May – it would look more muted, like the earthy red of Alfred’s home-made tomato soup. Just the thought made Jason’s stomach growl.

The longer he looked at the picture, the more he realized that all colors had faded with the rain. The green of the gauntlets, sleeves, and boots now looked less like moss and more like olives, with a tinge of yellow, except on the pants, where it had been bled into by the dark shadows from the leg. That was fine, too. At least it meant he didn’t have to detail the scaly fashion disaster. He couldn’t quite remember whether that had been Bruce’s or Dick’s idea. All he knew was that he had hated it with a passion, from the first day to the last.

The previously sunflower yellow cape had also suffered and now looked more like sunflower oil, although, at the very least, it had somehow maintained its crisp edges, even where it spread away from the base and onto the beams that led to Arkham Island and to the west platform. It was disproportionately large, but –hey—he needed the space for the lettering. Which was about the only thing that was still crisp and sharp as ever. Apparently, black was the only color that liked him today and said ‘fuck off, rain’, because the shadows he had put in throughout the design still stood strong. In a way, it was almost symbolic – only the darkness lingered.

God, this painting really needed some purple glitter. As soon as the rain had stopped. Jason ducked under the bridge and started counting his supplies.

He was short on everything now, except silver, which he had only used for the grappling line stretched tight between the two gloved hands, and the blue, which he had only had to use for the eyes. The same blue as Sheila Haywood’s. Jason shuddered at the thought. He had done his best to make this set of eyes different, less cold, but last he had looked, he had failed miserably. Perhaps he could use the silver to cloud it a little, just like he could use it to put some highlights into the black hair. The green was almost empty, but he should still have enough for the cowl. He had put some in there before, but the rain had washed it over with black. The real concern was the yellow. His can was almost empty, and even though the R on the chest would be small, it would be the most important part of the piece next to the lettering.

In the end, he had to wait almost half an hour until the hail had stopped and the rain had faded into a somewhat negligible drizzle. Jason sighed, pushed the hood and scarf back over his head and mouth, grabbed the yellow and the grapple, and stepped out onto the protrusion to inspect his work.

Tomato red, sunflower oil yellow, and olive green. Dear god, now he was really hungry for one of Alfred’s summer salads.

Jason raised the can, drew the yellow R onto the black spot on Robin’s vest, added another three layers, and shoved the can back into the backpack. He turned his head to make sure he got the right can as he reached for the green, then turned his gaze up towards the cowl.

And suddenly he was there.

Jason blinked. Like a deer in the headlights. Or a commissioner in the flood light. At least, it was what Jason imagined Gordon must have felt like every time Batman and Robin pulled their ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ trick, except this time the joke was on Jason.

“Fuck!”

He disconnected the grappling hook on sheer instinct, but Batman had seen it coming from a mile away. His fist curled around the rope, hard as steel, and Jason knew resistance was futile. He abandoned the gun on sheer instinct. Half a second later, as the ground rushed towards him, he remembered this wasn’t the Robin costume. There were no spares.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

The stop came suddenly and sharply and it sent his organs lunging forward against his rib cage, knocking the breath out of him just for a second. He couldn’t feel the cold steel of the hook against his skin, which was good, because that would have been really fucking uncomfortable, but he could hear it tear his backpack. Without hesitation, Jason opened the zipper of his hoodie and yanked up his arms. By his estimation, there was a twelve-foot drop left. That was doable. Not pleasant, but doable.

He rolled as he landed, grinding his teeth through the pain in his right shoulder and the feeling of gravel and god knew what else stuck against the back of his shirt. Whatever sharpness the bite of the cold would have gained was swallowed by the adrenaline rushing through his veins and the feeling of utter revulsion as he took a deep breath and looked at the water around him. If he swam with the current, he’d be halfway down the Upper Westside in a minute. He had a cache there. All he needed was a replacement grappling hook. That was all.

