Work Text:
Jason wasn’t officially a Bat again. He’d burned a few dozen too many bridges for that to ever be in the cards.
But he’d been on-call for the last few alien invasions, and he’d worked directly with several non-Bat Justice Leaguers. Nobody was going to stop the cops from arresting him, but they were no longer interested in doing it themselves. He was pretty sure that at this point most of the family had him filed under the same category as Harley and Ivy: still a threat, but open to negotiations and willing to help the Bats against bigger enemies.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He didn’t want to go back to taking orders from Bruce, but he didn’t exactly relish being treated like a two-bit villain either.
Still, he had to admit that some of their security precautions made sense. Like, for example, the rule Bruce had about leaving him alone with the recently-renamed Red Robin. The one that said Robin was currently ignoring completely.
“What the fuck am I meant to be doing here?” he asked the teenager, for at least the third time.
Drake didn't even look up.
Jason didn't regret most of what he'd done his first year out as Red Hood, not even the heads in duffle bags. But he looked back at what he pulled on Drake at Titans Tower and winced. He’d done almost exactly what he had accused Bruce of doing to him and used the kid as a prop in their feud. He still resented Drake for trying to replace him, but really the one he'd been mad at all along was Bruce, who'd actually let the kid do it. With a little bit of space, he could admit that he didn't exactly have the moral high ground with regards to replacing other people as Robin, Not after he'd slipped into Dick's role without hesitating.
Drake should have hated him for that. Up until very recently, Jason thought Drake did hate him for that, and he respected it.
But today, Drake had decided that it was strategically necessary for him to drag Jason around with him, which was a hell of a decision if he was still holding a grudge.
Jason did respect the pure fearlessness it showed, because it took guts to deliberately set oneself up to be alone with one’s would-be murderer for an extended period. Jason wasn’t sure if it was born of recklessness or arrogance, but Drake wasn’t even treating him like a potential threat.
He’d just led them both to the roof of an abandoned building, pulled out his laptop, instructed Jason to keep watch, and then started discussing security protocols with Oracle at a level that was well above Jason’s ability to follow. Drake hadn’t even told him who they were expecting, just that there was an outside-Gotham threat on the way.
Finally, Drake slammed his laptop shut. “That should do it. Is there a safehouse you’d be willing to burn? All of mine are compromised.”
“All of them?” Jason echoed. He kept an eye on the Bats’ safehouses, and Drake was the one with the most. “Are you being targeted?”
“I thought that was obvious?” Drake replied. “If this was an attack on Gotham as a whole, I would’ve just left you to handle Crime Alley like usual.”
Jason wasn’t sure if he appreciated the respect for his territory or objected to the level of mind-reading Drake apparently expected from him.
“You realize you haven’t even told me who we’re dealing with, right?”
“Ra’s,” Drake said.
Jason groaned. The League had been quiet for months. He should’ve realized they were up to something.
Jason didn’t have any problems with Talia’s faction. He didn’t exactly appreciate the ways she’d attempted to manipulate him and play him against Bruce, but he got why she’d done it, and he knew that she wasn’t interested in interfering with him directly. But Ra’s was a different story. The man would’ve killed Jason, again, either to hurt Bruce or just for being brain-damaged and in his general vicinity. Stupid eugenicist fossil.
“And he’s after you?” Jason asked. “What’d you do to piss him off?”
“Blew up a bunch of his bases, lied to him, survived a murder attempt, told him no, that sort of thing,” Drake said, as if all of these offenses were on the same level.
Then again, from Ra’s’s perspective, they probably were.
“I have League training, but I mostly dealt with Talia’s people,” Jason said. “Wouldn’t one of the others be better backup for this one?”
“Ra’s is going to play mind games,” Drake said. “He’s been threatening me with information that I can’t have any of them finding out in the middle of a fight. You’re the least likely to fly off the handle if he has one of his minions talk.”
It was not hard to tell that B had trained this kid. That logic was ice-cold.
“So, what’d you do?” Jason prodded. “Kill someone behind Daddy Bats’ back?”
“Bruce knows how many League bases I blew up,” Drake said. “If he hasn’t connected the dots on that, it’s not my problem. I think he’s probably just pretending it didn’t happen.”
That did sound like Bruce.
“I’ve got a safehouse,” Jason offered, “but I need you to prep me a little more than that.”
Drake gave him a look that would’ve been piercing without the whiteout lenses.
Jason kept his body language open. He was willing to be straight with the kid, especially since he doubted he actually needed to say all that much before Drake pieced it all together on his own.
Jason knew he’d come back messed up. Hypothetically, the Pit should’ve fixed any brain damage, and the emotional issues it caused in the process should’ve faded within a week. But he’d still been beaten to death and then spent years around assassins of dubious stability. So yeah, he knew he didn’t have the emotional regulation he’d had at fifteen--which was pretty pathetic, when he thought about it. Also, Drake was nosy enough to think he had a good idea of what would set Jason off, but all he had to work off of were his own research and Bruce’s extremely biased case file.
