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In the presence of absolute evil should not have been subjective, but by the very nature of the All-Blades’s use stipulation, they were subjective.
Subjective to whether Jason should be able to live, that is.
Currently surrounded on all sides by both seasoned gang members and their disposable cannon fodder henchmen, his guns systematically destroyed, knocked out of his hands, crushed to pieces by a bulldozer, thrown in a vat of oozing chemical soup that near-instantly dissolved them, or all three—Jason really wanted to just wake up from this ridiculous dream.
Roman Sionis was a force to be reckoned with, but a protégé who called himself the Black Macabre was running the shitshow when the top banana was in prison. And in this scenario, the student did not become the master. The student didn’t even come close.
What a great way to stage a resurrection, Jason grumbled under his breath, backing up until wannabe Black Mask’s henchmen were far too close for comfort and he himself was pressed flat against cold metal. He could feel, behind layers of steel, the hissing of mysterious green acid mere inches from his skin—far too close for comfort.
In the morning of the thirty-first of March at precisely 9 AM, Wayne Enterprises was scheduled to hold a—presumably routine—press conference. With Lucius Fox breathing down their necks to ensure it didn’t go awry, Bruce Wayne might make the tabloids in his sleep-deprived hungover state (though it was really from getting maybe two hours of sleep), and Tim Drake-Wayne would stumble up to the podium, and do everything for his father in the usual “he disappeared in the timestream so I have to pick up the slack” fashion, Jason Peter Todd(-Wayne, debatably) would be officially, publicly resurrected.
Currently, as it was the thirty-first of March at 3:33 AM, the Devil’s hour, the press conference would be a no-go. Or at the very least, a sleep-deprived haze.
So much for a mandatory hiatus the day of my press conference, Jason grumbled as he ducked one man’s bullet—so rude of him, honestly. In the process of the next ten minutes, still absorbed in the thought of what to say during his “public resurrection,” his backup gun got trampled—somehow—by an errant boot, his second backup was melted almost immediately in a shudder-inducing sizzle (he could almost smell the bacon), his spare of the spare of the spare, the tiny handgun that looked like a child’s toy, caught a bullet aimed for Jason’s head and jammed the barrel.
All in all, amazing luck.
“Oy! Pay a-fuckin’-ttention, Hood!” A very British-sounding henchman had his gun pointed directly at Jason’s head—well, his helmet head. “Were you even listening?!”
“No! Take this, asshole!” Triumphantly, Jason’s hand darted to his belt, groping madly for smoke pellets, a grapple, a bastardized batarang, anything—but his assailants were instead treated with a juice box to the head, complete with a bright orange Elmo & Sesame Street theme blazing loud and proud.
What the fuck.
Jason… Jason didn’t know how to react. The poor victim of the flying childhood trauma, one of the indistinguishable henchmen clad in black, looked equally confused before another henchman shot it, straight in the air. The juice box paused and hovered in midair like it was fucking magic, then exploded in a firework of grape juice that smelled suspiciously like the flammable sludge Repla—sorry, Timothy—had fabricated after a particularly zombie-like case of sleep deprivation .
What the fuck, except the second time. Maybe he had accidentally swiped whatever new prototype that Bruce or whoever else was working on last time he had been at the cave, except why would they put it in a juice box?
Maybe Replacement was trying to poison Damian, he thought wryly. The thought of demonic hellspawn consuming a juice box was amusing, sure, but—
(Well, Damian would rather skewer himself first than drink something out of a Sesame Street themed juice box.)
Good news was, based on the smell of gasoline mixed with whatever that suddenly hit Jason in the helmet-head like a train, it was flammable. Jason may be out of fire-starters, and he didn’t have the tiny flint and steel (the “flamin’ hot steel”) on him—but he still had one more ace up his sleeve.
Fickle magic, don’t fail me now.
“If y’all count as the ‘presence of absolute evil,’” Jason drawled, vaguely aware he was cackling in a deep, menacing mechanized villain laugh to outsiders, but in his helmet it was just high-pitched giggling, “then I want a refund.”
It was a gamble, obviously. Because magic was a fickle, fickle thing, and Talia—extending to anything she gave him—was inconsistent, if anything. But if it did work—and holy fuck, Batman, Tim Drake was owed his respect for how his magic Sesame Street grape juice sludge somehow defied gravity and was still flying through the air—it would be so funny.
(It would also solve his ‘I don’t want to fight evil henchmen right now because I have to be up at a godawful time of day later today because of my resurrection press conference I only half signed up for’ problem.)
But it was a gamble that was worth it, because instead of looking like a complete idiot who had done a backflip off the vat of sizzling green chemicals—which shook and groaned precariously—Jason instead looked like the badass crime lord he was, because he was holding glowing copper blades, and they were on fire, and he twirled them like the show-off he was, more mad giggles overtaking him that thankfully translated to his supremely evil Red Hood villain laugh, à la “I stuffed a bunch of decapitated heads in a duffel bag” evil.