He never made it all the way to the edge of the platform before Batman tackled him to the ground. Jason wasn’t quite sure what knocked more breath out of his lungs – the sudden impact of his solar plexus with solid concrete or the fact that Bruce of all people had resorted to a maneuver that he considered cheap, ineffective, and foolishly self-endangering.

“Jason! Stop!”

“Like hell!”

Somehow he managed to turn. He even managed to pull back one hand for a punch. Then he was suddenly pulled forward sharply and two boots to the stomach sent him back against the pier. Jason groaned through the pain, grabbed the spray can he had dropped before – not the best weapon, but beggars couldn’t be choosers – and took his usual stance. Perplexingly, that alone seemed to be enough to make Bruce flinch.

On a more infuriating note, for some stupid reason Jason’s own body refused to take the chance to scale the pier and run.

“Jason...” He shuddered. When had Bruce gotten so... old? “Please stop. I am here now. I found you.”

Jason snorted. “What? You want points for accidentally stumbling onto the needle in the haystack like the world’s luckiest horseshoed pig or did the big bad bat get a tip that I’d be tagging the underpass tonight?”

“Jason, please—“

“I bet you woke up at 2pm today and told yourself ‘oh yeah – today’s the day I save a bridge from fucking artistic enlightenment!” He spit out the words together with a chip of one of his teeth. That was gonna hurt later. Right now, there were more important things to deal with. Like the giant, bat-dressed mountain of muscle just six feet in front of him. “I hope you can fucking live with yourself!”

If Bruce had anything to say to that, he wasn’t willing to share. Jason scoffed. What else was new? He braced himself for the attack that was certainly going to come and took a deep breath.

Just in time for the explosion of the smoke pellet.

Jason coughed through the gray haze around him. Fucking bastard! He knew better than to swing for an attacker he could not see and decided to retreat out of the cloud instead. He should still have enough room. Six feet to the left, another four or five back.

He barely made it a few inches before two arms wrapped around his body, holding just tight enough to pin his arms, but not quite tight enough to hurt. Even now that Bruce was apparently somehow an inch shorter than him, his grip was made of titanium. It was fucking infuriating. Jason waited until the smoke cleared, his fingers coiling around the can ever stronger, before he finally took another breath and forced himself to look down.

“You’d better break both my arms before you let go, you fucking bastard, because I swear I’M GONNA SPRAYPAINT YOUR FUCKING—“

Jason swallowed hard. “... cowl lenses...”

The cowl lenses that were not activated right now. The cowl lenses that hid nothing. Not the bright blue of those eyes that had once smiled on him so kindly. Not the edge of tears in the corners. Not the heavy sadness in the half-closed lids.

“Son, no...”

“Son?” The word ping-ponged around Jason’s skull like a wrecking ball, shutting off his adrenaline supply first, then completely destroying whatever sense of urgency he had had. Somewhere in the depths of his brain, some asshole of a synapse had the fucking idea to send a ‘cry now’ signal to his eyes. Jason gritted his teeth and forced his voice into a low growl. “Don’t act like you care, you goddamn bastard!” It didn’t help. Jason felt the fiery waters of the Pit bubble up in the depths of his gut again as a soft sob weaseled in between his words. “You just up and replaced me... You fucking bastard... You were everything I had... and you just replaced me!”

Bruce closed his eyes, swallowed hard, looked at the painting, and then looked at him once more. “I replaced Robin, Jason, because Batman needed another Robin. But I could never replace you. You were my son. You still are. You always will be.”

“Liar...” He tried to wriggle free, but Bruce refused to let go. Jason scoffed. “You don’t fucking care! Nothing changed! You adopted Dick, so there’s your son, right there, you took on a new fricking Robin, and you didn’t even kill the fucking Joker!”

God... had I really forgotten all about that until I know?

“YOU PUT ME NEXT TO FUCKING SHEILA HAYWOOD AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN KILL THE DAMN CLOWN!”

