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It just had to be Black Mask, did it?
Jason grunted as he shrugged off another fist to the gut and punched out the False Face who had thrown it. He had been annoying the masked kingpin on purpose, but he had to admit he was surprised to get caught up in an ambush now. He hadn't thought Mask could predict or track him that well, nor care about him that much, to be willing or able to pull this shit.
A brief flash of a painfully familiar shade of blue in the rafters suggested another explanation: maybe this trap had been set for the Bats, and Red Hood had just happened to be close enough to get caught up too.
(Not that he was anything like a Bat, not anymore, not after all his assassin training. It was definitely just bad luck and didn't mean anything about what he was like, and he couldn't afford to go down this train of thought right now anyway.)
Instead, he considered that this was the first time a Bat was going to get a firsthand impression of what this new Red Hood fellow could do, and maybe he added a little extra flair to his takedown of the next goon just for Nightwing. Shooting the gun out of the guy's hand from the other side of the room was just objectively cool anyway.
He didn't realize for a long moment what else he'd done with that action, preoccupied as he was with the fight, until Nightwing dropped directly onto the head of a guy who was lining up a shot at Jason and quipped, "Tit for tat, Hood!"
Oh. Jason was automatically prioritizing threats against the acrobatic vigilante as equally important as threats against his own person. He'd saved Nightwing from a potential serious injury, and he hadn't even noticed himself doing so until the man pointed it out.
"It's easier if they have two targets," he growled.
"Course it is," Nightwing agreed easily, sliding smoothly into an aerial somersault that allowed him to kick a goon in the face.
They fought in silence for a long moment, before Nightwing commented in a tone just a little too casual to be real, "So why'd you pick the name 'Red Hood,' anyway? You don't seem to operate like a Joker fanboy..."
"The opposite. Joker took everything away from me," Jason explained flatly, grateful that the voice modulator in his helmet didn't let any of his feelings show in his voice. "It only seemed fair to steal something from him in return."
Nightwing nodded. "Poetic," he said. His voice sounded approving, which was a little weird, but Jason didn't feel like digging into it right now, opting instead to focus back in on punching out False Faces.
Before too long, the two of them had escaped onto the roofs, the shouts of Mask's gangsters fading away behind them. Nightwing found a comfortable AC unit to sit down on, and gestured to Hood. "I'm interested in getting to know you," he said casually.
Jason frowned behind his mask, glad for the privacy it offered him. This wasn't part of his plan, but at the same time, Nightwing could be a useful source of information. It would give him so much more insight into the city he'd left behind, to hear what he'd missed from one of its vigilantes directly. The only problem, since Nightwing clearly didn't recognize him, was...
"How long till the Big Bat comes for you?"
Nightwing laughed, a surprisingly bitter edge to the sound. "Oh, he doesn't even know I'm in Gotham. I'm still in the doghouse with him, so I don't tell him where I am and he doesn't know I've been here until I'm already gone."
Weird. And weirdly convenient. "Really? Whatcha do to piss him off?"
Nightwing sighed and scrutinized the blank mask Hood was wearing for a moment. "I tried to kill the Joker."
Jason blinked. "You did what? Why?"
Nightwing shifted, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the sky. "I'm the oldest of three brothers," he began, "and a year and a half ago, the Joker murdered my middle brother."
And that...
In a lot of ways, that was the very thing Jason had most wanted to hear. Talia had been wrong. Someone had tried to avenge him after all. "So you went looking for revenge?" He was glad that the modulator disguised the hope he couldn't keep out of his voice.
"Yes and no," Nightwing replied. "When I was younger, I would have done it immediately for exactly that reason, no question about it. But knowing what I knew by then... I took a year to think about it first. To ask myself, and some people I trusted, if that would really show that I loved him."
"Why wouldn't it?" Jason asked. That was kind of the heart of his problem, wasn't it?
Nightwing smiled nostalgically. "My Little Wing was such a smart kid. Loved to read. Loved to talk about what he was reading, and sometimes I couldn't even understand what he was saying until I read the book with him. There were a bunch of classics we read together. Frankenstein. Hamlet. The Count of Monte Cristo. We talked about cycles of violence and revenge, and how they can destroy the people who perpetuate them, and how the only way to break a cycle of revenge is to stop participating. And when I thought about that... I couldn't dishonor the memory of the boy who finally made me understand what's wrong with revenge. I couldn't become what he did so much to show me not to be."