With a leap and a swing of the blades, the All-Blades, tracing an X in the air with fire, the grape juice caught aflame. Instantly, as if a switch had been flipped, the warehouse blazed exponentially brighter, the henchmen stopped advancing, and started screaming.
“Come at me, if you dare!”
Jason was aware that was such a Robin thing to say, and he was the Red Hood, murdering crime lord of Crime Alley with a reputation to maintain, dammit, but it was so funny watching the henchmen running around and screaming like chickens with their heads chopped off. Oh, how just holding swords made of copper on FIRE made his life so much easier. The henchmen crashed into each other, crashed into poles, tripped and fell, and one even ran face first into one of the vats of chemical soup…
…And promptly started to howl in pain. The steel vat creaked ominously, Jason’s hackles rising as his instincts switched from offense to defense against—what seemed to be—a potential incoming avalanche. Heart sinking into his stomach, he turned in synchronicity with the other henchmen, staring wide-eyed as the entire tank began to shake.
No fucking way it’s that unstable.
As if a response, the creaking and groaning grew louder until the tank began to wobble and tip over, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THERE’S AN AVALANCHE OF GREEN CHEMICAL SOUP FLOODING TOWARDS HIM—
—And Jason had no grapple like the dumbass he was—
—And dear lord, if this was another Lazarus Pit but infinitely more rage-inducing with none of the resurrection benefits, or if he was going to turn into an acid-bathed Joker, this would be the fucking dumbest way to die—
—And someone soared down from the ceiling like a fucking bird, a fucking plane, but it wasn’t Superman, it was black robin’s egg blue with their arms wrapped tightly around Jason, carrying him like a fucking baby—
—And then, the arms lurched like they were nearly going to drop him. First of all, how rude of them! They go through all that effort of rescuing him from a chemical soup invasion and instead decide to throw him down while soaring through the air? Dying from that green acid wouldn’t be that bad, right…? Worse come to worse, he’d be alive, but just extremely fucked and psychotic like the Joker.
Midair and nearly swallowed by mystery acid, Jason shuddered at the thought.
“I’m here to save th—what the fuck?” Nightwing—because that was Nightwing’s voice, the dickhead—choked out. “Ja—Hood, why are you out here? And what the—fuck—are those?!”
“Your mom,” Jason said absentmindedly. “Wait, what?”
He felt the grapple jerk, and then the arms around him jerk in tandem. For a split second, he was hit by the absurd fear that he would fall—like when was the last time that had happened? Bats didn’t fucking fall off their grapple lines. But the grapple re-stabilized as fast as it had unstabilized—that is to say, in a few seconds that felt like forever—and Nightwing touched down on the gritty concrete of an unoccupied roof. A few moments later, he was followed by two dark shapes, both casting bat-like shadows in the pale moonlight: a purple blob (“the” Spoiler, one-half or one-third of Batgirl, depending who you asked, Stephanie motherfuckin’ Brown, a persistent thorn in Jason’s side) who nearly barrelled into Dick doing a dramatic flourish and a three-point superhero landing (“I saw Black Widow do it, okay?! I just wanted to try it, let a girl dream—”), and someone who scared the living nightlights out of him when they landed behind him, all stealth and no shadow.
“Little brother,” said the only brain cell in the family, aka Cass, aka Black Bat, aka one-half/one-third of Batgirl. “What are you holding?”
“Yeah, Jay-Jay,” Steph said, staring at him like he had grown a second head.
“No names on comms,” Jason said automatically. “Purple Batgirl, I will strang—oh, these things? I forgot to put these bad boys away.”
He was still holding flaming copper magic swords that had a name—the All-Blades—but that name was dumb compared to just saying “flaming copper magic swords that are also, did you know, on fire!” With a casual flick of his wrist, the blades twirled and flipped dangerously around his hands once… twice… and thrice… bad theatrics picked up from the resident circus boy, before vanishing into a puff of smoke.
Instantly, it felt like he had been dunked headfirst in a bucket of ice-cold water. With the blazing heat source gone, there was a burning sensation against bare palms, gloves superheated into rubberized kevlar through the sheer force of the All-Blades. Gasping, he peeled them off in a frenzy and threw them across the rooftop, adrenaline leaving his body faster than it had arrived, and slumped against Dick.
“Woah,” Dick said, hands catching Jason’s shoulders and pulling him into—something that was not quite a hug, but not not a hug. “Jason. Jay-Jay. Lil’ wi—”
“Don’t call me that, I’m not twelve,” Jason reflexively retorted. “I’m okay, I’ll be fine after I steal whatever caffeine monstrosity the Replacement’s whipped up. It’s just those things are stupid and engineered to be soulpowered.”