“No, he didn’t. But I did.” The voice came just before the flash of black and blue that descended to his left. Jason bristled. As if one opponent to ditch hadn’t been enough. “I thought he had killed Tim. Then he started gloating about you and...” Dick grimaced. “Something inside me snapped. I beat him to death and I was happy. To this day I hate myself for letting him win. I hate myself for crossing the line. But I was happy that he was dead, even if it only lasted for a minute. I don’t regret it. Do you know what I do regret, Jason?”

“The fucking fashion disaster you called a costume back when you started in Blüd?”

Jason wanted to kick him. He really did. More importantly, he wanted to kick Bruce, because there really were only so many explanations as to why Joker had only been dead for a minute, while Jason himself had been pushing daisies for six months.

Nightwing merely shook his head. “I regret that I wasn’t there when my little brother needed me the most.”

“Oh right!” He gripped the spray can even harder, an automatic reaction against the bubbling memories of the Pit and the sweet lull of rage. “How could I forget?! Of course everything would have been alright if you had been there! I’m sure Nightwing would have wiped the floor with Joker and Sheila and his goons in just two seconds! Silly me—“

“I’m not talking about Ethiopia!” To Bruce’s absolute horror, Dick ripped off his cowl in one violent pull, taking out a chunk of his eyebrow together with the adhesive. He didn’t seem to notice. “You didn’t need Nightwing, Jason! And you didn’t need Batman. You needed a father. You needed a brother!” Suddenly, Dick’s voice was small again, almost too soft to hear over the noise of the wind and the waves. “I’m so sorry, Jason. For three years you needed me and for three years I was barely there. Bruce can be an emotionless jerk, we both know that. He’s brooding, he’s demanding, he’s got the emotive range of a brick, and he really sucks at this entire parenting thing...”

Bruce flinched, but his mouth remained shut and his grip remained strong. That was nothing new. What was new was the look of... regret that Jason caught out of the corner of his eyes.

“I knew all of that,” Dick continued, “but instead of making up for it like a good brother, I left you to fend for yourself. No more. Bruce...” Dick put the cowl back in place slowly and reached for Batman’s shoulder. “Let him go, please.”

“Nightwing—“

“Don’t.” Dick’s brows bent into a scowl. “I know what you’re about to say. Just. Don’t. Can you please, for the love of God and for the sake of your son, put Batman on ice, just for a minute, and be Bruce, be a dad for a change?”

Somehow, Dick had hit a nerve. Jason wasn’t sure how or why, but the change was instantaneous. Bruce froze. A moment later, the crushing force that had kept him pinned lifted. Jason watched, utterly perplexed, as Bruce stepped back slowly, only for Dick to take his place. This time, the hug was only a light brush, not an enforced tangle. Jason raised an eyebrow at the unusual display of restraint. Had he accidentally ended up in some trippy alternate universe where Bruce and Dick had swapped bodies or something?

“I can’t change the past,” Dick said softly, “but I can promise you this, Little Wing: if you give us the chance, you can have a family now. I promise to be a better brother, the best I can be. And while she may not be officially part of the family, Barb missed you so much, too... And I’m sure Cassie and Stephanie would love to meet you—“

“And the replacement will just go sulking in the corner?” Jason shook his head. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Tim’s gonna be salty for a while,” Dick admitted. “But he’ll come around. He became Robin because he looked up to Robin. And that included both of us, whether he likes it or not. But even if you say ‘no’, even if you want to leave and never see any of us again...” For a moment, Dick sounded like the mere thought gave him nightmares. “Even if so... at least drop by the manor before you go and say hi to Alfred, okay?”

“You fucking asshole...” He felt the tension seep from his fingers like a slow poison. The spray can landed on the concrete with a harsh, metallic thud and rolled off into the waves. It disappeared in the dark waters just as Bruce returned from wherever he had stalked off to and handed him his backpack and grappling gun. Jason did his best to bite back the tears before looking at him. “You’re both assholes! You’re really gonna pull the fucking Alfred card on me?”

