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The party was in full swing.
“Jay, be careful,” Kori’s voice insisted through the com.
Jason grinned, snagging an hors d’oeuvre from a passing waiter. “I’m always careful.”
“Oh, god.”
He’d got the tip at the bar in Skopje, the one run by Jimmy the Greek. Jimmy, inexplicably, didn't seem to care that he was named like a restaurant, and served excellent aged pear rakija. He was also essentially a steel trap for tips and info, and it was no good pressing him to find out what exactly the Spider wanted. It’d been enough to learn that the Spider had some kind of info, or intel, or… something, anyway, that had the Spider putting out feelers for the Outlaws.
Well. The Outlaws could handle the Spider. Particularly if it meant that Jason got to mingle at a party in an oligarch’s dacha in Sochi. After all, what was the worst that could happen?
He wasn’t going to answer that question.
They didn’t know what the Spider wanted, so he was technically flying blind. Jason had done that before, of course, but—for all he considered Batman to be compulsive and over-prepared—Jason did admit he preferred to have a plan.
At the moment, the ‘plan’ was: claim to be a businessman from Star City, crash the party, and mingle the afternoon away in the hope the Spider would show before anyone kicked him out.
“Hey, who knows,” Jason muttered, smiling at an almost-mummified old woman in a clinging pink dress as he passed. “Spider might be useful.”
“Useful’s not what I’m worried about,” said Roy. “Spider’s an unknown.”
“Not unknown,” Jason said reprovingly. “We know tons of things.”
Roy made a noise.
Yeah, valid point. What they knew, and what seemed to be all that anyone knew, was that the Spider had appeared in the middle of Eastern Europe a few months ago. There were rumors he had been a merc, in with one of the oligarchs or another; big presence in Kazakhstan. Jason liked Kazakhstan; approaching Astana from the steppe, you could believe that aliens had dropped the city down by accident and forgotten to come back.
He’d checked with Kori. They hadn’t.
Just human engineering, patronage, and a shitton of corruption. Jason knocked back another flute of champagne.
But the Spider’s meteoric rise through the Russian-speaking underworld was unnerving lots of people, the sort of people Jason generally preferred to be more… nerved. Mercs, pakhans, the military-espionage complex, what passed for cops in this part of the world (and the good cops, too; there were some here, like everywhere—hell, if Gordon could keep to the straight side of things in Gotham, all those years back)… but the point was, the Spider was a cause for concern.
And his motives were impenetrable, and that was worrying Bruce. Not that Jason cared, much, what Bruce thought or did or worried about; not like Jason was taking orders from the pointy-eared bastard. But when Batman worried…
The Spider was clearly making a play for control over large stretches of territory and had already effectively reorganized the drug routes that ran through Minsk. Cracked down hard—terrifyingly hard, so far as outsiders could see—on human trafficking.
Jason approved.
And now, according to Jimmy the Greek, the Spider had intel for the Outlaws.
Jason let himself be drawn into conversation with an oil heiress. Well, he said conversation, but ‘exchange of innuendos’ was probably more accurate. He envied Bruce, sometimes, for the way the man could flick his public persona on and off like a light. Flirting in half-Russian didn’t come naturally to Jason and veiled sex jokes based on complicated multi-lingual puns were… well. Be easier if they were doing this in Spanish.
Or, god, it’d be easier if Svetlana were a guy. Not that he’d allude to that while in the East. And not that she wasn’t attractive; not that he wasn’t, you know, generally open, but… in recent years, he’d felt himself sliding gently further up the Kinsey scale.
He grabbed another glass of champagne, and a toastie laden with caviar (there was almost certainly a fancier term than toastie, but hell, he was stuck flirting with morally reprehensible female Russians while waiting for the Spider to make an appearance or spring a trap, and he refused to pretend to be a fancy person just for the sake of it) and downed the champagne in one go, startling a laugh from Svetlana.
It wasn’t like she was the worst of the morally reprehensible Russians here.
But they parted ways after a little more time, her called away to other flirting, Jay called to—ugh, he wasn’t feeling—maybe it was the caviar—
His stomach twisted, and he lurched a little on his feet.
Aw shit.
The Pit whispered but he kept it, and the contents of his stomach, down. The last thing he needed was the green taking over and leaving a crater in the heart of the Russian’s playground—the last thing he needed was to be sick, not out in the open, he had to get to the WC—
He could feel sweat starting at his hairline.
“Jay?” came Kori’s voice. “Your heartrate’s not looking—”
“Drugged,” he managed. “One of the drinks probly—”
“Jesus,” said Roy, clipped.
