Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jason didn’t really know how it happened, but after their reunion, he and Bruce ended up spending three days straight together before saying their goodbyes. If someone had told him, even a month ago, that he’d not only choose to let Bruce back into his life but would then proceed to willingly exist in his direct proximity for the following 72 hours, he’d have acquainted them with the All-Blades.

On paper, it read like a betrayal. A betrayal of his best friend, whose months of torment had been the direct result of Bruce’s recklessness. A betrayal of himself, too, the version of himself he’d spent six years carefully crafting from the shattered pieces Joker and the League had left him in. The version of him that didn’t care about Bruce anymore, the version of him that couldn’t be hurt by Bruce anymore, the version of him that needed Roy and only Roy.  

That was the person he became to ensure his survival. The only person he could be if he wanted to survive. He’d built those walls because he needed them, and he still needed them now. He couldn’t let them crumble at the first whiff of Bruce’s remorse.

Except that apparently, he could. Except that was more or less what he’d spent the last three days doing. And things were good. Terrifyingly good, actually. So good that Jason had already started fearing when the ground would inevitably give out beneath his feet and the reality he’d always known, that Bruce would never be able to forgive what he’d done, would finally come crashing down around him. So, as much as he missed Roy, he couldn’t bring himself to give up a single minute. Not when every one might be his last.

Jason lingered awkwardly in the foyer of the place he and Bruce had spent those strange three days in, a tiny house that Bruce and Slade had apparently been cooped up in for months as they tried to pick up Red Hood’s scent after the Deathstroke Incident. “So…” he muttered, shifting from foot to foot, shoving his hands in his pockets then taking them out again, resisting the strong urge to pace or maybe just run the fuck away and ruin this on purpose before fate could ruin it for him. 

Eventually, he found his voice again. “You’re going back home, I take it?” It came out exceptionally stiff and robotic considering he’d collapsed into Bruce’s arms and confessed the abridged version of seven years of sins only three days prior. It was just…  he felt out of place here. He felt out of place thinking about what came next, about Bruce leaving, about following him, about going back to Gotham. 

He felt out of place anywhere Roy wasn’t.

Honestly, he was itching to get back to their home safehouse. But it still felt… wrong? Wrong to leave Bruce like this when their last not-quite-goodbye had ended in Jason’s death and Bruce’s apparent descent into near-madness.

Bruce gave a vaguely assenting grunt from the living room as he packed the last of his gear. Jason scoffed under his breath at the sound. It was a little comforting, if he was being honest with himself. He barely recognized this new version of Bruce, but if nothing else, his everlasting love of communicating in as few syllables as humanly possible seemed to have stayed intact.

“Hell City, sweet Hell City,” Jason sighed, a strange, hollow pang of nostalgia echoing through his chest. Something bitter rose in the back of his throat. He swallowed it back down. “What are your plans?”

There was a beat of hesitation, less than a second. Even so, Bruce had trained Jason far too well for the falter to slip by unnoticed. “I have some personal things to attend to.”

Jason scoffed. “Wow, that was… quite possibly the laziest dodge I’ve ever heard from you. A lie that bad would’ve gotten me benched from patrol for a week. Thought we were tryna move past this, old man.”

Bruce paused his work, blinked a few times, then slowly turned his head towards Jason. Had it been anyone else, Jason would’ve called the despondent expression pleading, but Bruce Wayne didn’t plead. “Killing Superman came at a heavy cost,” he said softly, and it was obviously the truth, if not the one Jason had asked for. 

“And you need to scurry off to Gotham so you can lock yourself up in the Batcave alone and brood for a week straight? Wait—is the Batcave even a thing anymore?”

“Jason,” Bruce said, voice even softer, careful now, like he was handling a dangerous animal. Or maybe a wounded one. “I would consider it a personal favor if you would leave this alone.”

And, Jason supposed, even being honest about being dishonest was more than he ever got from Bruce as Robin. Proof that he was starting to see Jason as an equal now. A relationship that had been born from lies and built on better ones wasn’t going to transform into a fountain of candor overnight. And as much as he liked to pretend otherwise, Bruce was only human. Jason figured he could bend. Just this once. 

“Okay, fine, I’m dropping it. You been gone a long time, huh? You miss her?”

“Do you?” Bruce asked, giving Jason a long, searching look.

Jason sighed, but this one was almost fond. He gave Bruce half a crooked smile. “Answering a question with a question is also a lazy dodge. I expected better from Batman.”

Bruce returned the grin with a shadow of his own. “So is protesting the premise of a question instead of answering it. I already told you I intend on leaving Batman behind, so between the two of us, I’m not the one who needs to keep his powers of deception on an elite level.”

“Ouch. Low blow.” Jason felt the amusement slowly slip from his face as he turned Bruce’s words over in his head a few times. “I’ll stop if you stop?”

“Deal.”

Jason nodded and dropped his eyes to his bandaged hands, flexing them just to ignite sparks of pain in the still-healing bones, enough to ground him in the moment. “Gotham and I have a… a complicated relationship. She raised me, she killed my parents. She brought you and me together, she put me out on the streets for years first to get there. She made me Robin, she helped kill me. She brought me back to life, she gave me to Ta—to the League. It’s a checkered history. Six years away and I’m still not sure if the good outweighs the bad.”

With the momentary tension dissolved and the last of his packing finished, Bruce came to join Jason in the foyer. “My feelings are similar. In some ways, yes, I’ve missed her. Gotham is the only home I’ve ever had. In other ways, well… I haven’t actually called her home in years. Haven’t called anywhere home in years, really. It was a luxury we couldn’t afford. The things from the Manor that survived Superman’s attack have been moved into a new place, but it feels like a stranger’s home more than my own. I anticipate it will be difficult to get myself to put down roots there. Gotham has changed a lot since we’ve been apart. But, I’m looking forward to getting to know her again.”

“Gotham without Batman,” Jason murmured, feeling the weight of the words come down on his shoulders. “Feels impossible.”

“I’ve kept tabs on her. She’s getting by. In some ways, I think she may actually be faring better now.”

“Somethin’ tells me that’s got more to do with the distinct lack of Joker than it does the distinct lack of Batman. Which, as much as I hate to rub it in, is the exact point I’ve been making for the last 10-plus years.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “You don’t hate to rub it in. You love to rub it in.”

The grin split Jason’s face again. “You’re right, I do, and considering he murdered me, I think that’s my god-given right to enjoy indefinitely. I’d say I’m sorry, but it’s kinda the price you pay to have me back in your life. Roy would say it’s one of many prices, actually.”

“I’ll pay it happily. But regardless of the reasons, the result is the same. I don’t think Gotham needs me anymore.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I would pick up the cowl again if there was no other way to protect her people. But…” he looked Jason up and down meaningfully, “I know of another hero far better suited to the task. If he decides to choose that path.”

Jason rolled his eyes as heat crept up the back of his neck. “Yeah, yeah.” And then, softer, “You left some pretty big shoes behind, y’know. They’re not exactly easy to fill. They… you were like a god to them. You really think they’d take a replacement over the original model?” 

And—fuck—he hadn’t actually meant to say that out loud. Of all the walls he’d built in their years apart, Jason’s disdain for Batman’s image, methods, and ideology was one of his strongest defenses. He couldn’t just admit he was afraid he wouldn’t be as good as Bruce. He was supposed to be big and loud and mean and confident, sure that his way was the right way and he wasn’t just as good as Batman, he was better. The fear that lay beneath that was for Jason and only Jason to know about. Three days. Three days and Bruce was already breaking down his best shields. 

Jason honestly didn’t know why he was even surprised. Yeah, maybe it was for the best that he and Bruce spent a little time apart.

It was too late to take it back now. Bruce was already responding. “Perhaps not, but he isn’t a replacement, is he?” He placed a hand on Jason’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’re not the next Batman. You’re the first Red Hood. You won’t do it like me, you’ll do it like you, and our city will be better for it. They’ll learn to trust you now the same way they did when you were Robin. They took one look at you and knew you were one of them. It won’t be any different now.”

“Pretty soon here, I’m gonna start requiring you to say at last one cold, distant, critical, blunt, or otherwise emotionally constipated thing for every five nice things you say to me because this shit,” Jason gestured to Bruce’s easy smile and relaxed posture, “is fucking off-putting as hell.”

“You have a tell before you land a blow,” Bruce responded with barely a moment’s pause. “I noticed it in your fight with Slade. Before throwing a punch, you pull your off-hand back. Before aiming a kick, you twitch your hips. The more you let your emotions in, the more noticeable it gets. You also start to favor your bad shoulder the second you start to lose the advantage in a fight. As hard as it is to override those instincts, you’d be better off not protecting it so obviously and running the risk of someone getting a lucky shot in rather than telegraphing your biggest weakness so clearly. Maybe add some additional protection in your suit instead.” Jason blinked at him in alarm, lips slightly parted, and the corner of Bruce’s mouth twitched up. “There. Does that balance out some of the kindness?”

Jason gave Bruce an appraising look. “Wow. How long have you had that in the barrel?”

“Since the moment your smoke bomb cleared, give or take five to ten seconds. You can’t stick me to a wall to neutralize me and then expect me not to notice anything.”

“You didn’t point it out to your buddy. He was losing. Could’ve helped him beat me.”

“He’s plenty sharp enough to pick up on it by himself. If he’s not, he deserves to lose.”

“He did lose. Well—he definitely didn’t win, at least. I could have killed him. I almost did.”

Bruce nodded, face completely blank. “Hm,” was all he said, but Jason heard the resigned I know that even if Bruce didn’t put words to it.

“Would you have let me do it?”

“How could I have stopped you? I was out of the fight before you even threw the first punch.”

Jason and Bruce just held each other’s eyes for a long moment. “You could have,” Jason said eventually, little more than a whisper. “You could have stopped me. Because you know exactly where to push and how hard to press, better than almost anyone alive. You didn’t need your fists. Your mouth still worked fine.”

Bruce didn’t flinch a bit. “I would’ve sooner let you kill us both than use what I know to hurt you, Jason.”

Jason almost asked if he actually meant that, but really, he already knew the answer was yes. Or at least, that was the answer Bruce would give. He was far from an honest man, but he wouldn’t bullshit about this. Probably.

Satisfied with the impasse they had reached, Jason turned the criticism over in his mind a few more times, then nodded. “I know the tell you’re talking about. Ducra trained it out of me at one point, but the bender I went on after I left the Chamber knocked a lot of the All-Caste’s teachings out of my head. I’ll have to pay closer attention to it. You’re right about the shoulder, too. That’s actually fucked me over a lot over the past few years. Roy can probably get a guard in my jacket without making it obvious.” Jason ground his teeth together, swallowed hard, and added, “Thanks.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just… back when you were Robin, we would have had a week-long fight over this before you reached that conclusion. And you certainly wouldn’t have thanked me at the end of it.”

“M’not fifteen anymore,” Jason muttered, a little petulant. And then, after a pause, “Guess we’ve both changed a bit, huh?”

A complicated look passed over Bruce’s face, a few dark clouds over a clear sky, bittersweetness so familiar Jason felt it press down on his chest the same way Bruce likely did. “I suppose so.”

“You know I’m not him anymore, right?” Jason blurted out. “These past couple years, they—they fucked me up good. I’m different. I’m really different. Even if I wanted to give you your Robin back, I couldn’t.”

The storm was gathering over Bruce’s face, a dull, twisting pain replacing the hint of sweetness and nostalgia. “Have I done something to make you think this isn’t enough for me?”

“No, that’s not—it’s just—I know you miss him. I know when you came out here lookin’ for me, Robin was who you were hoping to find. And that’s okay, I’m not like, pissed about it. Not anymore, at least, if I ever was. I get it. That was the only me you ever knew, of course that was the me you wanted back. But you can’t—you can’t hold out hope that if you stick around and you’re nice enough for long enough, I’ll turn back into the kid you lost. You’re gonna end up disappointed, and I can’t… I’m not gonna be able to have an actual relationship with you if I know that’s what you’re thinkin’ the whole time. This,” Jason made a vague gesture to himself, “is all I have to give. To you or anyone else. If you can’t find a way to be good with that, you need to tell me now.”

“You’re alive,” Bruce said, eyebrows drawn together in a frown even as the words came out as reverent and genuine as they always did. Jason didn’t let himself be warmed by the sentiment this time. Even if it was true, it was still a dodge, and that was as good as a lie.

“Uh huh. But he isn’t. Your Robin died. Something else came back in his place, with mostly his face, and mostly his memories, but it’s not him. You can’t love me back into the person I was before I died, it doesn’t work like that. Trust me. I’ve spent more than enough time trying to bring him back to know it isn’t possible.”

Bruce reached out for Jason’s other shoulder and squeezed them both tightly, looking him dead in the eye. “I miss him,” he said, and this time, Jason knew it was the whole truth. “I will always miss him. The same way I’m sure there’s a part of you that misses the person I used to be and the relationship we used to have. But I was always going to lose him eventually, even if you hadn’t died. Part of growing up is losing the person you were to become the person you are. Missing him doesn’t mean I don’t love the man he’s become every bit as much as the boy I lost.”

Jason placed a hand over one of Bruce’s and squeezed back. “Okay.”

Bruce’s frown deepened. “You don’t believe me.”

Guess Batman’s mind-reading powers didn’t retire along with him, the bitter part of Jason’s brain supplied, but he held it back, letting the hard truth out in place of the same lazy deflections he’d been criticizing Bruce for. “No, I don’t. But I’m trying to. Maybe someday, I’ll get around to it. In the meantime, just… stick around, yeah? Don’t disappear for seven years again, and I’ll, uh… I’ll do the rest.”

Bruce wrapped Jason up in a giant bear hug. As much as it made him feel like the child he’d just insisted he wasn’t anymore, he buried his face in the warmth of Bruce’s chest and let himself believe for a single fleeting moment that Bruce could protect him from the world now the same way he used to when he’d wrap Jason up inside his cape during a cold winter patrol. “You have my word, Jay.”

It was a long time before Jason pulled back. Bruce let him go easily when he did. They stared at each other for a long, heavy moment, and then Bruce was pressing cold metal into Jason’s hand. A house key. Jason blinked at it in alarm. “I—I don’t know when—if—I’ll be ready to go back, B,” he stammered out.

“I know. But if you are, when you are… my home is your home.”

Jason didn’t let himself think about it, pulling Bruce in for another hug. “Fly safe,” he whispered into Bruce’s shoulder.

“Drive safe,” Bruce whispered back. “I’ll text you my address. If you ever need anything in the meantime, anything… I might be half the world away, Jay, but my phone still works.”

Jason swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah. And if, um… if you need anything, mine works too.”

Bruce huffed a small laugh. “You know I’m the parent in this relationship, right?”

“And you know you’re almost as much of a mess as I am, right?”

“Point taken.”

Jason hesitated for a long moment before eventually conceding that any time he and Bruce parted ways could be the last time they ever did. He remembered his own broken confession from months ago, I don’t even remember the last time we said we loved each other, or if we ever even said it out loud. He couldn’t leave it like that again. He couldn’t live with that again. 

He took a deep breath and pitched himself over the edge. 

“Love you, dad.”

“I love you too, Jaylad.”

Chapter Text

So, that was how Jason had ended up outside the door of his and Roy’s current not-a-home. Three days had passed since he’d left here with vengeance and forgiveness at war in his heart, not knowing if he’d ever return. It didn’t seem like a long time. Considering Jason felt like he’d aged ten years since he left, though, and considering it was the longest time they’d been apart since Roy moved in years ago, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Jason had been missing him like hell. The distance lived in his body more than his mind now, a constant ache in his chest, an empty echoing cavern taking up the space in his heart where Roy usually lived.

Things had been good with Bruce, but they were also exhausting. It was exhausting waiting around for Bruce to finally show his true colors, it was exhausting searching for a lie in every word, and it was exhausting carrying around the fact that no matter what Bruce said, his actions would always speak the loudest. All the reassurances in the world couldn’t change the fact that Bruce had still teamed up with the Joker, waited six years to avenge Jason’s death, and then spent another year unknowingly subjecting Jason to endless paranoid torment as he chased him down. And Jason wasn’t even sure that he hated Bruce for any of that anymore, but that didn’t make the weight of it go away. 

Roy, despite all the shit Jason gave him for his obnoxious personality and incessant chattering, wasn’t exhausting. Really, he was the only thing about Jason’s life that wasn’t. Roy had broken Jason’s bones and locked him up and triggered him on purpose, and none of it even entered Jason’s mind anymore, because it was Roy and Roy was good. Roy was safe. And even with all the supposed changes he had gone through… Bruce wasn’t. 

Fuck it if that made him weak. Fuck it if personal attachments are the death of any good assassin. Fuck everything you touch dies. Jason missed Roy. That was the truth, and Jason was frankly fucking sick of lying no matter how good at it he was. 

Roy was at the stove when Jason slipped through the door, frustration written into the stiffness in his spine. Jason couldn’t help but grin at the sight. Tell him I burned the house down or something. Roy certainly seemed to be giving it his best shot.

It did take all of Roy’s concentration to cook without setting half the kitchen ablaze, which had created a fountain, ever-flowing, of so many ways to fuck with him over the years. Jason took the opportunity to channel his League training and become one with the shadows, closing the door silently, stealing across the room, and creeping up behind Roy. He stopped short a foot away, figuring that touching his friend would probably be tempting house-burning fate just a bit too much.

“You sure you’re qualified to boil water, Ginger?”

Roy jumped almost out of his skin and whirled around with his fist raised, looking ready to punch Jason out. There was a half-second pause where Jason just basked in the glory of a perfectly constructed jump scare, and then Roy’s whole face lit up. He punched Jason in the shoulder with about a quarter of the force he seemed to have intended originally. His good shoulder. Jason was sure that wasn’t an accident. “You motherfucker,” Roy said, smile going blinding as he pulled Jason into a hug tight enough to make his ribs ache, quite possibly the sweetest hurt Jason had ever known.

“God, twenty-eight looks rough on you,” Jason teased, already capitulating, reciprocating the hug, and secretly cherishing the chance to hold Roy again. “That was way too easy, Mr. ‘Archers Train for Reaction Time’.”

“I haven’t seen you in days and you left not knowing if you’d ever come back. You are not allowed to start talking shit yet.”

“Nobody told me there would be rules now. Maybe I should’ve stayed with Bruce.”

“Stop,” Roy said, more of a plea than a command. “Let me hold you for one minute before you go back to being an asshole.”

“You’ve lost your tolerance for my bullshit already? Jeez, a guy leaves for three days and your whole world goes to pieces.”

“Jaybird, sweetheart, I’m begging you.”

“Okay, okay, I’m done now.” Jason pressed his forehead into Roy’s shoulder, breathing him in. “You’re lucky I’m soft on you, Ginger.”

“Yeah, I love you too.”

The minute passed in blissful, comfortable silence. Jason let his eyes slip shut, enjoying the first real moment of peace he’d had since he’d exited his final meditation before confronting Bruce and Slade. He only had to bite his tongue to cut off three dickish comments the whole time. That was probably some kind of record.

“Okay,” Roy sighed eventually, carding a hand through Jason’s hair. A pleased hum fell from his lips at the familiar feeling. “Carry on.”

“I can’t believe it was that easy to scare you,” Jason replied immediately, since all the mean comments he’d held back were just sitting in the barrel waiting to be fired off. “I mean, I can believe it, you’ve gotten incredibly complacent in your old age, but still. Embarrassing.”

“Please excuse me for not being hypervigilant in my own home.”

“Door wasn’t even double-locked, you might as well put up a sign asking to be robbed or shot.”

“We’re in Shitfuck Nowhere, China, not fucking Crime Alley. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another person within a twenty-mile radius of this place. Besides, you’re the only one in the world who can sneak up on me like that, and as tough a game as you like to talk, you’d never actually hurt me.”

“Ugh, shut up. Fine, you’re excused. Just this once.”

“I missed you,” Roy said, the teasing note leaving his voice as it came out soft and honest. Something in Jason released that, at least, he hadn’t been the only one. “You’re an asshole, but fuck, I missed you.”

Jason sighed and squeezed Roy a little tighter. “Missed you too,” he admitted quietly. It came easier than he expected it to. The truth was always easier when it was Roy. “The first three times we met, I tried to kill you, and you continued to keep me alive for months after despite the copious evidence that I was a danger to your life, and now we’re best friends. And yet, with the fuckin’ week I’ve had, I think you’re now officially the most normal thing about my life.”

“Yeah. Slade’s still alive, Bruce is cool now, and you might be willingly returning to the place where you died and came back to life. I’m shocked you’re still in one piece.”

Jason realized abruptly that Roy didn’t even know the biggest news, the Joker-is-dead news, but this was so nice. Peaceful. Peace was so rare for them. That information could wait. Until tomorrow, at least. “Wow. Thanks for the faith.”

“You already know it has nothing to do with my faith in you, Jaybird. It’s Bruce. Obviously. I’m well within my rights to have expected him to fuck this up in some colorful, inventive, surprisingly-cruel-for-a-superhero sort of way.”

“Me and you both, Ginger.” Jason let his eyelids flutter open again just in time to see Roy’s frothing saucepan shift into overdrive. “PS, your pot is boiling over.”

Roy immediately pulled back from the hug with a muttered curse and switched the burner off just before the water could splatter and scald the glass of Jason’s nice electric range. “And here I was telling myself you were exaggerating all those times you said I could burn water.”

Jason shooed Roy away from the stove. “Just stop before you hurt yourself.”

“But I’m hungry,” Roy whined.

“And if you make whatever it is you’re making, it’s going to end up inedible and I’m going to pop a blood vessel from the stress of watching it happen. Plus, I’m hungry too, and I am not eating any non-chili dog food you make. Let me do it.”

“Oh Jaybird, you spoil me,” Roy said with a contented sigh, boosting himself up to sit on the counter beside the range instead.

“What was this supposed to be, exactly?” Jason asked, looking at Roy’s sad pot of water with muted disdain.

Roy grimaced slightly, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Spaghetti?”

“Ambitious. Thank god I showed up before you burned this place down for real.”

“I could have handled it.” Roy paused and gave a small, self-deprecating smile. “Probably. Maybe. I did feed myself successfully for years before I met you, y’know.”

“And what were you eating, Ginger?”

“Ramen noodles and—”

“Ramen noodles and frozen pizza, yup. I rest my case.”

“And takeout. Well, before Superman torched all my favorite takeout places, that is. Can’t forget about takeout.”

“Fuck, you’re a disaster.”

“I’m your disaster,” Roy said, the sunbeam of his smile going blinding once more.

“Whatever,” Jason grumbled, heat creeping up the back of his neck. He retrieved a handful of spices from his rack and garlic and onion from the fridge. “So, are you gonna be a bitch about it if I make your food better?”

Roy recoiled. “Am I gonna be a bitch about it? Ouch. Hurtful.”

“Like I said, your tolerance got too low without me around to keep you in check. I have three days of insults to make up for. Gotta start somewhere.”

“Or you could, I don’t know, try being nice to me?” Jason snorted at the thought, and Roy sighed in defeat. “Yeah, you’re right, that’s wishful thinking.”

“The way I talk to you is as nice as I get. And I’m gonna go ahead and take that as a no, Jason, I’ll be nothing but grateful that you’re a better cook than I could ever dream of being.”

“More or less.” Roy waited until Jason was finished adding his ingredients to the pot, then grabbed him by the hand and yanked him away from the stove.

“Hey!” Jason squawked, digging his heels in and not allowing himself to be dragged any farther. “I’m cooking, remember?”

“Spaghetti noodles take eight to twelve minutes to boil. I do know how to read. And you may have missed three days of insults, but I missed three days of Jason hugs, so come over here.”

“Oh, fine,” Jason grumbled with entirely fake annoyance, giving up the fight and going where Roy wanted him. Without hesitation, Roy wrapped his arms around Jason’s midsection tight enough to squeeze the air out of him, resting his head on top of Jason’s and taking a deep breath. “Choking, not breathing,” Jason gasped out, completely exaggerated.

“Shut up,” Roy muttered, wrapping his legs around Jason’s waist in retaliation. “Let me hug my friend.”

“My ribs are broken.”

“Shit, fuck,” Roy hissed, releasing the cage of his legs and lessening the pressure immediately. He pulled back to search Jason’s face with wide, worried eyes.

Jason grinned. The concern faded immediately. Roy kicked him in the stomach. “You lying motherfucker!”

“Fuck you, you missed me.”

“Didn’t miss your bullshit, you fuckin’ asshole,” Roy muttered under his breath, once again making his displeasure known by pulling Jason back in and tightening his grip. “You’re gonna stay here and deal with my hugs until my fucking heart slows down, you got that?”

“It was funny.”

Roy sighed heavily and buried his nose in Jason’s hair. “It was a little funny,” he murmured. And then, quieter, “I’ve been really worried about you these past few days, y’know.”

“What more did you want from me? I literally called you as soon as I possibly could and told you I was fine. Repeatedly.”

“I know,” Roy said, squeezing Jason a little tighter. “And I worried anyway.”

“Fuckin’ sap.”

“I’m gonna make you tell me everything. You know that, right?”

Jason pulled back to raise an eyebrow at Roy. “Everything? We’d be here for days.”

“You got somewhere else to be? Got a hot date with the criminal masterminds of Shitfuck Nowhere, China?”

“It’s just that I can think of at least twenty things I’d rather do than rehash every gory detail of probably the weirdest three days of my already weird-as-hell life.”

Roy made shamelessly wide puppy dog eyes at him. “Can you think of twenty things you’d rather do than regale your best friend in the whole wide world with a harrowing, high-stakes tale of daring and destiny? Especially after explicitly forbidding him from witnessing said tale first-hand?”

“If you wanna frame it that way, I could probably think of a hundred.”

Something wicked sparked in Roy’s eyes at that. “Hold on a sec—”

“Fuck, he’s getting an idea and I’m in the splash zone, God help me—”

“I can’t believe I forgot in the midst of all of this excitement,” Roy continued, completely undeterred, “this whole thing was about vengeance, right? Vengeance on my behalf? Beating the piss out of the big bad wolf for blowing my house down and such? This is like if I kicked the shit out of Joker and refused to tell you about it, you’d kill me for that.”

Oh, the irony. The delicious irony that Jason would love to point out if telling the Joker story didn’t feel like it’d take ten years off his life right now. “I thought you were the one constantly insisting that I didn’t need to avenge you, the best revenge is letting go and living well, all that pacifist peacekeeping bullshit.”

“Changed my mind. I’ve become petty and childish in your absence.”

“Become? Just now?”

“At the very least, in addition to everything you and Bruce talked about, I have to know exactly how hard you hit Slade.”

“Hard enough to break my hands,” Jason said without thinking. Roy blinked at him in open-mouthed shock. “What? You drive a hard bargain, you broke me down, I give up. That’s how hard I hit him.”

“To break your hands?” Roy repeated incredulously. His eyes flitted nervously down to Jason’s hands, which were still covered in Bruce’s bandages even though the Pit was nearly finished healing them now. “I’ve patched you up from hundreds of fights, including several where you beat people to death with your bare hands, and you’ve never even come close to that. Even when you got your fingers broken, it was because of that thing with the mob where the enforcer smashed your hand with a giant fuckin’ rock, not because of how hard you hit any of them.”

“Yeah, well…” Jason shrugged. “I’ve never fought that angry before. So, I guess it makes sense.”

“Never? Not even when the Pit was killing for you?”

“That was different. The Pit is all blind rage. It’ll be stoked by my sense of justice or need for vengeance or whatever, but at its core, it’s anger for anger’s sake. It’s different…” Jason ground his teeth together. “It’s different when you know exactly what you’re doing. What you’re fighting for. Everything they’ve done. When you’re constantly aware of what it would mean to kill them and what you’d be giving up to spare them.” 

Jason finally broke eye contact with Roy, staring down at his own bandaged hands and remembering the way the plates of Slade’s armor had cracked beneath the weight of Jason’s fury, the grinding crunch of bone giving way, the way his control threatened to slip from his fingers with every choked, bitten-off noise Slade made. He took a deep breath. 

“I would have killed him if the Blades had let me. I tried to. They gave out on me. Apparently, he’s not evil. Not all the way, at least.”

“You knew there was a really good chance that would happen.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Do you regret it?”

Jason shook his head without a second’s pause. He knew it was the truth, even as his neck ached with the weight of it. “No. I still think he deserves to die for what he did to you, but they disagree, and… as much as I hate to admit it, my judgment is clouded. It’s clouded by my feelings for you, it’s clouded because the Pit still lives in me, it’s clouded by my relationship with Bruce. Red’s decisions were always based on my judgment and it added thousands to my body count. The Blades see things clearly in a way I never will be able to. They know the truth. I have to trust them.”

Roy let out a low whistle. “Fuck. That sounds really intense, Jay.”

Jason laughed, short, humorless. “You don’t know the half of it, Ginger.”

“Well, soon I will. Because, like I said, you’re gonna tell me everything. Let me have my vicarious vengeance, it’s the only kind I’m ever going to get.”

“You don’t care about vengeance. You’ve never cared about vengeance. Especially not for yourself. You’re just nosy.”

“Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, the result is the same. Storytime with my Jaybird.”

“God, I’d take the fuckin’ hugs over that any day.”

Roy pulled Jason into yet another crushing embrace, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “You missed my hugs. You love me.”

Jason sighed and buried his face in Roy’s chest. “Ugh. Fine. I missed your hugs. I love you.”

“Joker,” Roy repeated for what must have been the sixth or seventh time now. “He killed the Joker. He killed the Joker. Batman. Captain Thou Shalt Not Kill Or I’ll Throw Your Ass In Arkham For Life, Mr. I’ll Team Up With My Son’s Murderer If It Gives Me A Tactical Advantage, that Batman, he— he killed the Joker. Unbelievable. This is unbelievable, I don’t believe it, I seriously do not believe it, I’m shocked that you believe it. The Joker?!”

“Uh huh,” Jason confirmed yet again. He didn’t mind. Honestly, pictures and all, he still had some trouble believing it himself. Joker had been dead for a year, and Jason had spent the whole time still held prisoner by that childish, unreasonable fear that Joker would find him again. Somehow, he always thought he’d just know if Joker died, would feel it in his body, breathing life into some part of him that stayed dead when the rest of him came back. But he hadn’t known. A whole year, and he hadn’t even known. 

He wasn’t sure if he found the thought comforting or disturbing. Maybe it meant that Joker didn’t own that part of Jason anymore, that his death just wasn’t important enough for Jason to feel it. Then again, maybe it meant that part would always belong to Joker, dead or alive. That the scorched remains of Superman’s failed empire could be free of the scourge of Joker’s presence for a full year and his specter would still loom over everything Jason did. Maybe even death couldn’t wash out the stain Joker had left on his life. 

Maybe he felt nothing because there was nothing to feel, no connection left to sever, no bridge left to burn. But maybe he felt nothing because nothing had changed. Death didn’t pry the missing pieces of Jason from the clown’s hands. Maybe taking a life wasn’t enough to give Jason his own back, not even the life of someone categorically, irrevocably, unchangeably evil.

“And you believed him?” Roy asked, rousing Jason from his thoughts, his eyes gone perfectly round with shock. “You just took Bruce at his word when you’ve spent months talking endlessly about what a lying shitbag he is?”

Jason snorted at the thought. “No. God, no. You know me better than that.” Jason retrieved Slade’s photos from his jacket pocket and spread them across the coffee table for Roy, feeling somehow both lighter and emptier without their weight. He pointed to each of the pictures in turn.

“This is the bunker they were keeping him in so he could talk shit while they did all the heavy lifting on Kill Superman Day. Here’s Bruce spending Joker’s final moments telling him that his crowning achievement of killing a child means nothing because I couldn’t manage to stay dead. This one is Bruce with a gun, which is a wild sight, I know, but apparently, he does guns now when he has to. And here’s the cherry on top of the child-murdering cake, that motherfucker with a hole shot right through his deranged fucking head. Kinda feels weird that he bleeds red, like any other person would. For some reason I’d expected something else—I broke his nose one of the times I tried to escape the Asylum, but I honestly can’t even remember what it looked like since he concussed me about 30 seconds after—but anyways, that,” Jason picked up the final picture and handed it to Roy to give him a better look, “is a pile of Joker ashes. The twisted bit of metal on top is the knife he used to carve my face up. That’s all that’s left of him.” Jason swallowed the complicated knot of emotion rising in his throat and forced a smile over it. “That’s all that’s left of him, Roy.”

“Jay, stop,” Roy said, both hands out like Jason was a spooked horse or something. 

Jason finally paused his rant, blinked at Roy, and cocked his head to the side. “What?”

“You’re acting so normal about this. You’re acting too normal about this. How are you so normal about this?”