“Nobody’s pulling any cards, Jason. We are just being honest.” This time the hug was slow and gentle, with a feathery lightness that seemed unreal for someone of Bruce’s sheer muscle mass. “We missed you, son. Come home. Please...”

He wanted to say ‘no’. Part of him really did. He probably should. This was likely to be the best chance he’d get. But where exactly was he going to go? Back to Talia and Ra’s, who would either put him down like a mad dog or turn him into a tool for the League? Jason looked back at the graffiti on the bridge pier, at the delicate lettering inside the cape, and sighed. Part of him wanted this so very badly, wanted it like he had never wanted anything else in the world. To go back. To be safe. To be warm. To be loved.

BEING ROBIN GIVES ME MAGIC

“I’ll never be Robin again, will I?”

“Probably not,” Dick admitted as he joined him and looked at the picture in quiet awe. “But neither will I and I’d say I did pretty well for myself. If I can do it, so can you. The magic doesn’t come from the costume, Jason. It comes from you.”

***

The image had arrived at the cave long before the Batmobile and it had turned Alfred’s gut into ice. It was another masterpiece of course, almost flawless and absolutely vibrant despite the harsh weather that had taken its toll on the paint. It was also a painful reminder that, no matter what miracles might happen tonight, there was a part of Master Jason that was never going to heal, a wound that was so deep that no bandage or stitch could ever hope to close it.

Thank God Master Timothy had suggested they remove the plaque. Thank God Alfred had done it.

The children had arrived first, most of them through the hidden cave entrance, Miss Barbara once more through the main gate, and according to Master Richard, they mostly had Jason’s perfectionism and artistic integrity to thank for his delay. No, he was not going to leave a painting unfinished. No, he did not care that it was technically vandalism and illegal and bad. As a matter of fact, Alfred had a suspicion that the painting’s illegality was part of the allure. He could just picture Master Bruce’s indignation at having to choose between watching a minor crime conclude without intervening or forcing a confrontation that would end in his ‘recently returned from the departed’ son dropping off the face of the Earth, or worse. If Alfred’s memory served right, Master Jason had always enjoyed pushing the limits of how much Master Bruce was willing to put up with. He was a teenager after all.

Alfred had not minded the break. It had given him time to get the children changed into civilian clothes and settled into the den, which was certainly a much more comfortable place for an introduction to a long-lost loved one than the dank, dark cave. Master Timothy had initially protested, but had relented when Miss Cassandra had started all but dragging him up the stairs and onto the couch, in the interest of self-preservation.

Alfred had just finished serving a round of hot chocolate when the double doors opened. Master Richard was the first to enter, now dressed in simple, black slacks and a blue shirt. Master Bruce was just a step behind him, looking tired and worn as ever and ready to put out any potential fires. Alfred hoped it would not come to that.

And then there was Master Jason. Alfred swallowed the gasp that wanted to jump out of his throat.

Master Jason had been very short and lightweight for his age, at the time of his tragic death, proving once more that the smallest coffins were the heaviest to carry. The man who now stood just inside the door was taller than Master Bruce and bulkier than Master Richard, with hard lines to his face instead of soft curves, and a sharpness to the blue of his bright eyes that could have cut glass.

But it was Master Jason; there was no doubt about that. He recognized the teal blue of those eyes, the shape of his nose and lips, the slight curl to the coal black hair on his head. He would have recognized it anywhere.

“Jason!” Miss Barbara was the first to move, insanely fast and agile in spite of her condition as she approached him and stopped just a foot from his feet. It was rare for Miss Barbara to cry, but there were tears in her eyes now as she reached for his hand carefully. There was a flinch to Master Jason’s fingers that Alfred could not have missed had he been half blind and he was sure Miss Barbara had seen it, too. It didn’t matter now. “Dear God, I missed you, Jason... Thank you for coming home.”

For a moment, Master Jason stood still, as if time had stopped in his own little bubble. The smile on Miss Barbara’s face faded slowly, but Alfred could tell that she refused to let it die. She had always been stubborn like that.

