Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If he’s honest, he has to admit it happens by accident.

He’s been paying less attention to Gotham, too wrapped up in setting up the takeover of Kord Corporation- he could delegate, probably, but Fox is a shrewd operator, and Jason doesn’t want this done in a way that anyone sees coming.

The Red Hood needs to seem untouchable, at least for the first six months, or he’s going to be shot to ribbons by the first guy that realises Jason doesn’t have backup. He needs to stack the deck in his favour if he’s going to be fighting Batman and the mob, and if that means he spends eight hours a day making phone calls to expensive German lawyers and investment brokers and venture capitalists, then that is what he’ll do. He’s worked with worse people. Probably.

But he’d be lying if he said it didn’t give him a headache.

With a heavy exhale, he lets the receiver clatter down onto the telephone cradle, and blinks away the pain in his temples, slouching over to the ratty couch that comprises fifty percent of the furniture in his Metropolis safe house, nearly falling onto it. He’d started this process in Germany but this close to the finish line he has to be Stateside in order to sign paperwork, and he had been determined not to get too comfortable in Luthor’s city.

He’s maybe regretting that now, just a little. With a sigh, he resettles, fishing out the TV remote he’d inadvertently sat down on, and, on a whim, thumbs the power button.

The TV buzzes to life, opening on a familiar scene: Gotham, entirely engulfed by chaos.

Jason shakes his head, bitterly. He steps away for three years, and this is what the Bat lets happen?

It’d been a shock, seeing Batman let himself get caught on film. A bit of faith Jason hadn’t known he still had in the old man, lost. He’d known Batman was stubborn, bullheaded, wrong, but for him to be sloppy?

Well. That just proved Jason was right, didn’t it? Batman wasn’t working anymore.

Jason lets the reporting wash over him, only half paying attention. It  had rankled, at first, sitting across the bay while his home burned, but if he jumped in now, he wouldn’t be ready, wouldn’t have a plan. Things were still in motion, and he didn’t know how much had changed on the ground since he’d been gone.

Besides, this didn’t look as bad as the time last year, when Gotham had been ejected from the Union while Jason was halfway up a mountain with no television or newspapers. That had been a hell of a thing to come back to-

On the television, the camera pans across Gotham’s skyline, and Jason’s mind goes blank.

The clocktower, Babs’ new base of operations, is a smoking ruin.

No. No no no, she couldn’t- he wouldn’t have-

He let you die, a nasty little voice in the back of Jason’s neck whispers. Why not her?

Scrambling up, mashing the mute button on the remote, he rushes to the desk in the corner, wrenching open his laptop, fingers shaking as he activates the nuclear option.

Hacking the Bats’ comms is beyond risky, but (if Oracle is off the board) he has to know.

Putting the headphone to his ear, relief floods his chest when he hears Barbara’s voice for the first time in three years, then sours when he can process well enough to hear what she’s actually saying.

It’s not Barbara that’s dead.

It’s Robin.

Jason is on the road in less than a minute. If anyone needs his signature they can come find him.

He’s not meant to be patrolling solo. There’s probably a protocol, a document in the Batcomputer’s files, crisp and clean: action plan in case of bereavement. B, the hypocrite, probably dictated something like in the event of the death of-

Tim’s brain skips, once, like a needle jumping off a record.

- a Pre-Approved Loved One (see individual personnel files) no operative should patrol unaccompanied for a period of 1-3 weeks, pending review by Batman and a licensed counsellor.

But see.

Here’s the thing.

They buried Steph this morning.

And there’s nobody left to stop him and Robin is the only mould he can fit himself into without shaking himself to pieces and so Tim needs to be Robin and Batman needs Robin.

It’s not smart. Black Mask- anyone who looked up would see Robin’s not blonde any more, would start asking questions, this is something that they should discuss, should plan, but-

But Tim needs this more than he needs to be smart about this.

So, here he is. Patrolling. It looks like a quiet night anyway, now Black Mask has more or less consolidated his place at the top of the heap.

Tim is thinking of leaving Gotham.

He has not told anyone, but she recognises it, in his hesitance, his growing quiet. She thinks perhaps he cannot look anywhere in the city without seeing ghosts.

She thinks perhaps he is right. Perhaps she recognises it because she’s feeling the same.

Gotham was a home to her, for a while. But she is not Bruce, who carries Gotham like a snail with its shell, like Stephanie-

She flinches, at the thought. Stephanie, of all of them, had been the most like Bruce in that way. But Cassandra has lived in many places, and can do good anywhere there is violence. The things that tie her to Gotham are breaking. Barbara has left. Stephanie is dead.

She sights her grapple, breathes, and fires, launching herself into the night, feeling nothing but the lurch in the pit of her stomach, then hits the roof with a roll, righting herself, and moving on.

And Tim is thinking of leaving. He has not told her, which hurts, but he has not told anyone, so at least there is that.

Tim has started to be like Bruce, in that way. Cassandra understands. It is easier to keep moving, to keep fighting, that way.

Before Shiva, she would have done the same. She’d been arrogant, childish. Stupid. Shiva had, in a way, taught her better, although she hadn’t meant to. Cassandra had seen what perfection looked like, and she found she wanted something else, instead.

She wants to go with Tim, when he goes. She would have wanted to stay with Barbara, with Tim, with Bruce, with Steph.

She cannot have that. So she will go with Tim, when he goes. And so she has to find him, and get him to tell her where he is going.

It hadn’t exactly been part of the plan, to go after Robin. For one thing, last he checked, Robin was dead.

It had been a surprise to see little Timmy Drake back in the red and green and much less yellow, if only because Jason had thought he might have the decency to hold off for more than a day after they buried the last one.

Drake’s lack of respect for the dead is one thing, but him being out all alone does present an unexpected opportunity. So far Jason’s busied himself with keeping Sionis from sitting too comfortably, making a name for himself, and setting up safe houses.

He’s going to get on the Bats’ radar soon, so he might as well do it in a way that takes one of them off the board.

In his after-action report, he’ll probably call what just happened ‘a fight’.

What actually happened was Gotham’s newest up-and-coming drug baron mauled him like a bear hunting salmon.

Tim hits the roof so hard he bounces twice, rolling into an undignified heap. The tumble does neatly disguise the way he hits the emergency alert, so he can at least claim it was all part of the plan.

“Twice? Twice? Are you insane?” The metallic rasp of the Red Hood’s modulated voice turns almost indecipherable through their furious disgust. “What makes you so special you think you can take this gig from a dead kid twice?”

Robins are supposed to quip, at times like this. Tim opts instead for gurgling indistinctly into the tarmac of the roof. It doesn’t have the same effect a one-liner would have, but does at least let his attacker know he’s still conscious.

Shit. No. Bad. Should have played dead, come on Tim, you know this. Oh well, the jig’s up, might as well get-

The world goes white and Tim hears shrimp colours as the Red Hood hauls him up by the wrist and wrenches his hand-

-It’s whole seconds before he comes back to himself, crumpled on the ground, but it’s okay, it’s a broken wrist at least but he’d be a lousy excuse for a Robin if he couldn’t fight with at least a few bones broken, he’s not out of the game yet-

The Red Hood snorts and steps back, unimpressed, and finally Tim feels himself tapping into the kind of furious adrenaline that’s actually useful. Condescending prick.

“Yeah I don’t think the big man upgraded here.”

“Wha-”

“Am I talking too quick for you? I'm saying you're a kid playing dress up. Come back when you’re at least tough enough to wear short pants.”

Joke’s on this asshole, Tim’s communicator clicks once, which means Cass is about to swoop in and dribble that helmet like a basketball-

Tim blinks and the Red Hood is gone. By the time Batgirl drops silently into the scene the only evidence they were ever here is a few scuff marks in the gravel and Tim’s neatly fractured wrist.

Tim’s emergency alert goes off, which does make finding him easier.

It’s not the same, she forces herself to remember, tearing across rooftops. He has not been taken. He’s in a fight. He can fight back, or get away. He has his gear. He’s closer. There is nothing distracting her, or getting in her way. It’s not the same.

There’s movement on the top of a tower, still streets away, the tallest building for blocks around. The angle is bad, but she can see a figure standing up, faced away from her, looking down at their feet.

No time to catch her breath. She clicks her comm once, aims her grapple, and launches herself up as quick as she can.

Not quick enough, no no- the figure half-turns to face her as she pulls herself toward the next roof, a glint of a helmet in the moonlight, one hand on a hip, reaching for a gun, and she can see it, the movement playing out in her mind, inevitable. The Red Hood will draw a pistol, turn, and shoot Tim while he’s lying on the ground. And she will be too late to stop it.

In his ear, there’s a click on the Bats’ comm line, which means it’s time to reassess.

It hadn’t been an accident that he jumped Robin here, on the tallest building on the block. He’s got sight advantage on every building within grapple range. Bats like pouncing down on people, and he’s not inclined to let them indulge.

He’s about finished here, anyway. Robin’s not a factor for six weeks, twelve if Alfred is still deferring to Leslie. And maybe the little twerp can take the downtime to think about how bulletproof he isn’t.

Unlikely, though, from what Jason’s seen of Robin Three And Five. He doesn’t seem the introspective type.

Anyway, he half-turns, one hand on a gun for his own peace of mind, scanning the rooftops below for signs of Batman or Nightwing or-

Uh-oh.

Batgirl incoming.

Cain hadn’t been part of the plan. Or, rather, the plan had been to avoid her at all costs. The second she got involved his options narrowed dramatically.

He knows Batman. He can fight Batman, exploit the fact that he knows the man to have the upper hand against anyone Batman trained. He’s not afraid of Batman or Nightwing or any variety of Robin.

Batman, by all accounts, didn’t teach Cain a single goddamn thing about fighting.

Time to skedaddle.

Chapter Text

Monitor duty sucks.

Alfred had bound up his forearm in a bright orange cast with a severe warning to not take it off for weeks. Tim’s only solace comes from the fact that Bruce is too busy trying to figure out who bought Kord Corporation out from under them to smother Tim in awkwardness like he sometimes does.

And only Cass has signed his cast. Well. Not exactly signed. She’s drawn two dots and a straight line, a perfectly unsmiling face, right above the break in his wrist.

She thinks she’s hilarious. Tim glowers down at the little :| as though it’ll maybe apologise if he stares hard enough.

She gets to go out and hunt the Red Hood. She seems to realise that Bruce isn’t going to lecture her about not going out alone. And sure, fine, she’s one of the greatest fighters on the planet or whatever, there’s maybe six non-metas in the world that can even stand in the ring with her and Hood sure doesn’t look like any of them, it makes sense that nobody complains about her taking the lead on this case. But Tim’s still annoyed about it.