“Uh, because I literally told you verbatim this was one of the two things Bruce would have to do for me to entertain letting him back into my life. Remember? He did it.” Jason shrugged. “It’s a good thing. Why wouldn’t I be normal about it?”

“You set those conditions specifically because you thought Bruce would never be able to meet them and it would give you an excuse to shut him out forever. You did not go into Wednesday’s fight even considering this as a potential outcome, I know you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I didn’t, but weren’t you the one floating the idea that Joker might be dead in the first place? How are you this shocked now?”

“Because I didn’t think it’d be Bruce. I thought it was Superman. Y’know, the logical conclusion? That the evil dictator would kill the evil clown? Not the guy who’s been making excuses not to kill him for the past two decades? This is batshit, how are you not freaking out?”

“Fine, you got me. You wanna know the truth?”

Roy raised an unamused eyebrow. “Yes. Of course I do. That can’t be a serious question.” 

Jason dropped his eyes down to his hands, finally healed from the fight. “Sometimes, I look at Bruce and I still don’t think he’s real. Sometimes—a lot of times, most of the time, really—I still think this is a dream I just haven’t woken up from yet, or that Slade actually did kill me in our fight and this is what my dying brain has conjured up to fuck with me one last time. I stayed with him for three days and I’m still not convinced. He looks like Bruce, he has all of Bruce’s memories, but he doesn’t…” Jason trailed off, tracing a trembling finger over the glossy photograph of Joker with lead shot through his brain, dark red blood staining pale skin, perma-grin still plastered on his face. 

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It looked so real. 

“My dad didn’t do this,” he continued eventually. “My dad couldn’t do this. I begged my dad to do this from the second I met him until the second I dropped my comm link in Gotham Bay and walked into Arkham Asylum, and he never once budged.” Jason swallowed hard, like he was trying to physically force the information down his throat. “Whoever he is now, if he’s even real… the past seven years made strangers of the both of us, I guess. He’s not the Batman I knew any more than I am his Robin. My death fucked him up almost as bad as it fucked me up.” Jason barked out a humorless laugh. “And don’t get to thinking I’ve turned over some magic new emotional stability leaf, I am very far from normal about any of this. I’ve had about seventeen internalized meltdowns over it so far, you just happened to catch me after the brunt of it was already done with. Hopefully, at least.”

“The internalized meltdowns don’t tend to let up until you let them out,” Roy reminded him, voice feather-light. “You know that, sweetheart.”

“Right now I feel okay about it. About everything. Honest. I swear. So, if I promise that the next time this breaks my brain, I’ll come to you and let you put me back together, will you let it go? For today, at least? So we can have one day to enjoy the fact that the monster who murdered me has taken his last victim? That he’s never going to hurt anyone, ever again?” 

The concern on Roy’s face slowly faded as a small smirk took its place. “Actually yeah, we can enjoy it because I was—I was right? About like, everything? All that work I did to try and convince you Bruce might be worth keeping around and Slade might not be worth killing, it actually paid off?”

“I thought we got this part over with already.”

“Well, I’m certainly tempted to gloat, but I suppose my Jaybird’s been through enough this past week, hasn’t he?” Roy ran a hand through Jason’s curls, a bit of confusion still drawing his red eyebrows together. “You know I don’t lie to you, sweetheart. I believed every word I said to you in those months before you went to fight them, it’s just…”

“Things don’t just work out for people like us.”

Roy winced slightly. “Ouch. I mean yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I meant, but ouch.”

“But maybe they do, huh? Sometimes?” He looked up at Roy, feeling a strange, unfamiliar thing come to life in his chest. Soft, warm, bright. Jason was pretty sure it was hope. “I mean, we still have each other, don’t we? Everything we’ve gone through, we still got each other. Maybe it doesn’t always have to suck. Not all the time. And not forever.”

“That’s—that’s surprisingly optimistic, coming from you.”

“Yeah, it’s… it’s weird. This whole thing kinda gave me some perspective. After everything with Bruce and Slade, I had a minute to take a step back and look at my life and for the first time, maybe ever, it’s not a shit show. I was so wrapped up in being chased and getting revenge and not dying in the process that I didn’t notice it, but things are sorta coming together, huh? I mean, I have you, it seems like I have Bruce, I might even get Dick back. I’ve been keeping the Pit at bay, I’m the closest to a hero I’ve been since I was Robin, and I could go back to Gotham. Hell, I think I actually want to go back to Gotham. I like this. I want to keep it. So, I’m trying to be better. Trying to make sure I can hold onto it a while longer.”

“Good,” Roy said with a soft, genuine smile. “I’m so, so happy for you, Jaybird. You deserve this, you know that, right?”

Jason’s face heated up as he looked down. That… thing was coming up again. The thing he’d felt as he’d watched Roy sleepily nuzzle into his chest after the Deathstroke Incident, the thing he’d felt trying to explain to Bruce every way Roy had saved his life the past two years, the thing he’d been feeling in these rare peaceful, unguarded moments for longer than he’d ever admit to.

Love didn’t quite feel like the word. Jason had figured out that he loved Roy a long time ago, and was even getting to the point where it wasn’t that hard to say out loud anymore. Jason knew what love felt like as Roy patched him up from injuries and comforted him after nightmares and made Jason’s favorite meal on his birthday. This was something else. More fragile than love had ever felt, but sturdy at the same time. Hard to knock down, like Roy was. It was standing on the edge of a cliff not knowing if he’d fall to his death or learn to fly. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. He never wanted to feel it again. He never wanted to stop feeling it. It was like walking into a place he’d never been before and knowing it was his home.

It was fucking confusing, that was what it was.

Jason couldn’t stare at that soft, needy part of himself for very long before he had to tear his eyes away, and anyway, it was better not to think about it. Things with Roy were good, stable, predictable. Like he said, he wanted to keep it this way. He didn’t need to rock that boat.

Roy knocked his knuckles gently against Jason’s forehead. “Anybody home?”

Jason blinked a few times and shook the last of that unnameable feeling away. “Yeah, sorry, what?”

“I said you deserve this. You deserve to have a dad who cares enough to protect you. Who loves you more than his stupid code and his lame-ass rules. You deserve to finally get something good.”

“I already have something good,” Jason dismissed without thinking.

Roy raised an eyebrow. Jason squeezed his hand.

“I have you.”

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

Jason glanced down at his plane ticket to New Jersey. His eyes drifted across the room to the suitcase that held all his worldly possessions. Well, all the ones that wouldn’t get him labeled an international terrorist the second he set foot on US soil, anyway. He took a deep breath, then flicked his eyes back up to Roy’s worried face. 

“Depends. Are you sure you can transport all my weapons and gear without breaking any of it?”

“You’re saying that just to needle me because you don’t want to answer my question. I made almost all of it, which means I’m the one who has to do all the legwork if anything happens to it. I know how to transport my own shit.”

Jason shrugged. “One of the hallmarks of your personality is finding new ways to annoy me, you could drop our shit into a sinkhole or something. Gotham’s got loads of those. Huh. Do I miss Gotham’s sinkholes? Jesus Christ, what’s happening to me?”

Roy sighed, exasperated. “Jason.”

“Ooh, breaking out the full name, am I in trouble?” Roy provided absolutely no reaction. It was purposeful, and it was effective. Jason immediately capitulated. “It’s been a month. He probably misses me.” Jason let the words hang there for a few moments, then begrudgingly added, “I probably miss him too.”

“Not the seeing Bruce part, Jason, the going back to Gotham part. You know, the place you died? The place that started you down the Eternal Torture of the Hellish Poison Pit path? The place that hosted like, at least five of your top ten shittiest moments?”

“I’ve never actually made a list before, that kinda sounds fun. Would’ve made a good drinking game back in the day when I could pretend booze was a suitable combatant for Pit madness.”

Roy’s face was a stone wall of Done With Your Shit. Again, Jason didn’t have it in him to mount much of a defense. They weren’t going to see each other for a while. And dying and coming back to life will give you kind of a thing about leaving on a bad note. 

“Gotham’s not all bad. It’s got fantastic, dirt cheap, greasy bar food, constant rent-lowering gunshots, and the cemetery they put me in was pretty nice, too. B’s parents were there so we used to go visit every once in a while, it always had a lot of flowers in it and for some reason, it was the one place people wouldn’t steal from. Usually. I probably wouldn’t have liked it as much if I’d known I would end up buried there. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not certain it survived Superman’s Fuck Your Hometown Tour.”

Roy sighed like a single mom with five kids to wrangle. He sighed like someone who parked their car in Crime Alley and came back to find all their hubcaps missing. He sighed like a friend who didn’t want to see someone he loved hurt themself. He sighed like a good friend. “Jason Todd, for fuck’s sake, could you please take this one thing seriously?”

Jason closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and collected his wits. Roy was protecting him, was protecting both of them and their shot at a future in Gotham. He let his eyelids flutter open again and gave Roy the faintest of reassuring smiles. “It’s my home, Roy.”

Roy made a vague gesture to the safehouse. “This is your home, too.”

“We’ve lived here for like, three months. I don’t even know the address. Do you?”

“It doesn’t matter if we know it or not because I’m here. That makes it your home, which means anywhere can be home, which means Gotham doesn’t have to be anymore. Not if you don’t want it to be. You don’t have to go back there. You don’t have anything to prove, and you don’t owe this to Bruce. We could stay here, you could keep working as Red, I’m sure some of my customers need more work done, so I could start the shop again—”

“And we could spend the rest of our lives running from safehouse to safehouse until someday the injuries or the time starts piling up and we slow down enough for it to kill us? Life fast, die young? That’s really what you want?”

Roy cast a meaningful glance down to the plane ticket in Jason’s hand, clutched just tight enough to put creases in the paper, the one place Jason was hiding the tension in an otherwise forcibly relaxed body. “Is this really what you want?”

“We could settle down,” Jason said, voice too soft, too careful to be his own. It was the one part of returning to Gotham he was sure about, the one thing he held close to his pounding heart on the days his mind convinced him nothing could be worth seeing the crumbling, condemned remains of Arkham Asylum with his own eyes again. “For the first time since we met, we could settle down. Stay in one place, stand still, put down roots. Have a home. Not just a series of shit safehouses we abandon the second someone gets a whiff of our location. A home. Neither of us have had that since we left America. After all the blood we’ve spilled here, all the things that spilled our blood here… doesn’t a fresh start sound nice?”

“We could get a fresh start anywhere on the planet, it doesn’t have to be the place where half of all your nightmares take place.”

“We’re really not that far away from Nepal, where the other half of my nightmares take place, so…”

“At least you can’t visit your own grave here. There’s some fucked up shit in Gotham, Jay, some prime shit you could use to torture yourself the second you make a misstep you think you deserve to be punished for. It’s a minefield, and it feels like you don’t understand how much you’re going to have to watch your step.”

“Listen, Roy, if you don’t want to go to Gotham, you can just tell me. Like I told you, it’s not for everyone. It’s not like Star City. It’s a bad place, and it’s full of bad people. You don’t need to come with me, and I don’t have to stay out there forever, either. Just right now. I’ll be alright without you for a bit. We’ll make it work.” That last lie came out so perfectly Jason almost believed it himself, but he knew Roy wouldn’t. And somewhere, deep down, he knew he didn’t really need to give Roy an emergency exit.

“I would follow you to hell and back, Jaybird. I will go to the Hell City, I will put down roots with you in the Hell City, and I will learn to love the Hell City like you do. Well—not like—no one can love Gotham like the freaks who were born there do, but I’ll do my best. I will live out the rest of my days in the Hell City, and I’ll do it happily. If that’s what you want. That’s why I’m asking you to take this seriously and be honest with me. It’s an easy question, Jay, a yes or no question. Are you sure you’re ready to go back there?”

Jason sighed, rested his suitcase against the wall, and turned to put both his hands on Roy’s shoulders. 

“I am afraid to go back to Gotham, Roy.”

Roy’s eyes widened with rapt attention, all the exasperation vanishing as his eyebrows drew together in confusion.

Jason kept going, full eye contact, honesty, no jokes, the whole nine. “I’m afraid my life won’t be the way it used to be, and I’m afraid that it will. I’m still afraid Bruce isn’t real, and that the second I step a toe out of line, he’ll go ballistic and I’ll find out the whole thing was just one of his ridiculously intricate lies. I’m afraid of going back to the place where I died, I’m afraid of going back to the place I dug out of my grave, I’m afraid of living in the same city with my dad and my brother, I’m afraid that once I go back there, I’ll never be able to leave again, even if I really need to. I am scared shitless of going back to Gotham, Roy, and I’m doing it anyway.”

The last of Roy’s confusion melted into a small, peaceful smile. Finally, finally, he seemed to believe Jason. “And you’re sure you want to go alone?”

“Spent half my life alone with Gotham. Feels right to get reacquainted the same way. Besides, it’s just a few days. You can come clean up whatever mess I get myself into afterward, and then I’ll introduce you two.”

“It’s a big risk, Jay.”

Jason cracked a wide, crooked smile. “I remember someone telling me that most of the good things in life are.”

That punched a short laugh out of Roy. “Holy shit, you listen when I talk?”

“I listen when you have something useful to say, which is a rare occurrence. Listen, Ginger, I know you do this,” Jason made a vague motion to Roy’s fidgeting form and barely concealed worry, “because you give a shit about me. I appreciate it. But I’m going because I want to, not because I feel like I have to. I’m going because I think it’s going to be worth it. And I’m going because, even if this goes belly-up the second I get within the city limits, you’re going to be there with me in another week. I can take a week of anything. No matter how bad things get, we’re always going to protect each other.” 

Before he could think better of it, Jason pulled Roy into a tight hug. “I’m good,” he whispered next to Roy’s ear. “Do you believe me now?”

Roy smiled against him. “Yeah. I do.”

Chapter Text

Jason very specifically did not want his coming back to Gotham to be some big fucking production. 

Because it wasn’t a big deal. Really, it wasn’t. He was just coming back home. It was like returning from college to see your mom. If college was a cult of brainwashed assassins and Jason’s mom hadn’t overdosed on heroin 15 years ago. They would make the Gotham equivalent of small talk (exchanging death threats with anyone who looked at you wrong and screaming curses at strangers), catch each other up on what had changed in the last seven years, and then he’d be off to start a new life with Roy, figure out how the fuck he was going to build a bridge with Dick, and attempt to stay on New Bruce’s good side.

Jason wasn’t anything special. He was just like every other Gothamite who’d tried to leave, inevitably pulled back home by the uncanny magnetism of the worst place on Earth. It wasn’t a big deal, which meant Bruce didn’t really need to know that he was back yet. This part was for Jason and Gotham. A small family reunion, just the two of them.

It was fitting, Jason supposed, that he arrived in Newark with the breaking dawn under a false identity. Jordan Tate, an American field medic who’d moved out East to help with relief efforts back in the infancy of Apocalypse I, the Darkseid edition. It was the first fake ID he’d gotten after freeing himself from the League, and it came free with a convenient, relatively unquestioned excuse to cover his scars with a medical mask. Nobody would look twice, nobody would recognize him, but Gotham would.

Jason made a quick stop in the bathroom to change the medical mask out for a neck gaiter and Jordan Tate’s ID out for Eli Bennet’s, an identity he’d created almost solely to celebrate the fact that he’d pieced enough of himself together to remember Pride and Prejudice had been his favorite book. The irony was not lost on him, the lengths he was going to hide his identity in a city that had long since filed him away with her countless dead-and-forgotten-abouts. Still, he didn’t need to run the risk of anyone connecting him to that Alley rat who’d up and disappeared after being saved from a life of crime by Bruce Wayne. The odds were slim, but they would never reach zero, and Gotham had a habit of exploiting the one weak point you neglected to cover.

Satisfied with the disguise, Eli-Jason then made for the unsurprisingly short line of people waiting for cars to Gotham. It was barely 7:00 am, and Gotham had never been rich in business people or tourists. Most folks had enough brains to realize a few corny photo ops with the Statue of Liberty or even blowing all your money in Atlantic City was still better than getting knifed in an alleyway.

Gotham. Jason’s eyes traced over the outline of the word on the sign over and over again. It was strange, he thought absently, that Gotham was such a round word when the place was more sharp corners and hard edges, steep falls and sudden drops, than anything. It had been a long time since he’d seen it written down, an even longer time since he’d seen it in English, since he’d seen it anywhere but a news broadcast in Chinese. For years, Gotham had been little more than a nebulous specter of doom and gloom and memories that time couldn’t seem to fade, lurking at the edges of Jason’s new life and ensuring he could never really start over. 

But now, she was a place. A place Jason would be able to reach out and touch. 

There she was, standing steady and steadfast but never quite still, just beyond the perpetual stew-thick shroud of fog hanging in the air. There she was, just a too-round word on a sign. There she was, the fertile ground where all of Jason’s worst nightmares had been planted and nourished until their roots were so deep that any attempt to cull them just made them grow back stronger. With Poison Ivy dead, that was the only sort of plant that could really grow in Gotham, anyway. 

There she was, the home of the greatest mistake Jason had ever made.

There she was. Jason’s home.

“If you could pack your shit and get in here while we’re still young and pretty, that’d be fuckin’ appreciated.” 

Jason’s head snapped up in an instant. A cabbie was barely three feet away, close enough to trigger the automatic door in front of him, but he hadn’t even noticed. No one should be able to get a jump on him like that. Jason was so alarmed, so out of it, that all he could do for a moment was stare at her.

Short and muscular with a shaved head and the kind of rough, gravelly voice you get from picking up your first cigarette at nine years old, she looked like most of the people who survived in Gotham until adulthood did. Young in the face, solid in the posture, and carrying the weight of someone three times their age. Old in the lines around her eyes, old in the hunch of her shoulders, old in the guarded way she held herself, arms crossed over her chest, clearly trying to look bigger than she really was. That was one of the first survival mechanisms Gotham taught you, after all. 

The city aged people. Broke them down, too, if they didn’t learn to protect themselves. But she looked after them, in her own way. If you survived Gotham, nothing else in the world could touch you. Jason was living proof of that.

Apologizing for inconveniencing a stranger was sure to label him as an untrustworthy outsider, so Jason just wrestled his luggage into the backseat of the car, which was making a grating metal-on-metal kind of noise and was probably older than him or the driver. He watched the way her gray eyes shifted back and forth as he muttered the address to her, doing his best to come off as unapproachable as possible. One hand stayed on the handle of his suitcase while the other rested on top of the knife he kept concealed in the waistband of his pants. The way he remembered it, Gotham had more scam artists looking to con and rob people naive enough to come to the worst city in the world for a vacation than she had legitimate cab drivers.

“A tourist?” She muttered, one eyebrow cocked suspiciously as she merged back onto the road. “We don’t tend to get those no more since the freak came to town.”

Jason glared back, the corner of his lips reflexively curling up into a snarl even as he knew the gaiter would hide it from her view. “Do I sound like a fuckin’ tourist to you?” He snapped, surprised to hear the genuine Gotham accent in his own voice. The League had flipped that switch off in his brain years ago. Honestly, Jason had thought it was gone for good. He'd been planning on doing his best approximation of the thick Park Row accent he'd had in his childhood to shirk the label of 'outsider' as quickly as possible, but something about being back here must have turned it back on for him. God, he hadn't even realized how much he missed the sound of his own voice, the way he'd sounded before he had to think about every word he said, before his natural way of speaking had become a threat to Jason's safety and Bruce's social status.

“Meant no offense,” the cab driver muttered with a roll of her eyes, bringing Jason back to the conversation. Under her breath, quiet enough to go unheard by anyone but a Bat, she added, “First Gothamite in history to whine about gettin’ his feelings hurt, right here in my cab.”

Jason ignored it, figuring the vindication of calling her out wasn’t worth any possible connection she might draw between Batman’s skills and his own. “Since the freak came to town,” he said instead, voice dripping with sarcastic disdain. “Like Gotham ain’t in a perpetual state of ‘the freak came to town’. Superman ain’t nothin’ special.”

A few minutes passed in stiff, awkward silence. Jason would’ve preferred it stay that way, but the driver had other ideas. “Narrows, born and raised,” she offered, clearly trying to build some kind of bridge. In any other city, it would be an effort to save her tip. Here, she was probably just trying to avoid a fistfight once they reached their destination. “You talk like Bowery stock.” When Jason offered no response, she sighed. “They raise ‘em all mutes in the Bowery, do they?”

“Park Row,” Jason corrected in little more than a grunt, just trying to end the conversation as quickly as he could.

“Crime Alley?” She repeated, dark eyebrows shooting up towards her hairline. “And you ain’t dead yet?”

Jason snorted. “She took her best shot, but Gotham don’t give her soldiers up too easy neither.”

“And what’s with the…” she made a vague motion over her own face. “You a wanted man? Another Crime Alley boy on the run from the pigs?”

“Not yet, but I could be if you wanna keep askin’ dumb fuckin’ questions.”

The driver just laughed, the sound mean but warm, the closest to good-natured ribbing that anyone ever got around here. “Guess it’s true what they say, huh? You can take the kid outta Gotham, but you can’t take Gotham out the kid.”

Jason’s mouth clamped shut on whatever response he’d intended as the city skyline burst into view. He swore under his breath as a wave of same-different-different-same assaulted his senses. Three of the tallest, most distinct buildings in the skyline—LexCorp, Wayne Towers, and the Gotham Gazette headquarters—had all vanished. Gotham wasn’t any less imposing in their absence. A halo of neon light surrounded her, blotting out the weak winter sun as it peeked over the horizon. As they approached the city limits, Jason could feel the fog begin to give way to smog, the vague taste of metal and soot in the air a bit lighter than Jason remembered it. The streets were already choked with traffic and the driver left a procession of blaring car horns and death threats in her wake as she expertly weaved in and out of the stagnated lines.

Still, as they crossed Mercy Bridge, Jason began to recognize his city again. A familiar chorus of police sirens sang in the distance, muted by the rolling thunder of an incoming storm. The Second National Bank still bore the scorch marks from Two Face’s last heist in Jason’s Robin days. The streets were still scarred with potholes, a testament to Gotham’s always-changing, always-miserable weather. Within moments, icy rain was pelting the car, a few of the thuds heavy enough to be hail, almost like it was trying to prove Jason’s point. 

The years had made strangers of the both of them, but Jason recognized her.

“People are always goin’ on about shittiest crime rates, shittiest police, shittiest politicians,” the driver muttered, more to herself than Jason. “Nobody ever talks about how Gotham’s got the shittiest weather on Earth.”

A small, genuine laugh bubbled up from Jason’s chest. “The legend on the Alley was always that the Miagani people cursed the land when the White man drove ‘em out,” he recalled fondly. “Then all us Brown kids would bitch about how we was the ones gettin’ the rain and snow dumped on us, we was the ones freezin’ to death on the street, and couldn’t they have just limited the curse to the Diamond District or somethin’?” Jason sighed. “God, I miss the days when that was my biggest problem.”

The words fell from his mouth, easy and unfiltered, without his permission. Jason should have been mortified. The driver was a stranger, he didn’t even know her name, and here he was painting a massive target on his back. But really, it just felt like settling back into an old, friendly pattern. If there was one thing that united everyone in Gotham, it was that life refused to cut them a break. And it felt… good. It felt good to be a part of that again.

Sure enough, the driver laughed under her breath, having now correctly inferred that Jason’s threat had been nothing but smoke. “Ain’t that the truth. You been gone a long time?”

No part of Jason wanted to pull the knife, not even as an empty promise to show her he wasn’t to be fucked with. The bittersweet reunion, both with his city and her people, had rooted him firmly to his seat. “Mhm,” was all he could maange.

“She got a firm grip, don’t she? Seems like everyone who ever gets out always makes their way back eventually.”

“I never wanted to leave,” Jason said, soft and honest, resigning himself to being more genuine with an anonymous cabbie than he had been with Roy for the first year they’d known each other. “Traveled the whole world the past few years, all I ever wanted was to be right back here.”

“War’ll do that to ya,” she said, filling in the blanks just a few degrees short of the truth, though Jason wasn’t about to correct her. “The freak put me out, too. Ended up in Keystone of all places for over a year with my little brother. No one tells ya how hard it is to sleep without the sirens and gunshots.”

“Amen,” Jason sighed, feeling more at ease with every word he spoke, more at ease with this stranger than he’d felt the whole time he was with Bruce. “She seems different. Anythin' I should know?”

“The Bat’s gone,” she said, solemn, grave, almost like she couldn’t believe it herself.

“Really?” Jason asked, the perfect picture of confusion. “You sure?”

“S’been over a year since he offed the freak, still no sign. No way he’d stay away that long if he was plannin’ on comin’ back. There’s a hundred theories out there about why, but most of these idiots think it’s cause his identity got out. I don’t buy that shit. Wayne chose to tell the world, and besides, we never cared who was under the mask.”

“What d’you think happened, then?”

“First I thought he’d finally given up on us.” The admission came out in little more than a whisper, but she shook herself out of it almost immediately, throwing a careless grin over the weakness. “Now I’m thinkin’ maybe his time was just up. Maybe he was gettin’ too old to fight, or maybe he thought he’d done all he could do. Wanted to give us a chance to stand on our own. S’pose we did alright for ourselves while he was off fightin’ the freak. Either way, never thought the Bat or the last of the Waynes would be the first person to get out and stay outta Gotham.”

“Me neither,” Jason said, since it was the truth. 

“Speakin’ of freaks, rumor has it the clown’s gone too.” That caught Jason on his blind side, he’d been almost comfortable in this conversation and the mention of Joker put him flat on his ass. Dazed with the sudden rush of panic, Jason cringed with his whole body. By the time his mind caught up, it was already too late to cover the lapse, and the driver was giving an understanding grunt. “Yeah, I always hated the fucker too. I was one of his hostages once. Went to pick up my little brother from school a few years back and he had the whole place held up. Killed two teachers right in front of us before the Bat finally got there. Me ‘n mine got out alright, but he still wakes up screaming now and then, and that laugh, sometimes I…” 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Jason remembered the last time Joker had gotten ahold of a school full of helpless children on his watch—

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,

Fifteen kids dead, the oldest was ten, the youngest was four—

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,

Dismembered, mutilated bodies, little arms and legs stitched onto mismatched torsos, parents fighting over which patchwork corpse looked the most like their dead child—

Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

There had been a recording of Joker singing the nursery rhyme on repeat blaring over the PA system at the school, his voice had never sounded more grating, more mocking, scraping against Jason’s raw nerves, the parents were too far gone to hear it but Robin wasn’t, he saw red, he’d fled the scene, left people who needed help, all just to chase his own selfish vengeance and—

“M’glad he’s gone is all I’m sayin’,” the driver said, voice flat and distant, and Jason came back to his body just enough to feel the way he was shoving his back into the car door, fists clenched so tight they were shaking, breathing just a shade too hard to go unnoticed. 

“Who,” Jason tried, but his throat closed up around the words and he had to take a deep breath and try again. “Who’s fillin’ the gap?” He choked out, trying desperately to steer the conversation in any direction free of pale skin and green hair and Arkham Asylum. “Power vacuums never last long round here.”

“Yeah,” the driver said, clearly taking the hint to follow one of Gotham’s oldest rules: everyone’s been through shit, don’t ask questions. Her focus returned to the road and most of the tension left her posture, but her eyes stayed wider than they had been before. She checked the rearview mirror to look at Jason every few seconds. He couldn’t help but wonder what he’d said or done when the memories were pulling him under. “Uh, so most of the gimmicks burned up in the war, all the ones who didn’t went into hidin’ the second the Bat broke his rule. Crime families and gangs divvied up what was left. Maroni, Falcone, and Sionis are the major players still in the game. Closest I’ve ever seen her to normal city crime, but it won’t last. Never does. New gimmicks’ll crop up eventually, or the old ones’ll get bold again once they’re convinced the Bat is really gone.” She swallowed hard. “Jury’s still out on if any capes will show up to bail us out this time, though.”

Jason only caught bits and pieces of the explanation, busy as he was trying to shove the remnants of the flashback into some dark corner of his mind to freak out about later, but he got the gist. He frowned. “You think we still need one?”

She smiled bitterly. “You’re prob’ly too young to remember what things was like before the Bat. Constant turf wars with half the city caught in the crosshairs, every pig and politician in some evil fuck’s pocket, the few good people left at each other’s throats… this city, at her core, she brings out the worst in people. The Bat kept us from bringin’ out the worst in each other, too. Once we started seein’ that light go up in the sky on the reg, once we knew someone actually had our backs… that’s the only time I seen real change in this city. Trust me. We need one. Don’t never let no one tell ya the Bat did more harm than good. But aye, even if things slide back to how they was back then, we’re Gothamites, huh? We’ll survive. It’s what we do.”

Jason swallowed the thick, bitter memories at the back of his throat and nodded. “Yeah. S’what we do.”

They were at the hotel. The car engine made that awful grinding noise again, and Jason had to resist the surprisingly strong urge to say you should get that looked at, my friend’s a hell of a mechanic. He knew it would sound like a trap, and anyway, Roy wasn’t even here yet, Jason couldn’t start recruiting customers for him already. The sound faded to a dull roar as she shifted into park, and Jason could feel his heart stall along with the engine. It suddenly felt far too big, the thought of leaving the car now. Walking out into a Gotham without Batman, a city that knew better than to hope the worst was behind her, a city without a hero, a city that might need a hero. 

“What’s your name?” Jason asked, surprising himself with the question and the fact that he genuinely wanted to know, that it wasn’t just about staving off the inevitable. 

She turned in her seat to glare daggers at him. “Spoken like someone who’s bout to spin some sob story about bein’ too poor to pay for his cab.”

“I ain’t that kinda motherfucker,” Jason dismissed, taking his wallet out of his pocket and opening it for emphasis. “I don’t put nobody out, ain’t gonna start with you. You’re just the first Gothamite I talked to in years.” Bruce didn’t count. Dick didn’t count, either. Wayne Manor and Haley’s Circus might as well have been on a different planet from the Narrows with how different it was to grow up there. Jason glanced down under the guise of counting out his cash. “Wanna remember you,” he said under his breath.

She gave another one of those mean-but-warm laughs. “Since when do they make ‘em so soft in the Alley?”

“We can take this outside if you wanna see how soft I am,” Jason snapped, mostly for show, mostly because he was familiar with this dance. He knew what step came next. Soft meant weak and weak meant dead in Gotham. Joke or not, comments like that couldn’t slide.

“That’s more like it,” she said with a grin. As she tapped the meter, Jason noticed that her fingers were covered in simple, chunky silver rings. Rings were a good substitute for brass knuckles anytime you couldn’t risk being seen with a weapon. Most of the working girls in the Alley wore them. The driver let her rings collide with the metal of the meter, making a sharp clacking noise, and gave Jason a pointed look. “Take much longer and I’ll be chargin’ you for the pleasure of my company, too. Pay up, Alley rat.”

Jason was fairly certain it was the first time in his whole life he hadn’t wanted to punch someone out for calling him that. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said, shoving a fistful of bills in her direction. “Gotham drivers don’t have their licenses on display for a reason, and I don’t give my name out to strangers neither.” As he pulled his hand back, he deliberately let a tightly folded $100 bill fall into the cupholder beside her.

“That’s not from me,” he muttered as he relaxed into the backseat again. “You found that on the ground after your shift. Your boss don’t need to know. Whatever they skim off your tips, they ain’t skimmin’ off that. Far as they’re concerned, the Alley rat stiffed you.” 

Again, she turned to squint at him, distrustful and disbelieving like any Gothamite worth their salt would be. Jason shrugged, doing his best to ignore the way each of his shoulders felt like 20-pound weights. “Most kids who get that close to the Joker don’t never see their families again, let alone without a scratch on ‘em. You’re lucky. Prob’ly didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate at the time but trust me, there is. Take it. Celebrate witcha brother. They don’t stay kids forever.”

“Harper,” she blurted out just as Jason’s fingers wrapped around the handle of the car door.

“Huh?”

She looked at him through the rearview mirror, gray eyes gone dark and serious. “M’name’s Harper.”

“Harper,” Jason repeated with the faintest hint of a genuine smile. He let it reach all the way up to his eyes where she’d be able to see it. “Good name. I got a Harper of my own, actually. I’m—” Jason’s teeth closed just before his real name could escape. He might’ve told her, if the Bruce Wayne/Batman connection wasn’t public knowledge. He wanted to tell her. Huh. That was unusual.

”I’m Eli,” he managed after a too-long pause.

”You’re a liar, that’s what you are,” she countered, but it was all smugness that she’d caught the lie, no anger at Jason for telling it. “That’s fine, I ain’t never met an Alley rat who made a habit outta truth-tellin’.”

Jason shrugged, content to neither confirm nor deny, the Gotham special.

