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Blood always seemed to dwarf smaller bodies.
It didn't really matter what the wound was; gunshots, stabbings or beatings, pain always seemed to find a home in the skin of the children of Crime Alley.
The girl was young, thin in the way that a thrifted hoodie three sizes too big wouldn't cover, wouldn't get the chance to grow into. Her hair was dark, either dirt or blood staining what may have once been brown locks a menacing shade of reddish black.
Jason clutched her hand, his fingers scrambling to find a pulse that he knew wouldn't be there. The dull pallor of her skin and the lifeless stare of wide eyes gave as much away. Her murderer lay further down the alley, slumped, lifeless. Maybe Jason should have drawn it out more, made him feel what this girl felt when the bullet ripped through her faded pink hoodie. As it was, the assailant received a bullet of his own, a round red cut out between his eyes.
Batman would be coming soon.
Oracle would have alerted him to the gunfire, to the blank stares of two bodies, looking into the polluted gotham sky searching for stars they couldn't find.
Jason should leave.
Jason should pull himself together and run, scramble across rooftops and pack a bag and get out of dodge for a couple weeks.
Jason couldn't leave. Couldn't abandon this girl who was a little too much like the girls he knew, a few blocks over, a few years ago. This would have been Jason if he hadn't boosted Bruce's tires. This was Jason, at eight, bleeding beneath his fathers fists, at ten corned by men much bigger than him for taking things that weren't his, at fifteen bruised and broken and dead.
This girl was Jason, but unlike Jason she wouldnt be dragged back, kicking and screaming six feet under. She was just gone.
Jason should probably be gone too, he decided at last, slipping gloves fingers over the girls eyes, closing them in the hope that she may find the peace he never did, never would. He didn't know her name.
He stumbled to his feet, and didn't spare a glance at the man who had murdered this child, and climbed the fire escape opposite the dumpster.
He didn't look back, couldn't really. He knew what he would see if he did; green hair and glinting steel, belt buckles and bruised knuckles, bats and teeth and things that go bump in the night.
So instead he ran, to the heart of the alley, through the docks and finally to the outskirts of Gotham where a small safehouse awaited him, motorcycle fueled, go-bag packed. It was an emergency hideout, a stop-here-first-if-you-need-to-run sort of location.
The door slammed shut behind him and he scrambled about the shabby warehouse, tossing fake IDs, passports and clothes in a rucksack that may or may not last the flight out of Texas. His breath was coming faster as he insured that anything irreplaceable was in the small safe under his floorboards. Most of his safehouse were rigged to explode in the event they were compromised and, given the headlights approaching the stretch of road he was occupying, was currently underway.
Fumbling with his key, the ignition to his motorcycle thrummed to life under him, revving his engine just as a smoke pellet cracked through his window.
Jaskn pulled out into the stark, light polluted gotham night and flicked the detonator on, the compromised safehouse crumbling behind him.
War wounds on children were always the hardest to stomach. Watching the life slip away from someone who had never got the chance to appreciate it was agony.
Bruce Wayne had seen too many of his children die infront of him to excuse his son from making the choice of judge, jury and executioner on someone else's child. No matter what crimes that man had committed against the girl in the alley, no one had the right to decide whether he lived or died, to choose their own kind of cruel justice when the courts would give a fair punishment.
The Batman would apprehend the Red Hood at any cost, it didn't matter that Bruce Wayne had held his son as life slipped away from him, it didnt matter that the anger he felt pulsing in his veins towards Leonard Coney, the man in the alley, begged him to sympathize with Jason, that whispered that the man had got what he deserved. Leonard Coney deserved justice too.
And what was the Batman if not justice?