All he can do for now is compile information on the Red Hood, and pass it along to Cass.

There’s a long list of vague guesses Bruce and Dick have put together about who the Red Hood is, what he wants, where he might have come from. Tim knows Cass won’t have much use for any of that, though.

(Dick in particular has trouble packaging information in a way Cass finds useful. Tim tries to avoid thinking ill of Nightwing.)

“Here’s a new one,” he announces, thumbing the microphone on. “Don’t chase him into any warehouses.”

“Hm,” Cass grunts, over the line, and Tim shakes his head, eyes roving over footage stitched together from weeks of sporadic scuffles.

There’s a common thread. The Red Hood gets backed into a corner, by False Facers, or Mr. Freeze, or whoever. The Red Hood ends up with his back against the wall, his pursuers get cocky, and then one of them stumbles into a tripwire or sets off an alarm or walks into the sights of fifteen fully automatic gun turrets.

That one, Tim needs to look into.

“He likes setting traps, looks like. If he sees you coming, he’ll try to lure you somewhere he’s filled with C4 or something.”

“Hm.” That one sounded a little hurt, the way she gets when he implies that maybe there’s something she can’t do, like a quadruple backflip, or eating five burritos at once.

(She’d done both, obviously, taking the resulting sprained ankle and bout of nausea as badges of pride. Tim’s most fervent wish is for a friend that listens to him, ever, for any reason.)

“I’m serious, Batgirl. You wanna catch this guy? He cannot see you.”

There’s a thoughtful pause. “...Like Snoop Dogg,” she declares, eventually, for some reason.

“...Sure?”

“Outta sight. Can’t see me.”

Tim blinks. “...I should never have let you and Steph meet,” he says, before he remembers why he shouldn’t.

He barely hears Cass’ line click off.

Fuck. He needs to get out of this city.

As she stalks through the city, Batgirl considers her quarry. She is a detective, but it is the part of her she is least skilled at, and she should take every opportunity to practise.

(Robin understands this, now. He is better at giving her facts, rather than conclusions, than he used to be. He still forgets, sometimes, still first tries to give orders, but usually he remembers himself in time.)

What are the things she knows about The Red Hood?

There are many things Batman and Nightwing think about The Red Hood- that he is a he, that he is smart and dangerous and ruthless, that he has a plan, that he wants to replace Black Mask, that he has some interest in The Joker. They think he has killed more than fifteen people since he came to Gotham.

These are not things she knows. What does she know?

She knows he is young, and tall, and strong. She knows he heard her approach, which might be her fault, she could have been fast or quiet, and she chose to be fast. At the time, she thought she had to be. But she knows he can fight and keep half his attention on his back. He fights like he is expecting to be ambushed.

She knows he hurt Robin. She knows most people would find that difficult. Robin is… okay, at fighting. (Okay? The Robin in her mind squawks, cheeks puffed up like a balloon, but still smiling. Just okay?) And getting better. It is not usually a problem, and besides he is better at other things than her, he is her favourite for puzzles and numbers and things in glass bottles that fizz.

(There were things Spoiler was better at than either of them, at talking and charming and knowing something called Street Smarts! , she always said it the same way, a funny little growl and a pointing finger, always the same motion every time, and Cass has to chase away the grief for something that never happened, all three of them, working together without any hurts between them. They could have been the best.)

Her thoughts are disorganised, but the point is: many people would not be able to beat Robin in a fight, and The Red Hood did. She has reviewed the mask footage from Robin’s fight. The Red Hood did not reach for the guns he displayed openly on his hips, or the knife hidden under his jacket. He had time, when Robin was knocked down. She would not have been fast enough, if, once The Red Hood heard her, he had chosen to draw a pistol and fire.

(She dreams, sometimes, of being too slow. Of tearing the city apart, limbs moving like she’s underwater, ending up beside a hospital bed she’s only ever seen in nightmares.)

At the time, she thought she had to be fast. But now she thinks she was wrong. She thinks Robin was never in danger.

The Red Hood carries tools for killing, and he chose not to kill Robin. She does not know if that is important, if that means he will not choose to kill her. Not that it will matter. She is better at fighting than Robin, and she will be better than The Red Hood, if she needs to be.

There’s a spring in his step, a song in his heart, it’s a beautiful evening in sunny Gotham City. If he could get away with the damage it’d do to his growing reputation, he’d start whistling a happy tune.

Who knew beating the Joker into a coma could be so good for the soul?

(It had been so easy, was the thing. All the dressups, maybe especially the Joker, had gotten used to Batman being a reactive force. He’s got a whole city to patronise, he doesn’t have the time to go looking for anyone just because they’ve broken out of Arkham. If you keep your head down, he won’t come looking until you actively try to get his attention.

Jason has all the time in the world. It had been child’s play, breaking into a safehouse in Amusement Mile, slipping past the few goons that were hanging out, waiting to be told what the next big thing was going to be, and there he was, the Joker, sitting on the floor, face hard and unsmiling, lost in his own little world.

He’d seemed off his game, annoyed with Jason more than anything else. The Joker, apparently, is bad at improv. Who knew?

The crowbar in Jason’s hand had felt like poetry as he brought it down on the clown’s face and neck and arms and chest, over and over and over.)

All the same, he can’t help but feel like a kid that opened his Christmas presents a day early, now it’s done and the Joker is handcuffed to a radiator in a condemned apartment, dying by inches. He’s had his fun, and now he’s got to deal with the consequences like an adult. And sometimes being an adult means finding a doctor willing to keep the Joker this side of the grave.

He’s already tried the least scrupulous mob doctor he could get his hands on, a man who, rumour has it, earns his crust by stitching Black Mask’s ‘guests’ back together, on the occasions when Roman gets just a little too excitable with a scalpel.

When Jason had asked how much he would charge to take on the Joker as a patient, the man had laughed in his face. In a way, it warmed Jason’s heart to see a man with principles.

(Jason had killed him anyway, of course. If Sionis found out that Red Hood was sheltering the Joker, that was it.)

So he’s got a couple options. Either he lowers his standards and trusts the care of a significant piece of his plan to a man that dopes greyhounds for a living, or he makes a social call at Leslie’s clinic, picks up some supplies, and plays nursemaid himself.

The Joker’s lucky Jason is in such a good mood.

Something’s been eating at Tim, about the Red Hood.

Okay, a lot of things have been annoying him about the Red Hood, but the thing that’s worrying him is how casual the man had been. He’d talked like he’d known Tim, but for the life of him Tim can’t figure out how.

He’d been pissed off that Tim was Robin. He may also have been pissed off that Tim had given the Robin costume pants.

Tim doesn’t have the time to unpack that, so he’s just going to move on.

The Red Hood has spent most of his time waging war with Black Mask. Hood doesn’t have a gang as much as he’s a one-man mafia, offering protection rackets to small-time operations as long as they follow his rules. By all accounts, Hood can’t have time for more than three hours’ sleep a night.

He’s avoided Batman, and Nightwing, and especially Batgirl. But he takes time out of his busy schedule to attack Robin? What’s the point? Is he just picking them off one by one?

The thought stops him dead.

That makes a worrying amount of sense, actually. Go after Batman’s allies when they’re alone, neutralise them. He’d been scared off by Batgirl, but Tim hadn’t missed the fact that Hood was armed. He’s got no idea what the man might have had planned if they hadn’t been interrupted.

Okay, so. Hypothesis: if he was the Red Hood, who would he be after next? Assume Hood has some level of familiarity with Bat operations. Who’s the most vulnerable?

Well. Up until a few weeks ago, Tim would have said Dr Thompkins.

This time, she is quiet. The Red Hood doesn’t hear her coming until she’s almost upon him.

He’s standing outside the boarded-up shell that had been the Free Clinic, shoulders rounded, looking confused. She thinks about that, about the best way to get in close to him, no room in her mind for anything else. She hits the pavement three strides from him and he’s pivoting, weight on the ball of one foot, twisting into profile and for a second he’s reaching for a weapon and she sees the moment he recognises her and he stops.

Interesting. He’d run from her before, too. He knows her enough to be careful of her.

(Most people don’t, the first time. She’s beginning to build a reputation, but it’s slower than it could be. Criminals have to know it’s her beating them before they understand why they should be afraid. Tim jokes that she should let every tenth criminal go if she wants recognition; Bruce thinks she should keep doing things her way.)

By the bunching in his neck, he’s staring at her. Slowly, he raises both hands level with his chest, makes a practised series of gestures that mean precisely nothing.

Some of the tension drops out of him after a moment, and his helmet rasps, a metallic buzzing noise that might have been a sigh.

“I’ll admit that was a long shot. Blink once for yes, twice for no?”

He can’t see her eyes any more than she can see his. This is his attempt at a joke.

She blinks.

“Alright, good talk.”

She is almost certain she could beat him now, but Tim’s warning about traps makes her cautious. The clinic would be a good place to trap her, distract her, catch her in a memory.

He isn’t running, not yet. He looks like he is going to, small motions shifting as he thinks over his options. One moment he considers trying to bowl her over, another he prepares to grapple onto a roof.

She is in front of him, lit by street lamps, and he is armed and armoured. She will still beat him, but it will be messy. She cannot afford to be shot, not any more. Barbara has gone, Tim is hurt, they don’t have-

The Free Clinic is closed.

“Why are you here?”

He starts, surprised at something, perhaps that she can even speak. Perhaps he knew of her from before.

“Was hoping to pick up some aspirin,” he drawls, glib, thumbing over his shoulder at the boarded-up windows of the Clinic. “But it seems the doctor is out.”

Leslie, lips pursed in friendly disapproval as she sews Cass’s shoulder back together. Her movements are obvious, clearly displayed, used to patients that jump and twitch and are frightened of sudden motions.

Steph grinning as she hops down from the hospital bed, flashing her stomach to Cass, showing off her new scar with glee; Cass never thought that much about her scars, the faded crisscross of white lines across her body.

Bruce stopping by, stooping, looking abashed as the doctor grumps at him, hanging his head like he only does when Alfred is annoyed at him.

Steph, lying in the bed as Leslie watches, eyes cold.

“She killed Robin.”

She… hadn’t meant to say that. Anger had seized her by the throat, shaking with the need to hurt, to punish, to beat the world into place with her fists, to force everyone and everything to stop.

The Red Hood is frozen, locked still, tense like his muscles want to rip him into pieces.