“Extraction?” Jason mumbled as he staggered along the dacha’s back hallway, looking for the bathroom—
Faces loomed in and out of his vision—
“Yeah,” said Roy. “We’re six minutes out; hang on, Jay.”
A jowly, red-faced pakhan—his young something, wife or mistress, impossible to tell, dark curls half-pulled out of an elaborate updo—the pakhan’s belt buckle hanging loose; both their faces alive with shock facing him in the small bathroom—
“Sor’,” Jason slurred. “Sree. Sss—izvinisyuh—”
“Tovarich,” the pakhan began by reflex, the old word startled from him as Jason backed out; too small to get sick there—
Jason felt, rather than heard, the explosion. The walls of the dacha shook. Distantly, he heard screaming.
He had just enough presence of mind to think: six minutes goes fast—but then, “Jay?” Kori’s voice. He fumbled his hand towards his ear, trying to work out if she was here.
“Ree?” he asked.
“Jay, what’s happening? What was that?”
“Drugd,” he said again, losing control. “Bomb on th’, the groun’ fluh… Ree…
“Jay, just hold on,” said Roy. “Get shelter.”
“Works,” Jason managed. “Wha’ver they got me wi’… s’fast, Roy.”
“Three minutes, Jay, just give us three minutes—”
But there were pounding feet and then tac units in the hallway, AKs surrounding him. His eyes muzzily fixed on a red hourglass patch on one of the tac’s shoulders—
“Spider,” he said, and tried to spin into a fighting stance and, instead, vomited over the plush hallway carpet.
***
Jason woke up, lying prone on something hard. He blinked and rolled up onto his left side as his stomach rebelled again and—
Ugh. The something hard he was lying on was the floor, and, as a result, the puddle of sick was inches from his face. He pushed back and away, trying to get his legs underneath him. Made difficult by the shackles on his ankles and the manacles chaining him to the wall. He was in a cell, underground, based on the light—someone’s converted basement, it looked like. Bars divided the room in half.
Jesus Christ.
Unsurprisingly, the little weight of the com unit in the back of his ear was gone.
The subdermal tracker wasn’t great underground, but hopefully it had pinged before they brought him down—and Jason wasn’t great underground either, at darkness and dirt floor and small and… On that thought, he turned and retched again, this time bringing up nothing but bile.
“Are you alright?” said a low voice. Pretty, musical. Heavily accented.
Jason said, “What does it look like?”
“Expulsion,” she said, and the vowels said definitely Russian. He turned his head, searching the shadows for the speaker.
She sat cross-legged. Small, probably; harder to tell when she wasn’t standing, but slender and compact. Wearing nondescript clothes, cargo pants and a beige-ish probably-cotton blouse. Hard to be sure, in the low light. Red hair half-up in braids, awkward, childish, inelegant. Not one of the socialites from the dacha, then.
A nasty bruise over one side of her face; Jason felt a pulse of anger and pushed it aside for now. No manacles, no shackles, but she was definitely on the inside side of the bars, and the door out of the cellar was on the other side.
“Expulsion?” he repeated, still a little woozy. Whatever that stuff they’d hit him with had been, it worked.
He wanted it.
He also wanted, very much, to never have to discuss any of this with Bruce.
“There was evil in your body,” the woman said. “You expelled.”
Jason hoped that was just an overdramatic translation. He wasn’t looking forward to being locked up with a cultist. “Yeah,” he said. “I got drugged.”
She nodded, which probably meant she didn’t actually think it was a demon. (Honestly, though, Jason had learned not to jump to conclusions. With his luck, demonic possession via champagne could be a thing.) “Foolish,” she said.
“Hey!”
“To challenge the Spider.”
Something cold ran through his back. He asked, slowly, “That what I did?”
“No?”
“I was invited,” Jason said. The Pit whispered, You were baited, and Jason clenched his jaw. “And if the Spider has plans for me,” he continued, “he’d better get a move on. There’s a lot of people that he’ll have challenged, by taking me.”
“Friends?” she asked.
“Family.”
She inclined her head. “I had one of those.” She paused. “I had two.”
Now, Jason wasn’t stupid. He’d bet half of his spice rack that she was here to gain his trust. Hell, might not even be the Spider who’d taken him. But, if Jason was anything, he was versatile. If he kept this up, maybe he could get as much from her as she could get from him. Not that she’d get anything of value from him, of course.
Not my first kidnapping. He snickered.
“Something is funny?”
He waved a hand, and the chains clanked. “Not that funny. Just—the Spider took me?”
“You were unconscious.”