Oh. Jason had forgotten about that. It made sense — the idea fit into his mind like a piece from a puzzle, and suddenly so many things made sense again. That was why he'd resisted, in the beginning, the idea of vengeance. He wasn't sure if his new experiences were going to change his opinions when he had them all settled in his head, but it seemed like the best way to figure out what he really wanted and needed was to have the complete picture, so right now he was going to put that aside for later and finish getting all the new information.
"So why did you do it, if it wasn't exactly revenge?"
Nightwing sighed heavily. "I realized that it wasn't a cycle of revenge that I had to worry about at all. The Joker got out again, while I was out of town and couldn't get back, and watching it on the news... I realized that nothing had changed. Not even just that nothing had changed since my brother died at that monster's hands: nothing had changed since the Joker first popped up when I was a kid. He goes out and hurts people, and we send him to Arkham. He gets out and hurts people, and we send him to Blackgate. He gets out and hurts people, we send him to Arkham to get therapy, and he manipulates and tortures his therapist. He gets out and hurts people, we send him to Blackgate to think about what he did wrong, and he decides that he wants to do more of it. It was one thing to give him chances to change when he first started out, but by now we've given him every possible chance and he's chosen, every single time, to be a whole cycle of violence all on his own. Nothing we've done yet has stopped him.
"So if what we're doing isn't working, we have to try something else. I don't want to let the cycle of violence that killed my brother continue one minute longer than I have to. I wish more than anything that I'd figured it out in time to save him. Or even if I'd gotten there right after he died, I could have spared all the victims since him. But I can't change the past, so I have to settle for trying to save all the people who will be hurt in the future if we don't change anything."
Jason swallowed hard. Dick really was giving him every expression of love he could have wanted from his big brother, even the things he hadn't known to want. It felt dangerous. He couldn't imagine how his brother could be trapping him, but it just seemed too good to be true.
"Good reasons," Jason allowed after a long pause. Exactly the reasons he'd wanted, actually, but it felt much too risky to say so.
Nightwing nodded absently, his gaze fixed on something in the distance. "I'm glad someone thinks so, after everything. That was where I ended up at the end of my year of thinking it through. And then, the next time the Joker got out after I decided, he went after my youngest brother, and it felt like a sign. Like evidence that I was on the right path. Like the only way I could ever get to keep a family was if I broke the cycle. Batman tried to talk me out of it anyway, but nothing he said really... addressed any of what I was talking about. I knew about cycles of violence, and about the value of life... and that was why I wanted to kill the Joker. Because I'm not going to say that his life doesn't have its own value, but... at this point, making any kind of effort to keep him alive feels like saying that he's more valuable than any dozen other people. And that can't be right." He looked up, then, his expression focusing on Jason's faceplate in a way that it hadn't been for several minutes. "Oh, I just realized how talkative I'm being. Sorry if it's unwelcome; I've just... never had the chance to tell anyone about this who wasn't openly judging me for my conclusions."
"I'm definitely not judging," Jason managed to choke out. "After what I lost... it means a lot to me, that somebody cares enough to try and stop it from happening again."
He didn't say, It means a lot to me to know for sure that my brother still cares about me. He didn't say, I was terrified and you've brought me a world of comfort. He didn't say, I'm getting dangerously close to telling you who I really am.
He did say, "I'd like to hear more... if you'd like to share. What happened? What did you do?"
"I tracked the Joker down," Nightwing began slowly. "He told me that he'd killed my youngest brother and fed his body to Killer Croc — that he just had to kill me, and he'd have a full set of dead birds." A grimace crossed his face. "All those times we treated his life like it was infinitely valuable, and in return he treated ours like we were nothing more than trading cards, or those clay pigeons at the carnival. Murder 'em all, win some kind of twisted prize."
"Disgusting," Jason agreed.
"Well, I fought him, of course. I won. And I still thought, after beating him to submission, about not actually killing him. Not because he deserved any mercy, but because I knew it would hurt me to kill him directly, and I'd been taught so well for so long that it was dishonorable to hit people who can't defend themselves. But then he opened his mouth and started taunting me about my Little Wing."