“Now that…” he mumbles, eventually, “that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

She will risk being shot, if it means she can move again, surge forward, take The Red Hood apart, one more murderer stopped, but she’s not in control, she twitches, wasted movement, does nothing but draw his focus back to her, and in that moment there’s a crack and white smoke bursts from behind her, around her, the ground littered with smoke bombs and Tim’s voice in her memory chides her with the fact that The Red Hood sets traps.

It’s bare seconds of disorientation, but his hands were free, and it was all the time he needed to fire a grapple and vanish.

It takes him too long, but finally, eventually, he decides he really needs to know how Stephanie Brown died.

He doesn’t rush, doesn’t jump to conclusions. He buys weeks-old newspapers, trawls through online forums, asks careful questions to people on his payroll. Takes the temperature of the street. Has an awkward conversation with Cobblepot, and tries not to think about an honest attempt to change his ways, years past, ruined by the old man’s paranoia.

It had seemed uncharacteristic, at the time.

He asks just enough to recognise the plan, and backs off. No use giving anyone else enough to start piecing things together.

He remembers, of course. B idly putting the contingency together, on long slow afternoons in the Cave. Picking Jason’s brain about the gangs, who recruited from where, who could be leant on, who could be bribed, who couldn’t. Inserting Matches Malone into hierarchies, not a leader but a lieutenant, or an informant, or just a guy who knew a guy who could get you in with the Russians, or the Italians, or, on one memorable occasion, the Japanese.

(Through Matches’ sister’s boyfriend, of course. Jason had come along for that one, playing Malone’s gormless nephew, charming some of the younger guys with his extravagantly terrible darts while rolling his eyes as Uncle Matches bragged about how tight he was with the Yakuza, maybe getting one in three things right. Jason’s ethnicity was a confused shrug but there was a reason Sandra Wu-San had been on the list.

He misses his Dad, sometimes, misses him like he misses the answer to a thousand questions he’ll never have the chance to ask. It’s only now he realises he never really knew Willis at all.

That had been a fun day. A lot of it had been fun, at the time. An intellectual exercise, a just-in-case. A chance to satisfy the itch giving up on the drama club had left him with. Neither of them had ever thought they’d need it, not really.)

Jason remembers the Matches Malone contingency plan. After all, he’d based a lot of his debut on it.

He can follow the chain of events, up to a point. Batman debuts a new Robin, Batman fights with Robin, Batman fires Robin. That happens literally every time.

He thinks. He’s a little less clear on what stopped Drake from being Robin, but Drake is a disappointment to the name anyway, so clearly he can’t even get fired right.

Anyway, Batman fires Robin, as usual. Dick ran off to San Francisco to start a polycule, Jason took time off to go travel the world, meet interesting people, and get beaten to death, and Steph, it looks like, activated the Matches Malone contingency in order to, what? Get B’s attention?

Well. It’s not like he’s got room to judge. But why was that her plan? Did B not brief her on the Matches Malone identity?

So Matches doesn’t show, because of course not, and without a bag of severed heads to calm things down everyone does the logical thing and starts murdering each other. Somehow in the confusion Black Mask grabs Stephanie, tortures her most of the way to death, and ends up king of the underworld.

(Jason’s going to kill that guy, just as soon as he can find a way to do it without the city burning down again. It’s the only thought that keeps him on task; he can ignore the fury curling in his gut as long as he reminds himself that Sionis is a dead man walking.)

Steph gets whisked away to Leslie’s clinic, and that’s when things stop making sense.

Leslie Thompkins breaks her hippocratic oath and murders a teenager in order to… what? Make a point? Then she uproots her operation, liquidates her assets, flees for Africa.

He’s shaking, he realises, distantly. A doctor, breaking her oath, fleeing Gotham. Robin, betrayed by someone she trusted. Mothers killing children. He can’t- he doesn’t-

If Doc Thompkins has started doing relief work in Ethiopia Jason is going to scream. He thinks maybe he is screaming.

Nothing ever changes, Batman and Robin and the Joker and Black Mask chasing each other in circles again and again and again, Robin dies to make a point to Batman, Batman gets another one, Robin goes into the ground, gets pulled out, buried all fancy, dressed up in a suit and tie, how much did B spend on this one’s coffin? Did he bury her somewhere hidden, too, did she wake up lost and confused? Did she call for Bruce, did she get hit by the same fucking car? How many people were at her funeral? Three, four?

How long has it been? How long has she been down in the dark?

It takes him three tries to pull up the file, hands shaking over the keyboard. Pulls up the grave plot invoice, bought and paid for by Bruce Wayne.

Dully, he realises what he has to do.

Hood’s been quiet, in the days since Batgirl spotted him outside Leslie’s old clinic.

Tim doesn’t know what to make of that. Hood’s displayed knowledge of their associates too often now. So was Tim's theory right? Had he planned to take Leslie out of action, assuming she was still on their side?

He’d seemed genuinely shocked, when he learned what Thompkins had done. Privately, Tim can’t blame him.

(Bruce had gone ballistic when he’d heard what Cass had let slip, but he’d gone ballistic in Bruce’s own special way, where he’d just looked at her and scowled.)

But Tim can’t figure out why Hood seems to care so much about Steph.

(Briefly, after too-long awake staring at the same few scraps of footage, Tim had started to wonder if Hood could be Arthur Brown, out for some kind of convoluted revenge. He’d spent seven hours eliminating it as a possibility, which had really highlighted all these straws he was grasping at.)

Barbara had made this look so much easier than it was. His eyes hurt from staring at fifty CCTV feeds at once, he’s starting to get a crick in his spine, and he vaguely remembers that the sun is supposed to give him vitamins but he can’t remember how or why.

But he can’t bring himself to give a shit about any of that when finally, suddenly, with a jarring lack of subtlety, he catches a flash of red, marching through the night like a wind-up toy with malice aforethought.

He doesn’t have time to try and work out what he meant by that. Instead he opens a line to Batgirl.

She has tried being fast. She has tried being quiet. This time, she tries standing still.

She loiters at the wrought-iron cemetery gates, standing straight, watching as The Red Hood marches towards her, armed with a shovel.

There’s something fizzing through his spine, energy bubbling through him like carbonation, coursing through him in streams and dancing out the top of his head.

People accuse her of reading minds. She can’t. She just knows what people are going to do.

And the Red Hood is stalking towards her but she knows he’s not aimed at her, knows by the length of his stride that when he walks by her he won’t slow, breezing past her, rolling the shovel over his shoulder so it won’t clip the top of her cowl even if she doesn’t move. He’s going to walk right past her, and use the action of readjusting the implement he’s carrying to disguise the way his free hand is going to drift towards the knife hidden in his jacket.

He’ll walk away from her, up the hill, making a show of letting her into his blindspot, pretending he’s not paying any attention to her at all.

She’ll let him, she decides. He’s a firework about to launch into the night sky, a lot of sparks and anticipation, but this isn’t somewhere to ambush someone like her. She can give him a few minutes. He can’t hurt anyone here.

She knows what people are going to do, but so often the why escapes her, and she wants to know what has him so excited.

Chapter Text

He's not completely deluded, okay? He knows he's not exactly being logical.

But he knows how his mind works by now; he's gotten reacquainted with it. this is going to eat at him until he gets to the bottom of this, one way or another. he can't compartmentalise, not like-

Well.

What it comes down to is if someone had gone to his grave on a whim and decided to dig him up, he'd have appreciated it, so. Treat others as you'd like to be treated, he guesses.

“I’m not looking for a fight, Batgirl,” he broadcasts, over one shoulder. “I’m just here to check something.”

She doesn’t respond, but equally she doesn’t attack him while his back is turned. He doesn’t know why- she could take him apart and he’s pretty sure she knows it- but she seems content to follow, for now.

That could be a problem, given what he’s here to do.

He should have left when he saw her. But it might have already been too late. He’s not- he’s not focusing right now. He’s got tunnel vision, unable to see anything but the grave. He needs to fix this or the distraction is going to get him killed.

She’s not stopping him. He doesn’t exactly know why, but if she changes her mind he can deal with it.

“So… are you going to stop him, or… what’s the play here, Batgirl?”

They’ve moved somewhere out of camera range, and Tim’s not worrying about that at all.  He’s totally groovy with his whole view of the situation being compressed down to audio filtered through Batgirl’s communicator.

He loves, for example, being able to hear notorious crime guy The Red Hood The Second’s boots crunching on gravel, steady and measured.  He’s delighted by the muted sounds of late-night traffic as Batgirl moves away from the street.  He’s just ecstatic to hear, for some reason, the conspicuous absence of the sound of Batgirl breaking several of this asshole’s main bones.

It’s great.  If nothing else it’s giving him sudden, cringing insight into what it must have been like for Oracle every single night, trying to corral all of them.

In retrospect he’s only surprised she didn’t move to New York sooner.

She remembers this place.

She remembers this place.

She stood in the shade and watched a black wooden box be lowered into the earth.  A sunny day, for Gotham.

Her shoulders had still ached from the fighting.  She had stared straight ahead, and had done nothing to stop the box that they had put Steph into from being lowered into the dark forever.

She chokes at the realisation, a horrible little gasp, she doesn’t flinch at anything but she chokes at this, the sudden realisation of where exactly the Red Hood is leading her.

Behind him Batgirl makes a sound, and given who she is she has to have meant for him to hear it.

But she doesn’t attack him, she isn’t stopping him, he has to force himself to not react, be calm, be in control.  He has to be in control or he’ll be dead, again.

He tries the usual tricks to calm himself, remembering street names, holding Gotham in his head. He’s had to relearn it since he came back. The earthquake had changed the city, moved streets, demolished whole blocks.

Wayne Manor was levelled, he remembers, and his throat closes all of a sudden.

Halfway up 10th, old underground garage, six automated turrets activated by a transmitter in his jacket, left inside pocket. Distance: three kilometres north, as the crow flies. Disused maintenance station in the sewer, a brick of C4 primed to crack open pipes and flood the room, access: manhole cover four kilometres south-east.

It’s calming, to reassure himself of the precautions he’s taken. He has a plan, he has options. No matter what happens, he’s not reliant on anyone or anything outside of his control. Cain’s definitely got him beat in a sprint, he’ll admit that without shame, but if he can keep a foot chase up he’ll have the advantage over distance, he’s taller than her, with a longer stride.  Pitch a grenade at her to force some space, if he can keep away from her for twenty seconds she’ll never catch him.

Nightwing’s sniffing around warehouses on the other side of town, moving at the speed of a guy with one good leg. Batman’s taken a trip to Metropolis. Black Mask thinks he’s about to ambush Jason down on Pier 15. Robin’s on bed rest. Batgirl is seven-point-five meters behind him, almost but not exactly in his blind spot.  Everything’s under control.