Handshakes were just asking to get mugged or knifed, so he patted the back of the driver’s seat instead. “You ain’t half bad for a Narrows kid, Harper.”

That same hint of a real grin played across her lips as she stared straight ahead. “Yeah. You ain’t half bad for an Alley rat neither. See ya round.”

Jason dragged his luggage through the open car door, then turned back to give her a mock salute. “If death don’t get me first.”

Chapter Text

Whatever conversation Jason had with the hotel manager, whatever third fake name he’d used, whatever steps he’d taken to get to the room, it all passed in a blur until the deadbolt finally slid into the door behind him and Jason was alone with Gotham. He’d made it past the city limits and into a locked room without a single genuine threat to his life. 

Harper wasn’t kidding. Gotham really had changed.

A part of him was almost disappointed in such a meek showing from his city, but this was the point, wasn’t it? As much as Gothamites prided themselves on their ability to survive anything, the whole point of Batman, of Robin, of Nightwing, of Red Hood was that just because people could survive endless traumatic stress didn’t mean they should. The whole point was to make a city, a country, a world where they wouldn’t have to. Maybe it was just like Bruce had said: Batman was gone and the city was better for it. Maybe his symbol had outlived its usefulness. Maybe he’d achieved what he set out to do. 

Maybe it was over.

Supervillains and the vigilantes who came out of the woodwork to fight them with deathwishes instead of superpowers because what other choice did they have, how could they live with themselves if they did any less, someone had to protect the hellhole they all lived in and the cops sure as shit weren’t going to. Insane asylums that should have been condemned decades ago, never able to hold any of the flavor-of-the-month costumed freaks let alone the ones who could do real damage. A child-murdering monster wrapped in barely human skin and slathered with grease paint sitting on a throne of corpses and calling himself king of it all.

Maybe it was all over. Maybe Gotham was on her way to being a normal city—or, as close to normal as she ever could be, anyway.

Trust me, we still need a cape.

Jason didn’t give a voice to the quiet part, but it lingered in the silence all the same. Maybe Red Hood is the cape they need now. 

That wasn’t the point. That was in a completely different universe than the point was, actually. Jason didn’t even know the names of all the buildings in Gotham anymore, he hadn’t even told Bruce he was back, Roy wouldn’t be here for nearly a week. Vigilante plans should be the farthest thing from his mind. The cart goes behind the horse. Jason was reminded of something Bruce had drilled into him right from the start of his Robin training.

We can’t protect the city if we don’t know the city.

Gotham had made it this long on her own, she could make it a little while longer. So, Jason tried to stay in the moment. Just be with Gotham. Just look out the window and see her. Just breathe her air again.

And he managed to fail. Every single one of those simple tasks, he managed to fail. 

Crushed flat by the weight of just existing here, all Jason could do was sit on the hotel bed with his back to the window, frozen from head to toe, staring at the yellowed floral wallpaper and ordering his body to move to no avail. For years, the only thing that kept Jason alive was separating his mind from the tortures his body endured, and when he wasn’t doing it on purpose, Talia was training the Pit to do it for him, to tear every last bit of Jason out of his body with fangs and claws until even his blood ran green. Years of that shit, and still, he’d never felt anything quite like this.

His chest was somehow both full to bursting and hollowed out inside, a tight snarl of thorny vines, a writhing black mass of feeling expanding with every beat of his heart. It was alive, it was hungry, and it was consuming every part of him he left unguarded. It was going to break his ribs from the inside. It was going to swallow his heart whole.

He flicked his eyes over to the bedside clock, the only movement he could manage. It was already almost 11:00. He’d been in Gotham for four hours and all he’d accomplished was locking himself in a box so he could lose his damn mind. He debated calling Roy. Debated it really, really hard. It didn’t matter that it was nearly midnight Roy’s time, he was a night owl, and even if he wasn’t, he’d still pick up for Jason. 

But Jason was the one who had asked for this. He asked for the space. He asked to be alone with his city, whatever that meant. And now, he got his wish. If he couldn’t handle breathing Gotham’s air by himself, if he couldn’t handle sitting in a Gotham hotel room by himself, how the fuck did he think he was going to fight crime here?

Jason tried four times to unclench his jaw, unstick his teeth, move his tongue around the words, and even once he got all the motions together, it still took two more tries to get the sound out. “Why can’t I do anything by my damn self?” When predictable silence answered him, Jason finally registered the tiny sparks of pain dancing across his scalp. His hands had found their way into his hair of their own accord, yanking on it in a futile attempt to bring him back into the moment. With a lot of effort, he managed to bring them down and fold them in his lap instead. “It’s always call Roy, talk to Bruce, channel Ducra, why can’t I ever sort through my bullshit on my own? I don’t—I don’t need him, I’m not supposed to need anyone, I’m not supposed to—”

Unbidden, almost like she just wanted to make a point, Ducra’s voice tugged at the back of his mind.

You did not break alone. How could you heal alone?

Jason thought about snapping back, I’m about to break every piece of furniture in this stupid room alone if you don’t shut up or something petty and nasty like that, but 3,000 years of hard-earned wisdom was a pretty fantastic trump card. Ignoring his most experienced teacher just for the sake of posturing as something Ducra already knew he wasn’t… all he was doing was shooting himself in the foot. And Jason had spent years hurting himself to get back at other people. He was here to do better than that.

So, even as it felt like admitting defeat, he took a moment to try to see the situation through Ducra’s eyes.

Breathe. 

God, he hated it when she said that. Do the thing you’ve literally been doing your entire life without even thinking about it. In the early days of his training, Jason used to counter with you gonna tell me to order my heart to beat while you’re at it? 

He listened hard for any further instructions, anything more substantial, please don’t make me sit here and do this and be alone with my godforsaken thoughts, but Jason’s grip was too weak and shaky to hold onto her any longer. She had nothing else for him. If he didn’t start here, he wouldn’t get anywhere.

And she had a stupid fucking valid point. Gotham may be at a far lower elevation than any of his and Roy’s previous safehouses, but Jason still felt like he hadn’t caught his breath since the second his plane landed.

So, fine. He could start with that. 

Jason spent the next hour pretending a damp, musty, dirt cheap, and probably haunted Gotham hotel room was the Chamber of All. Pretending he was there with Ducra. Pretending he wasn’t far too aware of how pathetic it was that he’d barely shut the door behind him and already needed help. 

He forced the air all the way into his diaphragm, held it there until it burned in his lungs, and then let it out as slowly as possible. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, tedious and fucking arduous and—Ducra would be proud of him. Ducra would be proud of him, wouldn’t she? If Jason hadn’t smashed their relationship to smithereens years ago, she’d be proud. That could be enough. 

He imagined what Ducra would say if she knew he was here, and deliberately bypassed the fact that Ducra would never actually speak to him again after the way he’d left the Chamber. Finally, blessedly, he could hear her words clearly over the blood rushing in his ears.

Gotham, of all places, man-child?

“Looked at my life and decided it was too easy, All-Mother,” he quipped flatly. “Figured it was time to shake things up.”

Speak the truth or not at all, you foolish boy. 

“Bruce asked me to come back,” Jason said, quickly remembering how useless it was to lie to the All-Mother, even if she was only in his mind. “Didn’t want to let him down, I guess.”

Are we not past this, Jason? Covering an obvious lie with a better one? I am old, not blind.

“Fuckin’ hell, she can’t even give me a break when I’m the one imagining her.”

You would not have sought my guidance if you wanted an easy way out.

“She’s my home,” Jason said, voice cracking on the word. “And she scares me more than anything in the world. More than Joker, more than the League, more than Talia. I’ve spent, what? Six plus years in China hiding from her, hiding from my home, from the fuckin’ monster in the closet . I couldn’t do that forever. Couldn’t spend the rest of my life wonderin’ whether or not we ever could have made it work. I had to come back. I had to know for sure.”

Ducra’s voice gave an understanding hum but said nothing, giving Jason no way to buoy himself out of the sudden terrifying flood of vulnerability.

“She’s my home,” Jason repeated, the tremor quickly spreading from his words to his body. “She’s my home, why am I so fucking scared?”

Well, what is fear, man-child?

There was a long moment of hesitation. Jason knew the answer, but it felt wrong to put words to it here, in Gotham. Tasted like a lie without even speaking it. Bitter, acrid. Jason hadn’t really believed it back then, either, back when he and Ducra had this conversation face-to-face, but it had never tasted like a lie. 

“A sparring partner,” he eventually forced through grit teeth. “Take it as a challenge, it can only make you better, the past will always hurt you as long as you keep running away from it, blah blah blah.”

Good. So, what are we doing here then?

Jason ground his teeth together so hard they squeaked with the pressure, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes. He tore his focus away from the safe banality of the ugly wallpaper and shifted it to the square of weak sunlight coming in from the window, the shadow of his hunched body within the frame. He concentrated on the slight warmth of the January sun on his back. 

“You always asked me when I’d stop running, All-Mother. I never stopped. This whole time, from the moment I came out of the Pit till right now, I never stopped. That’s why I’m here, why we’re here. To stop running.”

Very good. 

“It’s just a window,” Jason hissed, the frustration at his own weakness already coming back as his heart jumped into his throat at the mere thought of turning around.

It is very rarely just a window, Jason.

And Ducra, as always, was right. It wasn’t the window. It wasn’t even the city behind the window, not really—or at least, that wasn’t the main thing. It was that he hadn’t been paying attention to the hotel’s location when he booked it, too busy with the two hundred other things vying for his attention at the time, and this one just happened to be on the water.

That meant that if the fog lifted for long enough and Jason looked out that window at the wrong time, he’d be able to see the place where he’d been murdered with his own Lazarus-poisoned eyes. And even if he couldn’t see it, Jason’s body still knew with a visceral, certain fear exactly where black water met crumbling ruin.

The hotel window was facing Gotham Bay. Where Arkham Asylum stood. 

He used to be able to hear the waves crash against the rocks on the rare occasions Joker let him sleep, a cruel reminder of how close civilization was, of how close Bruce was, and still, no one would find him until it was too late.

Jason had always thought a place could never hurt the way people did—an empty place, a harmless place, a place he would never have to step foot inside of again—but apparently, he’d been wrong.

He could leave. Unlike the Asylum, Jason could easily leave. He could eat the money and find another hotel. There had always been a million shitty roofs to put over your head in Gotham, and even if Superman had reduced every last one of them to rubble in Jason’s absence, Gotham had always been quick to move on. There were options. And it wasn’t like Jason was a stranger to sleeping on the street, either.

But there were no shortcuts to recovery, as Ducra had always loved to remind him. He could put it off, but the Bay would always be there, and the Asylum with it. Sooner or later, Jason was going to have to face it. And with his luck, if he chose later, he was going to end up getting reacquainted with the Bay by being thrown in there with cement shoes. Gotham was a minefield, and Jason had very little say in what triggers would pop up when, but he could control this. 

Another hour came and went before Jason was ready to do anything about it. With one last deep breath, he reached back to push himself up off the bed and nearly screamed when his hand brushed over something smooth, cold, and hard instead. 

Frantically, he pressed his palm down into it, trying to figure out what had happened, but there was no give, a bed was supposed to have give to it, what the fuck? He spread his fingers out, and his pinky caught on the sharp edge of a broken tile. Jason held his hand up to his face, filthy and coated in grime. A bead of blood was trailing down the side of his finger. It was the only warm thing in a room so cold he could see his breath. The other hand hurt too much to move, hurt too much to even think about. Jason hadn’t been able to look at it for days. He was afraid of what he’d find.

Someone was speaking, but Jason couldn’t make out the words. He could feel the thunderous pounding of his heart in his finger, pounding like he’d just fought twenty thugs off without Batman to back him up, but if he was fighting, he’d have his gloves. His finger wouldn’t be bleeding, and his finger was bleeding.

A second bead of blood joined the first, and with the added weight, gravity pulled it to the back of his finger. Jason turned his hand over and watched, transfixed, as the blood quickly carved a trail through the grime on the back of his palm, meeting the crease of his wrist and splitting off into two paths. The drops met up again on the underside of his wrist, finally dripping off onto the green of his uniform pants. They looked almost black now with all the bloodstains, enough blood to make the material stiff and crusty, enough blood to make the fabric stick to his body when he tried to move. He couldn’t even see where the new drop had fallen.

“Are you even listening to me, Boy Blunder?” 

Jason’s body screamed, g etupfightbackrunaway! But he was already up against the farthest wall. There was nowhere to go. He tipped his head back sluggishly. The shape before him was little more than a white blur with a streak of red through it and a mess of green on top. 

“No,” he managed.

Time lurched forward like a scratched CD, skimming, stopping, skipping backward. The frantic feeling was different. Mindless and terrified, it was more of a plea than a command now, runawayrunawayrunawaypleaserunawaypleaserunplease but he couldn’t, he couldn’t run now, not even in the pointless, painful way that would inevitably lead to being caught and punished. He was tied down. Strapped to a different cold-smooth-hard thing without the sharp edges. 

There was nowhere to go. 

All the frantic thing could do was build and build within him, writhing and fighting from inside a body that couldn’t move. His face was wet. There was a strange smell like Crime Alley drug den mildew and something else, vodka and… almonds? Bitter almonds? The input meant nothing to him but if the sudden, desperate, fruitless bucking of his limbs was any indication, his body knew to fear it. 

There was a voice that sounded like Bruce’s, buried so deep in his mind Jason could barely even make the words out. 

…smells like almonds. Almonds and rubbing alcohol. You ever smell that, Jason, you run. Don’t stop to look for me, don’t try to save anyone else, just run. Promise me. Promise me, Jay.

A scream echoed off the walls of the cell, so ear-piercingly shrill that Jason flinched at the noise. It must have been hours before the sound began to falter, cracking and fading before returning with a vengeance, each scream more hoarse and ragged and exhausted than the last and still just as terrified as when it began. It wasn’t until he tasted the blood from a throat run raw and useless that he realized the sound was coming from him.

Lurch forward. Stop. Rewind. Play it back. Wet face. Thrashing. Runawayrunawayrunaway. Screaming. Mildew, almonds, vodka. 

It played on repeat for years, decades, lifetimes. He didn’t even know what he was seeing, what the poison was showing him, only the frantic need to run away and the desperate certainty that he never would be able to.

When the track finally wore itself out, all that remained was Joker. “All that fuss over barely a quarter dose,” he sighed. “You better hope you haven’t lost your voice yet, birdie, or I’ll have to help you find it.” He examined his fingernails, disinterested, not even sparing Jason a glance. “If you ever fail to give me your full attention again, Robin, you’ll find out exactly why Batsy never let you within a country mile of Scarecrow’s fear toxin.”

Smooth metal became sandpaper carpet under Jason’s fingertips and he sat up with a start, so fast it made his pounding head spin. He felt like he’d inhaled broken glass, coughing up gasp after heaving gasp as vomit rushed to the back of his raw throat, just barely managing to choke it down before he could make an even bigger mess of things. His face was still wet, his pulse was still thundering, the sweat turned frozen by the chilling Asylum air was still clinging to his back. 

Desperate for anything to prove he wasn’t still there, Jason yanked the scratchy comforter off the bed and held it close to his heaving chest, curling over it, focusing on the texture. There had been nothing remotely soft or warm in Arkham, there probably wasn’t a single blanket in the whole building, God, what was that pounding about? He knew he’d probably fallen on his head but it was barely a three-foot drop from the bed to the floor and—oh.

The pounding wasn’t coming from inside his head. It was coming from the door.

“If you’re killin’ someone in there, it’s gonna cost you extra!” Someone shouted at the top of their lungs, voice strained enough that it probably wasn’t the first time they’d yelled it. “At least have the decency to use a gag, ya rookie fuck! You ain’t the only damn person in this hotel!” A pause, a few more bangs of their fist against the door, and then, “And it better not be no one famous, we’ve already been on the news four fuckin’ times this month!”

“I—I’m,” Jason stammered, barely even audible, especially not over the ruckus outside the door. He coughed a few times, swallowed hard, and restarted. “Fuck off,” he growled, voice still hoarse. His hands scrabbled around the floor and the nightstand until he found something to throw at the door, the bible from the bedside drawer. It collided with a satisfying thump, and the hotel worker made a disgruntled noise from the other side. “I ain’t killin’ nobody.”

“Keep your freaky shit to a dull roar then! You ain’t even been here one night and I already got seven noise complaints about you!”

“Didn’t know Gotham was full of narcs now,” Jason muttered to himself. Then, louder, “Back off, or the next one screamin’ll be you!” 

The voice muttered something incoherent in response, likely to the effect of I don’t get paid enough for this, which was true, they certainly didn’t. Footsteps retreated down the hallway. Jason wavered on the edge of another flashback, remembering the way Joker’s footsteps had sounded receding up the Asylum stairs, the way they echoed in Jason’s head long after the clown had left, the way every minute alone stretched into hours, into days, and with each one that passed, he knew the chances of Bruce finding him in time dwindled closer and closer to zero. 

Jason gripped the blanket hard enough to turn his knuckles white. “Bastard’s dead,” he bit out, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Almonds and vodka still hung thick in the air. All that shit, and his back was still to the window.

With a defeated sigh, Jason collapsed back onto the carpet. focusing his eyes on the brown edges of a water stain on the ceiling. Nothing was working. There had to be someone else he could talk to, something different he could try. Fresh out of the dignity that would usually stop him from doing something so stupid and pointless, Jason laid both of his palms flat against the carpet and pushed his fingertips into it, imagined his whole body sinking an inch or two into the floor, and gave up any hope of handling this like a normal human being.

“Hey, old girl.” He sounded more like he was talking to a frightened horse or a junker of a car than to the city that raised him but whatever, what the fuck ever, he had to do something or he was going to be this same huddled mess on the floor when Roy got here, never even having built the courage to look out the fucking window. “This is one hell of a welcome back, huh? Rolling out the whole red carpet for little ol’ me?”

Of course, there was no response. God, Jason was so fucking crazy. Whatever.

“Listen,” he said, the light, conversational tone flooding out of his voice as it came out soft and honest. “I know makin’ us miserable is how you show us you care, and you’re real good at it too, a lot fuckin’ better than I remembered, but could you—could you gimme a break? Just for like, thirty minutes, so I can get my foot in the door? So I don’t bail on this whole thing before I even get my bag unpacked? I know you wanted me back. I’ve felt you callin’ me ever since I left. I’m here, I’m back, and yeah, I did it for Bruce and I did it for me but I did it for you, too. I did it for our people. B says he can’t protect you anymore, that what he is won’t work for what you are. Think I might be able to pick up his slack. But I can’t do it if you chase my ass back to China on sight, alright? I’m sure you’ll get me back for it like, a hundred times in the next month. I know you’ll make me regret askin’ you for help. But I’m askin’ anyways. I wanna stay. So just—just back off for a few. Let me get on my feet before you knock me down again. Please.”

The silence felt like a boulder on Jason’s chest, slowly pressing the air out of his lungs. He couldn’t ever remember Gotham being quiet. For a while, he just lay there like that, alone with his city, playing the world’s strangest game of chicken and waiting for an answer from a thing without a voice, a thing that wasn’t technically even alive, couldn’t technically think for itself. Gotham had never exactly conformed to technicalities, though.

Eventually, Jason picked up on the sound of a police siren in the distance. The blaring horn of a fire engine was close behind it, and before long, the rolling wail of an ambulance brought up the rear. The discordant chorus built to an uneasy crescendo until Jason could swear they had idled right beneath the window he was still too scared to look out of. They stayed there for a good minute, the closest thing Gotham ever got to a symphony, somehow fraying Jason’s nerves and stitching them back together at the same time. Then they were gone as quick as they came, retreating towards Bristol. 

And yeah. By Gotham’s standards, that was a clear sign.

Jason patted the carpet a few times as a thank you, feeling a strange, bone-deep fondness banishing a bit of the death chill he always carried with him. Harper was right. As much as he’d tried to get away, Gotham still lived in Jason the same way she had when he lived on her streets. It was the reprieve he’d asked for. If he didn’t capitalize, there was a very real chance Gotham would never afford him another one.

Breathe. Jason pushed himself up to a sitting position with arms aching from the tension he’d been holding for hours. Breathe. He turned his head towards the patch of dull light the weak January sun had coughed up through the window. Breathe. Jason pushed himself towards it, inch by inch, until his back was braced against the foot of the bed and the window was just above his line of sight. Breathe. Jason stared at the ugly paper peeling away from the wall at the seams, the water damage beneath the warped wooden frame of the window, the condensation forming at the bottom of the pane. Breathe. Jason wasn’t sure how long he stared, just feeling the weight of what lay beyond the window. Breathe. He conjured up the image of the Asylum in his head, but every time he tried to picture a crumbling, harmless building, it distorted itself into something evil and monstrous within seconds. 

Breathe. It couldn’t actually be worse than that. Breathe. It was just a building. Breathe. A decrepit, dilapidated, condemned building that he wouldn’t even be able to see past the fog cover. Breathe. It was just a building. Breathe. It couldn’t hurt him anymore.

Breathe. Jason closed his eyes and pushed himself up to sit on the bed.

Breathe. He made fists in the blankets beneath him.

Breathe. Instead of the Asylum, he pictured Roy’s face.

Breathe.

Jason opened his eyes.

The black water stretched out as far as the eye could see, meeting the gray edge of the horizon about a hundred feet off from the shore, melting into it, blurring the line between sky and sea. The waves were as fierce as they always were, white caps smashing unforgivingly against massive, craggy rocks and kicking the filthy water against the cliffs, sometimes thirty feet up to the railing above. The stench of dead fish and pollution always hung stagnant and rotten in the air. Jason could almost smell it.

For the first time in years, Jason remembered the rash of record-setting storms in the summer of 2007. The Bay had risen to meet the road, trash clogging the sewer grates so the water couldn’t drain. It would take days to recede, and by then, another storm would hit and the process would start all over again. The whole eastern part of the city had been sectioned off for over a month. He remembered the one time Catherine had been well enough to take him to see the spectacle of seawater flooding cobblestone streets.

The thing was, people still lived on the eastern side of the city. And, apparently, they would be good and goddamned if they let anything, including the unprecedented wrath of Mother Nature herself, stop them from getting to work. It wasn’t like the landlords would stop collecting rent just because their properties were flooded, sectioned off, and borderline uninhabitable.

Jason hadn’t really understood all that, being eight years old at the time. He remembered watching, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as a boy who couldn’t have been older than 16 kayaked down the street in a Bat Burger uniform. In his disbelief, he’d turned to his mom and asked, what the hell is that pendejo doing?

Surviving, she’d told him. Gotham will bring that out of you, mijo. People get real strong, real determined, real creative when that’s the only choice they got.

As Jason had predicted, the fog cover was far too thick to see the Asylum. And, as predicted, Jason still knew where it was, looming off in the northwest distance, tugging at his heart, at his gut, threatening to send him catapulting headfirst into another terrible memory. 

The Asylum didn’t give up its soldiers any easier than Gotham did. The difference was that Gotham was alive in her people, and the Asylum was a killer, growing like a cancer, pinpointing every weakness and consuming whatever was in its path. Jason belonged to Gotham because he wanted to. He belonged to Arkham because he’d never had any other choice.

Now, he had a choice.

It was easier than he expected, turning his back to the window and shrugging on his jacket. He still felt like the Asylum was watching him, but fuck it. Let it watch. Gotham wasn’t a collection of the things that hurt him the worst. She was a living, thriving body of people and places and feelings. Alive. 

Fuck this hotel room, fuck the Asylum, fuck the doom and gloom and memories. Gotham was out there, and it was long past time she and Jason got reacquainted.

Chapter Text

In so many ways, Gotham hadn’t changed a bit.

That was the main thought in Jason’s spinning mind as he spent the first few days trying to get to know his city again. The place, the people, the landscape; he was shocked at how easy it was to recognize them. To map the changes onto his old idea of her and piece the new puzzle together. 

Of course, some things were wildly different. The distinct lack of corny-but-deadly supervillain shit, for one. The most glaring change was the absence of constant, sickening clown-themed crimes and the hunched-shoulders anger-fear that came with Joker’s full-time, rent-free presence in the mind of every Gothamite, but that was hardly the only major shift. It was almost as disorienting to see rebuilt streets named 2nd and 22nd Avenue when the decades-long Gotham tradition of ignoring the existence of the number 2 had always put 1st and 3rd Avenues right next to each other. There were no shop windows adorned with false advertising for “fear toxin proof” gas masks, no plants flourishing improbably despite the atrocious conditions, and not a single glowing green question mark in sight. That was weird, but it was just like Harper said—peacetimes never lasted long in Gotham. Gimmicky supervillains would have their day in the sun again, sooner or later.

But so many of the things that really mattered were virtually untouched by time and tragedy. It was a comforting thought, keeping Jason oddly warm in the punishing cold of a Gotham winter. So much of her was the same.

Almost all of Jason and Dick’s favorite restaurants had survived the apocalypse or started up again in the aftermath. They had all been fairly small-time; by all rights and reason, the end of the world should have obliterated them. Jason had a sneaking suspicion that Bruce’s unkickable Anonymous Donor Habit may have been the culprit. Jason wasn’t complaining. Good food was good food, shitty chili dogs were even better, and if Bruce being a repressed, sentimental bastard meant Jason got to eat them, then he could go right on dropping ridiculous, irresponsible amounts of money instead of just telling his sons he loved them.

The Gotham Knights stadium had been reduced to ash. So had Gotham U. So had the high school Jason had never graduated from, the public school he’d begged Bruce to let him attend instead of Gotham Academy, the one he’d fought to stay in and purposely tanked his grades for when Bruce tried to claim he was too smart for it.

The cemetery that held Martha and Thomas Wayne and an empty grave with a child’s headstone was worse for wear, but still there.

Jason couldn’t get himself to go in.

The same thing happened when he tried to cross the road that separated the Bowery from Park Row. His whole body had frozen over right there in the middle of the street, and if not for the blaring horns from oncoming traffic, Jason probably would’ve been flattened right into the pavement. He took the hint and retreated. There was plenty of Gotham to relearn, plenty of people to help. Park Row could survive on its own, and the cemetery would still be there once Jason finally worked up the guts to walk the grounds again. 

It chafed, letting the broken pieces of him win out, but Jason tried to think of Roy instead. If Roy were here, he would say that Jason was doing more than good enough. One step at a time. You’re here, aren’t you? That’s already more than you ever thought you’d do. Be nice to my Jaybird.

And even if it was his avoidance talking, he was still right—there was plenty of Gotham to see, plenty of things to learn. By the end of his first day of wandering, Jason pretty much had the lay of the post-Superman land. After the attack, it seemed about 70% of the city had been either salvaged or rebuilt, and the remaining 30% was still ash and rubble and things that apparently weren’t worth fixing after Superman had broken them. But that was textbook for his city, really. If everything was fair, if rich and poor areas were treated the same, if the neighborhoods that made up the Gotham Triad—the Bowery, the Narrows, and Park Row—didn’t always get the short end of the stick, Jason could hardly call that Gotham. 

The Triad was still there, of course, and its people with it. It’d take a lot more than a bad-tempered Kryptonian to exterminate the Alley rats, cockroaches, and other indestructible pests of Gotham. But, there was no mistaking the way the Triad had scarred over differently than the rest of the city. The way there wasn’t a single new building, even after so many had crumbled to dust or burnt to ash. The way more than half of the free clinics and shelters had been permanently shut down or obliterated. The way Jason was sure there used to be more people living there. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who grew up in those areas willing or able to leave, which really only left one grim explanation behind for why the streets were so much emptier. 

It could have been worse. Coventry and Kingston had been wiped completely off the map, sunk right into the Bay, as had everything within a five-mile radius of Wayne Manor. Jason felt a strange twinge in his chest at the thought of Park Row being obliviated the same way. Maybe it’d be nice if the streets that Jason had starved and stolen and worse on were gone, but blasting the past to smithereens wouldn’t undo it, and besides, all that shit made Jason who he was. All that shit had lit a fire under his ass to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. All that shit had brought Jason back home. Losing the physical evidence of that struggle, that victory… it felt wrong.

Gotham’s face was different. She was older, she was hurting, and she had plenty of new scars. But underneath, her heart beat the same as it always had. Just like him.

Because in so many ways, Jason hadn’t changed a bit either.

It was a strange thought, especially considering how much time he’d spent fighting imaginary and real-life iterations of Bruce on the subject, ready and willing to die on the hill that he wasn’t the same kid anymore. Joker had killed Robin, something else had come back, blah, blah, blah. And he stood by that. It was true. The Jason that Bruce knew was dead.

But there had been a different Jason before he ever met Bruce, a Jason forged and hardened by years of sleeping rough and living rougher. A Jason whose heart beat in time with his city’s. A Jason who knew the Alley and loved the Alley and spent every waking second waiting for the Alley to kill him. Nobody understood Gotham like the street kids did, and Gotham understood them the same.

Which meant that the Jason Gotham knew was still alive. The Jason Gotham knew was watching through dirty, smudged diner windows as the weak winter sun began to set behind decrepit buildings and flickering street lights. The Jason Gotham knew was picking up a round of shitty coffees and donuts for the street workers in the Bowery.

This was something he’d always wanted to do from the moment he’d moved into the Manor. Usually, the only way out of the Alley was in a body bag, and in the rare instance anyone escaped with their life, they were expected to give something back. But Jason had always been afraid to ask, afraid Bruce wouldn’t understand, or would ask a thousand fucking questions about the part of his life Jason most wanted to bury, or worst of all, somehow spin it as evidence of Jason’s lack of gratitude and take it as the excuse he’d been waiting for to finally ditch Jason in the same alley he’d found him in.

So, Jason had always kept it to himself and tried not to let the guilt eat him alive, but he remembered. It was cold work. It was 90% being cold or wet or both and 10% praying your john would be gentle enough that you wouldn’t end up in the free clinic afterward. And sometimes, that 10% was fucking cold, too.

He told himself things would be different when he grew up. Once he wasn’t living with Bruce anymore, once he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone, he’d make the effort. He’d be the help he never had when he needed it most. He’d finally stop being so fucking scared, scared like he’d been from the moment he was born here until the moment he died here. 

And even if Jason hadn't really planned on the dying or being resurrected or the brainwashing in the middle, there was still no time like the present.

The first two days Jason showed up, the workers had fought him every step of the way. He’d had to take a sip of each of the coffees to prove they weren’t spiked before any of them would even consider it. Even then, he’d only managed to get rid of about half of what he’d come there with. That was fine. He remembered what it was like. Better to be cold and hungry than dead or worse.

This was the fourth evening in a row he’d shown up, though, and not a single person who’d taken Jason’s offerings had ended up poisoned or missing. That was enough for both the boys and six of the seven girls who regularly worked this side of the Bowery to decide that Jason was fairly harmless. Weird, and probably lonely or guilty or something, but harmless. There were far worse things to be. 

The seventh girl, the youngest of them all, wasn’t so easily won. She couldn’t be more than 14. Too young to be out here, not that age or fairness had ever stopped Gotham from putting anyone on the street. Barely five feet tall, rail thin, hunched over, and constantly guarded, she was the picture of vigilance disguised as indifference. Jason had started calling her Shrimp. She refused to give him any other name, after all. 

She always looked cold.

Every day, she wore a ratty jacket so massive she all but disappeared inside it, nothing but a miniskirt and baggy fishnets protecting her bony legs from the biting Gotham winter, and black pumps that probably did a shit job at keeping her feet dry. It was a classic look for the working minors, dressing older than you were. There was a sweet spot where a cop’s eyes would slide right over you, but a perv’s eyes would linger, just this side of overdoing it, making you look even smaller, skinner, younger than you were. Not every john was cruising for jailbait, but the ones who did would shell out for it. The sicker they were, the better they paid. 

The street workers rose with the moon, and one time, Jason had gotten here early enough that Shrimp was just waking up, not yet dressed for work. She had warmer clothes, winter boots and jeans. She’d already be dead if she didn’t. But, clothes that kept your bones from turning to ice and clothes that got people to pull over long enough for you to lean in the car window were pretty much mutually exclusive. That was the main reason Jason was bringing hot drinks out here. There was a certain unique indignity to living like this, to bargain hypothermia against starvation. Jason couldn’t take that indignity away—they wouldn’t accept it, even if he could—but he could offer a welcome distraction. That was usually good enough.

Jason knew Shrimp was an Alley kid before she even opened her mouth. Because of course, she was. There was no chance Jason would feel this strange, invisible, unbreakable connection, this inability to walk away and leave well enough alone, with anyone but an Alley kid. And, of course, between the time and dedication required and the extreme likelihood of injury, earning the trust of an Alley kid was basically an Olympic sport.