Jason froze in place at the invocation of his own nickname. Dick didn't seem to notice, his gaze locked again on something that wasn't there.
"He called him by his real name, talked about how he'd tortured him to death, how he'd hit him so much harder than I hit back. And I had to get my brother's name out of his killer's filthy unworthy mouth. And, true to form, he didn't stop talking like that until he stopped breathing."
That didn't add up. When last Jason had heard, the Joker was in Arkham, decidedly alive. But that sure sounded like Dick had done more than just try to kill him...
"Everything after that... felt like a dream. I expected the guilt that hit me right after; I did read all those books with my brother, after all. I knew to expect that it would feel awful and surreal. But then all of a sudden my youngest brother was there, alive after all and calling for me. And while I was checking to make sure he was real and okay, Batman somehow managed to resuscitate the Joker."
"Batman did what?!" Jason screeched, horrified.
"I don't know why or how, but he brought the Joker back while I wasn't looking. I think maybe he was trying to protect me, in his own strange way, but... well." Nightwing shook his head. "It was still weeks before I could talk to other people normally again, because the intrusive thoughts about how fragile people are have been worse than ever. And I haven't seen my family since that night, because I'm in trouble and nobody trusts me around my surviving brother right now. It ruined my mental health and some of the relationships that are most important to me, and yet... I'm still not convinced that I was wrong. I'd do it again, even knowing that it would hurt me just as much, if I got another chance and hadn't found a better option to force a change. To break the patterns that keep killing innocent people, it's worth it. To honor what my Little Wing lived and died for, it's worth it. To give my Baby Bird a fair chance at living long enough to grow up, it's worth it. No matter what it costs me."
Jason stared at his big brother for a long moment. His big brother, who had never forgotten him. His big brother, who chose with clear eyes to make one of the greatest sacrifices he could imagine in Jason's honor. His big brother, who was somehow smaller than Jason now but still stood up like he could defend him from every wrong in the world.
And somehow the confusing prospect of being betrayed by Batman didn't feel so personal right now. Dick had been betrayed too, stripped of his best support network as a punishment for doing his best to do what was right, and Jason... could, perhaps, do a little bit to fix that.
Before he consciously knew that he'd made his decision, Jason was already disengaging his helmet. The gasp Dick let out as soon as the helmet was off confirmed that his brother could still recognize him just fine through the smaller domino mask he wore underneath.
"Little Wing? That's impossible," Dick breathed.
"It's supposed to be," Jason agreed.
Dick looked pained by what he said next: "Is it really you? Tell me who I am."
Jason lowered his voice as quiet as it would go, just in case, and whispered in Nightwing's ear, "Your full name is Richard John Grayson, but you prefer to go by 'Dick,' because your family spoke Romani at home and you didn't find out what it means these days in English until after your parents died, and by that time you were attached to the name because they'd given it to you. You were the first Robin, and when you gave me the name you told me that it was something your mother called you, and you were hoping that some of the love and protection she put in it would stick to me too, which was really fucking sweet even if it didn't save me. You're the big brother who took the blame for all the broken chandeliers in the house, even the one in the blue dining room that was really my fault. And you're the person who just proved to me that somebody cared about me after all, so maybe I don't have to go out alone just to get some kind of justice for my own murder."
Dick broke down crying and threw his arms around Jason's shoulders. "It's you, it's really you. You're alive, you got so big! How? What happened?"
"Long story short, I got snatched by the League of Assassins. They put me back together, but also told me that I couldn't possibly have been loved or mourned, because I hadn't been avenged. And they kept repeating it until I couldn't remember what was wrong with that picture anymore." He swallowed. "Thanks for proving them wrong."
"Always," Dick promised. "There was never a single second when you were unloved, and there never will be as long as I live."
Jason hid his face in his brother's shoulder like a child, pushing back the urge to cry. That shoulder might have been slightly damper than the other one by the time he had a handle on himself, but neither of them acknowledged it.
When he was finally sure he could keep control of himself, Jason pulled away a little. "Do you have anywhere you have to be soon, or can we hang out somewhere a little more comfortable?"
Dick smiled tearfully at him, apparently unbothered by the evidence of his own feelings running down his face. "I don't have anywhere more important to be than with you. Clearly, we have so much to catch up on."