“Right,” Drake said. “They’ve got two pieces of information they can play. One’s about an injury the rest of the Bats don’t know I had, so I’m guessing that won’t be an issue.”
He had a point. Whatever it was, Jason had probably done worse to him. Hewasn’t so happy to hear about it as he would’ve been back in the beginning, but he could admit that if he was interested in Drake not being injured, well, change should probably have started with him.
“The other one…yeah, actually, I might need to give you it ahead of time,” Drake said. “You’ll object just on principle.”
Jason nodded.
“When I was off in Europe, I started training with a teacher Bruce set up for me, but things kind of went off the rails after that,” Drake said. “There was an underground tournament, lots of people tried to kill me--”
“That’s what you get for leaving Gotham,” Jason said. “Better the attempted murderer you know…”
Drake snorted. “Something like that,” he said. “Anyhow, turns out that Ra’s has a half sister.”
“News to me!” Jason said. “I don’t think she was around when I was with the League.”
“She isn’t really League at all,” Drake said. “She runs with a cult associated with Hades, the Daughters of Acheron.”
“Is the daughter part literal?” Jason asked. “Because if so, that’s a heck of a lineage. Makes the demon brat’s background look tame.”
“She implied it was?” Drake said. “But she said a lot of stuff, honestly. Including that she wanted to have my kid before her sister killed me. Still not sure if Ra’s put her up to it or not, but either way…”
“Wait, is this her sister on the other side or--wait. Have your kid. Like, uh…” Jason trailed off. “How old was this person, exactly?”
“No idea,” Tim said. “She didn’t look that much older than me, but…you know how you can sometimes tell that someone doesn’t have a normal human lifespan, just by how they act?”
“So definitely too old for you,” Jason said.
He took a deep breath. The kid had come to him because he thought Jason wouldn’t lose his shit. So Jason had to at least try not to lose his shit.
Even if he wanted to go check whether a bullet would be enough to put her down.
“She didn’t actually get much farther than saying that,” Drake added. “Cass had been following me, and she stepped in almost immediately after.”
“That does not change what she tried to do,” Jason snapped.
“Yeah,” Drake agreed. “Also I think if one of the assassins says something about it, B might finally process how creepy Ra’s is about me.”
“You’re the new focus of his old obsession with B, right?” Jason asked. “Dick mentioned it during the last all-hands alien incident.”
“Yup,” Drake said glumly. “The Titans think I need a restraining order.”
Okay, yeah, this was pressing some buttons for Jason, all right. “And what do you think?”
“That I want my spleen back,” Drake said.
“Uh, okay?” Jason said.
“Ra’s has it,” Drake elaborated. “It’s in a jar. I think he keeps it on his desk.”
“The Titans are right about the restraining order,” Jason said. “I kill people for that kind of shit.”
“Look, I’m gonna be honest, if I thought you could actually make it stick, I’d say you should have at it,” Drake said. “But the Lazarus Pits…”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “But that just means I can shoot him without B objecting to it outright.”
Drake snorted.
“What, no lecture about murder?” Jason asked.
“I just told you I blew up a bunch of League bases, didn’t I?” Drake said. “I don’t agree with everything you do, but I get why you do it. We all decide what we can live with, yeah?”
Fair enough. That was pretty insightful, for a brat from Bristol. Then again, most brats from Bristol didn’t have half as much experience as Drake did with holding people’s lives in their hands.
“Okay, anything else that’s likely to come up?” Jason asked.
“What, all of that wasn’t enough?” Drake asked, but his tone was teasing.
“Hey, you never know with Ra’s,” Jason said.
Drake outright laughed. “No, you don’t. But no, that’s everything.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “You know how many ninja we’re gonna be dealing with?”
“Does it matter?” Drake asked. “We can handle them.”
Jason grinned at him, and saw his own bloodthirst reflected in Drake’s expression.
Normally, working with the Bats was an exercise in frustration. Bruce fought with him over methods, Dick tried to recreate a closeness they’d never had, and Babs snapped at him for rebuffing Dick. Damien ordered him around like a servant, Cass managed to disapprove of him loudly without saying a single word, and Stephanie just ignored him. Even Kate and Duke, who were mostly okay, sometimes treated him like a bomb about to go off. This was different. He wasn’t being treated like a half-reformed rogue or a prodigal child, but like an ally.
“I’ve got a safehouse up on Poplar Avenue,” Jason said. “Houses are abandoned on both sides, so I wired ‘em with explosives, and Roy even set up a controlled-range EMP device that’s wired to the security system.”
“Poplar's only a few minutes away,” Drake said. “We should make it there in plenty of time.”
“C’mon, then,” Jason said.
He stood up, and then extended a hand to Drake. He wouldn’t have blamed the kid for flinching away, but instead, he took it and hauled himself to his feet.
Maybe, just this once, working with the Bats wouldn’t be a massive chore.