Silence.
“...Soulpower?” Steph made a face. “Dude, you’re—”
“—a zombie, I know—”
“—actually, I was about to say ‘insane,’ and ‘what the fuck,’ but that also works—”
“—thank you very much, Purple Batgirl, you—”
“—whatever! I’ll buy you coffee myself! Don’t take RR’s things, he installed booby traps in them after the demon child kept stealing them and feeding it to the cow. ”
Dick sighed. He truly was constantly, unwittingly afflicted by eldest daughter syndrome. “Spoiler, don’t call Hood names. Red, need I ask why your swords are soulpowered, and why we haven’t heard of them—?”
Mid-sentence, he faltered and put a finger in the air, growing eerily still. The Batgirls uncannily mimicked his stance—the familiar poise of “I’m on comms.”
Weird. Jason could’ve sworn he was on the bat-comm channel that night; Oracle had been buzzing about a robbery on Fifth, a Condiment King excursion at a Wayne branch bank, how ironic was that, and blah blah blah until he had tuned her out, eventually shutting off that channel entirely to focus on his warehouse shenanigans. And, oh, how badly that had gone. Half the time, when he was busy Crime Alley crime lord-ing, listening to the bats trying to convince Damian not to adopt another stray animal was enough amusement to pass the time. Jason automatically assumed he had muted them out of sheer annoyance, but the lack of Oracle in his ear was telling.
“Copy, O,” Dick said to the air, shooting Jason a look behind blank white domino eye-lenses that suggested we’ll talk later. “Sorry guys, I probably won’t be back. Jay-Jay, don’t kill anyone. We’ll talk about your swords later.” With no fanfare at all, Nightwing leapt forward, nearly strangled Jason for the half-second he was being hugged, and immediately turned around and sprinted off the rooftop, somersaulting with the familiar hiss of the grapple line catching in the distance.
“Huh,” Jason said. He frowned and wanted to check his comm, but if it was muted—or even broken—Steph would never let him live it down. Also, Bruce would yell at him, but what else was new?
“‘Huh,’” Steph mimicked. “You’re lucky Nightwing had to deal with the demon child getting stuck in some goo Condiment King set up before his interrogation ripped you to pieces. I will reserve my judgement until we get back to base.”
“And what, exactly, do you have to judge me for, O supreme overlord Purple Batgirl?”
“The fact that your comm is broken!” she said triumphantly
“No, it’s not!” Jason said with false bravado. “Spoiler, I’ll show you broken comm—”
“Little brother,” Cass said forcefully. For someone who was older than Cass, Jason was sure being called ‘little brother’ a lot. Instantly, the two of them fell silent. Cass seemed to smirk imperceptibly under her mask. “You.”
Jason raised an eyebrow, before he remembered he was wearing his helmet. “I. What?”
“You’re an idiot,” Steph supplied, automatically ducked, and scurried backwards until there was a good twenty feet of space in between them. “Hey, BB, fifty bucks says that his comm is broken!”
“Says the idiot, Purp—”
“Take off your helmet, little brother,” Cass interrupted. All eyes swiveled to her. “You owe us fifty bucks.”
“My comm is not broken,” he said weakly. “I resent that implication.”
But one could never ignore Cass’s half-imploring, half-threatening body language, her poise expectant. In the background, ambulance sirens collecting chemical soup-ed henchmen was the lovely background music to Jason as he reluctantly pulled off his helmet, shaking out his helmet-hair—only to…
…watch it drop to the floor between bare fingers, in pieces, static electricity crackling through it.
“... Oops.”
The eye-rolls he got from them were scathing.
“So,” Bruce said, casually. He was brooding in the way that suggested ‘I know I told you to not go out yesterday, but I’m a hypocrite and I went out yesterday.’ “I hear Talia supplied you with weapons. Also, your comm.”
Jason bristled. How did the Replacement function like this? The light was too bright, the people were too annoying, the podium was a perfect target to explode at that fine hour of 9 AM. “Old man, I’ll show you copper sword—”
“Both of you shut up, it’s too early for this.” Tim, holding a tumbler of coffee larger than Jason’s head. “‘Be CEO of Wayne Ent.,’ they said, and all I get is abuse. Abuse, I say!”
“I’ll show you abus—”
“You’re repeating yourself, Jason.” Tim took an enormous swig that appeared to be half the tumbler, and by gods Jason wished that were him. “Imagine,” he continued, muttering to himself. “Three dumbasses dumbass enough to attend a press conference instead of rescheduling to tomorrow. April fools.”
“That would’ve been funny.”
“Just read your cue cards and shut up so we can go sleep.”