Unconscious, big word for a non-native speaker. He made a mental note.
“After I was drugged. Was that the Spider too?”
“Of course.”
“You know why? This—challenge thing?”
“The Red Hood,” she said, and yeah, he wasn’t in the helmet; randomly kidnapped civilians would not recognize him; she was definitely not what she was trying to seem—unless the Spider’s men told her, when they chucked him in here?—“The Red Hood established protocols, in Gotham. For… human trafficking.”
His eyes went to the bruise on her face. He said, “Yeah.”
“The Spider has been… establishing protocols.”
“I’ve heard.” To the tune of many ‘mysterious’ explosions at dockyards, vanished shipping containers, thugs with bullets in their kneecaps or severed hands—the Spider was not, apparently, inclined to be lenient on this issue. Again, Jason could respect that. “I am not a trafficker,” he said, for clarity. “I am a legitimate businessman.”
It didn’t sound incredibly convincing but he hadn’t thought further than ‘businessman’. He weighed the use of improv and abandoned the idea. If she did have him made, it’d just be embarrassing.
She hadn’t moved a muscle, still staring flatly at him. Bruce would like her.
“How did I challenge the Spider?” he asked again.
The corner of her mouth rose and, slowly, went down. A private smile. “The Red Hood has protocols. The Spider is creating protocols.”
“Yeah—”
Her eyes traveled over his body. She said: “The Red Hood is not in Gotham.”
Whoo. Yeah, really glad he hadn’t tried to convince her that he ran a fish-import business. “The—wait,” he said, and if Bruce ever asked why it had taken him so long to clue in, well, thank you, he’d been drugged—“The Spider’s worried that the Red Hood is trying to set up in Russia?”
“Are you not?”
“No!” And there went any pretense of not being the Hood, but, really, he hadn’t had much pretense left—
“A great deal of time in this part of the world—”
“Because it’s full of assholes and good drinks!”
She actually laughed at that.
“Seriously,” he said, “if you know who I am, then you—the Spider has to know this was a bad call. There are people right behind me and they will be pissed—”
“Your tracker has been jammed,” she said, “since the dacha.”
Okay. “Okay. Bad idea, that too. You know who I am, right?”
“The Red Hood. The Outlaw.”
“Is the Spider suicidal?”
“What?”
“Do you know what else I am?”
She looked confused. “From Gotham?”
He shook his head. “No. Well, yes. But. What I actually am, is a Bat.”
She nodded.
“No, I don’t think you’re getting it—if that tracker’s not responding and he doesn’t have a message from me saying it’d be inactive… the Spider’s not just facing the Outlaws, see. Not that I’d want to do that either. But Batman—”
And Jason didn’t kid himself; Bruce didn’t monitor anyone else’s tracker with the degree of ferocity that he monitored Jason’s. Seemed like, losing your kid in an explosion and then having him rise from the dead and travel halfway around the world to recuperate with your enemies, and then come back mildly psychotic from magic poison, left you a little bit paranoid. Left Bruce that way, anyway.
Jason had accepted the tracker because Bruce hadn’t asked but had just… looked, something shattered in his eyes. If that had been how he looked when Jason was dead—
“Shit,” he said now. “A jamming signal. Does that—”
That shouldn’t be possible. The League should already be here; should have arrived as soon as B got the alert. Nothing except a world-ending catastrophe would stop Bruce from coming after him, and if Bruce couldn’t come himself, he’d send Clark, and—
Jason examined the confidence with which he’d thought that, and took a shuddering breath. He hadn’t realized, until just now, how deep his faith in Bruce still ran.
Deservedly, he thought too.
The woman, oblivious to his revelations, smiled. “The Spider has his secrets. Many things are possible for him. They say he comes from another world.”
Jay thought about that a moment and then groaned. “Planet or dimension?”
She looked startled for the first time since he’d woken up.
“Look. If he’s not familiar with the power dynamics here, I’ll explain. He’s pissed off the Batman, and by extension the Justice League. He has kidnapped one of Batman’s known and named associates, even if I haven’t been in Gotham very much the last couple of months. He has shown that he has tech the League is not equipped for. They are not going to take this well—what’s your name?”
Unusual, for a spy not to start with that as a way to ingratiate herself. He made another mental note.
She said, “Natalia,” the Russian accent still heavy.
“Okay. Pleased to meet you, Natalia. If you have any interest in the Spider surviving the night, get me out of here before the League shows up.”
