Work Text:
Beep—
“Hey Dick, it’s Babs, just calling to see if you were back in town yet. How’d the case go? Anyway, call me back.”
—
Beep—
“Hey Dick, me again. How was Quantico? I saw the news, looks like the case went alright. I’m sure you’re exhausted, but give me a call sometime. I want to hear about Penny.”
—
Beep—
“Hey. It’s been a week, I’m…well. Bludhaven misses you. B hasn’t heard from you either. Just let me know if you’re okay, okay?”
…
“It’s Barbara, by the way. Call me back, before I break down your door myself.”
—
Barbara sets down her phone with a sigh, and finds that she can’t let it go. Her fingers stay wrapped around the device, tense and heavy, as if preparing to answer it the second it starts to ring.
It won’t, of course. He certainly hasn’t returned any of her other calls this week.
Barbara stares at it for a while longer before she can force herself to stop.
Enough.
Something happened in Quantico, and she’s going to find out what - whether he wants to talk about it or not.
It’s his fault for giving her the keys in the first place.
—
Dick doesn’t answer when she knocks - not the second, third, or fourth time either, but she can hear him on the other side. The shuffle of papers, the clatter of a laptop keyboard, even the occasional sniffle.
Barbara steels her resolve and pulls the key from her pocket, but when she opens the door, she’s still taken aback by what she sees.
Dick is sitting on the floor in front of his coffee table, which acts as a makeshift desk with his laptop propped up on it. Papers lay scattered around him, print outs and old newspapers mimicking a second carpet. He doesn’t even look up when she rolls in, closing the door behind her, but he nearly jumps out of his skin when she speaks up.
“What the actual hell is going on in here?”
He stares at her with eyes wide as saucers, mouth gaping like a fish as he tries and fails to find the words that could possibly answer such a loaded question.
“Babs–” He winces at the sound of his own voice, and she does too. He sounds raw, like he hasn’t spoken aloud in days, or worse, like he’s been crying for several. She wonders if it’s both.
Her anger drains away in an instant, like it always does when he looks so pitiful.
“How long have you been back?” she asks, suddenly afraid of the answer.
His brow furrows and she can practically see the gears in his head physically turning as he tries to do the math. “Uh,” he says, eloquently. “Is today Thursday or Friday?”
“It’s Saturday, Boy Wonder,” she answers without amusement, earning a wince.
“Shit.” He reaches up and rubs his face, pressing his knuckles against his scrunched eyes. “I got back last Friday night…”
She watches him drag himself to his feet, and wonders at the confusion on his face when he steps on one of the infinite piles of papers. Surely he knows who put them there?
”Dick, what is all of this?” Carefully, she works her way through the mess of his apartment until she’s settled next to the couch. Her eyes scan the floor as she goes, hoping to catch on some headline or another that might give her a clue.
“It’s just a case,” he says hurriedly.
It’s hard to watch him, harder to listen, when he’s so obviously hiding something. It’s the way his shoulders are hunched, the way he won’t look at her. The way he still hasn’t actually said ‘hello’.
“What case? Nightwing hasn’t been seen in a week, and you’ve been radio silent with Bruce and Tim, too.”
He bites his lip, and she knows she’s struck a chord. He leans down and shovels some of the papers together to clear himself a path away from his laptop, but he doesn’t walk away yet. Instead he stares down at the paper at the top of the pile in his hands - a print out from some newspaper or another - and Barbara can practically see him drifting away as his eyes start to glaze over.
He’s quiet for so long that she almost fears he’s forgotten she’s even there, and then she wonders when the last time he slept was.
“Dick–”
“It’s a personal one,” he cuts in. “Something came up when I was out there. This is just–I’m following up.”
Barbara grimaces and finally lets her curiosity win her over. She reaches over to the coffee table and picks up a page from the top of the pile. Dick doesn’t stop her, but a small part of her wishes he had.
Jason Todd’s obituary stares up at her, the date of his death highlighted and circled. The date of his funeral, the same. There are notes scribbled in the margin of the page but it slips from her shaking hand before she can even try to read them.
Her own voice comes out a whisper. “Richard Grayson, tell me what the hell you are doing right now, or so help me–”
“You can’t tell Bruce,” he interrupts instead. When she turns to him in shock, she finds him staring at her so intensely that it almost leaves her breathless.
Almost.
She manages a nod, and he continues, “How much do you know about your friend Penny?”
“What does she have to do with Jason’s obituary?”
“Did you know she has a brother?”
Barbara’s expression hardens. “Yes. He’s younger, in high school I think. She got full custody of him after their parents died when he was just a kid. Dick, will you just tell me what this is about?”
All at once, Dick drops onto the couch like a puppet with the strings cut. He buries his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes and his temple for several long seconds before taking an unsteady breath.
“While I was out there, her brother got caught in the crossfire of a fear gas attack. I guess, more like he ran toward it when he saw it happen. His friends said it was like he knew what it was.” He drops his hands to his lap, twisting them together almost absently. “I went with their team to the park where it happened, and I went with Penelope Garcia in the ambulance with her younger brother to make sure he got the antidote he needed.
“He was still unconscious when I left, but he was stable. The doctors said he would wake up, and I… I couldn’t stay and wait until he did. Babs, her little brother–he’s Jason’s carbon copy. His twin, I swear to God, I–”
His words stutter and his breath catches, and Barbara swears she sees all five stages of grief cross his expression in the course of three seconds before he gets the courage to speak again.
“Jay Garcia is Jason. Our Jason. And I don’t know how, but I’m going to prove it.”
—
Barbara isn’t sure how she ends up on Dick’s couch, elbow deep in this case, but she can’t leave now. It’s well after midnight, and she can’t stop staring at the screen in front of her where Jason Todd - her beloved pain in the ass, Boy Wonder 2.0 - stares back at her.
But he’s not Jason. He can’t be. Because Jason Todd is dead, and the boy shown on the school website on screen is Jay Garcia, Penelope Garcia’s little brother.
It doesn’t matter that she knows that face. That sometimes, she wonders if she knows it better than her own, for all the nights she stared at that very same obituary now sitting on Dick’s coffee table. It doesn’t matter that Jay Garcia would have to be Jason’s long lost identical twin, or his alien doppelganger, or some meta shapeshifter–
It can’t matter, because her Jason is dead and Penelope–
Penelope wouldn’t do something like that. How could she, when she never knew about Bruce or the rest of the family? How could she, when Barbara knows for a fact she has no connection to Gotham’s underground, or to their Rogues?
How could she, when beyond all of that, Barbara knows that the dead don’t simply come back to life?
But Barbara can’t stop staring and Jason keeps staring back, and she isn’t even surprised when the tears start to carve trenches down her cheeks.
—
It takes only two more hours of digging and theorizing before Barbara gives into a horrific hunch and bites the bullet, pulling up records from the graveyard where Jason was buried. From there, it’s using back doors to get into their private incident reports, and then a little more digging to find police reports that were never formally filed.
A string of grave robberies, covered up when the victims were deemed by the owner of the facility ‘dead’ and therefore ‘unable to be harmed’, and that there was no need to waste the GCPD’s time with something like that.
She feels her heart sink when she sees Jason’s grave listed among those defiled. The nausea hits when she sees the date - over a year ago now, and she’d have to check her old calendars to be sure, but she could swear…
Yes, October, when Penny came to meet her in person.
It’s too many coincidences, too many pieces lining up.
The chances are one in a million.
She’s risked more for less.
Barbara tilts the screen down enough to catch Dick’s eyes from across the room.
“I think you need to go back to Quantico.”