It doesn’t take long, is the thing, for Tim to figure out where they’re going.  They’re long out of camera range, but he’d caught them on camera at the gates to the cemetery.

And then Cass had hiccuped, which was Cass’ version of a screaming freakout.

And the Red Hood is carrying a shovel.

Why is the Red Hood carrying a shovel?

She is not stupid.  (She is not stupid.)  The Red Hood is marching towards Steph’s. Grave. With a shovel. There is only one thing this can mean.

She cannot think what he is doing this for. She is spending too much energy keeping her pulse even.

“Okay,” he breathes, as he comes to a halt by the headstone, turning to face her for the first time. “Okay. Batgirl, I am going to need you to be extremely cool about this. We need to dig up this grave.”

She hears what he says, and finds that it makes sense. She needs to check. The funeral-

The coffin was closed, at the funeral.

She never saw a body.

She’d been a coward, then. She hadn’t seen.

She should see now. She owes Steph that.

Steph wouldn’t want her to.  Steph didn’t like graves being disturbed.

Steph didn’t like it when Cass broke her jaw, either.  Same difference.

She was not… always kind, to Steph.  She did not know how to be.  But she always did what she thought was best for her.  And she will not turn her back now.

She nods.

“Something is rotten,” he hisses, attention still trained on her, body square-on towards her. “Tell me you don’t see it. Tell me this isn’t suspicious to you. Robin dies, again, and Batman doesn’t even attempt to take down the people responsible? Robin Three is back in the cape in, what, a day? You know them better than I do, Batgirl, do they not care? Or is there something they’re not telling anyone?”

He isn’t digging. She nods, again, in case he missed it.

“Exactly! This whole business stinks- what, hey-!”

Her patience runs out, and she snatches the shovel from his hands, and pivots on her heel towards the grave.

Well.  Alright then.

“Okay. Batgirl, I am going to need you to be extremely cool about this. We need to dig up this grave.”

Tim thinks maybe he’s going to throw up, or scream, or pass out.

“Batgirl what are you doing?”

The Red Hood is monologuing about something but it’s honestly impossible for Tim to pick up because Red Hood wants to dig up Steph’s body.

Red Hood wants to dig up Steph’s body, and he expects Batgirl to let him.

“Batgirl what the fuck are you doing?  Take him down!”

For a moment Tim thinks she’s going to just continue to ignore him, but dread pools in his gut as the mic picks up a rustle of fabric, and then a click, and then- nothing.

She hung up on him.  Batgirl hung up on him.

Tim slams his hands on the keyboard in frustration seconds before the screaming pain in his wrist reminds him exactly why he wasn’t supposed to do that.

It would take too long to dig up the whole body.  She learned that from last time.  She makes a hole at the head, instead, smaller.  She just needs to break in.  Enough to see her face.  To know.

There’s a hollow thud as the blade of her shovel hits the lid of the box.

Hesitation is weakness.  She puts her full strength behind the handle, and drives the shovel through the wood with a crash.

It meets no resistance.

It has not been long.  Stephanie should not be rotted to bones yet.  She should still be a body.  Except.

There is nothing.  Cass cannot move.

Dimly, as though she is underwater, she hears the Red Hood move up to join her.  He fumbles in his jacket for something, pulls it out in one hand.  There is a mechanical click , and pale light illuminates the dark soil.

He stares, trembling, into the empty box.

“We need to… we need-” 

The Red Hood is mumbling, too fast, incomprehensible, but he casts around like he’s looking for someone, like he’s expecting Steph to be hiding among the stone angels, waiting to clobber him with a brick.

“‘Sokay, I remembered this much if I hadn’t gotten hit by that damn car I’d probably have had enough brains to get to a hospital, but I was still holding my guts in when I broke out-”

He doubles over like he’s been punched, scrabbles for the back of his helmet, fumbling a familiar move for whole seconds until there’s a pneumatic hiss and the Red Hood is unmasked, facing away from her, puking unceremoniously onto the gravel.

Dirt and worms in his mouth, fingernails ripping out, choking on darkness and wet black earth, he can’t breathe he can’t breathe-

He can barely get his fingers under the clasp in time to wrench his helmet from his head before he starts vomiting, upchuck of pale thin bile and for some reason pellets of sweetcorn spattering into the grass.

When was the last time he had corn?

The mundanity of it stops him short.  When was the last time he'd had corn?

Ah, right. Taco truck, yesterday evening.  Pulled pork and corn salsa.  Not bad for New Jersey.  Besides, it was always kind of funny pulling up to a fast food place in costume- and was a good way to take the temperature of how infamous the Red Hood was getting.  In this case, enough to get noticed, not enough to get a discount.

(He used to try to get Batman to go get drive-through in the Batmobile, just for kicks.  Occasionally the old man had even indulged-)

Okay.  So that’s one way to cut a panic attack off at the pass.

He stands up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.  He’s steadier, now.  Gross, but steadier.

“So, Batgirl, got any theories?”

She doesn't answer, leather gloves creaking around the handle of the shovel.

Slowly, he circles around to the front of her, cautious of stepping too close to the grave.  She looks… honestly, that mask doesn't hide her face as much as he’d expected.  He can read her expression clear through the material.  She's trembling, and he thinks her eyes might be closed.

He steps back to turn away, which turns out to be the wrong move because Batgirl jumps like a startled cat and makes a motion like she’s just barely restraining herself from taking his head off with the shovel.

“Nightwing.  Nightwing pick up.  Nightwing I swear to-”

The comm line clicks open, and Tim almost collapses from relief.

“Robin, always a pleasure.  What’s up?”

“Do you… happen to be in Gotham right now?” Tim asks, as if he doesn’t know already that he is.

“You know, funny coincidence, but I do so happen to be, yeah,” Dick replies, graciously.  “Something wrong?”

Too late to second-guess.  “Could I ask a favour?  I need eyes on Batgirl.”

“Not that I’m saying no, but last time someone asked me that she threw me through a wall.  Odds of that happening again?”

Tim’s hackles start rising, but he doesn’t have time to get into that.

“Well, she’s outside, so pretty low?  It’s possibly extremely bad actually.  Has Batman briefed you on Red Hood?”

Tim swears he can hear Nightwing straighten up.  “Briefed is a strong word, but yeah, I’ve been following the case.”

Okay.  Okay good, yeah.  “Great, so Batgirl’s holed up in a cemetery with Red Hood and she’s turned her comms off.”

Nightwing’s quiet for a long few seconds.  When he speaks again, it sounds distinctly like he’s trying to talk around something.

“So… situation normal, then?”

“What?  No!  What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Robin.  Batgirl’s found another serial killer to project her issues onto.  This is what, the fourth time?”

Tim mutes his mic just in time for Nightwing to only catch the beginning of his frustrated screech.  Seriously.  He is going to move to Alaska if he has to spend one more night managing these children-

“Nightwing,” he intones, calmly, flicking the mic back on.  So calmly.  “I can’t be in the field right now.  We don’t have Oracle any more.  I don’t have a line to Onyx.  Batman’s still on the road back from Metropolis.  Batgirl has turned off her comms and was last seen in the company of a guy who saws off heads to make a statement.  Could you check on her.”

A rush of static on the other end indicates a sigh.  “Yeah, of course, Robin.  Sorry, I’m just a little distracted.  This thing Batman asked me to look into- well.  I’ve pretty much hit a wall here anyway.  Send me her last known location.”

She closes her eyes, breathes deep. She doesn’t open them again until she’s settled around this new reality.

She opens them and nearly breaks the Red Hood’s jaw because he turns too quickly and for a second all she can see is violence.

She has not settled.  She breathes hard, and glares at the Red Hood.

She- it would- he must-

It would make sense, if he had known this would happen.  If he had … taken Steph.  But he is as shocked as her.  If this is a trick, it is a trick being played on both of them.

As she stares, something comes over him, clicking his spine into place. “This is a crime scene. You know what to do?”

Something in her bristles at the condescension. “I’m a detective,” she snaps, and it’s grounding, cutting through the pounding in her head, the impossibility, because Steph isn’t there, the shapes on the headstone make her name but she isn’t there.

“Okay then, detective. So what do you think? Is it the ground? Is this some kind of Stephen King nonsense? Are we just Herman Munster’s dog?”

He’s rambling, pacing wildly, gesturing like he’s on a stage and it doesn’t seem like he’s paying attention to her at all until he stops short and half turns to her, confusion rolling across his shoulders.

“Oh come on, that was a good reference. You know, Pet Sematary? Had a guy from the Munsters played the creepy old man who brought his dog back to life? No? Nothing? You’re telling me the big man doesn’t make you watch schlocky horror films with him?”

It’s noise, all of it, he’s too open, broadcasting too much and her senses are overloading trying to process it all but there’s one thing that makes everything make sense.

“You,” she rasps. “Were dead.”

He reacts like she’d announced the sky was blue.

“Well, yeah? What did you think this was about?”

She hadn’t much cared who The Red Hood was, before. She knows Batman doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t have the same care for those things as Tim, or Nightwing. Knowing The Red Hood’s name wouldn’t have any bearing on how she would beat him.

But if The Red Hood’s identity is tied to how Stephanie is not in her grave, she will know it.

“Who are you?”

He starts, tripping on air, and pivots his body towards her, motion redirected unexpectedly, like when Tim climbs the fifty-two stairs up to the second floor of the Manor and his brain thinks there should be fifty-three.

“Oh, right, you don’t actually know that. This whole situation must have made no sense to you at all, huh.”

That is not an answer, but she is beginning to, reluctantly, understand the way Hood talks. He speaks like a vulture, lazily circling around the point until he’s sure it’s dead. She will wait.

“I’ve got to say, you are way more laid back than your reputation gives you credit for. Most people ask me who I am basically immediately. I think it’s the helmet, honestly. If I was parading around in a mask everyone would get that I’m hiding my face for a reason; nobody asks Batman what his name is. But they see a guy in a helmet, I guess they think ‘maybe he’s just concerned about head injuries, it’s worth asking for an introduction’. And I mean, it’s not like I’m not concerned about head injuries, you get TBI once and all of a sudden you’re extremely aware of how not indestructible a skull is-”

“I will not destroy your skull,” she promises, sternly. “Who are you.”

He takes a long breath, shaking his head slowly. Something like a smile pulls at his teeth.

“This is all kind of daytime TV, but I’m technically your brother.”

Lightning strikes down her spine, and for an instant she’s five years old, playing with guns with a father that smiles at her.

“Cain?” she hisses, blindsided, unacceptable, this has all been just another game-

The Red Hood blinks in confusion, stepping backwards, preparing to defend himself, he thinks she is going to attack him and he is right -

“What? No. Absolutely not.”  He bites down on something, and his eyes narrow, but he doesn’t move to fight or run, stays still.