On this particular evening, she was hunkered down in the center of the alley, flattened against the building at her back and clearly trying to block the punishing wind with the plastic crates on either side of her. Her dark brown eyes were fixed on the brick wall across the alley, but Jason could feel her watching him anyway. Jason boosted himself up to sit on one of the crates, placing the half-empty box of donuts in the space between himself and her. He took his coffee from the drink carrier, leaving one remaining. 

“You got 'bout fifteen minutes ‘fore it’s too cold to do ya any good,” he muttered.

She stared straight ahead like she hadn’t even heard him, and hissed back, “You got ‘bout fifteen minutes ‘fore I shove my foot up your ass.”

Needless to say, she reminded Jason of himself. He knew what it was like, losing your family, sleeping rough, doing things you never thought you’d do to keep your death grip on a life that didn’t always feel worth holding onto. Which meant he also knew how badly she needed a break, a chance to warm up, and a reason to trust someone. 

“Evenin’ to you, too, Shrimp.”

“You mighta got the rest of ‘em fooled, but I know your type. You come ‘round here witcha big green eyes and ya fake Alley accent and ya I ain’t gon’ make ya do nothin’ attitude till it breaks us down, and that’s when you go in for the kill. Seen too many people go off with fucks like you an’ never come back, and you’re built like every john who ever beat the shit outta me. I’m telling ya now, I ain’t just some helpless Brown girl and this shit don’t work on me.”

Jason did his best to hold the cringe where she wouldn’t see it. He knew how strangers perceived him ever since the Pit hijacked his biology and turned him into a monster force of nature; imposing, intimidating, dangerous. But he used to be smaller than Shrimp. Even after years of Robin training, he’d always been small. Sometimes he forgot he wasn't anymore. Being reminded that he didn’t just strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, he did the same thing to innocent civilians… it never really got easier. And being reminded that there was no visual difference between him and the bastards who used to beat him into a stain on the Alley asphalt, well. The day that didn’t hurt was the day Jason’s grave wasn’t empty anymore.

That didn’t matter. What did matter was that this was already the longest conversation he and Shrimp had ever had, so. Progress. He needed to focus on that. 

“You ain’t helpless. If you were, they’d’ve been fishin’ you outta the gutter years ago.”

“An’ don’t you fuckin’ forget it.”

“I didn’t like coffee when I was your age neither.”

She narrowed her eyes at the wall. “I’m eighteen,” she replied coolly, a smooth lie, a practiced lie.

Jason snorted. “And I’m Batman.” Her lip started to curl into a snarl. Jason held up a hand to stop her. “Relax. I ain’t a cop and I ain’t gon’ tell nobody. Hard enough bein’ out here, not gon’ do anything to make it worse on ya.” He took a long swig of his drink and made a face at it. He was already missing the sweet coffee Roy made. “It kinda tastes like hot gasoline, don’t it? Bitter as fuck, no matter what you put in it.”

“It ain’t about the coffee, I don’t trust you,” she spat. “Cover two thirds ‘a your face and show up for days on end without givin’ no one a name. Only an idiot would trust you.”

“Ain’t like you told me your name neither, Shrimp.”

“That’s cause I ain’t got no interest. Unlike you.”

“You wanna know my name?” 

“I just said I don’t give a shit about you. You fuckin’ deaf, pig?”

“Oh, please. You’re a workin’ girl. You could spot a pig a mile away. You know I ain’t one of them, you just don’t know what I am, so you’re throwin’ shit against the wall ‘til somethin’ sticks.”

Finally, she turned to face him, jaw set, eyes dark, voice a hard, straight line. “And what are you, then?”

“Would hot chocolate be better?”

“Don’t fuckin’ dodge me. I said, what are you?” 

“The shop has warm apple cider, too, if that’s more your speed.”

“I got a fuckin’ knife with whatever the hell your name is on it if that’s more your speed.” Jason smothered a laugh by biting down on his bottom lip. It almost felt like the universe had dropped this little shit into his lap just to prove what a saint Roy was for not leaving Jason in the first bloodsoaked field he’d found him in. Shrimp picked up on the noise anyways, and seemed to take it as something else. “I ain’t bullshittin’. I lifted it off one of my johns after he passed out and I know how to fuckin’ use it.”

“You could come there with me,” Jason offered, channeling a fraction of the patience Roy had maintained for the whole first year they’d known each other. “You could watch them make it, then you’d know it wasn’t laced.”

“If you think I’m goin’ anywhere with you—”

“Well if bein’ alone with me’s the problem, bring Candy. She’s soft on you, ain’t she?” Candy was the first person to give Jason the time of day when he showed up in the Bowery. She was one of the oldest girls, probably as old as Shrimp claimed to be. As the oldest girls often were, she seemed to be the one who held them all together. 

Which meant the rest of them would lay down their lives for her.

Shrimp’s dark eyes blazed. “You lay a fuckin’ hand on Candy, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

“Cause you got a knife and you know how to use it, yeah, I remember. Like I told you a hundred times, I ain’t here to hurt no one. But it don’t have to be her. Could be Coco, could be Joey, could be anybody. Could be all of ‘em, for all I care.”

“So you can get us all at once? How stupid d’you think I am?”

“Good god,” Jason muttered, squaring his body to face her. “Shrimp, you’re so cold, you’re shaking. You think you’re hidin’ it by lockin’ your knees and clenchin’ your jaw, but you ain’t that slick. Standin’ still here and arguin’ with me is gonna freeze you to the bone. You ain’t stupid. You know that. But you’re still here, which means ya want somethin’ from me. Spit it out.”

True to her roots, Shrimp spat in Jason’s face. It would’ve hit him square in the cheek if the neck gaiter hadn’t gotten in the way. “Fuck you. Stay away from me.”

Jason watched her retreating back as she stalked to the front of the alley, wiping as much spit as he could off his mask with a gloved hand.

“Poor fuckin’ choice of words, I guess."

He wasn’t about to follow her. Shrimp was essentially a window ten years into his past. She was just Jason if Bruce had never found him, and every time Jason did something prickish and stormed off, he expected to be followed and yelled at, and he welcomed the excuse to turn a screaming match into a fistfight. Shrimp would probably do the same. And as strangely invested as he was in this girl, he drew the line at making things worse, at making her life even more unsafe and unhappy than it already was. Instead, he left the coffee and donuts on the crates in the unlikely event that Shrimp would change her mind once Jason wasn’t watching her anymore and headed farther into the alley.

Between her bleached blonde hair and denim jacket covered in bright, mismatched patches, it was easy to find Candy. Soft and approachable on the outside and hard as nails beneath, she was eight inches shorter than Jason even with heels on and carried herself like a giant. Like she’d been out here for years, like it couldn’t hurt her anymore. And even though this life never really stopped hurting, Jason almost believed it when he talked to her. There wasn’t a single crack in her armor. He was almost jealous.

Before he even spoke to her on the first day, Jason knew Candy was the leader, the glue that kept them all together, probably the reason most of them weren’t dead. And still, her mascara was always clumped, like no one taught her how to fix it. She wobbled in her heels if she walked too fast in them. She was just a kid. They were all just fucking kids. 

The two girls she was standing with gave Jason apprehensive looks as he approached. Candy shooed them away and gave Jason a small nod of acknowledgment, which quickly turned to a boisterous snort of laughter as she clocked the stain on his facemask. “Holy shit. She spit on you?” 

Jason gave a small chuckle of his own. “Ya know what? I kinda asked for it. M’lucky her aim ain’t better or I’d’ve taken it right in the eye.”

“Better not give her a second chance, or she’ll prob’ly make it happen.” Her accent wasn’t as strong as Jason and Shrimp’s, so Jason figured she was probably born and raised right here in the Bowery. Spoke the land like a second language, intimately familiar with the particular brand of scum that inhabited it and the worse ones that rolled into town and left as soon as they were satisfied. She was a good choice to lead them. Not that it was ever much of a choice for anyone.

“Like talkin’ to a brick wall, that one,” Jason groused, despite knowing that description fit him far better than it did Shrimp. “Ain’t nothin’ I can do to crack her, huh?”

Candy cast a long look in Shrimp’s direction, then turned unreadable blue eyes on Jason. “S’gonna take more than a few days of sweet talk and free drinks with her, stranger. Plenty of good reasons not to trust someone like you.”

Jason cocked his head to the side. “Do you trust me?”

“Trust’s a big word.”

“You can say no. I ain’t gon’ do nothin’ to ya. Not that kinda motherfucker.”

Candy crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall, looking Jason up and down. “Put it this way: I believe you don’t want us hungry or cold. I believe you ain’t laced the shit you give us, and I believe you prob’ly ain’t gonna. That’s as far as it goes.”

“Hm. Can’t really ask ya for any more than that. Appreciate it.” Jason sighed and glanced down the alley where Shrimp was hunched over herself. She looked even smaller than usual, but Jason knew that was at least partially intentional. A curl of disgust licked at his insides. God, he’d forgotten just how viscerally degrading life out here could be. “Anyways,” he said, redirecting his thoughts more than the conversation, “don’t s’pose you got some kinda cheat code or nothin’ for the shrimp, Candy?”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. Candy wasn’t even a fraction as abrasive as Shrimp was, but she was almost as guarded. She just held the shield differently. If Jason had to guess, it was because she’d been out here long enough to learn how to protect herself without scaring away potential customers. “What’s it to ya?” She asked, a subtle dodge away from the point.

Jason shrugged. “Let’s just say I know the feelin’.”

Her eyes sharpened immediately, and when she gave him another once-over, it was with somber understanding. Jason did his best not to shift under the weight of it. He wasn’t surprised, not really. Instinctually recognizing your fellow street workers was the first lesson you learned out here; you had to know who would have your back when no one else did. It was just… it had been a long time since someone had looked at him and known. He wasn’t used to the squirming in his guts anymore. When Jason answered her expectant look with an almost imperceptible nod, she finally relented, tearing her eyes away with an understanding hum.

“How long’s it been since you got out?” She asked quietly, staring at the pavement beneath her heels. 

The wound was only half healed, and that was a generous estimate. Jason was pretty sure he was still swallowing the blood from it as he managed, “Ten years. And some change.”

“Hm. You was just a baby, then. Younger than she is.”

Jason shrugged again, but this one was sharp, mechanical. “It make a difference?”

“To her, maybe.”

Jason scoffed. “She’d call me a liar.”

“Mouth can lie. Face can’t. And you don’t pick up workin’ boy eyes at the store.”

“She ain’t even lookin’ for a lie, she thinks she found it already.”

Candy glanced up at him again with a mischievous grin, showing crooked teeth. “Spoken like a coward. Or a brat who got out and thinks he’s better than all us who didn’t. Which are ya, stranger?”

The Pit rose with a frantic, fearful rage at that word, coward. It bubbled up in his chest, threatening to climb up his throat and spill out of his mouth with something that was sure to lose him every Bowery worker’s trust for good. Jason had to beat it back with a fucking stick. If the knowing, amused look on Candy’s face was any indication, he hadn’t hidden it very well. Jason looked down. “I ain’t better’n you,” he muttered.

“Scared, then?”

“Well, scared keeps you alive out here, don’t it?”

“Scared also keeps you out here, mistah.”

Jason barked out a flat laugh. “Don’t worry, kid. Right here’s livin’ proof you can make it off the street every bit as scared as the first night you slept out there.”

Candy didn’t waver. “You want her trust, tell my girl the truth about you. Too scared for that, then just keep showin’ up and realize it’s gonna take a while. You start workin’ that young, you get real hard, real quick. Ain’t got no other choice.” A little bit of the hardness left her eyes. “Ah, what am I sayin’? You know that better’n me anyways.”

“Keep that quiet, will ya?” Jason asked, aiming for nonchalance and falling considerably short when it came out too quick, too tight, too invested.

The hardness came back. She narrowed her eyes at him. “How you expect us to trust you when you’re ashamed you used to be like us, huh?”

“It ain’t like that.” Jason hunched over himself. “Just don’t need this whole shitbox of a city knowin’ my business.”

“It’s both. And if I can pick up on that, so can my girl, ‘cept she don’t know what you are, so she’ll just think every whore disgusts you.”

“I told you it ain’t like that—”

“Then prove it. Tell her. Or stick around, and put that shame shit to bed before she notices and shuts you out for good. There. That’s your cheat code. Next time you make me beat the sense into ya, you’ll be payin’ me for the pleasure.”

Jason rubbed at the back of his neck, thinking about Roy arriving in a few days, trying to find his footing as Red Hood, the slew of injuries he was bound to incur as he adjusted to fighting on Gotham’s streets and rooftops instead of the Chinese countryside, hell, even finding a fucking apartment that wouldn’t be robbed or blown up or sunk into the Bay. Jason was nothing if not inconsistent, unreliable, untrustworthy. He couldn’t be the stability that girl needed. He couldn’t even be the stability he needed. “Listen, I’m kind of a…”

“Drifter?” Candy asked with a snort. “Damn, where’ve I heard that before?”

Jason ground his teeth together and brought the self-loathing spiral to a halt, or at least a pause long enough to make it through this conversation. He thought back to the early days of his partnership with Arsenal. How half the time, Roy’s interference in Red’s fights was the only thing that kept Jason alive. How he’d thanked Roy by spilling his blood and threatening his life, how even when he’d started getting better, it had still been a slew of insults and roadblocks and refusal to put a single wall down. How Roy proved himself trustworthy and honest dozens of times, and it had still taken Jason more than six months to even approach the idea that he might not be dangerous. Another six before he even entered the orbit of trust.

Okay, yeah. This was the least he could do to pay it forward.

“Can’t be back every day,” Jason said, since making a promise he couldn’t keep would be a shit way to earn anyone’s trust. He might as well aim for something disappointing, but achievable. “But I will be back. As much as I can. You on the sauce or the needle?”

Candy recoiled with exaggerated surprise, but Jason saw the tension in her jaw, the way her shoulders were an inch closer to her ears than they had been. “The balls on you, stranger. It’s like you want someone to smack ya upside your weird skunk-stripe head. ‘Round here, we charge for that sorta thing.” She said it like a joke, but Jason knew it was anything but. He wished, not for the first time, that he was the kind of person who could back down when they knew they were going to hurt someone if they didn’t.

“Candy,” he reiterated, because he had to, holding her eyes and dropping his voice into a low, serious register. “Be straight with me. Are you hooked?”

“God damn, you sure know how to flatter a lady.”

“Are you?” 

“Oh, for fuck’s—not anymore,” she conceded, voice gone soft. “Keepin’ the kids straight’s got me too busy these days.”

“Gave you too much to live for, you mean?” She glared at him, and Jason quirked an eyebrow. “What? You thought the street rat mind link only went one way?”

“Fuck off,” she muttered, very little heat in it.

“It ain’t cause you ran outta money, though, right?”

She snorted, forcing a cocky facade back over the vulnerability. “What are ya, my damn sponsor?”

Jason lowered his voice. “I’m someone who’s 'bout to give you money, but I can’t do that if you’re gonna turn right ‘round and blow it on a high.”

Suspicion cast a dark cloud over her face. “Nothin’ for nothin’,” she recited, an old Crime Alley saying that had slowly made its way to every crumbling, crime-ridden corner of the city. “Somethin’ for everythin’.”

“Don’t I know it,” Jason muttered. “I don’t wanna come back here someday and find out the cold or the job got her. Or any of you. Lookin’ out for all of ‘em ain’t easy, it’s a full-time job when you already got one, and nobody’s payin’ you for it, so I am. Makin’ sure you can keep doin’ it. You got somewhere safe to keep it?”

“Course I do, what kinda girl you take me for?”

“Good.” Jason pressed his back to the same wall she was leaning against and slipped a fistful of bills into her coat pocket with the number for one of his burner phones. “And if the johns start any problems you can’t solve alone, use that number. I got a… friend who’ll take care of ‘em.”

“What, you tight with Batman or somethin’? All the masked weirdos flock together? Tell ‘im to get his ass back here, I’m sick’a keepin’ his streets clean for ‘im.”

“Keep her safe? Keep ‘em all safe?” 

“Don’t need your help to take care of my people.”

“I know that. Keep ‘em safe?” 

She waved him off with a roll of her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Ain’t no Bowery workers dyin’ on my watch.”

Jason walked out of the alley and back into the arms of this familiar stranger of a city with a smile on his face. It was weird, fighting tooth and nail for the trust he would have received wordlessly and effortlessly as a kid, trying to prove he was one of them when he’d spent so much of his life trying to hide from that, but it also felt good. 

For years, Jason had slept in a warm bed in a safe house with a full stomach every night while a hundred kids just like him starved or froze or worse. The survivor’s guilt had never gone away, not really. If anything, it just got worse the longer Jason lived out a comfortable life knowing the only thing that separated him from those kids was that he happened to steal tires from the only rich guy in the world who signed adoption papers instead of calling the police.

The guilt was so intense that by the time Joker took him prisoner, a part of Jason was almost relieved. It felt like the universe finally evening the scales after so many unearned years of love and safety. And even with all the shit he’d gone through since, Jason knew he was still one of the lucky ones. Most Alley kids didn’t even see their 18th birthday, and even if Jason had spent his as a half-insane zombie killer on the run from a cult that wanted to murder him, that was still a chance he got that they never would. It felt good to finally give something back.

There had been a voice in Jason’s head, there since the moment he first entertained going back to Gotham and getting louder every day since, that insisted he’d never be able to make a real difference in his city. That Red Hood wasn’t strong enough or virtuous enough, or that Batman’s shadow was too big for him to ever step out of, or that Jason himself would never be on steady enough ground to save anyone, himself included. But he hadn’t put his uniform on once, hadn’t thrown a single punch, and already, a few lives had been made a few degrees less unbearable for a few days because he was here. Even if Red Hood crashed and burned, it was proof that Jason Todd could still make an impact in Gotham. 

He knew how to get through to the kids everyone else gave up on. Park Row had lived in him all these years, trapped just beneath the surface in a cage Bruce had tentatively constructed with bars made of for your own good and I’m just trying to give you the best life I can and some shit he’d never quite said out loud like don’t talk like a hood rat unless you want to be one again and you’re a Wayne now, act like it. And then the League had found that cage and reinforced it until the walls were unbreakable, but even they weren’t stronger than Gotham. She broke the bars for him. All he had to do now was be himself.

It was steady, it was familiar, and it made sense. For the most part, it was even pretty easy. Jason couldn’t remember the last time he could apply all four of those labels to anything in his life. 

Surviving Joker and the League’s captivity had never been easy, his time on the run afterward had never been steady, training with the Caste had never been familiar, and Roy and Bruce’s kindness had never, ever made sense. But now, every step he took on a Gotham street felt like gluing a sliver of himself back into place. For the first time since I should have been a better Robin, Jason could recognize pieces of the broken bird still in him. 

Maybe Robin wasn’t all the way dead. And maybe it wasn’t too late for Jason to be someone Gotham could be proud of.

Chapter Text

The sixth day, a freezing bitch of a January evening, found Jason making his usual rounds in the Bowery. By now, he knew the name of every worker who hit the street daily, where they were likely to be at 5 pm, and even a few of their coffee orders. Well, all of them but Shrimp, who still hadn’t yielded an inch or spoken a word to Jason since she spat in his face days ago.

He’d established a routine by now. Some mutual respect, too. Jason had a feeling Candy wasn’t the only one who could make out the outline of a scrawny working boy in the hulking beast of Jason’s body. Most of them were willing to hold a short conversation with him, and less than half of them subtly reached for a concealed weapon when he approached.

He’d established a routine by now. Which meant that before he even finished handing out the usual food and drinks, Jason had already noticed there was something wrong.

Candy was usually the first one he talked to when he arrived since she could point him in the direction of the people most in need and steer him away from the ones likely to snap or pull a blade on him. But Jason only had one coffee and a few donuts left by the time he finally found her. She was in the dead end of the alley farthest away from the street with her whole body angled away from the others. And she was alone. She was never alone.

Jason held the last cup out for Candy and she took it without looking up, teeth chattering with the cold. Even with her head down and her face hidden, Jason could tell she was worried. As he watched her hunch her shoulders further, whole body tense as a taut wire, he found a slight edge of guilt outlining the concern. The I couldn’t have prevented it, but I should have look.

“Where’s the Shrimp, Candy?” Jason asked, low, even, and as neutral as he could manage.

Candy set her jaw and stared at the uneven pavement beneath her heels. She hadn’t pulled her white blonde hair into the usual pigtails today, and it fell into her eyes as she leaned over her coffee. She wrapped her free arm around herself and muttered, “Not here.”

“I got two good eyes, I can see that. Where’d she go?”

“You comin’ round here is one thing, stranger. But I won't help you chase someone ‘cross the city who don’t wanna be caught.”

Jason drew a slow breath in through his nose, crammed the rising panic back down into his gut, and willed the frustration out of his voice. “I ain’t gon’ hurt that kid. Diamond District to Crime Alley, I ain’t never gonna lay a hand on Gotham’s children. You know that.” Candy gave no indication that she’d even heard him, blinking slowly at the ground, looking more defeated than anything. Jason kept pushing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. “And you know there’s plenty’a sick fucks in this city who will.”

Candy twitched her shoulders, barely even a shrug. “She goes where she want, I ain’t her fuckin’ mother.”

Jason lowered his voice further, trying to shove some warmth into it the way Roy would. “You know where she is, Candy. And you don’t want her there any more than I do.”

Her icy blue eyes flicked up to Jason’s for a moment. “Maybe you already forgot, but this is the job,” she snapped, her voice cold and harsh but missing even an ounce of the usual fire. Candy took another sharp breath like she wanted to keep going, but the small spark of life had already left her body. She slumped against the wall beside her. “It’s cold, it’s hungry, it’s shitty. You do bad things in worse places for miserable fuckin’ creeps and you still count yourself lucky at the end of the night when they underpay you ‘cause at least they ain’t beat you to shit too. There’s no want in any of it. There’s no safe. There’s no nothin’.”

“I know,” Jason said, beating back the distinctly green part of him that wanted nothing more than to rise to her anger, even weak and lifeless as it was. Fighting was easy. This was fucking hard, and it never got any easier. “But that’s the work she does every day. You ain’t blink twice at it ‘til now. Somethin’s different.”

She wouldn’t even pick her head up to look at him. Jason heaved a heavy sigh and once more hurled himself over the edge, dredging up his past to gain the trust of a stranger.

“When I worked the street, I used to be the one they’d send out to track the girls down when they’d been out too long. Whether they was in the alley or the gutter, I found ‘em. I can find her too, with or without your help. I will find her with or without your help. Only reason I ain’t done that already is ‘cause I know you got a decent head on your shoulders and you care about that little shit. You see her break herself for this job every day and I never seen you like this before. I wanna know why.”

Something like a growl came through the cage of Candy’s teeth. “Fuckin’ lyin’ bastard, you ain’t never even told me your name, why would I tell you—”

“My name is Jason.”

I’ll give you a chance to rest if you just tell me your name, bird boy.

Jason shook himself out of it fast and hard and pushed on. “But that stays between you and me. I’m workin’ with ya, kid. Work with me. Please.”

Finally, she met his gaze, face slack, eyes enormous. Her lips twitched like she wanted to accuse him of lying, but she must have found the truth already because she barreled past it. “What’re you gonna do if you find her?”

“Make sure she’s safe.”

“I already told you, safe ain’t in the fuckin’ job descri—”

“Make sure she ain’t somewhere they can’t hear her scream. Or somewhere they’d be happy to hear it.”

Candy paused, chewed on her lip. Slowly, almost like she didn’t mean it, she shook her head no. “I’m all she got,” she said, voice breaking. “She’ll never trust me again if I tell you.”

“You rather she be pissed or dead?” And then, softer. “I ain’t gon’ tell her it was you. You wouldn’t squeal. I went off to track her down myself.”

Candy set her coffee down on top of a dumpster and took two steps back from Jason, wrapping her skinny arms around herself. Finally, barely above a whisper, “She’s in the Alley.”

A fierce chill ran down Jason’s spine. He told himself it was just the weather. “An’ what’s she doin’ there, Candy?”

“Blizzard’s supposed to come through tomorrow night. Won’t be nobody lookin’ to get their dick wet at 20 below. Whenever that happens she always go lookin’ for a big score to get her through to the next week, plus some to pass around for anyone who don’t think that far ahead.”

“And they don’t make ‘em any sicker or richer than the Alley johns.” Candy nodded stiffly. “She got a regular there?” A beat of hesitation, and then she nodded again.

There were a few awful seconds of silence where the tension turned the air to water and Jason couldn’t breathe, and then Candy found her voice.

“He always hurts her.”

Jason started running before she even finished the sentence.

“Relax, gorgeous. A pretty thing like you shouldn’t be so tense.”

It hadn’t been hard to find Shrimp and her john. With everything in Gotham that had changed, the alleys that Park Row jailbait street workers used to sell off bits of their innocence weren’t one of them. Jason was pretty sure he’d worked this alley himself.

“I already told you, you ain’t pullin’ this shit with me again.” Shrimp. She sounded sullen. Unconvincing. Defeated. “Specially if you like me in heels. My ankle still ain’t right from November.”

Jason was completely sure he’d worked this alley himself, actually. And he’d probably had this exact same argument here, too.

With a deep breath, Jason blinked the Pit back to the recesses of his vision, pressed his back to the brick wall behind him, and turned his ear toward the mouth of the alley. He had to get some sense of what he was walking into before he interfered, but he could barely even hear the conversation over the pounding of his own heart.

“And I already told you, we’ll discuss that behind closed doors.” The voice was oily, dripping slime and money and bad intent. “Or did that empty little head of yours already forget which one of us is the paying customer?”

“Soon as you show me you ain’t brought no weapons this time, I’ll go anywhere you want.”

It wasn’t about earning Shrimp’s trust anymore, hadn’t been from the moment Jason saw that look on Candy’s face. It wasn’t about passing the time until Roy got here, it wasn’t about getting to know Gotham again, it wasn’t even about building a foundation for Red Hood to stand on. It was only about the little waver he just heard in Shrimp’s usually hard, confident voice and the harsh scrape of shoes against gravel that said her john wouldn’t be taking no for an answer.

“C’mon. You know me. You know I’d never give you more than you could handle, don’t you, angel?”

“I said what I said, mistah. Turn your pockets out or get to lookin' for a different good time." The words were firm, the tone was anything but. She was scared. If Jason could hear that, then a rich scumbag john that lived to intimidate little girls certainly could, and things were heading from bad to worse.

“You have nothing to worry about, sweetheart.” He sounded like a predator about to close in for the kill. Something twisted deep in Jason’s gut. “Last time I checked, the beggar clinic still takes in rough trade trash like you. And if you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t always be crawling back for more.”

If Jason had it his way, this creep’s head would’ve been summarily divorced from his shoulders five minutes ago, but he’d done this all wrong. He hadn’t thought about what he would do once he found Shrimp. The sprint here was raw instinct, bone-deep, well-buried knowledge of the worst the Alley johns were capable of, and the desperate, clawing need to stop one kid from being hurt like that. Just one. Jason’s return to Gotham would be worth every last knot it had tied up in his guts over the past week if he could just save one kid.

He hadn’t thought about it. He’d come as a civilian. He’d come just shy of completely useless. He’d come with an excellent chance of making this even worse.

If he was here as Red Hood, he’d be on the roof. He’d have the full picture, he’d know exactly when to intervene, and he’d have a solution that didn’t put Shrimp at risk. If he was here as Red Hood, he wouldn’t be so fucking scared.

He didn’t have his gear. He didn’t have his mask. He didn’t even have a fucking gun. A thin neck gaiter and a prayer were the only things separating his true identity from the eyes of some random Alley pedophile, and he was armed with nothing but the two small knives he’d snuck through airport security. And the All-Blades. If he was willing to make an irrevocable connection between his civilian and vigilante identities before Red Hood had stepped a single foot in Gotham, that is.

Worst of all, he didn’t have a plan. Every mentor he’d ever had was screaming at him to retreat. The risk of Shrimp getting caught in the crossfire was way too high, and dying was still (probably) worse than whatever this prick had planned for her.

“You want a punchin’ bag so bad, gym membership’s cheaper than I am.” Every word sounded like a cry for help, desperately needy and desperately sure no one was coming to save her. Jason couldn’t leave her like this. Training be damned, he wasn’t leaving her here.

“A bag won’t sing for me like you do, angel. Nothing sings as pretty as you.”

Two sets of footsteps made their way from the far side of the alley towards Shrimp, and Jason’s heart clenched at the noise. The harsh catch in her breathing said Shrimp had picked up on it too.

“No,” she said, the tremor in her voice clear enough for anyone to hear now. “I told you if you brought those two fuckin’ clowns back ‘round you’d be findin’ yourself a new whore.”

“You’ll be compensated accordingly,” the john purred over a thud that said he’d backed Shrimp into the wall behind her. Jason could picture it, a rich, powerful man towering over her, blocking her escape routes, giving her no choice but to ask for the mercy she’d never receive, she was just a kid, she was just a fucking kid.

“No,” she repeated, sounding like an earthquake was happening inside her.

The man let out a noise somewhere between a purr and a growl. Satisfied. Victorious. A lion licking its chops. Jason’s skin crawled.

“Whores don’t get to say no.”

Jason didn’t even make the decision to intervene. His body did it for him.

By the time his brain caught up, two of the men were on the ground, unconscious and bleeding from the nose and mouth. The third, presumably Shrimp’s john, was underneath Jason’s hand, pinned to the wall by his throat, cringing as Jason reared a fist back to punch him out.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

It took every last shred of self-control in Jason’s body to hold his fist there and stop it from caving the man’s face in. If he was doing this, he was doing this. Not the Pit. Him.

“My girl said no,” Jason snarled, more animal than human, barely even recognizing the voice as his own. “Now you can show an ounce of fuckin’ decency for the first time in your whole miserable life, or you can find out what it’s like to feel as small and helpless as you’re tryna make her.”

“Who the fuck are you?!” The man asked, frantic, high, terrified. The Pit surged brilliantly at the sound of it, and Jason had to suck in a few deep breaths to beat it back into the corners of his mind. “What kind of setup is this? Do you know who you’re fucking with?”

“I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit.” Jason looked him up and down. Tall, well built, filled out with for-show muscles. Never-needed-to-use-them muscles. And even as Jason's bulk had been paid for with his blood a thousand times over, Shrimp was still right. Jason was built just like the johns who beat the shit out of her.

Refocus. Refocus. Jet black hair slicked back to the scalp, piercing blue eyes, an entitled quirk to his lips even as he was one good punch away from shuffling off this mortal coil. Expensive suit, expensive watch, expensive haircut, expensive shoes. Yeah. Jason knew the type. “You think whatever Fortune Five company you work for’ll be on your side when it breaks to the public you spend your free time beatin’ little girls shitless?”

All the color drained out of the john’s already pale face. “I—I have no idea what you’re talking about. The lady’s eighteen, and we were just—”

“Save your breath. I don’t care how long you’ve been getting away with this vile shit, it ends today. The Alley ain’t a safe place for scum like you to take your day out on a child and use your wallet to keep it quiet. Not anymore, and never again. You wanna buy her time— anyone’s time—you pay for their time, and you back the fuck off when they tell you no. Every street kid in the Triad is under protection now. So you’re gonna watch your fuckin’ step.”

“Whose protection?” The man sneered, but his voice was shaking worse than Shrimp’s had been. He managed a weak imitation of the once-over Jason had given him. Even through the fear, he pulled one of the slimiest, skeeviest grins Jason had seen since he was a kid. “A pretty boy like you?”

Something small in Jason flinched. His palm was already pressing into the man’s windpipe to make up for it. Jason leaned in and flexed his fingers slightly, making it perfectly clear how easy it would be for him to snap the john’s neck like a toothpick. “I’m fillin’ in for a friend. If I was you, I’d clean up my act and start treatin’ my girls like ladies before he shows up, 'cause he ain’t gon’ settle for a fractured arm and a concussion.”

The man blinked at him in wide-eyed confusion, but the question on his lips turned into a scream as Jason broke his arm with a single sharp, precise movement, yanked him forward by it to force the bones out of alignment, and smashed his head back into the wall, knocking him out cold.

All the energy left Jason the moment the john hit the ground. His stomach was roiling fire, his limbs were frozen concrete, and he collapsed forward, just barely able to get his hands up before his face could smash into the wall. Crime Alley. He was in Crime Alley. Willis and his belt, Catherine and her needles, Jason freezing and starving and worse, it was here, it was all here, the pavement under his feet had probably been soaked in his own blood at some point.

Whose protection? A pretty boy like you?

Ten years of distance and training and Jason was still that same kid. The same scared kid Bruce had found, posturing like a monster animal killer man to hide how small and terrified he’d always been. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead to the frozen bricks, dragged in gasp after gasp of frigid, polluted Gotham air, but it was no use. Even in the black of his closed eyelids, Jason could see his the john’s face, could hear that slimy, predatory voice, why the fuck did Jason actually think he could handle this?