“The Batman does not kill—”
“Everybody else does!” Because, really, Diana was a warrior; Clark did what he could to avoid deaths but he had his share of misadventures and… pragmatism; Oliver’d been knee-deep in complicated spy shit since the first day he hit that island—honestly, about the only Leaguer who was as reliably anti-death as Bruce was Billy, and one of his major nemeses was an intergalactic magic worm. Also, Billy was eleven.
“I mean it,” Jason said. “This was a really, really bad call. The entire Justice League will be on its way; even if the Spider’s blanked out the signal, you think they’ll really have trouble getting here? They are coming.”
Not a moment too soon: there was a rumbling noise in the distance that Jason recognized as the arrival of the Black Osprey. They’d come in force then—a good call, since the Spider was using unfamiliar tech—
Natalia turned her head, catching the sound a moment after he had.
Jason said, “That’s the Justice League, Natalia.”
She stood, unfolding smoothly upwards and moving towards him. Jason had been right; she was short. She hovered over his face, meeting his eyes, and spoke. Clearly. Without even a trace of the Russian accent left.
“Right on time.”
As the hypodermic plunged into his neck, Jason looked the Spider in the eyes and thought, Oh shit.
***
This time, Jason woke up in the Osprey; he recognized the bulkhead above him. He found this plane annoying, mostly because of the name. The League had a member with the Wisdom of Solomon, and the best they could do was stick ‘Black’ in front of the model name.
At least they hadn’t listened to Dick, Jason thought. Dick had argued for naming the rotocraft the Justice-copter, which not even Clark had been able to dignify.
Oh shit.
Jason sat up so fast he saw stars, and hands caught him. “The Spider,” he gasped. “The Spider is—”
“They’re handling it,” came Roy’s voice. “We’re an hour north of Sochi, near the mountains. Lie down a bit, okay? Two non-standard drugs in twelve hours; even bats need a break sometimes.” He pushed Jason, gently, back onto the bed.
“Natalia,” Jason said. “Natalia’s—”
“She’s okay. She’s talking to B, he’s doing the victim thing with her—”
“No!” And Jason was up again, dodging a startled Roy, tearing out of the aircraft, down the gangway and out over… someone’s lawn? A perfectly normal house, from the outside, smallish and Russian-looking, lit by sunrise, big spreading trees and slightly peeling paint but not an obvious den of sin—
Jason burst through the door and stopped short.
B turned to him from where he sat, perfectly whole, at the circular kitchen table. He looked as relaxed as he ever got with the cowl on, which wasn’t very but also wasn’t DEFCON 2. (Jason didn’t like thinking about DEFCON 1, not even casually.)
Natalia sat across from Bruce, prim and demure, big bruise still decorating her face. Matching bone china teacups, bright yellow with gold-edged rims, rested on the table in front of each of them. An absurd gold samovar occupied the table’s center. As Jason watched, Natalia raised the teapot from its perch on the samovar and carefully poured the tea.
Bruce said, “Good morning, Hood. I hope you are recovering?” He spooned sugar into his teacup and delicately stirred.
“She—” Jason started. Al-right, he’d thought Bruce would like her; and, alright, Bruce’s taste in women was, by and large, execrable—and upon occasion, physically excruciating (see again, Talia)—but Bruce wasn’t usually an idiot.
Not this much of one, at least.
“She’s the Spider!” Jason yelped, as Roy pelted into the kitchen behind him.
“Hood,” said Bruce smoothly. “Please meet Natasha Romanoff.”
“The Spider.”
“Yes.”
Alright, so Bruce wasn’t going to be any more help. Jason turned on his (former?) captor.
“You called yourself Natalia,” he said, which was not as significant a violation as the multiple druggings but—
“Natasha is short for Natalia,” she responded, unflinching. Sad Russian trafficking victim entirely gone from her demeanor, now.
Jason squinted. “They’re, like, the same length.”
She smiled at him.
“Yeah,” he said. “No. Look, B, there is a high chance she has drugged your cup or—”
Bruce sipped.
“Besides,” said Natasha/Natalia, “you said your name was John Smith.”
Roy coughed, and Jason heard the barely concealed triumph. Admittedly, it wasn’t one of his better aliases, but come on—
“She’s a crime lord!” he said.
Roy coughed again.
Bruce, horrifyingly, smiled at Natasha/Natalia, and she smiled back.
“And,” Jason added, for good measure and because he could not handle that, “she had me drugged and abducted and—Wait. Where are all your guys?”
“Sent away.” She saluted him with her teacup. “Since your arrival, in fact.”
“Wait,” he said. “What? You were waiting for the Justice League alone?”
She nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
He turned to Roy, who nodded, and to B, who didn’t even have the decency to act like this was weird. “What?”