Something shivers along his shoulders, and he steps into a role, movements he’s acted out before.  He raises his head, scrawls a grin across his face, and bends at the waist, like a television character pantomiming being charming.

“Alright, take it from the top. My name’s Jason Todd. I was the second Robin, and Bruce Wayne’s first adopted son. Do you want to take this somewhere else? I don’t know about you but I’m starting to get cold.”

Chapter Text

The thing about Gotham, one of the things about Gotham, is that living here teaches you to mind your business.  The kid behind the grill barely looks up long enough to see the Red Hood and Batgirl walk through the door before she registers it as Not Her Business.

“Take a seat anywhere,” she hollers, distractedly, as though there’s anyone else in the diner at all.  “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He's missed this city, he really has.

It's not like Dick’s avoiding Blüdhaven on purpose.  He’s just keeping his hand in while the leg heals.  Gotham’s a better place for recovery than Blüdhaven right now, is all.  There’s a support system in place; battered and bruised as it might be, it’s still better than no support at all.

It’s not a big deal.  He’s just… resting his eyes, for a minute.

Nathan Ducklow, ‘Ducky’ to his friends.  Professional mook, excuse me, ‘ private security consultant’, currently working for Two-Face.  Reasonable, as far as palookas go, and, crucially, seen shooting pool with a crew that had most recently been freelancing for Joker, prior to the clown’s sudden disappearance.

“Hey, Ducky,” Nightwing says, injecting his voice with the kind of breezy casualness he knows freaks people out.  “Word is you know a guy who knows a guy who might know where a certain clown might be hiding.”

Ducky squirms in his grip, struggling between the brick wall of the alley and Nightwing’s grip on his collar.

“Nightwing!  I don't know what you heard, but. I ain't done nothing!”

“Mm-hmm,” Dick replies, noncommittally.  “I'm just curious what you might have heard around the old watering hole recently.  Some of your buddies have been taking the kind of work that includes greasepaint as a business expense, if you catch my meaning.”

Ducky grimaces.  Probably he's aware that the Joker is something of a sensitive subject among Batman and his affiliates.  “Look, Nightwing, I ain't one to judge.  And besides, they're strictly freelance- I wouldn't socialise with any of that freak’s full-time guys.”

“Sure, I get that.”

“Yeah, but you know, I'm not gonna judge a guy for taking what work’s available, right?  I know Joe’s little girl has a kid on the way, and he's trying to get whatever hours he can-”

“Times are tough all round,” Nightwing agrees, mainly to keep Ducky talking.  Also, frankly, it's true.

“-And it's either freelancing or signing on with Black Mask, and frankly that's not as attractive a proposition as it was a month ago, you know?  Between you and me this Red Hood guy’s got people real nervous about signing up with Sionis nowadays.  So anyway, Joe and the guys were asking about my gig, and you know I've been with Dent four years now, and that's a big milestone, two times two, you know, so I got my quadratic bonus, and the guys were asking about maybe I put in a good word for them because it turns out Joker’s been a little tardy with his paychecks recently-”

Now that is interesting.  The costumed element of Gotham’s underground gets away with a lot of erratic behaviour, but even the Joker has to bow to one fundamental truth: if you don't pay your hired muscle, you don't have hired muscle for long.  And word gets around.

“He didn't try to keep them on the hook?  No promises of a big score to make them stick around?”

“That's the thing, they didn't get any details beyond 'post up in this warehouse and look after a couple crates of C4’ before the Joker’s in the wind.  No orders, no nothing!”

Ducky pauses, eyes darting this way and that with the classic ‘you didn’t hear this from me’ air of conspiracy.

“Now, you didn’t hear this from me…”

Sometimes, Nightwing truly loves Gotham.  There’s just something in the air, or more likely the water, that makes everyone think they’re Humphrey Bogart.

“...But one of the guys, he was telling me he thought he heard a sound from upstairs, like someone hitting a side of meat with a bat.  ‘Course, he’s the one who picked up a gig with the Joker, so that kinda thing comes with the territory, but when he went up to check on the clown he swears there was a window open when there oughtn't have been, and no sign of the Joker besides.”

Huh.  If it was anyone else, Nightwing would say it sounded like the Joker got kidnapped.  Unfortunately, it’s not anyone else, so this is definitely some convoluted scheme of the clown’s.  But it doesn’t sound like he's getting anything more out of Ducky.

Maybe if he got a little less friendly, Ducky might be inclined to remember a couple more details, but honestly he's got most of what he came for.  Also he doesn't really want to start a fight if he doesn't need to.  His leg hurts enough as it is, he doesn't need to aggravate it unnecessarily.

“Alright buddy, it's your lucky day, now scram,” he announces, letting go of Ducky's collar and jerking his head in dismissal.

Ducky starts towards the mouth of the alley, but stops short, turning back to Nightwing, looking embarrassed.

“Say, uh, if it's not too much trouble, could you maybe rough me up a little?”

Nightwing blinks, not bothering to hide his confusion.

“You… want to get beat up?”

“Well, it's just that we get hazard pay for injuries sustained as a result of employment these days.  Pays double in the case of vigilante-related violence.”

Huh.

“You’re saying Dent let his mooks unionise?  Must have been some negotiation.”

“I mean, it came down to a coin toss in the end, but so does everything if you think about it.  So…?”

Nightwing sighs, and pulls out an escrima stick.  “Sure, buddy.  Since you asked nicely and all.”

Jason Todd.

The helmet sits discarded on the seat beside him, but he’s still wearing a domino. He has an expressive face, which helps her, in theory.

She considers what she knows, as he sprawls into the booth seat across from her, peeling the laminated menu from the slightly-tacky table and considering it, devoting a theatrical amount of attention to the words.

There are no pictures of him she’s seen. No stories from Bruce, or Alfred. She doesn’t know if Nightwing would have any. She knows Tim doesn’t. She hadn’t even known for sure he had existed until a few weeks ago. Bruce had taken her to his grave. To warn her.

He liked cars. And girls. And getting into fights. A kind of ice-cream. The colour green.

Cass thinks she prefers motorbikes to cars. Chocolate ice-cream is okay, but hurts her teeth sometimes. She doesn’t have much of an opinion either way about green.

Bruce said other things, too.

And here is the trap, the one she tried not to fall into earlier. These are things Bruce said about Jason. These aren’t things she knows.

What does she know?

Well. She knows one thing.

“So. You were dead,” she intones, leaning forward seriously like she’s seen Batman do at meetings. Jason makes a face like he bit a lemon, so he probably recognises the motion.

A nod towards him being who he says he is. Also he’s been irritating her all evening, so she’s getting her own back. Batman upsets him, which is interesting.

“Yup.”

“You were not pretending, or kidnapped.”

“Nope.”

“You chased after The Joker, who caught you, bashed your skull in with a crowbar, and exploded you.”

He tenses suddenly, and for a second all she can see is he’s going to run. Then the moment passes, and he uncoils with a shrug.

“Sure, why not.”

There is… something there.

“Did The Joker not explode you?” she guesses, trying to guess at what he’s objecting to.

He rolls a shoulder, his left hand seesawing back and forth.

“Kinda. Beat me most of the way to death with a crowbar or a tire iron or something, rigged the warehouse to blow and locked the door. Think smoke inhalation might have been what did me in, but there was a lot going on in the moment.”

She missed her guess, from the way his hackles go down, but without more she can’t tell if what he’s hiding matters.

“So you died. You were buried?”

Not even a flicker, this time. Either he was expecting this or whatever he is about to say upsets him less than The Joker.

“I don’t remember being dead. As far as I could tell, I blacked out in Ethiopia and woke up in a box. I was still bleeding from the beating. Dug my way out of a very fancy coffin with nothing but a belt buckle and adrenaline. Staggered out into the rain and immediately got hit by a car.”

He says it so casually, so calmly, that for long seconds she waits for the punchline.

“A… car?”

He shrugs, like it’s embarrassing. “I had no idea where I was. Looking back later it turned out I’d been buried about six months, and the big guy’d already had my body interred in an anonymous grave. I guess he was worried about my remains being desecrated.”

He shakes his head like people do on TV, like he’s pretending to laugh.  She is getting annoyed with his little plays.

The diner girl has shuffled over to their booth, fishing a spiral notebook and a blunt pencil stub out of her apron pocket.

“What can I get you?” she mumbles, her body radiating exhausted boredom.

The Red Hood glances down at the menu again, then looks back to the girl.

“I’ll have a black coffee, and a regular western omelette, thanks,” he says, with the practiced smile of someone trained to reassure a witness.  The girl scribbles, then turns to Cass.

Cass glares into the middle distance, and digs into her memory.

“Moons Over My Hammy,” she intones, as precisely as she can.

The Red Hood blinks hard at her, genuinely startled for some reason.  The girl’s brow scrunches.

“Okay, we're not a- I mean… sure, Batgirl.  I'll get on that.”

He curls his fingers around the weak cup of coffee, letting the heat seep into his hands, and finally asks himself what on earth he's doing.

He’s burned his identity.  He’d been so careful about it, it had been his secret weapon, something to pull out at the exact moment to destabilise Batman, and he’d let it into the open like it was a casual icebreaker.

Also Batgirl apparently thinks every restaurant has gimmicky names for food.  Which.  That’s not the important mystery to solve here.

Okay.  He can do this.  He got himself into this mess, he can get himself out.  No sudden movements, just… let Batgirl do her thing.

“So, Batgirl,” he says, consciously trying to unclench his entire body.  “What’s your theory?”

The thing about Cass.  The thing about Cass is she stresses him the hell out.  She’s a maybe-eighteen-year-old who has absolutely no regard for her own mortality, who enables Bruce’s worst tendencies, who doesn’t listen to anyone, who, worst of all, is exactly as good as she thinks she is.

She beat Shiva.  On his best day Bruce couldn’t beat Shiva.

She almost died doing it.

She was reckless, arrogant, she almost got herself killed, and Bruce let her because he’s bought into the idea that just because she’s the best it means she won’t ever die.

Dick knows better.  Dick’s learned by now that it doesn’t matter that Cass can always win in a fair fight, because fair fights aren’t how people die in this business.  But he can’t explain that to her because a: she already doesn’t like him because he and Barb were on the outs and Cass picked a side, and b: she’d think he was being condescending and go pick a fight with Deathstroke just to prove she could.

And then Deathstroke would kill her.  Or, worse, try to recruit her.  Or even worse she’d win and then decide to go take on Doomsday or Black Adam or someone who could knock her head off with a thought.