He should go back home to the hotel, he should get out of here, he had to get out of here, if he went down out here he wouldn’t get back up and god only knew what would—

“What—what the fuck?”

Shit. Shit.

He’d forgotten the kid was still here.

Chapter Text

Jason sent up a quick prayer to whatever eldritch horror watched over Gotham in the hopes that the Pit had receded far enough to leave his eyes, took three deep, shaking breaths, and slumped sideways into the wall. Heart still racing, he searched the alley for Shrimp.

She was crouched between the wall Jason was leaning against and a dumpster, back pinned to the corner, barely a few feet from the man Jason had just finished off. A deep purple bruise bloomed across her cheekbone. Half her dark hair had been pulled loose from her ponytail, hanging over her face in limp strands. Her chest heaved with raw, shuddering breaths. Mascara ran black tracks down her face as she watched him, eyes enormous. Her arms were held out in front of her, fists clenched, like she thought Jason might turn his anger on her next. 

Sorry I did that in front of you rolled around in his mouth, but he couldn’t insult her like that.

“What the fuck?” Shrimp repeated, a trembling, terrified whisper. Her eyes darted from Jason to her john and back again. She made a quick move forward like she wanted to get in Jason’s face, but the energy left as soon as it came and she collapsed the rest of the way down to the frozen pavement instead.

At least Jason wasn’t the only one left exhausted, shaken, and frightened in the aftermath. The thought shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was.

The bulletproof confidence that had propelled him into the fight was long gone. He had no idea if he’d done the right thing, all he knew was he couldn’t listen to that kid get hurt and— and—

“There’s a blizzard comin’,” Shrimp muttered, just barely above silence but unmistakably panicked. She pushed her hair out of her face with a quivering hand, and Jason noticed belatedly that there were bruises encircling her wrists, too. Had to beat the Pit back again. If the way Shrimp’s eyes went even wider was any indication, he hadn’t done it fast enough. 

Still, it seemed she had more important things to worry about. “This was a week of food, a roof over my head the night the storm comes through, and extra for the others, what did you do?” Her voice was a clear threat even as it wavered, hard steel and terror, like a wounded animal. God, he might as well be looking in a mirror. “There ain’t—there ain’t enough time for me to make up that money before the storm hits, what the fuck did you do?!”

Jason swallowed hard. “He been gettin’ worse, ain’t he?”

“What? Didn’t you hear me? I could freeze, starve, ‘n die cause’a you, the fuck are you on about?” 

“This motherfucker,” Jason kicked at the unconscious man at his feet, still carefully not looking down at him. “He’s good for a big score, but he puts you in the clinic. With the money you lose while you’re recoverin’, you barely break even. At the start, he never did anythin’ you couldn’t work through, so you thought it was fine. Eventually, that wasn’t enough. He kept pushin’ your limits, wouldn’t settle for fists no more, and now he’s bringin’ friends ‘round. Won’t listen to a word against it. When you say no, it’s like he don’t even hear you.”

“He’s a bastard, just like half my fuckin’ clients. What’s your point?”

With all the strength left in his body, Jason pushed himself off the wall, backed up until he hit the cold bricks on the other side of the alley, and slid down to the ground. With his knees up and his head down, he finally ground out, “He’s gonna kill you. Maybe not today, maybe not next time, but he ain’t gon’ be satisfied ‘til he kills you.”

“The fuck would you know about it?”

Every breath echoed infinitely in Jason’s chest like he was hollowed out inside, like a gaping chasm had been left behind. He tried not to think about how many times he’d watched another kid his age go down that path. Tried not to picture their cloudy, unseeing eyes when he closed his own. It was too easy to imagine the same look on Shrimp’s young face. It was way, way too easy. “I know enough. Let’s get you back to Candy, huh? These scumbags won’t stay KO’d forever.”

“Fuck no,” she spat, and even as it was barely a fraction of her usual fire, Jason knew to take it seriously. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere with you, and you ain’t leavin’ my sight ‘til you tell me what the fuck your problem is.”

Jason’s neck muscles felt about ready to tear from the strain as he forced his leaden head up again and rested it on his knees. “Did you want me to let him beat you shitless, Shrimp?”

“What I want is for you to stay in the Bowery where you fuckin’ belong and pick some other whore to be your condescendin’ ass fix-me-up project ‘stead of chasin’ me all over God’s creation, ‘cause I can take care of my damn self. I ain’t a fuckin’ child no more, I choose my johns and I take what they dish out. I know what he is, I came here anyways.”

“You was scared,” Jason argued, hearing the fear in his own voice all the same as hers had been. Shrimp would probably hear it too, the unspoken I was scared for you. “I never seen you scared.”

“You ain’t even been ‘round here a week, you don’t know shit.”

“Fair,” Jason sighed, tipping his head back against the wall and staring up at the gloomy Gotham night sky. A plane blinked across the span of gray and black, half obscured by the puffs of frozen air drifting from his lips, breaths still a little too harsh to be natural. Absently, he wished he was anywhere else. “But I know how this kinda thing goes.”

“Vaguest motherfucker I ever met in my life, covers half his face, speaks in riddles, and he fuckin’ wonders why I don’t trust him,” she muttered under her breath, more to herself than Jason. 

“I’ll tell you who I am if it’d mean anything to you,” he offered before he had a chance to talk himself out of it, remembering what Candy had said, you want her trust, tell my girl the truth about you. It wasn’t until well after the words left his mouth that he realized Shrimp had been speaking in rapid Spanish, and he’d responded the same. Belatedly, he added, “And if you want to say something I won’t understand, you’ll have to pick another language.”

There was a long silence. Jason could imagine the look she was giving him, blinking in astonishment, or eyes narrowed in accusation. Already building up a barricade of reasons as to why this didn’t make Jason any more trustworthy, as if he’d found a Brown girl he wanted to sucker in, assumed she spoke Spanish, and learned an entire language in under a week just to get on her good side. 

It was exactly the kind of elaborate thing Jason would come up with as an excuse not to trust someone. It was basically what he’d done with Roy.

When a full minute passed without a word between them, he pushed himself over the edge. 

“My name’s Jason,” he admitted to the asphalt under his feet, switching back to English so there was no chance he’d be misunderstood. The chill was seeping in through the back of his jacket and the seat of his pants now, slowly slipping into the marrow of his bones. 

Jason focused on the cold instead of the mortifying ordeal of exposing weakness to a stranger. 

He focused on the cold instead of Bruce and Talia’s voices weaving into a thick cord of panic wrapped tight around his throat, your identity is the most valuable thing you’ll ever own, there’s nothing more dangerous an enemy can take from you. 

He focused on the cold instead of the hissing green memory of telling Joker his name.

Shrimp snorted, a distant drop of lightness in an endless ocean of tension. “What, like Jason Todd?”

Every single cell in Jason froze solid, heart threatening to burst from the ice block of his chest and leave him shattered. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. His stalling mind was an empty cavern, one thought on repeat bouncing off the stone walls, you’re dead you fucking moron, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.

She laughed again. Mean, sharp, but not suspicious. “Damn, you ain’t winnin’ any points on your I’m just like you, I’m from the Alley too bullshit if you don’t even know ‘is name.”

“What’m I missin’ here?” Jason ground out, praying she’d interpret the strain as confusion instead of the biggest spike of panic Jason had felt in months. “Who is that?”

“Somebody’s dead kid, I dunno. But one of these rich fuck’s musta liked ‘im a hell of a lot. The Jason Todd Memorial Shelter’s been the only decent roof in the Triad for years. After the war came through, it was one of maybe three that even kept the doors open. Assumed you picked his name for ya lie since half the Alley rats owe ‘im their life. Should prolly do your research next time you try to dupe an Alley girl, pendejo. Startin’ to wonder if you even from Gotham.”

“I been gone for years,” Jason blurted out, unable to manage anything else, awash in a sea of panic and shock and a few soft, fragile things twisted up in the implications of that, because it had to have been Bruce. It had to have been Bruce. And if that shelter—Jason’s shelter—had stayed open all this time, then Bruce had been funding it long after Jason’s death. Bruce had been funding it when he was halfway across the world fighting God not knowing if he’d ever make it home. All this time, he never stopped keeping an eye on the Alley kids, on Jason’s people, and no, he couldn’t go down that road right now. “When I left, every roof in the Triad was a front, a scam, or a trap. But I was an Alley boy, born ‘n raised. You know the code. Anybody who makes it out’s gotta find a way to give back. And you…” Jason sighed, swallowed hard, and muttered under his breath, “You remind me of me.”

There was something different in Shrimp’s voice when she spoke again. “Look at me.” Jason frowned at the sky, unwilling to approach the gargantuan task of making his neck support his head’s weight again without a real reason. “Look at me and say that shit again so I can figure out which parts are lies.”

Even with everything slowly squeezing the thick, smoggy air from his lungs, that punched a short laugh out of Jason. “Ay dios mio, if we was any more alike, she’d be stealin’ the tires off my car. How does anybody put up with me?” With a heavy sigh, Jason rolled his head around to meet her steely eyes, supporting his chin on his knee. “Hi. I’m Jason. You ain’t gettin’ my last name, you’re lucky as hell you got the real first one, cause I got a slew’a fake names and papers to back ‘em up with. I grew up here. The war put me out. Kids like you was what brought me back. I remember how cold the streets was in winter.” Another deep breath. It burned his lungs. Jason knew the acid taste in his mouth wasn’t just the pollution. “I thought I didn’t need nobody’s help when I was your age, too. I was real fuckin’ wrong.”

“Who the fuck are you?” She demanded, more of an accusation than a question, voice hard and eyes harder.

“I told you already. Twice. Need your ears checked?”

“No, not that, fuckin’—nobody fights like that on the Alley. We fight quick, dirty, an’ ugly, we leave the body cold and we run before the cops get a whiff. There ain’t no finessin’ or plannin’ or style ‘bout it. You—you fight like Batman.” 

God, this whole situation would be ironic as fuck if it wasn’t sending half of Jason’s body into attack mode and the other half into a total shutdown. He wasn’t even wearing a bat yet, and already, Gothamites were looking for the ghost of their lost hero in the wreckage of his former sidekick.

“Shrimp,” Jason managed, an exasperated groan in place of the full-body cringe that threatened to overtake him. “For Christ’s sake, don’t compare me to that silver spoon motherfucker. We all know he was Bruce Wayne. If you never do another thing for me, don’t put my name anywhere near a fuckin’ billionaire’s when I just told ya I almost froze to death on the streets.”

The storm on her face didn’t lift. “That ain’t the point. An Alley rat wouldn’t talk, an Alley rat ain’t leavin’ ‘em alive, an Alley rat gon’ pull a knife, slit their throats, an’ bolt. Make it make sense. Who the fuck are you?”

That was dangerously close to an admission that she believed the other things Jason had said, and that was a good enough reason to let a few more shreds of almost-truth slip into the space between them. “Told ya, the war put me out. Quick, dirty, an’ ugly don’t get you as far out East as it do in Gotham. Had to pick up some new tricks.”

Shrimp squinted like she could smell the lie but couldn’t find the proof. “Motherfucker, your eyes glow in the dark! I’m s’posed to believe that’s just some party trick you learnt overseas?”

“I could explain that,” Jason offered with a sigh that was more tired than anything. “But you won’t never believe me.”

Her eyes went even narrower. “Cop out.”

Jason held her gaze and in a perfectly monotone voice said, “I ended up in Nepal for a while. Took a bath in some magic chemicals. My eyes used to be blue. Like my dad’s.” The last part was more of an afterthought, and Jason wasn’t quite sure which one he was referring to.

Shrimp rolled her eyes. “You ain’t even try to make that convincin’.”

“See?”

“Whatever. This why you always coverin’ your face? So you can trash pervs in alleyways without gettin’ ID’d?”

Fuck it. He’d already come this far. “No. I cover my face ‘cause I got some scars I don’t want no one to see. And ‘cause it’s colder than a witch’s tit out here.”

Several full minutes passed in total silence, Shrimp barely even blinking as she seemed to search every visible part of Jason for a lie and came up with nothing. Finally, something seemed to relent in her. “You got a reason for waitin’ a whole fuckin’ week to tell me a single honest thing about you?”

“Same reason you still ain’t told me your name. At this point, I’d be fine if you just gave me the same fake one you give to the johns. Ain’t nobody know who I’m talkin’ ‘bout when I say Shrimp. It’s tirin’.” 

Never did he think he’d been spending so much of his first week back home trying to get (justifiably) mistrustful Gothamites to tell him their names, but he supposed there were worse ways to spend the time. 

Your real name was precious. Especially in a place like Gotham, especially after the end of the world had come and gone. It didn’t take a vigilante to understand that. For the street kids, giving it away was one of the highest possible displays of trust, just beneath information about your family and right above telling them before you went off with a dangerous john.

Your real name was precious. Shrimp knew it just as well as Jason did. He didn’t blame her for keeping it to herself when it was probably the only valuable thing she could still lay claim to. But Jason also knew what happened to kids like her if they didn’t find someone to trust. If they didn’t catch a break. If they didn’t get out.

“You can leave the Triad any fuckin’ time you want, Jason,” Shrimp countered, rousing him from his thoughts. “I can’t. I got a lot more to lose than you do.” The storm came back over her face then. “Like my meal ticket, which you still ain’t apologize for stealin’ from me, cabrón.”

“Relax. You’ll get your money.”

She shook her head vigorously, expression riding the line between anger and fear. “If you steal from that son of a bitch, he’ll kill me. The second he wake up, he’ll find me and kill me.”

“As much as he’d deserve it, I ain’t a thief.” Jason suppressed a rueful grin and added, “Not anymore, at least. I got money, I’ll give it to you. You ain’t gon' starve or freeze on my watch. Not your friends in the Bowery, neither.”

“They not my friends.” The reply came out so quick it sounded like more of a reflex than anything. Jason couldn’t help but remember saying the same thing himself not too long ago, we’re not friends, you’re a pain in my ass. 

Jesus. The irony was thick enough to suffocate in.

“You’re tellin’ me Candy ain’t your friend?”

Shrimp shrugged. “I’d take a bullet for ‘er,” she said, looking anywhere but Jason’s face. “But friends is for bitches who don’t suck cock just for a chance to get out the snow.”

And yeah. Jason knew that too. He knew that a little too well, a little too sharp to be harmless, he’d always said this shit was in his past now but it wasn’t, was it? It never would be. Jason was every broken version of himself all at once. Carried every person he’d ever been and every mask he’d ever worn around with him every day. Decade-old hurts might as well have happened yesterday.

“None of the kids workin’ the Bowery’ll starve or freeze on my watch,” Jason managed past the veritable boulder lodged in his throat. “There, that accurate enough for you? Or you gonna point out that some of them’s already 18 and ain’t really kids no more?”

Shrimp shot him a withering glare. “This your thing? You just walk around makin’ smartass comments knowin’ nobody can step to ya for it? Learnt to fight like Batman so you can run your mouth with whatever dumb shit you wanna spew?”

God, Roy would have loved to hear this. Jason had a sudden, vivid flash of the hellscape Shrimp and Roy could create for him if Roy worked his magic trust-earning superpowers on her like he had with Jason. He suppressed a shiver. No fucking thank you, they were both already impossible on their own. 

“Nah, I talked shit six ways to Sunday long ‘fore I got big enough to back it up.”

“You get your ass beat for it?” Shrimp asked with a smirk, mostly rubbing it in, though Jason could hear the shadow of understanding beneath the bluster.

Jason’s mind did a quick skim over the greatest hits of the last ten years and skidded to a poorly timed stop right on his fight with Slade and the Pit’s fights with Roy. He suppressed a wince. “Still do, every now ‘n then.”

“Invite me next time. Think I deserve it after this shitstorm.”

“Enough with that already. I told you you’ll get your money. What’s the usual score for this scumbag?”

“Still playin’ this stupid ass game, huh? How many times I gotta tell you I ain’t your damn charity case?”

Jason scoffed. “What, you want me to smack the shit out you too so you can feel like you earned it? Trust me, you don’t want that. I don’t neither.”

Shrimp narrowed her eyes. Jason knew what it meant. Nothing for nothing. Something for everything.

“500 for the night,” she said, slow, reproachful. 

Neither of them put words to it, but Jason heard the implication in the silence. The only clients that paid that well were the ones that made you regret the day you were born every moment you were with them.

Jason shifted to grab his wallet, but something on Shrimp’s face made him stop short. “But I ain’t gon’ stop workin’,” she said, voice both smaller and harder than it had been. “If that’s what you’re aimin’ for.”

“Of course you ain’t gonna stop workin’,” Jason said like it was obvious. It was obvious. “I think if you like livin’, you should stop seeing Mr. Tall Dark and Sick As Fuck over here, but I ain’t gon’ make you do that neither. What are ya, thirteen? Ain’t nobody hirin’ a 13-year-old Alley rat unless it’s for somethin’ even worse than this. The work you do is miserable as shit, if you had better options, you’d’ve taken ‘em ages ago. Just tryna make sure this job don’t kill you before you find somethin’ better someday.”

One more small shard of Shrimp’s defenses seemed to fall away. “Spoken like a workin’ boy.”

At that, Jason went back to the task of fishing out his wallet, a choice that surely didn’t raise a single suspicion from one of the most suspicious people he’d ever met. Whatever. The ship had sailed on leaving the past in the past about a thousand times within this week alone. 

He retrieved five hundred-dollar bills and fanned them out for her to see. “Nothin’ for nothin’, so how’s about a hundred for your drink order, a hundred for actually lettin’ me buy it for ya, and three hundred for your name.”

Shrimp’s eyes darted between the money and Jason’s face half a dozen times. She was still holding herself like a prey animal, like she had to be ready to bolt at any second, but she had a thousand chances to leave. A thousand chances to say no. Jason had left them open for her on purpose, and she hadn’t taken them. 

“If you think that ain’t a fair shake, say the word. I’m willin’ to negotiate.”

She took a sharp breath like she wanted to mount a counteroffer, but the words never came. She hugged her knees close to her chest, took a deep breath, and muttered, “I like hot chocolate.” Even quieter, she added, “With them little marshmallows.”

Jason cracked the first genuine, unbridled, wholehearted smile he’d managed since he got inside the Gotham city limits. His chest felt fifty pounds lighter, at least. Great. All he had to do now was not ruin it. “Me too. Was my favorite when I was a kid, actually. Any chance you’d take a few donuts, too? Eres una calaca, and it’s a little pathetic if I’m honest.”

You’re a skeleton. It was the same thing the older girls would say to Jason when he offered to add money to the pot. Worry about yourself, niño. ¡Come algo, calaca! Eat something, skeleton! For once, the memory wasn’t sharp. It was fond, warm, even as the January chill was well settled in his bones by now.

Shrimp raised an unimpressed eyebrow and cast a meaningful glance at the unconscious john. “You wanna be the second guy in this alley to get an inch and take a mile, Jason?”

“Alright, alright, I got the message. Should I tell ‘em to write Shrimp on the cup?”

“You won’t tell ‘em to write jack shit on the cup if you know what’s good for ya,” she snapped. Her dark eyes flicked towards the end of the alley like she wanted to run. Jason leaned back and held his hands up, making it clear that he wouldn’t follow her if she did. The standoff lasted ages. Jason was pretty sure ice crystals were forming inside his mouth with how fucking cold it was out here.

Shoulders hunched, skinny arms crossed tight over her chest, her whole body turned away from Jason and her eyes stuck firmly to the empty road at the mouth of the alley, she muttered, “Maria.”

It was so quiet Jason wasn’t sure he’d even heard it right. Wasn’t sure she’d spoken at all. It might’ve been the wind. When Jason didn’t respond, she went fully rigid like she was bracing her body for a blow, and louder, she said, “It’s Maria. The workin’ girls and boys and the johns call me Angel, but my abuela named me Maria.”

Jason let out a long breath. It tasted closer to relief than anything had since he left Roy. He moved his mouth soundlessly around the name a few times. It felt good, felt right. He was pretty sure he hadn’t said a single Latina name since before his death. It was a different sort of coming home than Newark airport, than passing through the city limits, than putting his boots to Gotham’s streets again. It was a home he hadn’t even realized he left, hadn’t even realized he missed.

“Maria,” he said, voice so gentle he barely recognized it as his own. “Mm. You got anyone left who still call you that?”

She shook her head, the movement slight enough that Jason almost didn’t register it. “Not since she died.”

“Miss it?”

Whatever tension the conversation had eased quickly returned. “You sure do ask a lot of fuckin’ questions—”

“My ma bit it when I was nine,” Jason offered, just trying to get her to put her guard back down. “No one’s called me mijo since. I miss it too.”

“You can’t tell nobody,” Shrimp said, ignoring Jason’s statement even as he could tell it landed with her. “I meant what I said, I have a knife and I don’t care ‘bout your fancy fuckin’ Batman fightin’, I’ll find a way to bleed you out. Anyone ask, you don’t know a damn thing about it, you only know Angel. If you ever use it with a single other motherfucker in earshot, I’ll—

“Knife me? Yeah, I get it. I’ll go to my grave with it, Maria. So long as you do the same with mine.”

“What, Jason, like the dead kid?” Her lips quirked up into the barest hint of a smirk. “Nah, I ain’t never met a Jason in my life.”

Chapter Text

Even with the specter of Arkham Asylum still constantly looming over him, even surrounded by the scars of a city that had never quite healed from the decades it had spent being ravaged by the Joker, things in Gotham were already so much better than the best Jason had dared to hope for. He’d made it back home. He’d stood in Crime Alley. And maybe, just maybe, he might’ve helped a few people, too.

So, Jason figured it was as good a time as any to go see Bruce.

Roy would be here tomorrow, and Jason really wanted to get this out of the way first. No matter what Bruce said or did, Roy would find something to hate about it, something he needed to defend Jason against, and Jason would then be faced with a deeply unenviable choice. Either he would have to spend an inordinate amount of time defending Bruce—ew—or allow Roy to go straight for Bruce’s throat, get his revenge for the Deathstroke Incident, and blow all the work Jason had done to let Bruce back into his life to shit, which was somehow even worse. For everyone’s sake, it would be so much easier just to skip that part.

Best case scenario, Jason could enjoy a reunion with Bruce without having to fend off Roy’s understandable and completely justified skepticism and distrust for several hours afterward.

Worst case scenario, well. Roy would be here to pick up the pieces soon enough.

Jason should probably let Bruce know beforehand, but… things were so stiff with him now. Formal. Weird. Watching him do his very best impression of What A Good Dad Would Say was off-putting as hell. Jason was finally starting to get his city, his people, his normal back, and he liked it. He wanted to be normal with Bruce, too.

Jason had a key. He had the address. He had an open invitation. My home is your home.

Bruce’s new place was essentially the Manor. Normal people could drop by their own kind-of-homes unannounced, right? If Bruce didn’t want Jason to do that, it was his fault for not being specific enough with his instructions. Yeah. That was plausible. Jason could just go there like a normal son, see Bruce like a normal dad, and have a normal time, right?

Besides, running the risk of being a little bit rude was far from the worst thing Jason had done to Bruce.

The drive from the hotel to Bruce’s new place was a long one, but that was fine. A few days prior, Jason had bought a motorcycle from one of Gotham’s countless scummy used car dealerships. There were surely a hundred problems with it that the salesman had conveniently forgotten to mention, especially at the price Jason had paid for it. After spending years living with a mechanic, Jason had picked up just enough knowledge to surmise that the thing wasn’t a deathtrap on wheels, but anything past that was Roy’s territory.

Instead of fixating on his slowly rising anxiety about seeing Bruce again and admitting he’d come back to Gotham unannounced, Jason kept his attention on accumulating a mental list of everything he suspected was wrong with the bike. If he presented it to Roy the moment he saw him again, he might have a viable chance of avoiding the lecture on how he’d been duped and should have waited for Roy to arrive before flushing money down the shitter like this.

There was surely a case to be made for that, but Jason needed stuff that was just his, especially when it came to transportation. Apart from the fact that there was always a chance someone was tracking your movements in Gotham and renting or taxiing was just inviting trouble, Jason also couldn’t afford to rely on anyone else to get him around or out of the minefield of triggers that was Gotham City.

The new not-Manor was on the Upper West Side, the complete opposite end of Gotham from where Wayne Manor once stood, but Bruce had still managed to nail down the uneasy, reclusive, ‘weird guy with way too much money’ vibe uncannily well. Perched at the top of a hill and surrounded by dense forest, the place was modest and minuscule compared to the grotesque extravagance of the original model, but it was still one of the nicest houses Jason had ever seen.

Jason brought his bike to a stop at the bottom of the unreasonably long driveway. Craning his neck back to stare at the mansion, he could feel it in his chest, in his bones. This place was too new to carry the same heavy, haunted energy of Wayne Manor, but it still had plenty of ghosts of its own.

It was fitting for Jason to be here, then. After all, he’d spent the whole past week haunting the footsteps of a boy who’d been dead for years.

The driveway, Jason quickly learned, was a nightmarish maze of snow-slick asphalt and sharp turns. There was no way Bruce drove this inane fucking obstacle course every time he came home. He must have a back entrance, and it was kind of a dick move not to tell Jason about it, actually.

It had to be some kind of convoluted defensive measure to deter intruders. A strange move, considering Bruce’s biggest enemy when he’d moved here could have flown right to the doorstep without toiling away at the pointless task Jason now was. Still, Bruce’s paranoia had always cast a wide net, and even back when he’d been fighting god himself, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he’d still been looking at security from a hundred other angles. It was kind of working, too. If Jason was here to rob the place, he would’ve given up and found an easier target after the fourth time his bike hit black ice and nearly veered off the road.

As it stood, though, Jason wasn’t here to rob the place, and giving up wasn’t really an option. One way or another, he was going to have to drag his sorry, frozen, snow-covered ass through Bruce’s front door. Cutting his losses, Jason parked his bike off the side of the driveway halfway up the hill and made the rest of the trip on foot.

Bruce was going to get shit for this. Bruce was going to get so much shit for this.

Actually, given what Jason knew about new-Bruce, the old man would probably apologize. Gross. Jason would much prefer some bitchy banter or even a full-blown fight. Contrition really took the fun out of it.

The front door was massive. Jason felt… small standing in front of it. Not too far off from how he’d felt the first time he’d stood in the shadow of the original Manor. Back when he was four foot nothing and so hungry he couldn’t stand without wavering. Back when he’d stepped out of Alfred’s car shaking like a leaf, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the strangest, richest guy he’d ever met to somehow come up with a worse fate than the one that awaited Jason back in the Triad.

With a deep breath, Jason sunk the key Bruce had given him into the lock, turned it, and eased the door open.

Before he even passed the threshold, Jason could feel that something was off. He dismissed it. By the time he’d lived there for a year, Jason had been so familiar with the Manor’s imposing, unsettling energy that he’d barely even felt it anymore, but this wasn’t the real Manor. It was new and different and weird. Jason wasn’t used to it yet. And apart from all of that, the anxiety was getting harder to ignore. He was nervous about seeing Bruce. A little bit. It was fine.

Still, Jason pulled his neck gaiter over his nose. He didn’t know why it helped, but it did. Probably the same repulsive cocktail of residual League training, distant memories of his time as Robin, and vivid flashes of the Asylum that guided most of Jason’s decisions. Bruce had been almost as strict about secret identities as Jason now was, every Shadow covered their face—no assassin worth their salt had a single identifying mark—and the memory of Joker forcing Jason’s name out of him after three days of nonstop torture never really left his head.

There wouldn’t be anyone here but Bruce, anyone who would be disgusted or appalled at the sight of Jason’s ruined scarred face, but even Bruce still looked at it a bit too long, his gaze lingering on Jason’s mouth before quickly snapping up to his eyes. A practiced, nearly perfect mask of neutrality would slip effortlessly over his face, but Jason still saw it.

It hurt Bruce to look at him. The real him.

And Jason really wasn’t in the fucking mood. He’d never been in the mood for anyone’s reaction to the scars, actually, not even back in the days when he’d be killing them within seconds. Jason’s nerves had already been on edge almost nonstop for the whole past week. He didn’t need to add any fuel to that fire.

The mansion was plenty big enough that Bruce wouldn’t have even heard Jason come in if he was more than a few rooms away. Jason took the opportunity to do some preliminary reconnaissance and figure out what kind of hornet’s nest he was about to kick here.

Or, he was going to take the opportunity to do preliminary reconnaissance, if turning the first corner hadn’t ended with him almost colliding with another body. Jason managed to plant his foot at the last second, jolting back two steps, knives already in his outstretched hands protecting center mass. His mind reacted slower than his body. It took a few moments for him to actually decode the person in front of him.

It was a kid. A very, very distinctly not-Bruce kid.

“Who the fuck are you?” Jason hissed. It was a safer, softer, less permanent move than the one the Pit desperately, fervently demanded of him: kill the little shit before he could reveal himself as a friend or foe, before he had the chance to kill Jason first. Or, at the very least, stab both his blades through the kid’s hands and pin him to the wall like a moth to cork until he got some answers. People tended to spill real fast with a little motivation.

Even as Jason kind of agreed with those particular sentiments, he was supposed to be better than that now. He had to be better than that now.

“Who am I—I’m supposed to be here, who are you?!” The kid’s voice was high and tight, his light brown eyes darting from Jason’s face to his knives, around the room, and back again. Perspiration on the forehead, slight tension in the muscles, Jason could almost hear the jump in his pulse. He was afraid. Good. He should be.

The kid’s eyes flicked to the door behind Jason, probably realizing there was no sign of forced entry, and widened even further. “Are you—are you trying to rob this place? Because I promise you really don’t wanna mess with the guy who lives here.”

Jason took a moment to size up his opponent. The kid looked fucking harmless. Shaggy black hair fell out of a bun and into his eyes, he had a slight frame that looked like a strong breeze could blow him over, he was still in his pajamas for fuck’s sake. Small, young, jumpy, anxious, breakable.

This didn’t require immediate murder in self-defense. And if that changed, Jason could snap him in half like a twig.

“Of course I’m not a fucking robber. Bruce doesn’t scare me and neither do you. Who are you? Why are you here?” Jason flipped one of the daggers through the fingers of his left hand and watched as the kid’s eyes tracked it, a well-hidden shudder running through him. “And I’d advise you not to lie. You don’t wanna know what happens to people who lie to me.”

The kid cracked a nervous smile. “Ha, um, not that I don’t love being threatened by masked strangers or anything, but trust me, you don’t want this fight.”

“I really, really do, actually,” Jason countered, little more than a growl. Judging by the slight burn in his blood and the alarmed look on the kid’s face, he could guess that his eyes were starting to glow. “But I’ll still give you one more chance. State your business for being in this house, and maybe you won’t have to get any more familiar with my knives.”

The kid shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Mmkay. Have it your way.”

Well past fed up, Jason made his move. The lunge was flawless, fluid and sudden, feinting to the left first in such a way that the kid wouldn’t even see the knife until it was through his shoulder, pinning him to the wall. But Jason’s blade embedded itself, unsatisfyingly, into plaster and nothing else. A faint crackling noise and the fuzz of static electricity in the air were all that was left in the kid’s place.

“A fucking meta?” Jason muttered under his breath, harsh. He hated fighting metas. Especially new ones he didn’t have any research on or experience with. A long string of Spanish curses fell from his mouth. “You gotta be shittin’ me, B…”

“Looking for me?” The voice came from above him, and it took an embarrassing ten seconds of searching for Jason to realize the kid was sitting on the banister a whole floor up from him.

Teleportation? For fucking real? What the fuck ever happened to the no metas in Gotham rule?!

“Sorry to disappoint, Big Scary,” the kid continued, voice light and breezy and missing even an ounce of the previous hesitation Jason had been so sure he could capitalize on. He trotted down the stairs, leisurely, the way you would move if you could disappear anytime someone tried to put you in your place. With a stupid, chipper little smile, he got right up into Jason’s personal space, just a few inches away. “But if you were looking for an easy win, you should probably go pick a fight with one of Gotham’s seemingly innumerable run-of-the-mill criminals instead.”

“I enjoy a challenge.” Jason yanked his blade out of the wall and began to circle his opponent slowly, looking for an angle. The kid just let him do it, not even following Jason’s eyes, this wasn’t how it worked, this wasn’t how it worked. Jason forced a cocky smirk to cover the panic. “And I’ve fought and killed bigger and badder than—”

There was a sharp crack, a fizzle, and the kid became a blur of motion as he sprinted across the room. The punch was barely a glancing blow to Jason’s chest, but at that speed, it knocked Jason flat on his back and robbed all the air from his lungs.