“Alright...” She took a short breath that screamed frustration, before looking at Master Bruce and Master Richard in turn. “Which one of you two bumbling idiots do I have to hit over the head with my sticks for being an insensitive prick?”

Master Jason laughed.

Alfred shuddered.

How long had it been since he had heard that sound? He knew it was ‘only’ two years, but it felt like an eternity. It was not even that loud or bright a laugh, more like a low chuckle, but the air in the room seemed to be singing with its sound, carrying it into every corner, every nook and cranny, and soaking up the heat from the fire place with every millisecond that passed.

“I missed your feistiness, Barb.”

Miss Barbara accepted the hug with a wide smile and ran a hand through the unruly mop of black against her shoulder. “Well hopefully you missed more than that, because I sure as hell did not just miss you for the wise-cracks.”

It was a light-hearted jab and judging from the hint of a grin on Master Jason’s lips, he knew as much. Then, his eyes fell on the couch behind Miss Barbara.

Miss Cassandra had gotten up quiet as a shadow, as always, but she took just as much time approaching him as he needed to straighten up. There was a certain defensiveness to his posture that was hard to miss and Miss Cassandra reacted in kind, making herself look as small and unthreatening as she could. It wasn’t very hard, given that she was barely eighteen years old herself and stood at an unimposing five feet and four inches.

“That’s Cassandra,” Barbara said softly as she turned to the side and retreated just enough to get out of the way. “She’s been Batgirl since the earthquake. She has a speech disability and she was raised by David Cain, which tends to creep people out, but she is one of the kindest people you will ever meet.”

“Hey.” Master Jason was not convinced. Alfred knew why. Even more than bravado and courage, it had been Master Jason’s instincts that had kept him alive throughout his years on the streets. He knew when someone was dangerous.

Miss Cassandra had noticed it too. Alfred watched her lips curve into a gentle smile. She closed her eyes, brought her left hand in front of her chest as if in prayer and her right hand against it in a fist, and bowed deeply. Alfred could not help the smile that came to him. She had only ever greeted one person like that: Leslie Thompkins.

“Uhm...” Master Jason mirrored the gesture as best as he could. “Nice to meet you, too... Cass. I can call you Cass, right?”

“Yes, please.”

Another bow, shorter this time, and Miss Cassandra retreated back onto the couch. Master Jason rolled his eyes, clearly aware that this was not the weirdest thing that had ever happened in this house by a long shot, before looking at the last two guests on the couch. The lines of his face grew harsher in the same moment Master Richard cringed.

“So you are the new Robin?”

“Tim Drake,” Master Timothy said with the vocal confidence of a business man and the physical ease of a living Christmas goose in front of a feather-picking machine. “So you are Jason...” Alfred watched him shift his weight from one side to the other and back. “Nice to meet you, I guess.”

“I GUESS?” Miss Stephanie’s slap rang through the den with a sharp echo. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you?” She shook her head and got up quickly, slinking past Miss Cassandra and the glass table, past Master Bruce’s exasperated look of displeasure, and onto the spot that Miss Cassandra had just occupied. “Stephanie Brown. Also known as ‘Spoiler’.” She put on her brightest smile and held out her hand. “Pleasure to meet you and please don’t mind Tim – he can be an idiot.”

Master Jason accepted the handshake, but remained silent as the grave he had risen from. His eyes narrowed in concentration, but there was also a hint of dread in them.

“You look familiar.”

“Yeahhh, about that...” Miss Stephanie rolled her eyes and balled her free hand into a fist. If Alfred wasn’t mistaken, she was suppressing the urge to rub her neck. “We kinda met already. Once. But it was dark. And it’s been a while. It’s totally cool if you don’t remember.”

“It’s totally not cool, Steph—“

“Tim, stop talking or I swear the next time it will be my fist.” She shot Master Timothy a look that could curdle dairy, then wiped the frustration off her face again and turned to Master Jason once more. “It really doesn’t matter.”

Master Jason was not convinced. He withdrew his hand, then raised both of them to push Miss Stephanie’s hair back over her shoulder. The change was instantaneous.