“I apologize for the… drugging and abducting,” she added. “And for the false pretenses that brought you here.”
“I’m not trying to move in on Russia.”
“No,” she said. “Although, I rather hope you do.”
“What?” Maybe Alfred or Damian, someone crafty, could make him a little sign saying What? that he could just hold up instead of wearing out his voice.
B said, “Hn.”
“B—” Jason began. “Look, does anyone want to explain—?”
“I didn’t lie,” the Spider said. She smiled. “No. I did. But the point is, I didn’t lie when I said the Spider is from a different world.”
Slowly, finally, things clicked together. “Dimension, I guess, not planet?”
Bruce said, “Hn.”
Jason pulled out the chair between B and the Spider, swung it backwards, and straddled the seat, folding his arms on top of the back. Natasha/Natalia poured him tea and—rudely—added water from the samovar. Without even asking if he wanted it watered down. She hadn’t done that for Bruce.
And yes, alright, Jason would have asked for a splash of two of the hot water—bitter tea concentrate wasn't his thing—but that was not the point.
“There are relatively few reliable ways to get the Justice League’s attention,” Natasha continued, proffering the china cup.
Jason took it and said, “They have a hotline.” And was ignored.
“Once I was… in a position to be heard, I acted. I anticipated that losing a valued member of the organization, even of a… peripheral group, in a dramatic manner, would attract the attention I would need.”
“You drugged me twice,” he said.
“The first time was necessary. The second bought me time and goodwill. If you were conscious—” She looked him up and down. “You are theatrical.”
Jason breathed in. “I’m—”
And Bruce had the nerve to say, “Hood,” and cut him off.
Natasha explained: “This way, you and I were alone here. I did not object to your safe removal by your allies; I provided an antidote; and I had the opportunity to be heard in a calm manner.”
Jason said again, “They have a hotline.”
Batman said, “Hn,” managing to thereby convey that the hotline rota for the past month was Billy, Hal, and Kara, none of whom would be any match for Natasha and none of whom were well-suited to actual terrestrial crime.
Jason still thought she could have tried, but conceded, “They need a better hotline.”
Batman said, “Hn.”
“I would like to return to my world,” Natasha said. “We were discussing terms when you—” She didn’t say barged in, but the words hung in the silence anyway.
“Terms?” Jason said.
“The jamming tech, and a variety of specific narcotics,” said Bruce.
“You’re—” Jason widened his eyes.
“And Russia,” Natasha said. “Ulterior motive: I’ll leave a power vacuum when I go. I’d prefer the hole to be filled by someone with… similar motivations.”
“We have a ship,” mused Roy. “You could split the time.”
Jason looked at him, betrayed. “I don’t want Russia,” he said. “And B, come on, this is extortion! If you believe her—”
“I do.”
“Then you’re—you’re still having her pay to get home? Come on, B.”
B said, “Hn,” which meant, Jason, please stop assisting with negotiations.
Natasha was smiling slightly. “If you’d like,” she said, “you can think of it as compensation. For the inconvenience.”
“B—” Jason tried, because Jason didn’t listen, he never listened, that was the root of all of it; Jason didn’t listen and B didn’t listen back—
“Let me explain,” Natasha interjected with a knowing nod across the table at Bruce. “He’s accepting the payments because—”
“Because he’s terminally incapable of not seizing any advantage—”
“Because his son was kidnapped, and he was frightened, and he does not want to be caught off-guard again.”
Jason exhaled hard. Bruce didn’t flinch. There were rustles, and a click, as Roy went back out onto the porch.
Eventually, Bruce nodded his head at her, glacial.
“I don’t mind paying my way,” she said. “And we all have family.” Her lips tightened.
“Some of us,” Jason said, because he wasn’t up for looking at Bruce right now, “have two.”
Natasha shrugged and a flash drive materialized in her fingers. “The jamming tech’s the best I could recreate. Not my field. The drugs—” A brief smile. “The drugs are more my thing. Call it a gesture of good faith.” She flicked her hand and the drive arced into the air, coming down in a graceful tumble—
Bruce’s hand caught it two inches above his tea.
“The League is not unfamiliar with dimensional rupture,” he said.
Natasha finished her own tea and stood. “Good.”
Bruce rose, laughably dour in this cozy kitchen with the rising sunlight streaming in. He gestured to the door, his cape flaring, and Natasha smiled.
“Natasha,” Jason said, before she left. “If I take over your operations here—”
Another flash drive soared through the room, landing in his coincidentally upturned palm. “Okay,” he said. “And the Spider?”
“Say…” She smiled. “Family leave.”