Not teleportation, then. This scrawny little shit was a speedster. And the only one still alive he knew of was—

“The Flash?” Jason wheezed, the ceiling tiles blurring and sharpening before his eyes, astounded and frankly fucking pissed off at the way things were going. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Oh cool, so you’ve heard of me.” Jason couldn’t pinpoint where the voice was anymore. If his brain was already short-circuiting this much from one blow, the implications for whatever remained of this fight were so bad that he choked on what little air had come back into his body the moment the thought entered his mind. The kid’s voice sounded underwater when he spoke again. “I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but for one, I still don’t know who you are, and for two, so far, you’re remarkably unpleasant.”

Jason fumbled for the knives the blow had knocked from his hands and made his way back to his feet, slow and unsteady. Meticulously, he scanned his surroundings for his enemy and found a concerning and total lack of world-saving speedster. He let out a frustrated huff, doing his best not to think too hard about how the Flash had helped save the world, helped kill Superman, and how decidedly easier it would be to off Jason than the god who almost ushered in the apocalypse.

There was a tap on Jason’s shoulder. Every last cell of his body went into attack mode, striking backward with his knife without even taking the time to aim, but somehow, he was still too slow. His weapon met plain air.

Another harsh spike of panic rocked his body. He didn’t know how to fight a speedster. The League hadn’t trained him on speedsters, he hadn’t studied speedsters, he didn’t know how to fight a speedster.

Fear was wild and painful and green in Jason’s veins. There was a door somewhere inside him, a door made of when do you stop running and maybe she doesn’t have to be wrong and promise you’ll do whatever it takes to stop me, a door Jason had locked the Pit behind months ago. A door Jason had worked his ass off to keep closed. A door the Pit had been thrashing against and clawing at from the moment Jason first bumped into the Flash. It was splintering. It was groaning under the pressure. The shards breaking off were slicing into Jason’s heart.

He would never be fast enough. He would never be fast enough to land a single hit, let alone come out of this fight on top. And Jason was weak. He didn’t want to die again.

He opened the door. He let the Pit out.

Chapter Text

It was only supposed to be for a second. Just to give Jason long enough to think, to breathe, to plan.

It was just for a second.

But he opened his eyes to the Flash’s smaller body pinned beneath his own, his knees bracketing the kid’s arms and all his weight on the heaving chest under him. Jason’s left hand was fisted in the kid’s hair, yanking his head back to expose the vulnerable skin of his neck, and his right had a knife pressed into the kid’s throat, just above the Adam’s apple. Jason could see the pulse standing out, the carotid artery that would be so easy to sever. 

The blade had already drawn a thin line of red, the blood trailing down the sides of the Flash’s throat to soak into the carpet beneath him. With twenty percent more pressure and a quick slice, Jason could watch the life drain right out of the Flash’s body, and help would never arrive in time to save him. 

The kid’s eyes were wide. He was staring at Jason like he was seeing him for the first time, the real him, the one that lurked beneath layers of lies and fruitless attempts to be good, to be a person. The Flash was seeing the monster beneath the human skin. The fear was wild and alive in his eyes, the fear Jason deserved, the only thing he still deserved.

He was just a kid, he was just a fucking kid, Jason didn’t hurt kids, he didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be here. 

The hesitation couldn’t have been much more than a second or two, but it was enough. Jason didn’t even know what happened. He blinked, and there was the vague feeling of a presence behind him and nothing beneath him. Had the kid—had he moved through Jason’s grip? Through his body?

Without thinking, Jason turned and swept the Flash’s legs out from under him, but he recovered so quickly that Jason barely even saw him fall. And of course, Jason’s eyes couldn’t react fast enough to track him, and he lost the kid again. He was a sitting duck. Again . God, Jason hadn’t wanted to kill someone this badly in a long time, hadn’t even wanted to kill Maria’s john this badly, and it was for all the wrong fucking reasons. 

The Flash was a hero. He hadn’t trafficked children into a lifetime of slavery, he hadn’t used drug lord money and power to corrupt governments, he’d helped kill Superman, for fuck’s sake. But Jason was frustrated and he wasn’t used to being one-down in a fight and this wasn’t fear, fear was dangerous, he wasn’t allowed to be afraid but this was still bad, this was really bad. 

There would be no doing it by halves, that much was clear now. If Jason let the Pit help him, it wouldn’t stop at a few inches of breathing room. It wouldn’t stop at all. It would be the end of the Flash’s life.

It wasn’t worth it.

With every frantic beat of his heart, Jason shoved the Pit back another step. It didn’t matter how bad Jason wanted it, it didn’t matter how much the Flash did or didn’t deserve to suffer or die, nothing was worth letting the Pit kill for him. Nothing was worth giving up what he and Roy had torn themselves and each other apart to accomplish. Nothing was worth staining his hands with even more blood that would never, ever wash out. Nothing was worth how Roy would react if Jason relapsed.

Even if restraint would end in Jason’s blood, even if it would end Jason’s life, it didn’t matter. Nothing could be worth that.

Jason opened the door in his mind, threw the Pit back in, and slammed it shut. It was barely holding itself together, frail and splintered, and Jason knew he’d be seeing green at the edges of his vision for days, but he didn’t have the time or resources to repair it right now. This would have to be good enough. To get him through the fight, at least. Please, please let it be good enough.

Finally, the kid emerged from one of the countless corridors that split off from the foyer. God, even the way he walked pissed Jason off. It was purposefully slow, like this fucker needed to make a conscious effort just to move at the pace everyone else on the fucking planet did. 

The Flash held his fingers to the wound in his neck and blinked at them as they came away coated in red. After a long moment, he turned wide eyes on Jason, the bemusement in them clearly hiding the bits of soft, fragile, honest panic that lay beneath. “Not cool, dude. You don’t see me bringing a knife to a fistfight.” 

“Nah, you just bring half a thunderstorm and the wrath of fuckin’ god,” Jason muttered, knives held at the ready. 

“Also feels like a good time to remind you the fistfight could’ve just been a conversation if you didn’t have a Superman-sized temper and the impulse control to match.”

The Pit purred its satisfaction at the comparison. Jason felt more than a little sick. He filed it away to ruminate on later. “Be glad I didn’t turn it into a murder scene.” 

The Flash rolled his eyes. “Wow, the Generic Villain Factory really must’ve been running low on funds when they churned you out.” 

The kid put his hands on his hips, looked down, and sighed, then glanced back up with the same eerily Dick Grayson-esque million-watt smile he’d had before the Pit had pinned him down. Jason wanted to break out his teeth. Wanted to make sure he could never pull that smile again.

“Anyways, as established, I’m the Flash.” His voice was bright and conversational again, a strange, sharp, uneasy contrast against the blood still dripping down his throat and painting the collar of his white t-shirt a violent crimson.

“Congrats.”

“Not a lot of people get to see me with the mask off, you must be a special kind of burglar.”

“I’m not a fuckin’ burglar, I told you that already, and your secret identity ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on to me. What the fuck are you doing here?” Where’s Bruce? He wanted to add, but it was too weak, too much information, too close to an admission that he needed help to get out of this in one piece.

The Flash didn’t look even a little bit bothered as he deliberately sidestepped Jason’s question. “Flash’s the name, speed’s the game, as you probably know, I helped kill Superman—you’re welcome, by the way—and a fun fact about me is I really don’t appreciate having knives held to my throat. You know who I am, you’ve seen my face, that feels like a pretty decent show of good faith if I do say so my—”

“Are your ears broke? I don’t give a fuck about any of that, you still ain’t told me why you’re here. Talk.” 

“Or… what?” He asked with a grin that was more playful than cocky, and that was almost worse, somehow. The same fight that presented a serious and imminent threat to Jason’s life was a fucking game to the Flash. “You’ll put another dent in the drywall? Stab an inanimate object? Or maybe a particularly offensive bit of air? I could have incapacitated you already if I wanted to. Hopefully, this strange and disproportionate belief you have in your abilities hasn’t put you so far up your own ass that you can’t see that. You can’t kill me, I don’t particularly want to kill you—or, I’m reserving my judgments for now, at least—so why don’t we just start over? You know some things about me. Let’s hear some things about you. Your name would be a good place to start.”

Green surged like a tidal wave inside Jason at the thought. No. Candy and Maria were one thing but that—no. The Flash wasn’t a Triad kid, he wasn’t even from Gotham, he didn’t get to ask Jason that. There’s nothing more dangerous an enemy can take from you. No chance. No chance in hell. 

“Or your powers, maybe? Apart from the super-rudeness, which is kind of a given.”

“I could kill you, pendejo,” Jason hissed, more like a reassurance for himself than a threat to the Flash. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t. It shouldn’t matter, the Flash didn’t need to die, he didn’t deserve to die, it was just—it was—even when Jason had nothing else, no semblance of safety or comfort, the one shield he could hold in front of his battered body was that no one could beat him in a fight. Put the League’s favorite weapon in a room one-on-one with anyone and it could kill them. Rip itself to shreds inside and out to get the job done, maybe, but it could kill them. Jason could kill them. He could always kill them.

He might not be able to kill this one. The Pit could, had already proven as much, had been about half an inch from ending the fight and the Flash’s worthless life and Jason was the one who had given it up. The opportunity was still there. The Pit still lurked behind the door, pacing the length of its cell, biding its time, waiting for Jason’s resolve to falter or his confidence to crack. More than ready, more than willing, it would be so easy. But without sacrificing everything he’d done to build a life worth living, Jason might not be able to kill the Flash. And if he couldn’t, then he was helpless, wasn’t he? And if he was helpless, then— then—

“No, you really can’t,” the Flash said, smile still as bright as the yellow sparking through his eyes. He made a vague gesture to Jason. “I’ve been through this whole tough guy, ooh, don’t fuck with me, I’m a big mean dog, growl bark growl bark rigamarole like, a thousand times. You aren’t even the first guy with glowing eyes who’s tried to do it to me, that’s how often I’ve been around this block. I’m sure it works wonders on whatever poor saps you victimize on the daily. Really, it’s a great schtick, they probably really do find you as terrifying as you think you are. But I’m not them, and this stuff stopped working on me a long time ago. Alpha male macho posturing and BS aside, I’m being so real with you right now, you can’t kill me. Pinky swear, you can’t kill me.”

Static crackled through the air. The Flash disappeared again. Jason shoved the panic down as far as it would go and turned, finding his opponent on the opposite side of the foyer, right next to the front door.

The kid gave a friendly little half-wave. “See?” 

He closed the distance between himself and Jason, slow this time. When he came to a stop, it was once again well within killing striking distance. It was a taunt. If Jason actually reached for him, the Flash could be a mile away before Jason even registered the movement. 

Jason knew, but he made a wild slash at the kid anyway. It was all he had.

Of course, by the time the blade would’ve sunk in, the Flash was ten feet away. The moment Jason’s hand returned to his side, the kid was right up in his face again. Somehow, every time it happened, it still managed to make Jason even angrier.

The Flash clicked his tongue in disapproval. “Ooh. Bad dog. Can’t teach him any new tricks.”

“Ain’t anyone ever told you to shut the fuck up?” Jason snarled.

“Growl bark, growl bark, there he goes again. You’re very scary. People have told me to shut up pretty much every day since I learned how to talk, though, and it hasn’t stopped me yet. Fantastically unoriginal. I’m right here whenever you wanna try out some new material.”

Jason clenched his fists around the cold metal of the handles of his knives, hard enough to make his fingers ache, but didn’t make another move towards his opponent. The Flash, for all his incessant fucking chattering, wasn’t wrong. Speed would never win him this fight. Jason needed something else.

“Oh good,” the Flash said, his stupid fucking permanent smile going warm and vaguely patronizing, “It’s finally sinking in. Sure took your time dragging yourself to that conclusion, didn’t you? Had me thinking you might never get there. The bigger the ego, the deeper the bruise, so I’m sure you’re still nursing it, but try not to take it too personal. Superman couldn’t even kill me and you… you’re not Superman. So, one more time, I’m gonna ask nice. Who are you, and why are you here? Think carefully now, because if you still can’t swallow your pride and work with me, you’re not gonna like the road we go down next.”

But Jason had his way in now. 

Enough instances had piled up to confirm it. 

The Flash flinched every time he said Superman’s name. 

There was something there. He couldn’t beat the kid physically? Fine. A Bat’s power was in their mind, not their body. And long before he was Talia al Ghul’s weapon or the All-Caste’s warrior, Jason had always been a Bat.

Jason could win this fight. Not the Pit, Jason. Calm washed over his body, settled his frantic heart, and steadied his muscles. He let a slow breath out through his nose, held the Flash’s eyes, and capitalized.

“Superman couldn’t kill you?” Jason asked, choosing every word carefully and delivering them slow and even, doing everything in his power to maximize his window to notice physical tells and ensure there was no chance the Flash would mishear. “But Superman killed Aquaman, didn’t he? And Martian Manhunter?” 

A small cringe at the second name. Alright. Progress.

“He killed half your city, too, right? Marched his army right in there and turned your home and your people and everything you’ve ever known to ash in a few hours, just like he did to Gotham?”

For half a moment, the Flash looked away. Closer. Good. 

“Subjugated most of the planet and barely broke a sweat, but he couldn’t kill you? I don’t buy it. Maybe he wasn’t trying to kill you. Maybe he just didn’t see you as a threat. Why would he, really? I mean, you zip around the place and do your little quips and put on a nice show, sure, but that ain’t gonna save the world. You’re not good for much outside that, are you? Not like your teammates, I mean…” Jason sucked his teeth. “Batman? Master strategist, elite combat skills, one of the best minds on the planet, probably the reason you guys won at all. Deathstroke? Ruthless bastard, incredibly versatile, world’s most infamous mercenary. Mera? Gotta imagine she’s got the same powers as Aquaman, so another scary motherfucker.” 

Another cringe, with his shoulders this time. Jason was circling the body, poised and ready to go for the throat. All he needed were the right words to get the Flash to tilt his head back.

“Cybor—”

Jason’s whole world went dark. There were a few moments where nothing was real, where he couldn’t hear or feel or see a thing, and then there was pain screeching through his head like his brain had gone through a blender. He blinked until a fraction of the haze cleared and he could make out the fuzzy outline of ceiling lights above him. Ugh. ‘Fighting a speedster’ was definitely going on Jason’s ever-growing list of experiences he never wanted to have again. 

“Keep Victor’s name out of your fucking mouth,” a voice snarled above him. It was so menacing, so viciously, violently angry that it took Jason a few slow, stupid seconds to realize it was still the Flash talking. The same Flash who’d been skipping circles around Jason with childlike glee not two minutes before. 

Good. Anger was good. He could work with anger. He could make anger work for him.

“Yikes, did I hit a nerve?” Jason muttered flatly, dragging himself back to his feet. “Is Victor a touchy subje—”

Jason’s back hit the wall so hard that two picture frames crashed to the ground with him. The pain started as a blunt ache but quickly built to a sharp, stabbing throb that engulfed his whole face. There was a dull thudding noise playing on repeat so quickly that it was more of a wall of sound than anything. 

The Flash must be punching him, but the movements were so fast Jason couldn’t even see them. There was a hand around his throat, letting just enough air in to keep him at the edge of consciousness. Awake enough to feel it all, but weak enough to ensure every hand Jason tried to hold up to guard his face was batted away effortlessly. He tasted blood, could feel it draining down the back of his throat, churning thick and sickening in his gut. Everything was underwater. He couldn’t even tell which way was up anymore. 

All at once, the Flash was gone, leaving Jason crumpled at the base of the wall, gasping for air. Jason didn’t bother looking for him this time. That wasn’t how he would win this fight. 

The Flash had gotten him good. There was enough blood soaking into the gaiter that it was getting hard to breathe through it. That was fine. Jason had breathed through worse. “I can take a shit-kickin’ kid,” he panted, licking the blood from his teeth with a sharp grin.  “I learned from the best. I could do this all night. Can you?”

Silence answered him. 

Jason wasn’t bothered. He wheezed out a mocking laugh. “Shit, I say some random nobody’s name and you’re ready to pitch the world’s fastest bitch fit. Ain’t you supposed to be a superhero? This seriously the best you got? Cause unless you’re in the mood to smash that precious good guy image of yours to smithereens and kill me right now, I’m just gonna go ahead and keep on talking about Victor and we’ll see who lasts—”

“You forgot to mention the Joker.”

Jason flinched with his whole body.

He didn’t mean to. It was just a name. It was just a fucking name. But he hadn’t—fuck—he hadn’t expected that here, he hadn’t been ready for any of this, this wasn’t how he fought, this was wrong. Every day he’d spent here in Gotham had put another crack in the walls he kept around his memories of Joker. They were weak, they were breakable, Joker couldn’t come up right now, Jason was already losing, fuck, fuck.

“You wanna run your mouth about my team? You’re forgetting someone. The Joker. I watched him play mind games for almost a year, you really think you can do it better than him?”

No. No, he didn’t. Jason knew he couldn’t, and he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to be like Joker, he’d never wanted to be like Joker, the last fucking person on the planet he wanted to be like was Joker, he just didn’t want to be pinned to this wall like a fucking bug. He had nowhere to run and he heard the cold, detached note in the Flash’s voice, he knew where this was headed, he didn’t want to go there, he didn’t want to be here. 

Jason cringed harder, fists held out in front of him. It was a weak, ineffectual shield and an even weaker excuse for a threat, but Joker used to crowd him against walls like this. Used to let Jason try to fight his way out before chaining him up and beating him into a stain on the Asylum floor for the hundredth time. And how different was this, really? If anything it was worse. Joker didn’t have powers. This motherfucker most certainly did.

He didn’t care how weak or ineffective it was, Joker had taken Jason’s fight away from him once, and he would be good and goddamned if he ever let it happen again.

With every harsh, ragged breath, the wall behind Jason got colder, the mildew smell in the air got stronger, the slow, incessant dripping noise got louder, Jason’s mind was headed somewhere he wouldn’t be able to pull it out of. When this happened at the hotel, it had taken him out of commission for hours and he couldn’t do that, not here, not now, not in the presence of an enemy, quite possibly the most dangerous one he’d ever fought.

A fresh burst of blood flooded Jason’s mouth as he bit down hard on his tongue. He had to stay present, he had to stay silent, he had to stop the broken bird within him from gaining traction. There was a Robin begging for mercy, begging to be rescued before Joker could get to him again, but nobody would save Robin. Nobody would save Jason. He was alone. He was alone with the Joker Flash.

Not real. Not real. But a whimper came out past his teeth anyway.

“Oh, you don’t like Joker?” The Flash’s voice was getting closer. There was a bitter, vindictive twist of fake pity in it now, every last ounce of the earlier ease and light completely vanished. Jason cringed back again, but there was nowhere to go. “Should we talk about him some more then, since you love talking so much?” 

The Flash finally stepped into Jason’s view. His whole body was vibrating with rage. Sparks of yellow were still darting through his eyes, but they were dark now, they were dangerous now. 

“What’s your problem with him?” He asked, and Jason didn’t miss the change in the way he spoke. The thrill of the hunt, the predator instinct, the sick rush of sinking your teeth into something soft and vulnerable, Jason recognized it. It was the same way he had spoken when he’d found the Flash’s weakness. “Your accent, you talk like you grew up here. Were you raised on stories of all the fucked up things Joker did just to get Batman’s attention?” 

That didn’t earn a reaction. Something in Jason solidified. The Flash didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe he could get through this in one piece.

The kid’s eyes darkened further. A hint of a smirk pulled at his lips. A frantic, unstable feeling shot through Jason, like the electricity that fizzled off the Flash every time he used his powers. “No, it was something closer to home than that. He didn’t just leave a mark on Gotham, he left a mark on you, specifically. Did he come for your people? Hurt somebody you care about? Kill somebody you care about? Did he make you watch?”

That was closer, close enough for the fear to come back, to turn Jason’s spine to liquid again. Once again, the Pit offered its services, hissing and simmering in his chest, acidic energy coiled in his muscles, and once again, Jason beat it the fuck back.

“Stop,” he whispered instead, shaky and feeble. It was more weakness than he could afford to show but he didn’t care, his mind was so loud, and if he didn’t do something soon, the Pit was going to kill the Flash and Bruce would never even look at Jason again. He covered his head with trembling hands. “I get it, now stop.”

“Why?”

Jason felt the impact as the Flash dropped to his knees in front of him. He kept his head down. An endless tide of Joker images was already flooding his mind and the Flash was pale enough that Jason could mistake it for the corpse white of Joker’s skin if he looked at it from the wrong angle, everything was wrong angles right now, and if he opened his eyes to a single reminder of the clown, Jason was going to lose it.

It was pointless. A hand fisted in his hair, gave a harsh yank, and slammed the back of Jason’s head into the wall behind him. The pain forced Jason’s eyes open, and the gaze that met his was yellow, not green, but Jason saw Joker just the same. These eyes danced the same way the clown’s did when he was drinking in an impending victory, when he was deciding how he’d inflict that victory on Jason’s body.

The Joker’s Flash’s lip curled into a snarl. “You didn’t have any issues talking about my dead teammates, my dead friends, my family, give me one reason why you deserve the mercy you never would’ve even entertained showing me.”

Jason’s mouth worked soundlessly around words that wouldn’t come. 

There was nothing to say. Jason had never deserved anyone’s mercy.

The Flash made an unimpressed noise. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So, should I just throw out names until I hit my mark, too? Was it your sister? Your brother? Mom, Dad, best friend?”

Jason looked away, just for a fraction of a second, but recognition sparked in the Flash’s eyes all the same. 

“Oh. It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one he hurt.”

Liquid fire and desperation surged through Jason’s muscles, and he had to drop his hands to the floor and clench his fists in the carpet to stop them from closing around the Flash’s still-bleeding neck. Jason couldn’t kill him. He was too slow. He would always be too slow. He couldn’t kill him, he couldn’t kill him, and if he tried to it would only make everything worse but god, Jason wanted to kill him. 

“The Joker I knew wasn’t really in the habit of letting his victims escape with their lives, but you were special, weren’t you?” The Flash’s hand tightened in Jason’s hair, using it to turn his head from side to side. His voice went low, and Jason had to fight off a shiver. “Aww, big mean dog’s bark is a lot worse than his bite. He can dish it out, but he just can’t take it. Why am I not surprised? Is that what this little muzzle you wear is about? Did the Joker give you something to remember him by?”

The Flash reached for Jason’s mask.

There was nowhere left to go.

Jason was falling into a pit with no bottom and there was only one ledge to grab, one shield he could hide behind, there was only one thing he could—

“My name is Jason, okay?!”

Oh god, what the fuck was he doing? What was he doing?! He shouldn’t be saying this, he shouldn’t be saying this, he shouldn’t be— “My name is Jason, I’m here to see Bruce, he told me I could come whenever I wanted. That’s the truth, I told you the truth, now back the fuck off of me.”

Whatever. Whatever. Jason was in no condition to come up with a lie good enough to fool someone who probably had Bat training, and there was no way the Flash would know who he was based solely on a first name and the less-identifiable half of his face. The silence had a fist around Jason’s bruised throat, cutting off the blood flow to his brain, blocking the air from reaching his lungs, the pressure was too much, Jason’s head felt like it was going to burst—

“You’re lying.” The Flash’s voice was soft, a slight tremor in it, nothing like the easy fight-winning confidence of a few seconds before. There was a strange, unreadable tension in his body, his eyes were impossibly wide, and his grip on Jason’s hair had gone slack. Jason wished he had the strength to rip it from the kid’s hand altogether—Joker had held him like this way too many times for it to be safe—but the best he could do was let out a weak growl.

“I’m not fucking lying. Why the fuck would I lie about my name to a stranger? That’s so fucking stupid.”

“Because you see me as an enemy and you’re trying to regain the upper hand. Same logic behind every other thing you’ve done since you got here. I don’t know how you know about Jason, but using him as leverage is…” The Flash made a confused, disgusted face and shook his head. “Unbelievably fucked up. For someone who seems to hate Joker so much, you certainly act an awful lot like him. You’re lucky Batman isn’t here, or you’d probably end up on the news tonight.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He should've just given the kid a fake name, shit!

Jason shoved the Joker comparison—the second of the night—away to lose his shit about later and tried to focus on the slightly improved direction the fight had taken. Keep the Flash talking for long enough for Jason to get his strength back or for Bruce to show up and actually save him for once. He’d still be faced with the same problem as before, how to fight or escape someone who could run circles around him, but that was still better than—than Joker.

“Shocked he told you about me,” Jason muttered, staring at the ground.

“Jason died. He’s dead. He died a child, and he died a hero. You’re very alive, an adult, and an asshole. Try again.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jason breathed out, frustrated, exhausted, done. “This is the most asinine conversation I’ve ever been a part of.” He picked his head up to glare at the Flash. “I was dead. I’m not anymore. You want the details, you can hit Bruce up, but you ain’t my problem and I won’t do this inane fuckin’ song and dance again for your benefit.”

The Flash let out a nervous little laugh and looked around like he was expecting someone to jump out at him and reveal that this had all been an exceptionally strange, elaborate, tone-deaf joke. “Are you messing with me? Because this is a really, really weird thing to lie about, it’s definitely not funny, and it’s not what I meant by ‘new material’.”

Jason finally gathered the strength to push the Flash off of him. The motion was lifeless and pathetic, but the kid let him go anyway. Slowly, unsteadily, and with a lot of help from the wall behind him, Jason scooped the one knife he hadn't lost possession of off the floor and made it back to his feet. Still, he was nowhere near the shape he’d need to be in to outmaneuver the Flash. He needed a distraction.

With a sigh, Jason scrubbed a hand over his aching face—and yeah, his nose was definitely broken, whatever— and yanked the gaiter down to hang around his neck. The Flash took a step back, eyes wide and horrified as they repeatedly darted between Jason’s eyes and his mouth. 

Jason did his best to ignore the squirming in his guts, the way his heart was crawling up his throat, the way the Flash’s eyes felt like branding irons on his skin. “Does this answer your question?” He snapped. “You wanted to know so bad, here it is. This is what Joker gave me to remember him by, about six hours before he fucking killed me. I’m Jason, I’m not dead anymore, and I’m here to see my fucking dad. What else do you want, two forms of ID and a goddamn DNA test? Wanna call me a dog a few more fucking times, or can we be done now?” 

The Flash took another staggering step backward. This was as good an opening as Jason was going to get. He lurched forward to push past the kid, but the motion was too fast for his broken head and the world pitched sideways under him. The hand that was meant to shove the Flash aside ended up fisted in the sleeve of his shirt, the only anchor keeping Jason’s feet under him.

They stayed like that for a long, viscerally uncomfortable moment, the Flash seemingly rooted to the spot and Jason just trying to get the room to stop fucking spinning, until Jason finally had the wherewithal to push the kid away again.

One painfully slow, easily exploitable, uncoordinated step at a time, Jason started dragging himself toward the door. There was blood dripping from his chin to the floor in long, viscous strands, Jason’s mind threatened to betray him again as it hauled him back towards Joker, towards his knife in Jason’s mouth, towards it sawing into his cheek and— Jason tried to wipe it away, but there was no point. The stream was too steady, and Jason was too off-balance to spare a hand trying to staunch the bleeding. Whatever.

It took a few steps before Jason was willing to risk moving his head again. As dizzy as he was, he had to look where he was going. Faceplanting into a wall was the last fucking thing he needed right now.

He looked up just in time to see the door swing open. 

Jason stumbled back three steps in his surprise, and that was enough to take his legs out from under him again and send him back to the floor in a heap.

Steel blue eyes met his. Jason’s heart came to a crashing halt.

“Bruce?”

Chapter Text

For a single moment, the only thing Jason felt at the sight of Bruce was visceral, primal, bone-deep relief.

A single moment where something deep and base and stupid and Robin-shaped in him let go of every scrap of tension it had been holding. The same something that had been begging to be rescued from Joker minutes before even though just like last time, just like every time, Bruce was far too late to save Jason from the mess he’d made or the people that hurt him.

A single moment, and then everything else drowned it out, because this wasn’t good. It couldn’t be good. Bruce would never, ever side with Jason on this one. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even ask for Jason’s side. 

Jason scrambled back to his feet, supporting himself on the nearest wall, bracing against it with one hand while the other weakly clutched the single knife he still had. He was far too close to the Flash. Anywhere in the state of New Jersey was too fucking close to the Flash. But he couldn’t worry about that right now. 

Bruce was here. Bruce’s eyes were on him. Bruce was staring him down.

If the fire in Bruce’s eyes meant the same thing now that it had meant when Jason was Robin, then he knew exactly where this was headed. And, well. He was far more afraid of that version of Bruce than he ever could be of the Flash.

“Jason,” Bruce said after a long moment, voice impressively even. He closed the door behind him and set the grocery bags in his hands aside with calm, measured movements. “I don’t think I realized you were stopping by.” His eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly. “Or that you were back in town.”

Each word was clipped. Pointed. Jason recognized the tone from years of working with Batman, inevitably and invariably falling short of his impossible standards. He recognized the tone from every time he’d ever been benched from patrol, Bruce looking at him and seeing a liability instead of an asset and revoking the trust Jason had worked so hard to earn. With a sharp, sickening pang that rang endlessly in his hollowed out chest, Jason recognized it as the exact same tone Bruce had used after Felipe Garzonas’ death.

The same one he’d used when he accused Jason of murder at 13 years old. 

Fuck. 

Every muscle, every bone, every blood cell in Jason’s body was screaming at him to run, his eyes lingering longingly on the door behind Bruce, but he knew there was no point. Even if he could make a straight line from here to the entrance, and that was a massive if, Bruce wouldn’t allow it and Jason couldn’t fight Batman like this. He couldn’t fight anyone like this. And a failed attempt to run from his colossal, cataclysmic, unfixable mistake would only make Bruce angrier.

Fuck it. If Jason’s body wouldn’t work, his mouth would once again have to pick up the slack. “And I didn’t realize you had a meta lurkin’ the halls of your house. Today’s full of surprises.”

“Not to butt in,” the Flash said, frantic and incredulous and fast, “but I didn’t know your dead kid was alive, Bruce, so I kinda feel like that takes the cake!”

For a moment, Bruce’s gaze left Jason and settled on the Flash, immediately softening. Jason dragged in a raw, gasping breath. He hadn’t even realized how much Bruce’s eyes had felt like rigid, frigid iron bars wrapped around his lungs, choking the life out of him. Just a moment, and then Bruce’s attention returned to Jason, and the weight crushed him flat into the stupidly expensive carpet he was currently bleeding all over. The barely concealed wrath had completely left Bruce’s face when he looked at the Flash, and now it was back. Which meant Bruce’s rage was for Jason, and only for Jason. 

“I didn’t think it was the appropriate time, Barry,” Bruce said. The words were even and toneless, but Jason heard the anger anyway. The same something that held that stupid, childish hope that Bruce might actually be here to save him, the thing that held onto a bloodstained Robin uniform like a life raft, the thing still stuck inside Arkham with Joker that would go on believing in Bruce until its dying breath, flinched at the sound of it. 

The Flash (Barry?), on the other hand, was either oblivious or apathetic to the storm brewing between Bruce and Jason. “Is there an appropriate time to tell me your Robin is, what?” Jason could feel the kid’s eyes on him. “A zombie?” 

Jason spared a glance backward towards the Flash but was quickly pulled back in by the magnetism of Bruce’s anger. He forced a shrug from leaden shoulders. “Somethin’ like that.”

The facade slipped from Bruce’s face for half a second as Jason spoke, and he could feel the full force of the fury lurking behind it. There was a vein standing out in Bruce’s neck, his face had all the sharp lines usually reserved for the mask he had sworn he was leaving behind, and his eyes were flint and steel and danger. Jason pressed his back harder to the wall behind him, like he could get any farther away from Bruce without sacrificing the precious distance he’d put between himself and the Flash. Like maybe he could disappear inside the walls of a house that had never been his home and never could be now if he just wanted it bad enough.

With Bruce looking at Jason like that, with his own body quite literally between Bruce and his real new kid, Jason suddenly felt very small, very young, very out of place. This wasn’t his home. He didn’t belong here. He wasn’t welcome in Gotham. She couldn’t have sent that message any clearer than she did when she fucking killed him, but he still hadn’t gotten it through his thick skull. 

God, he should’ve stayed in China, he should’ve stayed with Roy, he should’ve known his fucking place. He was happy. He had his one good thing that years of blood and pain and failure couldn’t touch. But he’d gotten greedy, reached for more when he knew he already didn’t deserve what he had, and now he was going to lose it all.

The words were lodged right there behind his teeth, seems like you two have some shit to sort out, I’ll come back some other time, but they died in his throat.

There was still a sentence to be handed down, after all. A punishment he’d earned. The same training that had spurred Jason to turn this into a fistfight in the first place kept his feet glued in place now, unable to leave without first hearing Talia’s Bruce’s judgment. 