So yeah, she’s a blend of the most annoying things about Bruce and all the things that make him cringe about his own adolescence come to life and every time he’s in the field with her he’s painfully aware of the fact that he can’t really rely on her because she’s never had to learn to work with a team and she doesn’t respect him as a leader.

Which would all be fine if she didn’t keep making friends with mass murderers.  He’s worked with, or at least around, people who don’t listen to him, but he can’t work with Cass because he can’t ever be sure what Cass is going to do.

She went to war with the CIA, just because, as far as Dick could tell, she didn’t like them.  She broke a man out of death row just so a child murderer died behind schedule.  She had some kind of thing with a Tarakstani freedom-fighter-slash-terrorist that Dick never had the energy to try and figure out, and the only thing Bruce ever tried to rein her in on was when she went on one date with Superboy.

But he doesn’t say any of this to Tim, because he can tell Tim’s having a bad night.

He does bring up the time she threw him through a wall, though, and he means it as a joke but maybe he’s not any good at making light of things any more either, because Tim still blows up at him.

It’s fine.  Checking up on Cass is busywork, but isn’t that what he’s in Gotham to do?  A few easy patrols to keep him limber while his leg heals.  It’ll be fine.

What is her theory?

“You woke yourself up.”

“As far as I know.”

“So she did too.”

She can picture it.  Steph, waking up in darkness, fighting, driving herself forward, willing herself to live.

It’s something Cass has tried to mimic, more than once.  Cass has never wanted to live that badly; she has had to imagine Steph by her side, bullying her into deciding to survive.

Not something she’s tried to explain.

“Did you want to live?”

Jason blinks, hard.

“Did I- what kind of question is that?”

Batgirl shrugs, unapologetic.

“Steph wanted to live.  I can see her wanting enough to come back.  Did you?”

“I wanted… I wanted to go home.”

It’s not a no.  It’s not a yes.

“That’s your theory, then?” he says, rougher than he probably should have.  “She just wanted it bad enough?”

“Why didn’t you go home, then?”

Jason can feel his shoulders rise, defensively.  He pushes them down.

“I told you.  I got hit by a car.”

She fixes him with a look through her eyeless mask.

“You got better.”

“Well.  Maybe there’s other things I want now.”  Before she can jump on that, he continues.  “And there’s a problem with your theory: who put the grave back?”

She frowns, considering, and he lets himself relax a fraction, back on less uncomfortable ground.  She’s not the person he needs to confront with this.  He doesn’t need answers from her.

“Who did yours?”

Ah.

“An interested party.  I’d be surprised if it was the same people.”

“Who.”

“League of Assassins,” he spits out, annoyed more than anything else.  “Ra’s al Ghul wanted to know how I came back.”

“Why won’t he care this time?”

Jason blinks.  “Because he’s dead?”

Batgirl pauses, seemingly off-balance for the first time this conversation.

“Oh.”

“You don’t know who Ra’s al Ghul is, do you.”

“No.  Don’t care.”

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to recognise where Hood and Cass had met up.  In his defence, he's been to a lot of funerals for a guy in his twenties.

Like, a lot of funerals.  Some months it feels like he's been to more funerals than weddings.  Which probably says something unflattering about him, or his social circle.

There's shock, of course, and a kind of impersonal horror, but this isn't his first rodeo.  He can work through this.

He takes time to check his comm is off, though.  Tim doesn't need to catch any of this.  Dick’ll figure out a way to break the news to him once he's sure what he's looking at.

Because right now it sure looks like the Red Hood, possibly aided and abetted by Batgirl, has stolen the body of Stephanie Brown.

Maybe it’s not that!  Who knows, this could all be some kind of hilarious misunderstanding and… and what?  Steph popped out of the grave all on her own and decided to go for a stroll?

Dick massages his eyes, mostly succeeding in smushing his headache around a bit.

“Okay, Nightwing, review,” he mutters.  “Red Hood and Batgirl were definitely here, judging by the footprints.  Sidebar, I am never making fun of Batman for making everyone have bat-symbol boot treads ever again, it’s actually come in pretty handy right now.”

He rolls the pen light he found on the ground around his fingers, absently.  Well-made, but off the rack.  Not Bat-custom.  Still functionally the same, though.  Probably Hood’s.

“So they- she digs into the grave, just enough for, what, the Red Hood to haul Steph’s body out by the hair?”

“He what?!”

Nightwing blinks.  “I know for a fact my comm line was off, Robin.”

“You're right!  That's absolutely the issue here!”

He breathes in deep.

“My comm was off.  So I could verify what I was looking at.  Before I told you.”

“And when would you have told me?  Next week?  Next year?”

“Robin, we can have this argument all you want later but right now I think it’s more important to find Batgirl and Hood, don’t you?”

He is being annoying.  He doesn’t seem to think that the things he’s hiding are important to the case.  But he doesn’t get to decide that.  Anything could be important.  Steph could have been taken by this League of Assassins.  She could be in danger.

She could be alive to be in danger.

“Did the League capture you?  Is that why you couldn’t go home.”

He sighs, like she is the one being dense.

“Maybe I just wasn’t interested in seeing if he’d done to me what he did to his parents.  I’d look terrible as an oil painting.”

“I have not seen a painting.”

He cocks his head, curious, cautious.

“Huh.  No statues, no shrines?”

“He told me about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Once.”

“Wow.”

“He said. You liked cars, and girls. And getting into fights.”

“Huh, projecting much? I’ll give him one and a half out of three.”

“A kind of ice cream. The colour green.”

“Neapolitan. When I was twelve, sure. You’ve got to bear in mind this was like six years ago, they didn’t have ice creams like they’ve got nowadays.”

“Brash. Impulsive. Headstrong. Never looked before you leapt. He said he should have stopped you.”

It’s a low trick. She says the words to hurt, to cut him. Imagines Bruce saying them about her, all the ways they would hurt her.

It works.  Hood flinches, small and sudden, and he looks sad.  Cass immediately feels bad.  She realises she hadn't expected him to care, then realises that was a stupid thing to think.

Of course Jason cares what his dad thinks of him.

“Huh.  What did he have to say about Robin?” he asks, after a heartbeat, his voice flattened.

Cass has never known how to say sorry.

“The same,” she says, instead.

“Wow,” he repeats, deadpan.  “Before or after he buried her?”

She shakes her head.  “He tried to… scare her away.”

Steph had never been afraid enough.  She had been afraid, but had not let it stop her.  She had-

“Right,” Jason says, staring her down like she had let him see the inside of her head, like he can read her better than she reads him.  She does not like it.

“So here's the million dollar question: do you think he knows I'm alive?”

He says it casually, but nothing about his body is casual.  He is locked-tense, nearly shaking with some big emotion.  This question matters to him.

She thinks about it.  Did Bruce know Jason was alive?

Bruce keeps a lot of secrets.  Secrets he should not be keeping.  But this?  Something like this?

She misses Barbara.  She has not let herself miss Barbara in a while.  There was too much shame, too much pride.  But Barbara could have talked her through her thoughts, could have provided another way to look at Batman’s secrets.

But Barbara is gone, and Cass cannot hide behind her any more.

“No,” she says, based on nothing, but finds that she believes it.  It feels like the blind faith, like knowing Bruce Wayne never murdered that woman.  She had been right then.  She hopes she is right now.

“Good.”

He breathes hard through his nose, suddenly conscious of the clench of his jaw.

Too much, too uncontrolled, Cain’s pushing his buttons and he's letting her like a chump.  That's not how this is supposed to go, he had a plan-

-Except none of this is part of the plan, is it?  His plan has nothing to to with Cain, or Stephanie Brown.  They're complications, or proof that his cause is righteous.  Nowhere in his plan was he supposed to go looking for Robin’s grave, and now he's flying blind, improvising, and he hates it, hates the naked vulnerability of working without a script.

Cain won't kill him.  Cain won't allow him to die.  He can't trust much but he's pretty sure he can trust that.

“Good,” she repeats, blankly.  “Because he didn't do it.”

“Yeah, you get it.”

He's only looked into his return to the living enough to confirm it wasn't Talia’s idea.  The idea that someone did this to him on purpose would be too much, and the thought that someone might think Jason owes them for it makes his fists itch.

If anyone could have done it, Bruce might have been top of that list.  But it's a relief to have confirmation that he didn't.  Nothing that happened to Jason is Bruce’s fault.  Everything that happened after is Bruce's responsibility, and that's where Jason has some notes.

“And you wondered why I don’t want to go home any more,” he says, and it comes out a sneer.  “You never knew him when he was worth knowing.”

Nightwing sprawls flat on his stomach on a flat roof opposite an all-night diner, and pulls out a slim pair of binoculars, peering across the road into the diner windows.

Huh.  That sure does look like Batgirl sitting at a diner booth across from… someone.  He can’t get an angle on the guy’s face, but he has a clear view of at least a black-leather wrapped elbow, gloved hands gripping a cup of coffee like they’re trying to pop it.

So unfortunately for everyone it looks like Dick’s theory that Batgirl is trying to start a book club with another mass murderer was right.

Well.  Not a book club.  A quilting circle?

He’s so tired.

His comm clicks on.  Tim’s given up on the silent treatment, a little earlier than expected but all good-

“Nightwing,” a baritone that is definitely not Tim’s rumbles in his ear, “report.”

“Look around, Batgirl. When I was Robin the worst we had to deal with was mobsters and Deacon Blackfire. I’m out of the picture for three years, and what? Gotham’s burnt to the ground three, four times? There was an honest-to-goodness ebola outbreak?  Gotham got kicked out of the United States? There was an earthquake? I didn’t even know we were on a fault line! If this is what you guys handling it looks like, I’m not impressed.”

He’s trying to make her angry. It’s working. It should work less when she knows he’s doing it on purpose. But it works anyway.

“What,” she grinds through her teeth, “did you want Batman to do about it.”

“What I want from Batman,” he spits, and he is performing again, making practiced movements, “is for him to take some responsibility.   I want to hear him justify why he did nothing when I died.”

There’s a yawning pit in her stomach.  A feeling that she has misjudged something, and badly.

“What did you want him to do?”

“I want the Joker dead.  I want to know why he let that miserable creature kill me and did nothing.  I want to know why he’s content to let Black Mask run Gotham.  I want to know when he gave up.”

There was… a machine, once.  Mind control, or something.  Designed to make people decide to kill.  It made you make a dream where killing was the correct decision.  It infected a priest, and a soldier.  And her.

The soldier resisted for ten minutes.  The priest, an hour.

It took less than a second for her brain to spin up a reason to murder.  She is always, and forever, a heartbeat from killing again.