“Oh crap...” His hands snapped back sharply. “You’re the girl from Robinson Park, from the gazebo!”

“Yeah.” Miss Stephanie bit her lip. “That was me.”

“I’m so sorry, I—” Master Jason hung his head in shame. “I nearly killed you! I didn’t mean to! I— It’s just—” He gave a quick nod towards her shoulder. “Your hair. It’s the same shade as hers. I just—”

“Hers?” Miss Stephanie raised her eyebrows in confusion. Then, just a second later, the lights came on. “Oh. Oh crap.” The name ‘Sheila Haywood’ hung between them like the sword of Damocles himself. “Well that makes sense then. No wonder you were freaked out.” One of her hands rose slowly, until it came to rest against Master Jason’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Jason, really. You had a disassociative episode brought on by trauma triggers. Not your fault. And besides...” She peeled back the chiffon scarf she was wearing to reveal a perfectly bruise-free throat. “All healed. No permanent damage. So don’t worry about it, okay?”

Master Jason snorted. “Well, aren’t you taking this all chipper! You a shrink or something?”

“No.” She shot a quick look at Master Bruce and Master Timothy. “Just someone who’s used to being surrounded by all kinds of crazy since an early age.”

“An occupational hazard in this house, I’m afraid,” Alfred chimed in, if only to break up what was shaping up to be a very uncomfortable silence. That, and he had entertained the introductions long enough. Perhaps it was a selfish thing for a man of his position to ask for, but there was only one person in this room who had spent as much time mourning Master Jason as Alfred had, and he had already had his chance. “And a longer story best discussed over dinner, perhaps?”

“Alfred...”

Dear mother of God... He looked like a grown man, yet he still sounded like the fifteen-year-old they had buried two years ago. Alfred forced the pain down with the grief. “I do trust you are staying for dinner at least, Master Jason?”

The hug came so sudden and swift, it was as if Master Jason had teleported the short distance straight into his arms. His fingers clung to the back of Alfred’s jacket like a drowning man to a lifeline. A second later, the soft tremble of sobs rocked the unfamiliarly tall body Alfred embraced.

“Dear god, Alfie... I missed you so much... so much...”

“I missed you, too, Master Jason. Every minute of every day.”

He didn’t mind the fact that those fingers were leaving wrinkles in the fabric. He didn’t mind the cold wetness of tears on his shoulder. None of it mattered. Master Jason was home. He was real and alive and he was home. There was no greater blessing, no greater miracle than that and no negative feeling in the world could live in him longer than the joy that thought gave him.

Now he just had to make sure that neither Master Bruce nor Master Timothy tripped over their not so gracious tongues and said something that could make Master Jason regret his decision to return.

“Well then, my dear boy...” He drew back slowly, fully aware that Master Jason was still clinging to him as much as he could. For someone who now stood an inch taller than the Batman himself, he looked infinitely small and fragile and likely felt like it, too. “Perish the thought that anybody shall ever grow hungry in this house and, frankly, every single soul in this room looks like they would appreciate some food, especially you.”

“Only if you don’t mind me helping you in the kitchen,” Master Jason lobbed back. “Like before.”

“I expected no less.” Alfred smiled. “Shall we go then?”

It was a rhetorical question and Alfred was infinitely grateful that everyone, from Master Bruce to Master Timothy, seemed to have understood the hint. Not a single voice sounded in protest as he led Master Jason out of the den and through the hall to the kitchen. It was a silent walk, but for once it was not the uncomfortable, depressing silence of a house full of dead bones, but the silence of two old friends, utterly at peace and serene in each other’s presence.

At least until they reached the kitchen.

“So what are we making for dinner, Alfie?”

Alfred smiled, rolled up his sleeves, and retrieved the large bag of bread buns and the giant jar of sausages he had bought just this afternoon from the cupboard next to the fridge.

“The one thing no-one in this house has eaten in two years, Master Jason: chili dogs.”