Bruce’s attention flitted between Jason and the Flash again. “Go upstairs, Barry. We’ll talk later.”

Jason couldn’t tell if it made him feel better or worse that Bruce wanted to deliver whatever punishment he was concocting for Jason in private. Wasn’t sure he’d know better if it bashed him over the head with a crowbar right now. Wasn’t sure worse could leave a dent in a situation this fucked.

“No shot whatsoever,” the kid countered, voice trembling as he seemed to do his best impression of the easy, unquestionable confidence that had come second nature when Jason was his opponent instead of Bruce. “You’ve spent anywhere from two weeks to over a year lying right to my face, you’ve lost all right to decide what I do or don’t need to hear, and you certainly don’t get to send me to my room.”

This time, Bruce’s eyes lingered a bit longer on the Flash. “Barry,” he repeated, the threatening Batman growl starting to creep into his voice even as the look on his face was all warm concern. “Upstairs. Now.”

“Unfuckingbelieveable,” the Flash muttered, but his footsteps dutifully retreated down the hallway and up the same stairs he’d been zooming around like a jungle gym as Jason had fought for his life. What a good, obedient little Robin, the inconsolably bitter part of Jason’s mind snapped. Takes his orders and falls in line. No chance in hell Bruce doesn’t take his side. 

That part fell silent and abandoned him to the whims of Bruce’s wrath the moment Bruce’s eyes fell on him again, a thousand-pound weight slamming into Jason’s chest, knocking the wind out of him. He leaned heavily against the wall as a fresh wave of nausea threatened to come spilling from his mouth. 

“What did you do?” 

The tone was so demanding Jason had to consciously stop himself from shrinking away from it. He bit down on the betrayal that slid over his tongue before it could weave itself into words he’d regret forever. Bruce didn’t even ask what happened. What did you do?

The hurt screamed its protest. Bruce was supposed to understand now, Bruce had seemed so willing to give Jason the benefit of the doubt, Bruce had come to a fight against a League-trained assassin without a fucking weapon because he wanted to talk to Jason that bad. Wanted to fix things that bad. This was the same Bruce who had been there when Jason had cried and begged for his forgiveness, who had held Jason through it and said things like I trust you to do the right thing and you don’t have to be good to deserve my love and you didn’t come back wrong, all that matters is you came back.

Same guy. Same Bruce. Same dad.

Which meant that either that whole thing had been the worst, most malicious lie Bruce had ever told, or this was too big of a fuck up for even New Bruce to abide. Jason deserved either of them, deserved both of them, but they carved his chest open all the same.

So many responses flooded his mind with so many degrees of truth and deception that he didn’t even really choose what ended up falling from his mouth. “I fought,” he said, voice as even as he could make it, doing everything he could not to give Bruce a single reason to let go of whatever composure was keeping this relatively civil. “That’s what I do.”

The vein was standing out even starker now, right up against Bruce’s pulse point, the same place where Jason’s knife had bit into the vulnerable skin of the Flash’s throat. For a moment, Jason entertained doing the same thing to Bruce, entertained blowing this to hell on purpose before Bruce could do it to him, entertained letting Bruce beat the shit out of him and whether or not it would hurt less than whatever Bruce was about to say.

But Jason had done enough damage. He didn’t want to hurt Bruce, not anymore. He just wanted to undo the insurmountable mountain of impulsive, bullshit decisions he’d made over the past week. It was eerily like the Asylum, feeling the decent life he’d worked his ass off to build imploding from all sides because he never thinks it through, he never thinks it through, and nothing’s changed, he’s still the same dead bird who couldn’t stay dead but couldn’t get smart enough to stay alive, either. 

“Was it self-defense?” Bruce asked, jolting Jason from the spiral of his thoughts. He said it like he already knew the answer, like he just wanted to make Jason say it.

Jason just barely held off the flinch. He swallowed thickly. “No.”

“So,” and there was a slight tremor in his voice that was pure, unbridled rage. Jason fought the urge to shudder, to cower. “You decided I didn’t need to know you were coming back to Gotham, you showed up at my home unannounced, and you attacked my guest. Am I seeing that correctly?”

Jason heard what Bruce wasn’t saying. You attacked my good kid. My real kid. The one I haven’t failed to protect yet, the one who hasn’t failed to follow my orders yet, the one who hasn’t gotten himself killed yet. Another harsh wave of betrayal rocked his aching body, this time washing up a painful knot of soft, fragile things with it that Jason couldn’t afford to untie right now.

Covering the lapse with annoyance, Jason narrowed his eyes. “Thing is, I seem to remember someone tellin’ me his home was my home and giving me a key, and the last time he told me that, he actually meant it, so I figured it’d probably be fine to believe him this time, too. Guess I was wrong. You told me to come back when I was ready, I came back when I was ready. I didn’t know I needed a fucking visitor’s pass.”

“You should have told me.”

“You should have told me you found another scrawny, black-haired orphan to adopt, looks like we both fucked up.” Impressive that you kept going even after you got the last one killed. Jason closed his teeth around it just in time. He didn’t know much right now, but he did know that was the wrong thing to say. 

Bruce’s jaw clenched. “That’s no excuse to assault them. They have just as much of a right to be here as you do.”

And Jason knew he should try to stay calm, knew how these things always went with Bruce, anger begets anger, and there was already an insatiable wildfire growing in Bruce without Jason adding fuel to it. He should stay calm. But he could still hear Joker’s laugh in the back of his head and his face was still throbbing and this whole thing was so fucking stupid, the words were already rushing like vomit from his raw throat, it was too late to take them back. “Well, had I fucking known that maybe things would’ve gone differently. As it happened, though, I thought you lived alone, I found a stranger in your house, and he wouldn’t fuckin’ tell me why he was here!” 

Something dark was sliding over Bruce’s face. “So your immediate solution to not knowing something is violence?”

“Yes! Of course it is! Did you forget what the fuck happened to me after Joker, Bruce? You forget who happened to me?”

Suddenly, the distance between Jason and Bruce was eliminated and he was right up in Bruce’s face. The small, broken thing in him cringed at the proximity, at being well within the range of Bruce’s vengeance, but Jason ignored it in favor of the rage that made his breathing hard, eyes stinging, body shaking. 

“I’m a weapon,” Jason hissed. “You know I’m a weapon, 'cause I’ve told you I’m a weapon, and I’ve shown you I’m a weapon. I couldn’t possibly have made this any clearer than I did. If you tried to convince yourself I was something different, that’s fucking on you. You don’t get to be pissed at me for actin’ like a weapon when you specifically put me in a situation that would result in me actin’ like a fucking weapon. You knew I was comin’ home at some point. It’s been over a month. You knew I could be comin’ any day now. All you had to do was tell me your shiny new kid would be here and none of this would’ve happened. This ain’t just on me.”

The darkness was sinking deep into Bruce now, making a home in his expression, the kind that wouldn’t leave until well after this fucking disaster had run its course and Bruce and Jason’s relationship was in the ground. Jason barely even recognized him. He should leave. He should leave, he should leave, he should leave before he demolished whatever minuscule hope still remained of keeping Bruce in his life. Before his violent, brutish hands did the only thing they knew how to do.

Jason should leave, but he was still rooted to the spot. Bat training said you earned this, now stand there and take it like a hero would.

And even as it felt more like an indictment than a weapon now, it was still true. Long before he was Talia al Ghul’s weapon or the All-Caste’s warrior, Jason had always been a Bat.

Bruce opened his mouth. Jason tensed his whole body for the blow.

“I thought you were better than this now, Jason.”

And there it was. 

The day that Jason had been fearing for so long was here, and it had come to break bone.

Jason had known it was coming, had known there would be a day when his fuck ups would pile too high and Bruce would finally reveal the truth. That his love still had limits. That his forgiveness was conditional. That he could only accept what Jason had done, what he was, because he thought Jason would never do it or be it again. 

Bruce didn’t love Red. Despite any claims to the contrary, Jason had always known that. Even if Bruce wanted to, he couldn’t love Red. Everything Red was stood as a monument to Bruce’s failures, as a father, as a teacher, as a protector. Everything Red did would’ve earned him a place in the center of the Rogue’s gallery if he’d done it in Gotham instead of China. Red belonged in the Joker’s company more than he did Batman’s. Bruce could never love something like that.

Bruce didn’t love Red. He just loved Jason enough to pretend they weren’t the same person. And with a knife covered in his new son’s blood clutched in Jason’s trembling hand, Bruce couldn’t pretend anymore.

Jason knew it was coming. It felt like being shot in the face anyway.

The death knell rattled through his chest. His ears rang with the force of it. Jason just barely managed to smother the gasp of pain before it could escape his throat and settled for half a stumbling step backward to hold his shaky balance. “And I thought you wanted to act like a real dad this time ‘round,” he snapped, just trying to put anything in front of his vulnerability before Bruce noticed it as the prime opportunity it was.

“How does this have anything to do with my—”

“I’m bleeding. Do you wanna know why?” The fury was building with every word, Jason should stop, he should slow down, he should— “You want any more information ‘sides the fact I started the fight? You want my side? You even give a shit ‘bout my side? Or did you just see the body in the fuckin’ alley and me on the roof and decide I was a liar ‘fore I even opened my damn mouth?”

Bruce’s eyes blazed. “That was ten years ago, Jason.”

“Yeah, and nothing’s fuckin’ changed, huh? You still expect the worst’a me. You still see a fire and figure I set it, figure I enjoyed settin’ it. You still look at me and see a hood rat doomed to be a criminal and you just wait ‘round for me to do somethin’ that proves you right.”

“You’re a murderer!” Bruce shouted, all Batman now, booming voice loud enough to bounce off the wall behind Jason and slam into his unguarded back, threatening to send him to the floor. The same voice that used to echo across Gotham’s rooftops for miles, the same one he used to strike fear into the hearts of hardened criminals, the same one he used to bring the Rogues to heel. He’d never actually used it on Jason before. 

Jason didn’t let the implications land, just covered himself in anger and let them slide right off. “So are you, asshole!”

“I’ve never taken pleasure in it! I never tortured, I never drew it out! The things you did in Asia, Jason—”

“That wasn’t fuckin’ fun for me either! Told you a thousand times I did what I had to do to stay alive, the Pit—”

“You hurt people! Everywhere you go, you hurt people! You spent years doing nothing but hurting people! Of course, I assumed you did it again!” 

“You fuckin’ liar, you told me you ain’t give a shit about any of that!”

“I cared less when they were guilty strangers, this was my child!” 

“He’s the fastest motherfucker on the planet, Bruce! I ain’t even got powers! You really fuckin’ think that between him and me, he’s the defenseless one?” Jason dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and held it up for Bruce as the blood dripped from his fingers to the carpet. “You think I fuckin’ won?!” He took a threatening step forward, mere inches from Bruce, close enough to feel the fury radiating from his body. “You think I came here and beat on your kid for kicks?” 

Bruce’s mouth twisted into a conflicted line, but he didn’t speak a word.

“D’you think I’d fuck up an innocent kid for fun, yes or no?” Bruce set his jaw. A frantic jolt of panic lanced through Jason’s body, strong enough to bypass his brain and force the words out of his mouth. “Y’know, like the Joker did? Is that really what you think of me, Bruce?”

Jason could’ve sworn regret flashed over the steel of Bruce’s face, but he was probably imagining it. Imagining a world where hurting Jason was something Bruce cared about avoiding. Imagining the intricate web of lies Bruce had been spinning since before they even reunited was the truth Jason had wanted so badly to believe. But he still wasn’t speaking, he wasn’t saying no, and even with everything Jason had fucked up it should still be easy as hell to say no and Jason’s mind was filling up every second of silence with you’re just like Joker you’re just like Joker you’re just like Joker you’re just like Joker you’re just like—

“Is that really what you think of me?!”

Any hint of hesitance hardened into an impenetrable shell. Jason was reminded a bit too vividly of another former mentor whose feigned sympathy was just another weapon, another former mentor who turned to stone the moment she was displeased. He pushed it away just in time to hear Bruce say, “I think you’ve done worse in the past.”

For a moment, it hurt so much that Jason’s vision whited out, ears ringing, knees trembling beneath him. Bruce’s eyes were already widening before he’d finished speaking, but even Jason wasn’t stupid enough to interpret it as remorse this time. 

The words stuck in his throat. “Worse than the Joker?” He rasped out eventually, voice breaking on the name. 

The shell shattered. Bruce’s ashen face fell clean through the bloodstained floor. “No—I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Yeah, you did,” Jason interrupted with a bitter, brittle smile. “You absolutely did mean it, you just didn’t mean to say the quiet part out loud.”

And if there was still a way to make this worse, Jason was going to find it if he stayed here for one more second. He tried to get all the gears turning in a body that felt more like a stranger’s than his own, and wasn’t that fitting? Bruce had already decided that the intruder who’d hurt his kid was a monster wearing his dead son’s face. Why should Jason recognize himself when Bruce didn’t?

It didn’t work. Every movement he made was sluggish and jerky and Bruce easily sidestepped to stop him. Regret was swimming on his face, but the sea was still anger, almost all of it was anger, the regret was drowning in the anger. 

He’d just compared Jason to the Joker, and the anger had still won.

“Is this what you do now?” Bruce demanded, still big and loud, still not backing down. He wasn’t sorry. Why the fuck should he be? He was right. The Flash was right too. If Joker was still alive, he’d probably see Red as a threat to his title of Sickest Fuck In Gotham. They were right about him. “You make a mess, hurt people, take no accountability, and then leave without making any effort to fix what you broke?”

That same small, wounded Robin inside Jason that had once been so relieved to see Bruce flinched at every word. He tried to push it down far enough to evade Bruce’s notice, but it was Batman. He was fighting Batman, he was losing to Batman, and there was no chance Batman would let a single advantage slip past him.

And fuck it. Jason was already standing in the scorched ruins of the new life he thought he could have here. There was nothing whole left to destroy. He might as well burn it all down to ash.

Jason picked his head up and held Bruce’s smoldering eyes. “Here’s my accountability,” he ground out through his teeth. “I made a mistake. I made a mistake comin’ here, I made a mistake leavin’ China, and y’know what? Maybe I made a mistake lettin’ you find me at all. Maybe I made a mistake when I ain’t killed you and your little merc buddy the second I put eyes on you. Maybe I made a mistake believin’ things’d be different this time and trustin’ you when you said you was willin’ to put all that shit behind us. I made a lot of fuckin’ mistakes, B, but I already had more’n enough of the fuckin’ Joker comparisons today, so I ain’t tryna add killin’ Batman or his new kid to the list. You need to let me go. Now.”

“You can’t just walk away,” Bruce argued, somehow fragile and unyielding, an order and a plea, like Bruce was just seconds away from breaking, too. Jason couldn’t buy it. He couldn’t afford to empathize with Bruce right now. He needed to leave. 

“I can, and I will, ‘cause I need to. Don’t—” Jason dropped his eyes to the floor, grit his teeth, and forced a deep, shuddering breath. “Don’t make me do it, B. Don’t make me hurt you. I don’t want to, but I will.”

Bruce didn’t budge. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even breathe. Jason forced himself to meet Bruce’s eyes again, and a tear slipped out before he could stop it. It felt just as cold trailing down Jason’s scarred cheek as the Lazarus in his veins, as the ice in his guts, as the slow death of his hope for a second chance with Bruce.

Jason barely managed to press the word out of his frozen chest. “Please.”

Something in Bruce’s eyes broke. He didn’t move out of Jason’s way, but his whole body deflated, and Jason capitalized.

Bruce didn’t fight when Jason pushed him aside. He didn’t fight when Jason yanked the door open. He didn’t fight when Jason slammed it shut behind him.

And when the Pit threatened to pull Jason under the moment he slung a leg over his bike, when it argued fervently and desperately that this could all be fixed if he drowned it in the blood of every other monster in Gotham, well.

Jason didn’t fight either.

Like father, like son.

Chapter Text

“What did you do?”

Barry should’ve intervened there. They should have intervened the moment Bruce had picked up the full weight of the blame for the fight and put it on Jason’s shoulders. 

Fight was a generous word for it. One-sided ass kicking where Barry could’ve stopped at any time and chose to dig the knife in deeper instead, just because they wanted to, just because they could, would be more accurate. 

They should have intervened. Should’ve thrown open the bedroom door they were currently crouched behind, bolted down the stairs, and put their body between Bruce and Jason before this whole thing went nuclear. Neither of them would be fast enough to stop Barry. No one in the world was fast enough to stop Barry. They could put a stop to this. They had to put a stop to this.

Barry didn’t know Jason. Not beyond the stories they’d been told, a caricature of grief and loss, more of a lesson than a person, Barry didn’t know Jason. Barry didn’t owe Jason.

Except… except.

Except—

Oh, you don’t like Joker? Should we talk about him some more then, since you love talking so much?

Except—

It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one he hurt.

Except—

Did the Joker give you something to remember him by?

Except Barry owed Jason in the same way everyone owed everyone else. The basic courtesy to notice the line in the sand when it’s drawn. The basic courtesy not to cross it. It didn’t matter if Jason had done it first; rules didn’t disappear for everyone the moment one person broke them. Free permission to act like a monster just because someone hurt you was the same path that led Superman to madness.

The apocalypse had plunged Barry’s world into a thousand distressing, exhausting, confusing shades of gray, but there was still right and wrong in the world. Barry still knew right from wrong. They’d known what they were doing was wrong, and they’d done it anyway. And just like they’d known it while their fist was caving in Bruce’s dead son’s face, they knew it now. It was wrong to let Bruce blame Jason for mistakes they’d both made. 

But they didn’t intervene. They stayed crouched behind the door like a coward, their ear to the small crack they were eavesdropping from. It was so slight that even if Bruce had been looking right at it, he wouldn’t have been able to notice. They stayed where it was safe, they stayed where they knew Bruce would take their side against any threat up to and including his real kid, and they let Jason take the fall.

“All you had to do was tell me your shiny new kid would be here, and none of this would’ve happened. This ain’t just on me.”

It felt like the words were aimed directly at Barry. They glanced down at their shaking hands, still slick with Jason’s blood. Jason, who could bleed despite having a headstone in a Gotham cemetery engraved with his name. Jason was a cold corpse, a ghost of regrets and mistakes and lost opportunities that had haunted Bruce for almost a decade. Jason was a person Bruce could reach out and touch, a person who could hurt and be hurt, he was alive. 

Barry needed to get back downstairs. They needed to fix this in whatever way it was still fixable.

Vic had a headstone engraved with his name, too.

Barry would give anything, anything in the world, for Vic to be someone they could reach out and touch. A person who could hurt and be hurt. 

He was dead.

“I thought you were better than this now, Jason.”

They were still going at it, Bruce was digging in deeper, it felt intentionally harsh, how could Bruce be reacting this way? If the world had been kind enough to bring Vic back into Barry’s life, they would never. They would never take him for granted again, they would never pick a fight no matter how angry they were, they would never look at a bad situation and assume Vic was to blame, assume Vic had done it intentionally.

Unless—unless Bruce was lying about the whole thing. Unless the pain in Bruce’s voice every time he’d spoken about Jason was the most disgusting, convoluted, unconscionable long-con in the history of Batman. Unless Bruce was fucking cruel, Bruce wasn’t cruel, was he? Bruce had taken Barry in when they were on the verge of self-destruction, Bruce had spent weeks bringing them back from the brink, Bruce had been so kind and gentle and trustworthy, even when Barry had done nothing to deserve it, that couldn’t all be a lie, could it?

Barry remembered the way Jason shrank and flinched at the mention of Joker’s name. Like he was expecting a beating, like he feared a beating even though he’d already been in the active process of taking one from Barry without a single dent in his tough guy act. Remembered the wild, desperate terror in his eyes as Barry had pushed their advantage. Remembered the raw agony in his voice as he’d done everything short of begging Barry to stop.

No. That part couldn’t be a lie.

Barry could feel the temperature of the argument rising even as their pulse was pounding too loud in their ears to make out all of the words. Bruce and Jason’s voices were getting louder and harder with every barb they threw, every sharp thing they sliced into each other with, like Jason’s knife to Barry’s throat, like the crunch of Jason’s bones under Barry’s fists, like the snap of Vic’s neck between Superman’s hands—no.

They couldn’t go there, they couldn’t go there, they had to get downstairs.

“You really fuckin’ think that between him and me, he’s the defenseless one? You think I fuckin’ won?! You think I came here and beat on your kid for kicks?”

There was a terrifyingly long pause. Barry’s mouth went dry. Bruce didn’t speak. Jason kept going.

“Do you think I’d fuck up an innocent kid for fun, yes or no?”

Another pause, another stupid, too-long pause.

“Just say no,” Barry implored, strangled, frantic, the pit in their stomach growing deeper and colder by the second. “Even I know he didn’t do it for fun, you’ve gotta know that, it’s so easy, just say no.”

“Y’know, like the Joker did? Is that really what you think of me, Bruce?”

“Don’t,” Barry breathed out, they could’ve gone down there, it wasn’t too late to stop this thing from shattering into a million irreparable pieces, it was Barry’s job to stop it from shattering, Jason was alive, Jason was alive, how could Bruce not be doing whatever it took to keep him safe?

Bruce used to tell Vic and Barry both that he wasn’t a good man, that he hadn’t been a good father, that he was good at what he did as Batman, but he wasn’t good. Barry had never believed him, not all the way, not really. Bruce was deeply, deeply flawed, yeah, and seemed to be allergic to any overt show of affection or pride, especially in the early days of the Justice League. But at the end of the day, Bruce had always been good to them. To Barry and Vic. Bruce showed up when it counted. Bruce was who they needed him to be when they needed him to be it. 

But now, Barry could see it. Jason had been Bruce’s son years and years ago, way back before he’d even met Vic and Barry. And Bruce hadn’t been a good dad back then.

Maybe that mountain of guilt wasn’t entirely misplaced. Maybe Bruce wasn’t exaggerating all the times he talked about those massive, life-altering mistakes of his. Maybe he did fall short. Maybe he did hang people out to dry when they needed him the most. 

Maybe he was still doing it now.

“Is that really what you think of me?!”

Barry stayed frozen behind the door, the Speed Force cold and lifeless and heavy in their body like it had been when they were halfway starved to death. It should be easy. It should be so, so fucking easy. They’d helped kill Superman on a broken femur; they could stop a father from hurting his son. But they didn’t. Their mouth was the only thing that moved when they told it to. “Don’t do it,” they repeated, like a plea, like a prayer, the words sticking to their throat. “Don’t do it, Bruce, don’t say that.”

One more pause. Barry could feel the hammer about to fall. If Bruce was going to do the right thing here, he would’ve done it already.

“I think you’ve done worse in the past.”

Tears sprang to Barry’s eyes. The words weren’t aimed at them, but it still felt like a betrayal. A betrayal of who they thought Bruce was, who he’d made himself out to be. Barry didn’t know Jason, sure, but that didn’t matter. They knew Bruce. Bruce was supposed to be a good man.

A good man wouldn’t say that.

A good man wouldn’t say the things Barry said, either.

Barry slammed their head back against the door, just to feel something, just to get their body working again. They didn’t care if Bruce heard, let him hear it, let anything stand in the way of the total destruction that Bruce was not only complicit in but actively working towards. Their vision whited out, ears ringing too loud to hear Jason’s response, or maybe Bruce’s apology, please God let it be an apology, this was wrong, this was wrong.

After working with Bruce for so many years, Barry had seen him angry before. Hundreds of times, hundreds of ways. Boiling, red-hot frustration with the team. Devastated, visceral rage for Darkseid. A cold, empty, hollowed-out and echoing betrayal when it came to Clark. But never, not once, had Bruce actually directed his anger toward Barry or Vic. He was stern, he was demanding, he was liberal and vocal with his disappointment, but no matter how badly they fucked up, no matter how harsh and sharp Bruce’s feelings about it were, Bruce never took it out on Barry and Vic. Never took it out on his kids. 

And Jason—God, Bruce talked about Jason like he was the only thing that had ever mattered, the only thing that ever would matter, he wore the loss like a wound that would never heal, he talked about it like it was seared into his gene code. But Jason was the one he would be reckless and thoughtless with? Jason was the one he would be mean to? Those seemingly endless stores of self-control he’d had with Barry and Vic even in the midst of the apocalypse ran out when it came to his real kid?

“What are you doing?” Barry’s voice was hoarse, ragged, like they were right there in the middle of the screaming match, too. “Bruce, what the fuck are you doing? That’s your kid.” A cold tear slipped down their cheek. “That’s your kid.”

The front door slammed so hard the whole house shuddered with the impact. Finally, blessedly, Barry was jolted out of their spiral.

Before the intention even formed in their mind, their legs had already put them in front of the door, their hand clutching the knob so tight their knuckles were probably white under the crust of Jason’s blood. In the half-second it took for their brain to catch up, Bruce had already covered Barry’s hand with his own and put his whole body between Barry and their goal.

Barry shot Bruce a fierce glare they hoped smoldered even a fraction as much as the indignant rage blazing in their chest. “Get out of my way.”

Almost everything on Bruce’s face was soft, warm concern. There was a faint edge of residual fury in his eyes, but it was receding, it shouldn’t be receding, Bruce should be just as mad at Barry as he was at Jason, but he wasn’t. That was wrong. “Are you okay?” Bruce asked, annoyingly, unquestionably sincere.

Barry narrowed their eyes, a snarl curling in the back of their throat. “No. And neither is Jason, not that you seemed to care. He has a grade three concussion, and he’s going to try to drive in a fucking snowstorm.”

A pause. Another stupid fucking pause. Bruce’s eyebrows knit together. He didn’t get out of Barry’s way. In fact, he was settling into his defensive position more solidly. Barry could vibrate through him and the door in an instant. They had enough of their strength back to do that now, they’d just done it in the fight with Jason, why weren’t they doing it?

“He was speaking to me fine,” Bruce said slowly. “What makes you think—”

“Because I’m the one who gave it to him, Bruce! I know exactly how many times I can hit someone that hard before I do serious damage and I well exceeded it. He was hiding it from you. Obviously. You might’ve known that if you’d bothered to ask if he was okay at any point in that horrendous fucking shitshow you just put on. Maybe you don’t care about how hurt he is, maybe you don’t care if he dies in that storm, but I do. Get out of my way. Right. Now.”

Bruce’s spine straightened a bit at that. He still didn’t move, but the hesitation was enough for Barry to take advantage, shoving Bruce away from them and flinging the door open. There were light footprints in the fresh snow on the driveway, but they were already starting to fade. The blizzard would hit Gotham full force any minute now. 

Barry knew they should be smart, act deliberately, move strategically, but the panic was thrumming harder and harder with every thunderous beat of their heart and they didn’t have it in them to be anything but fast.

They went to follow Jason’s trail but stopped short almost as soon as they’d started. A mere ten feet from the door, the footprints disappeared into thick underbrush, and Barry wouldn’t be able to get in there without something to cut it with. Really, Jason shouldn’t be able to either, but Barry didn’t have any extra bandwidth to make that make sense right now. 

Already feeling the futility sink into their bones with the frigid January air, Barry still sped up and down the full length of the obnoxiously long driveway three times. Maybe they’d find where Jason had emerged from the woods, or some tire tracks, or, if they were lucky in a way they really knew they didn’t deserve to be right now, Jason himself. 

Of course, there was nothing.

Jason had learned at the feet of Batman for years. God only knew what happened to him since then. He of all people knew how to disappear without a trace. 

Fuck. 

Barry allowed themself a single moment to drop to their hands and knees in the snow at the base of the driveway, let the unforgiving bite of the cold sink into their bones, and scream the betrayal and the frustration and the shame and the overwhelming fucking all of it into their hands. Then, they picked their head up and stared daggers at the new Manor, looming grim and imposing at the top of the hill. 

Fine. They’d just have to go to the source, then.

Barry skidded to a stop in front of the open door, back turned to Bruce, chest heaving, the panic more than making up for how much their endurance had improved since they’d agreed to stay here. They fisted both hands in their hair, still frantically searching for the signs they knew they wouldn’t find.

“Barry.” It was far closer to a command than it had any right to be. 

For an instant, Barry debated ignoring it completely. Debated leaving while they still had the chance, before Bruce could spin another web of pretty lies flawless enough to buy their obedience again. It sounded vindicating. It sounded just. But Barry had been looking at self-control in the rearview mirror for well over an hour as it stood. Deep-seated Justice League training said look at your leader when he’s talking to you, righteous, vicious anger said let him fucking have it, and even after all this time, all this betrayal, Barry was and always had been a subordinate, a soldier, first. Doomed, destined, and programmed to follow orders.

They turned murderous eyes on Bruce and gestured wildly at the driveway behind them. “This blizzard is supposed to be the worst one of the whole winter, he couldn’t even fucking walk straight, he’s gonna die out there—”

Barry hadn’t even realized their whole body was vibrating until both of Bruce’s hands were on their shoulders, pushing down firmly, exactly the way Vic used to do it. 

Barry didn’t let it settle their heart, no matter how much they might want to. 

“I should search the city,” they continued, urgency growing by the word. “I could cover it all in a few hours, I should—”

“Barry,” Bruce repeated, even closer to an order, and Barry’s blood boiled. 

“Help me,” they demanded, voice shaking with rage. “You’re the one who taught him how to vanish into thin fucking air, help me—help me fucking un-vanish him or whatever! It’s the fucking least you owe me—it’s the least you owe him.” 

Bruce’s face only got more unreadable. “Even if I agreed to that…” Bruce’s mouth formed around words he clearly decided Barry couldn’t be trusted with, the same insulting, condescending choice he’d made with every other piece of information related to Jason, every piece of information that could’ve stopped this nightmare before it started. “His skills exceed mine,” was the vague, useless response Bruce settled on, his voice forcibly measured. “If I found him at all, and I’m not sure I could, it wouldn’t be until long after the storm has blown over.”

“So you’re not even gonna try? You’re just gonna leave him out there so he can die for a second time?” 

Bruce’s face stayed stone still at the pointed comment, but Barry could tell it was a practiced effort. “Jason knows how to drive in the snow.”

Barry’s frustrated huff quickly turned to a frozen cloud in front of them. “Yeah, him and every other coastal city boy in New England. Gotham never sees the kind of shit that comes through Central City—”

“Jason spent years living in the Himalayas,” Bruce interrupted, gruff. “He knows how to drive in the snow.” The warm, grounding pressure on Barry’s shoulders increased, and they couldn’t help it this time. The tension started to bleed out of their body. “He will never listen to you or me with the state he’s in.”

The casual blame in Bruce’s voice made Barry recoil with their whole body, but they still couldn’t bring themself to wrest free of the only thing keeping them tethered to Earth right now. “I wouldn’t want to talk to someone who compared me to the Joker either, what the fuck is wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with me? What the fuck did we just do, Bruce?!”

This time, Bruce stiffened noticeably, the briefest hint of displeasure flickering across his face. “Leave it alone. Come inside. We’re taking care of you now.”

“Taking care of what? I’m fine! I’m not going to come inside, we have to find him! And even if we didn’t, you still lied to me about—about everything, including the fact that you were supposedly giving up lying. Why in God’s name would I want to be anywhere near you right now? Let go of me. I’m leaving.”

“Don’t,” Bruce said, but this one was more of a request than a demand. There was a long pause that seemed physically painful for him, and Barry couldn’t help but remember the ocean of empty space where Bruce should’ve put any kind of reassurance that his son wasn’t like his murderer— “Please, Barry.”

“Why?” Barry repeated, through their teeth this time, marshalling every bit of strength left in their exhausted body to fight off the memories cold and bitter on their tongue, give me one reason why you deserve the mercy you never would’ve even entertained showing me. “Why should I stay? So you have the chance to come up with another lie even more bulletproof than this one was? So I can spend another year trusting you with my life while you lie to my fucking face the whole time? Sure, that’s loads better than making sure I didn’t just kill your kid!”

Bruce’s eye twitched slightly. Barry thought a little too hard about how much restraint Bruce was showing, how much Barry was actively trying to escalate things and how little Bruce had risen to the bait. There had been no restraint with Jason. Why had there been no restraint with Jason?

“He won’t die,” Bruce said, solid, sure, surer than he had any right to be.

“You didn’t even know he was concussed! You have no idea whether or not he’s safe out there!”

“I know what I’m talking about. Trust me. He’s not going to die.”

“Trust you? I don’t! I don’t fucking trust you! How could I trust you after everything you did?”

“Barry—”

“You don’t know if he’s going to make it, you don’t, you can’t, and wasn’t it your fault he died the first time? You’re really good with having that on your conscience again?!”

“I don’t even know if he can die!” 