She hates this.  She feels an… itch, under her skin, something terrible clawing its way out from inside her.  She hates the certainty, knowing she would have done exactly what Jason asked of Batman.

“I,” she rasps, halting, furious and humiliated that she was stupid enough to take this fight to words, where he can run faster than her, “know myself.”

She should have just hit him.

He's expecting her to react, sure.  He's done his homework and by all accounts Cain is more psychotic about the sanctity of human life than Batman ever was.  He knows he's spoiled the mood, is ready to deal with sanctimoniousness or disgust or disappointment.

He's not at all expecting panic.   Cain looks like she's about to cry or puke.

“I know myself,” she says, roughly, like that relates at all to what he was saying, like she's trying to convince someone of something.

“...Congratulations?”

The sound of his voice distracts her or something, because she jerks back from the edge of whatever panic attack she'd been on the verge of, and glares at him.

“He won't,” she growls, and now she's pissed but it's obvious she's overdoing it, covering something.  “He can't.”

“I would have.  If it was him.”

“I know.  So would I,” she says, like it's shameful.  “But he's …good.  He never will.”

Good.  What does she even mean by good? Is it good to stand idly by, to ensure your own hands stay clean when preventing further horror would cost nothing but your own soul?  Is it good to perpetuate a broken system because it’s convenient and familiar?  Is it good to-

“Alright sorry to keep you, the cook yelled at me for like ten minutes.  So it's a western omelette for you and a legally-distinct scrambled egg, cheese and ham breakfast sandwich with hash browns.  Did you want more coffee?”

“Uh.  No, thank you.”

“No worries,” the waitress says, just barely not yawning, and slouches away.

He truly does love this awful, evil city.

Eventually, he goes for the direct approach.  He opens the door and walks into the diner.

Before the bell’s stopped chiming both of them are on their feet.  Hood’s helmet has clicked back onto his head by the time Nightwing’s got eyes on him.

No matter.  He’ll just hit him in the throat.

“Hood,” he pronounces, “we need to talk.”

“Nightwing.”

It’s Cass that interrupts him, caught between them, shoulders hunched, trying to keep both of them in her eyeline.  Hood’s reaching for something in his jacket.

“Batgirl, whatever it is you’re doing, it can wait.  Whatever Hood’s told you is probably a lie.”

“How’d you figure that, Nightwing?” Hood asks, coldly mocking.

“Well, for one thing I’m almost certain you’re working for the Joker.”

That lands.  Hood freezes, Batgirl turns to glare at him, and it’s all the opportunity he needs-

The grenade sails toward him in slow motion, moving through molasses, his brain calculating a mile a minute- too small a room, too cluttered, too late, too slow, too slow-

He blinks and Batgirl snatches the grenade out of the air, hurling it through the plane glass window like a baseball pitcher.  It explodes in midair, raining glass from shattered windows three stories up down onto the road.

The Red Hood is gone.  Batgirl doesn’t spare a second, leaping through the shattered window in pursuit.

Nightwing turns to the counter, flicks a card to the deeply unimpressed waitress.

“Sorry about the mess.  Call that number, they’ll pay for the repairs.”

Hood’s taken to the rooftops, running like the wind.  Cass is whole seconds behind him, it’s taking everything not to lose him.

Nightwing bounds after her, bright and springy and full of annoyed energy.  It’s compensating for the bullet wound in his leg, for the moment.  But that won’t last.

“I have this,” she yells, over her shoulder.

“He’s actively throwing grenades at us and you still want to play nice with this guy?”

Cassandra does not know how to explain to Nightwing that grenades are easy.  That she has had more practice with grenades being thrown at her than she has had hot dinners.  That it is not even complicated, just a matter of speed and timing and not being a wimp.  That a grenade is dangerous within about fifty feet, and she can ten times out of ten catch and throw an armed grenade seventy feet straight up without breaking stride.  That she is almost certain Jason knows she can do this.  That she does not need Nightwing here.

“Yes,” she says, instead, and accelerates.  Jason is gaining ground- he is taller than her, and he knows how to move through the city, and he is actively trying to lose her; she doesn’t have time to babysit Nightwing.  He can keep up or not.

Jason deactivates the security around the window with trembling fingers, slips inside, and hits the light switch hard enough to crack the plastic housing.

He’s more than half expecting an empty room, almost half expecting a stick of dynamite with his name on it, and not at all expecting what he sees.

Joker’s body, stiff and cold and dead. He died with a pouty little frown on his face, wrists still cuffed to the radiator where Jason had left him, days ago now.  Dreamlike, Jason stumbles towards the body, gets two fingers on its ice-cold neck, checking for a pulse.

Nothing.

It doesn’t look like he ever woke up.

Well. What is he supposed to do now?

And then, right on cue, the window explodes inwards as the God-Damn Bat-Man launches into the room and sends Jason slamming into the wall.

Chapter Text

There’s going to be a funeral, Bruce realises, belatedly.

It’s been seventy-two hours since he watched Robin die.  Eleven days since he fired Robin, took the costume away, convinced he had been making the responsible choice. Six hours since the last of the fires burnt out.

Three weeks since he stood at Jason’s grave with Cassandra.

The only thing he wants to do is sleep, but the rolling storm in his head won’t stop, endlessly turning over all the things he is still responsible for, and the funny thing- the absolutely goddamn absurd thing- is that he’s started imagining responsibilities that aren’t even his.

There’s going to be a funeral. Someone is going to have to pick through Robin’s things and box them up for next-of-kin, someone is going to have to go to the funeral director and make their best guesses as to what Robin would have wanted, make a guest list, choose appropriate music, write appropriate speeches about a life cut short, but that person isn’t going to be him.

There is no reason in the world why Bruce Wayne should be within ten miles of the funeral of Stephanie Brown.

Probably, he thinks, exhaustion tinting his mind hysterical, probably for the best. Nobody thought he’d done a good enough job of it last time this happened.

He attends the funeral anyway.  Pays for everything, discreetly.  When anyone tries to clumsily insinuate that he’s got no reason to be there, he grimly intimates that he’s here for Tim’s sake.

He may be telling the truth.  Maybe all of this was for Tim’s sake.  Maybe everything he ever did or failed to do for Stephanie Brown was just for Tim’s sake.

He tells her it was real and it feels like a lie.

He is… colder than he was.  Brutality and lies and terror his everyday tools.  And he’d never been shy about expressing his opinion before.  He’d barely tolerated Spoiler’s presence before he made her Robin.

She disobeys him and he fires her with nothing more than a backward glance and corporate ‘you did your best’ condolences.  As if no Robin had ever disobeyed him.  As if no Robin had ever leapt into a situation without looking.  As if her mediocrity was unique.

As if he couldn’t possibly imagine what she’d do next.

But that wasn’t all it had ever been, was it?  There had been times when he’d treated her like any other young person under his mentorship.  Working together in the Batcave, examining the miraculously resurrected Oliver Queen.  He’d talked her through his thought processes, she’d made fun of him, unafraid, enthusiastic.

Ollie recently took in his own ward, a blonde teenage girl from a troubled background.  Dearden and Brown are their own people but he can’t help but draw a comparison.  Ollie has, by all accounts, enrolled Dearden in school, kept her out of the life.  She is, for the moment, still alive.

He is fairly certain he did not intend to cause the death of Stephanie Brown.  At his most forgiving, he might imagine he meant the opposite- for her to go home, give up the fight, be safe.

But that doesn’t mean he treated her honestly.  He can’t be sure of his intentions any more. It seems… probable. In keeping with his character. To have set her up to fail, to only use her as a means to an end, a way to get the real Robin back.

He did this.

So what now?

Back to work.

In the wake of tragedy, he reprioritises.  Oracle leaves Gotham, choosing to focus her attentions on her Birds of Prey.  Nightwing is itching to return to Blüdhaven, but the bullet in his thigh is keeping him in Gotham, at least for a few weeks.

Robin is thinking of leaving.

He did all this to get Robin back and it didn’t work.

Batgirl wants to go with him.  That… is acceptable.  They work well together, and are good at covering each other’s deficiencies.  He can facilitate, task Alfred with preparing Batgirl a safehouse.  She’ll have to learn to do her own laundry, but she’s resourceful.

Spoiler is dead.

He should… he should do something. He needs to do something. 

He’s not a fool. One case is a memorial. Two is a graveyard.

Onyx is a semi-independent actor, but she’s reliable enough.  She’s been at arm’s length for her whole stay in Gotham, and he sees no reason to change that.

Fox calls in as close as the man ever gets to a panic, informs him that Kord Corporation has been bought out from under them.  The new owner is anomalously reluctant to step forward.  Bruce traces the purchase through a string of shell corporations that starts in Germany and ends in Metropolis.

It’s always something.

There’s a new player in Gotham. Emerging out of the embers of the gang war, a new Red Hood begins a single-minded assault on Black Mask’s operations.

Sionis’ pride insists that it’s a group, at first, but Bruce recognises the relentless fury of a man on crusade. The Red Hood doesn’t need a gang, if he can put it into the mind of every man on Roman’s payroll that they aren’t safe.

At first, Hood isn’t… a priority. Batman can’t let him run loose forever, but Hood, after his brutal debut, becomes something of a known quantity. The Red Hood has clear lines: no dealing to kids, no recruiters in schools. Bruce isn’t sure what Hood is doing with the money he’s collecting, but he begins to suspect that Hood is taking it out of circulation. He’s not buying guns, he’s not buying narcotics. He’s not even buying people, just intimidating them into reporting to him, instead. It can’t be sustainable, but for the moment Hood is making the gangs less profitable.

Bruce can’t call him a benevolent force, but he’s a useful check on Sionis’ influence, and Bruce is wary of taking him off the board until there’s something better to replace him.

Then the Red Hood attacks Robin.

Cassandra wants to hunt the Red Hood.  Batman sees no reason to stop her.

Robin’s injury has kept him from leaving Gotham, at least for now.  Bruce refuses to feel relief.

He tasks Tim with assisting him in investigating the new owner of Kord Corp.  Tim is as capable in person as anyone, but he’s recently developed an alarming degree of business savvy, and the task might keep him satisfied for a while.

It won’t stop him leaving.

(He notes, in the back of his mind, that the Joker has been quiet for longer than he’d expected. He doesn’t have time to investigate, but swallows some of his pride and tries to suggest that Dick look into it.)

The Red Hood’s campaign against Sionis continues.  Bodies pile up, but no more than they usually do in gang skirmishes.

Less, in fact.  Hood doesn’t have foot soldiers of his own.  There are a few retaliatory strikes against dealers that have been coerced into reporting to him, but he is, by and large, effective at keeping his promises.  The men that pay him are protected, and those that try and punish them are dealt with brutally.