Barry’s jaw dropped open. Bruce’s clamped shut. Barry had half a second to be grateful that Bruce was finally yelling at them like he’d yelled at Jason, and then Bruce was already looking away. Drawing back. He didn’t draw back with Jason, he didn’t let up, he didn’t think twice, not a single time. Bruce took a deep, measured breath before meeting Barry’s eyes again.

“He should have died a hundred times over, and it never stuck,” he continued quietly, voice a weak imitation of calm, another courtesy he hadn’t bothered to show Jason. “He—he’s done things and lived through things no one in the world should be able to, and he did it without any definite, confirmed powers. I have no idea what he’s made of or why, and neither does anyone else. After all of that… driving in a blizzard or sustaining a concussion from your fight will not be what puts a stop to whatever is happening to him.”

And Barry still had a thousand questions, a thousand arguments, a thousand reasons they were still desperate to turn this into a fight every bit as bad as the one Bruce had picked with Jason, but that… what? That information was batshit, their brain stumbled over almost every word Bruce had said, and it was enough to stun them into silence, into inaction, which was, of course, by design. Bruce took the opening to usher them back inside and close the door. Barry could’ve kicked themself for falling into the obvious trap. 

There was a heavy, bloated pause, bearing down on Barry’s lungs, aching in their chest, and between that and the raw sear of betrayal, Barry couldn’t stand to look at Bruce. Their eyes darted anywhere else and landed on a massive, circular blood stain two feet up from the base of the wall, veins of red reaching from it down towards the baseboards, staining the white paint. Bloody handprints where Jason had braced himself, so fucked up he could barely put one foot in front of the other, so out of his mind that the only thing he had left was the primal, clawing need to run. Soaked into the carpet, stretching the infinite distance from the wall to the door. Desperate for a single clean surface, Barry looked down to try and get a grip, but it was there too, drying into a coarse crust on their hands, and there was even some on Bruce’s hand now where it had covered Barry’s as they’d tried to leave.

It was Jason’s. All of the blood was Jason’s. And all Bruce cared about was Barry.

Barry swallowed a gag. Thought they might be sick.

“Were you listening to my conversation?”

Barry’s eyes shot back to Bruce’s and found a hardness there they hadn’t seen since the fight with Superman. The tone was close to his Disappointed Leader Voice, but it was just a bit too unsteady, too hesitant. Almost like Bruce knew he didn’t actually have any right to use it. 

“Your dead kid is alive, Bruce, you really thought I’d just wait in the time-out corner for whatever heavily doctored crumbs of truth you decided to throw my way? Of course I was listening!”

“I asked you for privacy.”

Barry snorted derisively. “Uh, no. You told me to go upstairs. I did. If you wanted to have privacy around me, then the non-optional Bat espionage training was a dumb fucking move.”

“You knew what I meant.”

“And I know what you said. Guess you should’ve thought it through a little harder. Y’know, like you should’ve thought before you compared Jason to the Joker?”

Bruce pressed his lips into a thin line. “I didn’t compare him to the Joker,” he said, so quiet it was barely even audible, finally, finally acknowledging a fraction of the horrible things he’d said to his son. Bruce made an awkward, half-aborted motion with his hands. Barry was pretty sure it was the first time they’d seen him look uncomfortable. “He compared himself to the Joker, I just… didn’t respond tactfully.”

“That’s what you call it?”

Bruce’s gaze intensified, and Barry fought the urge to shift under the weight. “Jason hurt you,” he said, eyeing the line of red over Barry’s windpipe. It was barely bleeding anymore. Barry could already feel it stitching itself back together. The furthest fucking thing from a relevant detail. “He came into a place you felt safe and attacked you. Why are you defending him?” 

“That’s the real Jason?”

“I asked you a question, Barry.”

A humorless laugh pried itself from Barry’s mouth. “So did I, but the difference between you and me is I’ll walk out that door right now with a clean conscience if you keep lying to my face. You want me to stay. That means we do this on my terms.”

There was a loaded pause. A small part of Barry that was still sitting devastated beside Vic’s makeshift grave in Mexico braced for the blowup, but they were too numb to really feel it. “Yes,” Bruce ground out eventually. “That is the real Jason.”

“‘Kay. And when you said the Joker killed him, you were telling the truth? Dead, and now, for whatever reason, not dead anymore? Same kid?” 

Bruce nodded tightly.

“Cool, so you really need to ask me that? You really need to ask me why I think that someone who died and came back to life should, I dunno, stay that way?” Barry took a step closer, the Speed Force sparking to life in their veins. “Do you know what I would give for that to happen to Vic? Anything. Anything in the whole fucking world, everything in the world, and more. But I don’t get that. You do. You should be turning the whole world upside down, burning bridges with your friends, building bridges with your enemies, whatever it takes to keep him safe, you should be willing to do it. You should be happy to do it. You got something that basically no one else who has ever lost and grieved and changed because of their dead people has ever gotten. The greatest gift you could ever get, and you’re—you’re sending it back! You let that gift walk out the door with a concussion in a snowstorm! You couldn’t even be fucked to tell him he was better than the monster who murdered him! Are you serious? The question isn’t why am I defending him, Bruce, it’s why aren’t you?! ”

A muscle jumped in Bruce’s jaw. “Things are… complicated with Jason, Barry. Extremely complicated. You don’t know the whole story.”

“Who cares? Who cares about the rest of the story, Bruce? That’s your kid! How could you talk to him like that? How—how could you—you would never talk to me like that.”

“That hardly seems relevant right—”

“I think you’ve lost the right to decide what is and isn’t relevant information, don’t you?” Barry interrupted, voice cold. “Yeah, I have about a thousand questions about,” they gestured wildly to the door Jason had left through, “all of that shit, and you will answer all of them if you actually want me to stay, but right now, I wanna know why you talked to him like that.”

Another twitch went through Bruce’s face, sharper this time, and still, Barry hated how sure they were that Bruce would never hurt them. “I do the best I can with him, Barry. Same as I do with you.”

“I’ve had more than enough of you treating me like I’m stupid today, Bruce, so let’s not pretend you treat me anything like you treated him, huh?” When that actually seemed to stun Bruce into silence for half a second, Barry pressed their advantage. “That’s where you’ve been the past year, right? That’s why you’re different, why you talk like a human being now? It had something to do with him?”

Bruce looked like he wanted to protest the premise of the question again, but after a moment, he opted for a jerky nod instead. 

“Right, so putting aside the fact that you’ve been using Jason’s story to relate to me losing Vic for the past two weeks and the whole fucking time he was alive—which I will yell at you about later—whatever it was that taught you how to be a person, it happened because of him. You brought all of that knowledge here to help me get through the anniversary. But the second he shows up again, the guy who helped you learn how to be a person, all your person-ness goes out the window and you treat him like shit? You give me everything and you give him nothing? You call that fair? You call that the best you can fucking do?”

“You and Jason are very different people, Barry,” Bruce replied tersely.

“But you didn’t even give him a chance!” Barry argued, louder, frustration mounting by the moment. “You assumed it was his fault the second you opened the door. You just—you didn’t even ask for his side, not really, you just asked for enough information to confirm your bias! Did you happen to notice, Mr. World’s Greatest Detective, that he was covered in blood and bruises and I barely have a scratch on me? Or did that go in the same box that his blatant and obvious concussion went in, since it was all too fucking inconvenient to your apparent belief that I’ve never done anything wrong in my life and he’s never done anything right?!”

Bruce sighed heavily. God, Barry wished he’d just rise to their anger the way he had so easily, so effortlessly with Jason. Wished he’d light the match. The explosion couldn’t be worse than the way the gasoline roiled thick and sickening in Barry’s gut. “You heal quickly,” Bruce said. “Whatever he did to you probably isn’t visible. Jason is dangerous—”

“More dangerous than me? You just said he probably doesn’t even have powers!”

“Jason is one of those most deadly killers in the world, Barry!” Again, Bruce curbed the outburst before the sentence had even fully left his mouth. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and leveled out his voice. Barry hated it. “He’s… he’s not just someone who used to be Robin. He’s a Shadow. A League-trained assassin. He trained with another enclave of warriors so powerful and secret that most people don’t even believe they exist. He went one-on-one with Slade and would have killed him if he wanted to. Nobody seems to know the extent of his abilities, nobody knows the depth of his training, nobody even knows how many people he’s killed. Including Jason himself.”

On a different day, Barry would be glowing with pride at beating someone Deathstroke had lost to, but right now, they were still too fucked up to feel it. Too cold all over, with anger still boiling them from the inside out. Barry never felt good about hurting people, not even Superman, not really. They did it when they had to, and only as much as they had to do it. But first Trickster, and now Jason? Half a bad memory, and they’re just as bad as the bad guys?

Bruce’s dead kid was alive, and Barry used his worst trigger against him. Their grief was turning them into a monster. Just like Superman.

“I’ve killed people too,” Barry argued, voice shaking slightly. It was easier than I’m already the monster you think he is. It was also less honest.

“I know. I know what you’re capable of; you’re one of the most powerful people on the planet. But you also have lines. We both know that, regardless of any surrounding circumstances, you will always be one down against someone willing to cross your lines.” 

Barry remembered glowing eyes and a knife biting into their throat. They remembered Jason seemingly pulling himself back from the edge of whatever that was and opting for getting his ass kicked over killing Barry. He has lines too was on their tongue, but apparently, today was a day for cowardice. 

“So yes, my main concern was you, seeing as he doesn’t know you, he doesn’t take threats lightly, and with your powers, you are an active danger to him. One of the most significant ones on the planet, in fact. Jason… Jason isn’t a bad person, but a lot of bad people have gotten to him over the past few years, and those people taught him to take out an active danger at the earliest possible opportunity. I had every reason to believe he would hurt you.”

“He. Didn’t.” Barry said through their teeth. “Which you would’ve known, if you had asked. He didn’t hurt me. I hurt him. Hear me? I hurt him. I hurt him because I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t know why he was here and all of that could have been avoided if you told me the truth!”

“You’re bleeding.”

“He was too, you didn’t care. It was my fault, Bruce. It’s my fault your house is covered in Jason’s blood, it’s my fault he was too triggered to even have a conversation with you, and it’s my fault he’s driving through the city with a broken fucking head. You didn’t even ask if he was okay. Your dead kid is alive, you come home to find him bloodied and terrified and barely able to stand, and you didn’t even ask if he was okay? What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Something shuttered on Bruce’s face. His expression went perfectly blank, perfectly unreadable. “I care about you very much, Barry. But the way I choose to parent Jason is none of your business.”

“You made it my business! You blamed him for shit that I did!”

“I am not blaming him for your actions. He told me he started the fight. He told me it wasn’t self-defense. With the facts I had access to, I was right to hold him accountable.”

“You don’t know what happened!” Barry shouted at the top of their lungs, annunciating every word. “You still haven’t asked! Yeah, Jason pulled his knives when I would’ve been fine with a conversation, but he also couldn’t land a fucking hit on me! All he could do was talk! You know who escalated the fight? You know who finished it? You know who waged psychological warfare on a kid who apparently died and came back to life? You know who actually acted like the Joker today?” Barry jabbed a thumb into their own chest. “Me.”

“Barry, anytime something like this happens, you always blame yourself for—”

“Don’t. Don’t do that, don’t patronize me, I’m not a fucking kid anymore. You don’t get to decide for me what I should and shouldn’t feel about this, and you don’t get to act like the objective authority on a situation you didn’t even witness firsthand just because you’re fucking Batman. You’re doing the same thing the news did when I attacked Trickster. You have no idea what actually happened, you have no interest in what actually happened, you waltzed in when the fight was already over and you twisted the facts to fit a narrative that suited what you already believed. Why am I automatically the victim here? Because it’s easy to believe the big scary violent guy would be big and scary and violent, and then I can stay the soft, innocent kid who needs you to swoop in and come to the rescue?”

“Barry—”

“Ask me what really happened,” Barry cut in, voice a perfectly even command. “Ask me what really happened, or admit you don’t actually want to know, because it’s more convenient for him to be the problem child and me to be the golden one.”

“You’ve been in a hard place lately,” Bruce said, careful, measured, a caring dodge but a dodge nonetheless. “I just wanted to protect you from being hurt again.”

“And he’s in a good place? If I’m supposed to believe everything you’ve told me, then he died and came back to life. His eyes glow when he gets mad and he has a Joker style perma-grin, Bruce, he’s fifty shades of fucked up. Why am I the only one getting cut slack?”

“Jason came back six years ago. You’re two weeks out from the first anniversary of your best friend’s death. My priorities shifted accordingly.”

“Ask me what happened,” Barry repeated firmly. “Or admit you don’t want to know.”

Bruce stared them down for a long moment. Two years ago, Barry would’ve caved in seconds; Bruce was their leader, it wasn’t Barry’s place to give him orders, to question his authority. Five years ago, Barry wouldn’t even be meeting Bruce’s eyes right now. They’d be apologizing for their own existence. They’d be bracing to get thrown out of the Justice League.

Now, Barry didn’t even flinch. Bruce was just a man. A man Barry cared about, sure, a man who’d pulled them back from the brink of death a few weeks ago, definitely, and a man who constituted about half of their remaining family, too. But he’d still lost the right to demand Barry’s obedience a long time ago. 

“Fine,” Bruce said, frustrated resignation in every inch of him. He motioned Barry towards the kitchen. “Let’s sit down, and you can tell me your side.”

Chapter Text

Jason came back into his body violently.

It was a gasp, a sob, a harsh crack of his head against the wall behind him, and the blank black void of his closed eyelids. It was bits of memory and feeling stitching themselves together into a largely incomprehensible web of regrets and blood and bullshit. It was whole minutes before his brain and his body would cooperate with each other long enough to bring his hands up to his eyes and make an attempt to move whatever was stopping them from opening. 

It was always like this. Jason was fluent in half a dozen languages, but the only one the League had taught to the Pit was violence. 

There was a wet noise when Jason moved, a dull pain as his arms unstuck from his shirt. Bare, frozen fingertips met a coarse, thick crust that coated his eyelids and glued his lashes together. Jason rubbed at it without thinking. It stung. Pulled uncomfortably at his skin. Ripped a few eyelashes out. 

He didn’t care.

Being blind god-knows-where after doing god-knows-what was suddenly the worst thing he could imagine, and he didn’t care if it hurt. His whole body already felt like one big open wound. He scratched and scraped at the crust frantically until the skin beneath felt raw and open, and finally, blessedly, he could blink his eyes open. 

It was his hotel room. Probably. He was alone. As far as he could tell.

Small mercies.

Small mercies.

He had no idea how he’d made it back here. Didn’t remember scaling the fire escape, even though his positioning relative to the window and door and the distribution of evidence meant he must have. Fuck, he barely even remembered disappearing into the brush in front of the Manor or slinging a leg over his bike. 

But steel blue eyes and uncompromising hard lines? Those were burned into his memory. Right there with the unavoidable, inescapable guarantee that no matter how much he changed, no matter which way he turned or bent or broke himself trying to fix what had always been broken in him, Jason still didn’t know how to build something. A home, a life, a relationship. His bloodsoaked hands couldn’t form anything but fists. He only knew how to destroy. 

Everything you touch dies. 

A fresh start isn’t worth much when you’re still the same shit person you’ve always been. 

It took a long time before Jason could shove the self-pity down far enough to make room for anything else. Even though he knew what that crust was, he knew what the wet was, he knew what it meant, what needed to be done, what he needed to do. He was wasting incredibly precious time, and for what? A self-indulgent spiral about shit that didn’t fucking matter? Shit that really wouldn’t matter if he got himself arrested?

Talia would have him beaten for it.

Bruce would be fucking disappointed. That was on theme, at least. 

But the black cloud was loud, the spiral’s pull was strong, and Jason was weak. It felt like years before he found a single useful bone in his traitorous body, even longer before he was able to start actually taking stock of his surroundings. It couldn’t be, though. If it had been years, Roy would be here. Roy would be here, and one thing about this irreparable fucking shitstorm Jason had stirred up would actually be fixed. 

He must’ve burned the evidence at some point. His skin smelled like smoke and accelerant, there was soot on his fingertips, and he was shivering in nothing but boxers, socks, and an undershirt. He was soaking wet. It wasn’t from the snow. 

No, that was blood. All of that was blood. 

Every visible inch of him was stained a deep crimson. The kind you only get to after you’ve spent too long killing someone, spent longer than any decent person would. It had saturated his clothes, was dripping from his hair, had already dried to an itchy, chunky crust on his face and hands, running into his eyes as he made fruitless attempts to blink it away. Small pink chunks clung to his skin. 

Jason swallowed hard. He didn’t even want to know. 

The carpet underneath him was already so drenched it squelched when Jason shifted his weight. Bloody footprints led from the window to the place he had seemingly collapsed against the wall. His feet were cut up so bad they felt like they’d been flayed, and it was hard to tell his socks had been white once. That blood was probably his. 

The Pit had made some effort to hide its tracks, which meant there probably wasn’t a clear trail of DNA from the crime scene to here, but he was still leaving evidence everywhere. The room was under a fake name, but this could still easily be tracked back to him, to Roy, and inside a week, he could lose his dad, his freedom, and his best friend in one cruel… well, Jason couldn’t call it a twist of fate, could he? 

No. He did this. He chose this.

He needed to start making moves before the sun rose on the bodies and GCPD got a whiff. Smart moves, swift moves, correct moves.

He didn’t.

Jason hadn’t made a right move in days. He’d probably only find another way to make this fucking worse.

So, he just sat, curled up against the wall and staring blankly at the wall in front of him as night turned to dawn and dawn turned to day. Roy would be here soon, probably. Unless he’d just blinked a few too many times and today was still yesterday and Roy was still thousands of miles away. It didn’t really matter, he supposed. Time wasn’t real, his body wasn’t working, and for the millionth time, Roy was going to have to save him from himself. There was nothing to do but wait.

The blood wasn’t dripping anymore, had dried into a thick paste on his skin now. It itched. He wanted to scratch it. Wanted to scratch off his own skin, maybe find a new person under there, someone who actually was any of the things Jason had claimed to be. God, he’d been such an idiot. He couldn’t tell what was worse, the fact that he’d genuinely fallen for what had seemingly been yet another one of Bruce’s expertly crafted lies, or the fact that none of this was actually Bruce’s fault. Not really.

He could blame Bruce for it, yeah, and Roy would blame Bruce for it, too. He could feel vindicated and righteous and justified for a few seconds at a time, but reality would always come crashing back down. All he’d needed to do was have a civil conversation with a stranger. Keep the frightened beast Talia had made of him in its cage for a few seconds and think the situation through. Jason had survived three weeks with Joker and two years with the League, but he couldn’t make it through one uncomfortable situation without trying to put a knife in it. If he could, none of this would have happened.

He could still have a dad. 

Even if it was a lie, even if it had always been a lie, it had been such a nice lie. Jason hadn’t been ready to lose it yet. 

Not for the first time, Jason wondered if maybe he’d been stronger back then, when he was a kid, when someone was beating him shitless every single day. Wondered if letting himself relax into happiness and safety and complacency with Roy was a mistake, not just for himself, but for everyone in the blast radius of his inevitable fuck-ups. The al Ghuls’ favorite pet killer wouldn’t have folded the moment the conversation got uncomfortable. 

Given the conversation never would’ve even started with the al Ghuls’ favorite pet killer. He only spoke through League-issued weapons. He would’ve figured out how to fight a speedster, or he would’ve died trying. 

But still. Jason used to be used to the pain. It wasn’t until he started trying to free himself from it that bullshit like this started raining down on him. Maybe everyone would’ve been better off if he’d stayed with the League. If he’d found a way to be good enough to convince them to keep him. Or if he’d just let them put him down like the monster they thought he was, like the monster everyone seemed to think he was.

Jason was so lost in his head that he didn’t even notice someone was at the door until the handle was already bouncing against the wall behind it and Roy was strolling through. 

“Good news, Jaybird!” He chirped as he closed and locked the door behind him. 

Jason flinched at the noise with his whole body, deafeningly loud after his only companion had been his own ragged breathing for the past however long. 

“I’ve already checked about four things off my Gotham bingo card—” Roy cut himself off abruptly as he realized the bed was empty and Jason was curled up in the farthest, darkest corner of the room. “What the fuck?” He breathed, eliminating the distance between them and kneeling at Jason’s side. “What—what happened to you?” 

At first, the harsh, shuddering breath ripped from his chest was the only response Jason could give. Eventually, he managed to lift his head long enough to nod towards the window and the trail of blood leading from it. “Evidence,” he croaked.

Roy’s fingers were already threaded between Jason’s, guiding his hands away from his head and placing them at his sides instead. Chunks of black hair fell to the floor with the motion. Jason hadn’t even noticed when he started pulling on it. “Fuck evidence, what the fuck happened to you?” 

“Evidence,” Jason repeated fervently, voice cracking on the word. Roy was kneeling in the evidence. The evidence was soaking into Roy’s pants. Jason had brought Roy into this mess. If they got caught, it would be Jason’s fault. “Big city. Cops. Jail.”

“Jaybird, you need—”

“Please.”

Roy set his jaw, took a deep breath, and stared into Jason’s eyes. “Is it your blood?” He asked, a slight tremor in his voice.

Shame washed over Jason in a thick, sickening wave. He barely kept his head above the water long enough to jerk it to one side, then the other.

“Okay. Fine. Evidence first.”

Two trips to the corner store, three gallons of bleach, a few felonies' worth of contaminated evidence, one climb up a fire escape in a historic blizzard in broad daylight, and a change of clothes later, Roy had eliminated every last excuse Jason had to put this off any longer. “Not my finest work,” Roy muttered as he shoved the last wad of bloodstained paper towel into a garbage bag. “But it’ll get the job done. Your turn.”

“We should leave,” Jason rasped. “New hotel. Cover our tracks.”

Roy blinked at him blankly. “God’s wrath is out there covering our tracks in record-breaking snow right now. I know how to cover up a scene. You know I know how to cover up a scene, because I learned it from you. I am not moving you anywhere in this condition; you’re shaking like a leaf, and you’re on the verge of shock. Not to mention, if the Pit decides to make an encore, I’d rather fight it in a place I’m familiar with. All of Gotham is basically your backyard. You already have an unfair advantage.” A pause, and his face softened a bit. Jason wished he deserved it. “Let me help you, sweetheart.”

Jason flinched. Sympathy warmed Roy’s eyes, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. He sank to his knees beside Jason, took a deep, shaking breath, and began gently cleaning the crusted blood from his face. “How many bodies and how many injuries, Red?” He whispered, the familiar question sounding foreign, wrong, like rocks falling out of his mouth. Roy was rattled. Roy was never rattled.

“Six. Three—no, four. I think.”

“Where?”

“Narrows. Bowery.”

“Not where did you kill them, Jaybird, where are you injured?” 

“Feet. Shoulder. Nose. And something—” Jason made a vague gesture over his eye, “something with my face.”

“You broke your nose?” Roy asked, pulling his hands back and fixing Jason with a quizzical look. “You broke your face? You—nobody ever gets that close to you, you haven’t broken your nose in years, you haven’t broken your face the whole time I’ve known you. How did a Gotham street thug manage it?”

“Meta.”

“There’s metas just walking the streets in this godforsaken city?” 

“No.”

“Then how—you know what? Never mind. We’re doing this first.”

Roy scrubbed the rest of the blood from Jason’s face and set his nose in silence. He spent a while feeling around Jason’s bruised eye, which had nearly swollen shut at this point, frowning more and more with every light press of his fingers, every wince Jason couldn’t quite hide. “Dunno who in God’s name would be strong and fast enough to do this, especially to you, but I think it’s your orbital bone. Which, of course, I can’t do anything about, because I’m not actually a doctor, no matter how much your nonstop injuries keep trying to make me into one. And you’re not going to go to a hospital, so it’s… just gonna suck real bad for weeks until it heals.” Roy’s frown deepened. He let out a heavy sigh. “Somethin’ tells me you probably want it to.”

Jason looked away. Roy seemed to take it as answer enough. 

He moved on to cleaning the countless small cuts on the soles of Jason’s feet. “You’re lucky as hell you don’t have frostbite. They’re gonna have to invent a new kind of Hepatitis for the guy who walked the streets of Gotham without shoes on. Remind me to get you tested when this is all over.” The joke fell flat on its face. Roy clearly heard it just as much as Jason did, because he was already shifting gears. “You gonna tell me what happened?”

For a half second, Jason forced himself to meet Roy’s eyes. Instantly, he felt his whole face crumble beneath Roy’s attention. “I fucked up,” he whispered, hanging his head, voice run ragged like he’d been screaming for hours. “God, I fucked up so bad, Roy, I didn’t even know I could still fuck up this bad.”

Roy swallowed hard and nodded. “Were they innocent?”

“No,” Jason hissed, the Pit scalding his veins and stinging his eyes so harshly he had to close them against the pain. They weren’t innocent. It was one of the only things Jason was sure of from the time he left Bruce’s place to now. He couldn’t remember faces, voices, or names, but he could see four large men gathered around a woman, pinning her to the wall behind her, he could see a child screaming and kicking at arms so much stronger than they were, he could see Shrimp in the kid’s eyes, he could see Candy in the woman’s clenched fists, and Jason had to force his mind off track before he could go under all over again.  “But I still—I didn’t—”

“You didn’t mean to?” Roy finished with a small cringe.

“I didn’t mean to,” Jason whispered, raw, horrified. “I saw green and they were dead.”

At that, Roy forcibly erased all emotion from his expression. It was no use; Jason knew where he hid it. In the clench of his jaw, in the depth of his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Jason couldn’t read exactly what it was, but he knew it was bad. “Is your shoulder dislocated?” Roy asked, perfectly even. “Or something worse than that?”

“D-Dislocated. Are you…” Jason lost his words for a moment, staring at the brick wall of Roy’s face. He tried to hold himself back. The plea spilled out anyway. “I’m sorry. Please don’t leave.” 

There should’ve been an argument in there, a reason why Roy should stay, but Jason didn’t have one. I fought as hard as I could was a lie. I didn’t have a choice was bullshit. It was an impossible situation was, at the very least, deliberately misleading. Jason didn’t have a bulletproof justification to cover himself in like armor any more now than he’d had when he fought with Bruce. All he had was the cold, frantic knowledge that he’d well and truly go off the deep end if Roy didn’t stay here. That Roy was the only person he had left. That Roy was the only thing he’d ever been able to love without demolishing it. 

And Jason knew exactly where the bottom of that deep end was. If the Pit rampaged through Gotham the way it had in the Chinese countryside, it was only a matter of time before the League caught wind, tracked him down, and turned him back to their side. Roy was probably the first person they’d have him kill. 

Roy’s hands paused on their way to Jason’s shoulder. He held perfectly still for a few moments, and then his eyes flicked up to Jason’s. “What are you—of course I’m not going to leave. That’s not how this works, Jay, you know that. I—I’m not mad at you.”

“You’re something,” Jason argued. “You’re something that you don’t want me to know about. You’re doing that thing with your face. You haven’t done that in years.”

“I—” Roy started, then quickly cut himself off, clearly remembering how pointless it was to try to stand between Jason and the truth. “I love you,” he said, voice a rough whisper. “And it never gets any easier, seeing you like this. I—I thought maybe this was in our past now, and I’m not pissed at you or anything like that, it’s just… I know how much it hurts the first time you fall off the wagon hard.” Roy’s voice dropped to a register Jason could barely hear. “I didn’t know how much it would hurt to watch it happen to you.”

It slammed into Jason’s gut so hard he almost wanted to double over at the feeling. His eyes watered. He told himself it was from the pain, not the emotion. No harm in adding one more lie to the stack. “I-I’m sorry,” he stammered out, because it was all he had to give Roy, and it wasn’t even close to being enough.

“I’m really not upset with you, Jay.”

“I know. I believe you. But I still don’t… I don’t want to be the reason you hurt.”

Roy swallowed hard, nodded, and fell silent.

Jason waited until Roy was finished patching him up to speak again. “Can we go home?” He asked in a small voice.

Roy sat back on his heels and frowned. “Um, aren’t we home right now? Wasn’t that the whole point of all this, that Gotham is your real home?”

The flinch came so hard and sudden that Jason’s head smacked into the wall behind him. He couldn’t even feel the sting of it. “I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I think I made a mistake.”

“That’s a pretty drastic change from the tune you were singing in China,” Roy pointed out, voice feather light. “I know you’re really in the shit right now, Jaybird, but now’s not the best time to be making big decisions about—”

“Can we go home?” Jason repeated, the desperation starting to crawl into his voice. “Please?”

Roy sighed, his eyes going deep and sad and understanding. “Of course we can, sweetheart. I can get a storage unit for the stuff we brought here and take care of it later. We can be on a plane back to our old place by tonight. Go right back to the way things were. But…” His eyebrows drew together. “Are you really sure that’s what you want?”

“I made a mistake,” Jason said again, since he seemed to be drawing from a very limited pool of responses. “I—I thought things could be different now, and I was wrong.”

A storm came over Roy’s face. He’d connected the dots. Jason didn’t want him to connect the dots. He didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted to go home. “Jay, what happened?”

“I told you, I fucked up.”

“Yeah, I heard you. I also know how important staying clean was to you. I know what it would take for you to give it up. You never go down without a fight, Jaybird, you go down kicking and screaming and biting at their fuckin’ ankles, whatever it takes. Just being here in Gotham wouldn’t be enough. If it was, you never would’ve come here in the first place, especially not on your own. You wouldn’t put yourself in that situation. Not anymore. So, what happened to you?” 

“I fucked up. Me. I fucked up.” Jason tucked his face behind his knees. “And now I’m gonna run from it. Because that’s what I do.”

“It was Bruce.” A statement this time, not a question. “He hurt you.”

Jason shook his head miserably. “It was my fault.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Roy, please.”

“I won’t make you tell me anything, Jay, but we don’t lie to each other. That’s part of the deal.”

Jason tried to get his mouth to work around the words. Really, he did. But it was no use. “I—I can’t.”

Roy looked down and nodded. “Okay.” It wasn’t disappointment or anger. He just looked, sounded, felt sad. Jason could taste it in the air. Wished he could spit it out.

Silence descended as Roy moved Jason to the bed, all but carrying him there despite Jason’s wordless grunts of protest. He could walk. This was nothing. Jason could remember a time the League had whipped the soles of his feet for hours, then made him climb up the sheer side of the mountain without gear. And Jason actually remembered it, which meant they probably did it more than once. This was nothing. 

The post-Pit adrenaline crash had left Jason frozen to the bone. He’d been trying to hide the chattering of his teeth, but that only made his whole jaw tremble pathetically instead. Roy was nice enough not to acknowledge it out loud. Just bundled Jason up with every blanket in the room, plus two more he’d picked up at the store, and the electric blanket he’d brought from their not-home in China. Roy knew as well as Jason did that his body heat would be a much more efficient way to bring Jason back to the temperature of the living, but even with all the physical evidence scrubbed off… letting the Pit kill with his body had left Jason feeling dirty. Right down to his soul. Dirty in a way he hadn’t felt for the better part of a year, and he—he didn’t want to make Roy dirty too. 

So, Jason pretended the artificial warmth could hold a candle to the walking furnace that was Roy Harper, curled up against the wall, and ignored the knowledge slowly chipping away at what little was left of him, that having Roy’s arms wrapped around him might be the only thing that could make this okay again. The bed dipped as Roy joined him on it, mirroring Jason’s position, laying his cheek against his knees and fixing his eyes on Jason. There was an unbearable 18 inches of space between them. Jason wanted nothing more than to close it.

He didn’t.

Roy didn’t speak again until after Jason’s breathing had evened out and he was somewhere in the loose general orbit of stability. “What if I promise that, whatever you tell me, I will not leave here to go kick your dad’s ass for hurting you again?”

“Could you promise that?” Jason shot back, not letting the question really land on him. 

Roy opened his mouth to retort, paused, then closed it, resigned. “What if I promise that, whatever you tell me, I will not leave here to go kick your dad’s ass for hurting you again… today.”

Jason didn’t know why, but it broke something in him that time. A full-body cringe rolled through him, aggravating every last injury he’d incurred from every last stupid decision he’d made in the past however many hours, days, months, years—

He sighed and hid his face behind his knees. “I don’t know if I can use that word for him anymore.”

There was an excruciatingly long silence. “So it was him,” Roy said eventually, and that couldn’t be anything but rage choking his voice.

“It… it was and it wasn’t. It’s complicated.” 

Jason waited for Roy to press him for the details, waited for Roy to give him an excuse to blow up about how he didn’t ask to be interrogated and then shut down for a nice, miserable few days, but it didn’t come. 

“I don’t know how to fight speedsters,” Jason confessed under his breath.

“Wha—oh.” Horror crashed over Roy’s face. “Oh. Oh, no.”