So the casualties are almost entirely from Black Mask’s ranks.  Red Hood shows no sign of meta enhancement, just a microscopic knowledge of Gotham’s low places, an affinity for lethal traps, and a pragmatic unwillingness to stand his ground.

Batgirl reports an inconclusive altercation outside of the former Free Clinic, and then with a suddenness that appears to alarm Sionis as much as it does him, Hood disappears.

He makes the calculated decision to trust Batgirl to handle the situation, and takes off for Metropolis.

There, he finds a bleak studio apartment with a final demand notice taped to the door.  Apparently one John Peters has been tardy with his rent.

There’s almost nothing inside- a single couch, an old television, a side table.

The man who bought Kord Corporation, who evaded the watchful eye of Lucius Fox, stayed here.   He moved hundreds of millions of dollars with the stroke of a pen, and this was where he chose to stay.

Interesting.

Batman sweeps the scene.  It’s almost clean, but he comes away with a few miniscule hairs trapped in the couch.

It feels like a win.

Tim calls him on the drive back.

From there, it’s a series of choices, an unfolding plan of attack.  The …bizarre nature of the crime almost irrelevant.

Coordinate allies.  Activate the tracker in Batgirl’s costume.  Direct Nightwing to get the target moving.  Divert the Batmobile to anticipate the Red Hood’s escape route.

Get somewhere high up.  Spot the target halfway up a rusted-through fire escape, hauling open an apartment window and slipping inside.

Follow.  At speed.

Connect.

Hood pulls himself off the floor, turns, slower than Batman was expecting, and tilts his head almost delicately.

“Huh. Got to say, I don’t love the new look. What was wrong with the blue and greys?”

Bruce blinks, honestly shocked out of Batman for an instant.

“What,” he growls, barely.

The Red Hood shakes his head, sounding dazed. Maybe he hit his head harder than Bruce thought.

“I mean, black on black on black? You dressed for a funeral?” He shakes himself back together, his voice turning sneering, older. “In that case, there’s a body right here; I know a spot where there’s a free casket not being used by anybody.” He pauses, mock-thoughtful. “Two caskets, now I think about it.”

“What did you do,” Batman growls, low in the throat, preparing for another collision.

“What you should have done,” Red Hood spits back, but there’s something in the tone, and Batman latches onto it.

Glances down at the Joker’s body, both wrists cuffed to an iron radiator.  The body slumped.  Rigor mortis already faded.  Bruises on the face and neck, consistent with a beating, most likely with a blunt instrument.  Dead more than a day.

The Red Hood, desperate to get back here.  Fleeing at the moment Nightwing mentioned the Joker.  Posturing, covering up something with aggression.

“You didn’t mean for this to happen,” Batman concludes, out loud.  “Whatever your plan was.  This was an accident.”

The Red Hood bristles.  Embarrassed, somehow.

“I- first off, I definitely meant for this human cancer to end up dead.  But I’ll admit, letting the Joker die like someone leaving their dog in a hot car wasn’t the plan.  But, you know, I got a little distracted, Bruce-”

Batman freezes.  The Red Hood continues like he didn’t even notice.

“-because I found out what happened to Robin.  What happened to Robin again.  You going to make Stephanie a cautionary tale too?  Tell everyone she was too angry, too undisciplined, that you did your best but she was doomed from the start?”

He’s heard enough.  Batman pounces.

But the Red Hood bats him away, irritated, openly, contemptuously familiar with Batman’s style, and dances back into the apartment, leading him further from the body, creating space between them.

“No, we’re past that.  You’re going to listen to me now.”

There’s a hiss of air, a click of metal catches releasing, and the Red Hood is pulling off his helmet.

Six months ago, Oliver Queen, the first Green Arrow, rose from the dead.

Apparently, it’s catching.

(Just for a second, brief and bright and gone before he can fully articulate, his chest is filled with something.  All the people he’s lost, Clark and Ollie and Jim and Sasha, for a breath he’s filled with the delusion that he can have them all back- and if they can come back to him why can’t-)

But this is not Jason, his son, Robin, big-hearted and determinedly hopeful; this Jason is staring him down with wrath and ruin in his eyes, like he’s here to sit in judgement.

“Hey, Bruce.  I’ve seen what you’ve been up to since I died.  You want to know what I’ve got to say about it?”

This is a dream.  This is identical to dreams he’s had.

“Jason.”

“Oh, so you do remember me.  I was starting to wonder.”

“Jason.  How is this possible?”

The boy sneers, irritated, like Bruce had asked the wrong question.

“Who can say?  Maybe I’m back to break what you keep fixing.  Maybe you’re bleeding out in a warehouse somewhere and I’m a dream you’re having.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  Maybe I’m here to hold you accountable for the death of Stephanie Brown.”

There’s no defending against this.

“You know what’s really funny, in retrospect?  Those rules you used to tell me we had to follow, even though we were vigilantes, for the sake of making nice with the Commissioner?  Everyone you sacrificed on the altar of getting along with the cops, and it didn’t even work.   They turned on you the second they had an excuse.”

Bruce blinks.  His mind is swimming, confronted with too many impossibilities at once.  He’s barely able to follow what this vision is saying.

“Is this,” he manages, “about Gloria Stanson?”

Jason nods, like Bruce is a very stupid pupil that against all odds asked a pertinent question.

“Good job!  I’m honestly surprised you even remember her name.  And it’s about Gloria, it’s about Linda Koslosky, it’s about every time you put your own sense of superiority above getting the job done, it’s about Stephanie Brown, and it’s about me.  It’s about how you feed the Joker back into a broken system again and again and tell yourself you’re not part of the problem.  It’s about how you’ve given up. ”

Bruce… doesn’t know what to say.

Batman has lines.  Of course he does.  He doesn’t know how to express that, to him, killing the Joker would be giving up.  Giving in.

“When we fought Blackfire, when he nearly broke you and his cult took the city right out from under us, did you just shrug and go back to cold-cocking purse snatchers?  No, no you didn’t.  You turned the Batmobile into a tank and told me to man the machine-gun turret; we rolled down Fifth Avenue with rocket launchers.  We went to war with Blackfire, and it was grisly and awful and it worked.  But Black Mask kills Robin, and what, you treat it like there’s a new mayor?  What happened to you?  Why aren't you tearing his empire apart?  Why is he not afraid to show his face within a hundred miles of Gotham?  Why aren't you avenging her?

“Why didn't you avenge me?”

Ah.

There’s a lot of things he could say.  He could bare his soul a little, but he doubts Jason would be impressed.  Batman wants to lecture him, to articulate why it is so important that he be untouchable, untainted.  Bruce wants to cry and beg forgiveness from this apparition.

“Do you honestly think,” he finds himself saying instead, “that I didn’t try?”

It’s the only thing to say.  The only thing that might save this.  Only the truth matters here.

“After the Joker killed you he moved on to an attack on the UN.  I knew what he was there to do, so I let Superman deal with it.  While Clark was distracted, I hunted the Joker down.  We ended up fighting in a helicopter full of panicking gunmen.  A stray shot killed the pilot, I escaped, the chopper crashed.  I let myself hope that he was dead.  If that chopper hadn’t crashed I would have beaten the Joker to death with my bare hands right then and there.”

“No.”

For a second his heart stutters at the rejection, but it hadn't been Jason that spoke.

Bruce turns, inevitability weighing him down, to see Cassandra standing behind him, her body trembling with horrified betrayal.

She flops into her chair, the motion setting it spinning on its wheels across the tiled floor of her cave, and towels the more obvious sweat out of her hair.  The training robots have gotten boring again.

It has been five days, she thinks.  Five days since Jason fled Gotham, Bruce on his heels.  Today, Bruce has tried to talk to her.

She didn’t let him.  She’s stayed holed up in her bunker in the sewers, her own private sanctum that Batman made for her.  That Barbara tried to pull her out of whenever she could, worried that Cass wasn’t getting vitamins from the sun.

Cass has no idea how the sun is supposed to feed her vitamins.  She went on a cruise once with Barbara, and did not feel like the sun made her feel anything but sticky and uncomfortable.

Bruce tried to talk to her.  She isn’t ready to talk to him.  Perhaps in a year or five the thing in her chest will have gone down enough that she will be able to hear what he has to say over the rush of blood in her ears.

He tried to kill a man.  Batman would have killed a man, thought he maybe had killed a man.  And went right back to being Batman like none of that mattered.  Before she had ever met him.

She is embarrassed.   She should have been more careful.  She had thought just because he was different from her father that there were no ways they could be the same.

Everyone has tried to talk to her.  Tim has tried to persuade her that Batman is different now, that she doesn’t need to worry.  Nightwing has told her she is being dramatic, but he did warn her that Batman was going to try to talk, and how to avoid it if she wanted.  Alfred told her to shower.

She wonders what Barbara might have said.  She, out of everyone, fought with Batman the most.  Maybe she would have been on Cass’s side.

Maybe she would just have called her stupid.

Steph-

Steph is alive.

Steph is alive and would not have called Cass stupid for running from Batman.  Steph would have- Steph will take Cass’s side, if Cass can explain it right.  Maybe even if Cass explains it wrong.

Cass has wasted five days sitting in a sewer beating up training robots and not showering, but she is not going to waste any more.  She is going to- she is going to-

Hesitation is weakness.

“Computer,” she says, as clearly as she can.  “I need to talk to Oracle.”

The screen blinks on, the logo of Oracle’s head spinning like a tossed coin.

“Identify yourself.  If you have a keyword, say it now.  If your keyword is incorrect or if your voice profile does not match a recognised user-”

“Cassandra.”

“Phrase correct.  Pattern match.  User recognised.  What function do you need performed?”

It occurs to her all of a sudden that she has no idea if this will work.

“I need to talk to Oracle.”

“You are talking to Oracle.  What function do you need performed?”

“I need to talk to- Barbara.”

“This function is inaccessible.  What function do you need performed?”

Cass huffs through her nose, irritated.  But the momentum is with her now, and if she sits back down she will lose it.  If she cannot have Barbara she will make do with the computer.

“Search.  Red Hood.”

“Searching.”

The display shimmers into a patchwork of images and scrawls of words.  Pictures and video, a few old and blurry of a thin person in a funny domed helmet and suit, but many more of Jason.  None of him without his helmet.  A few of him in fights, arrows pointing to things he is holding, or motions he is making.  Barbara may be gone and may not want to talk to Cass, but wherever she is she is always, always watching.

“Refine search?”

Cass smiles as the beginnings of a plan slot into place.

“Location.”