Chapter Text
In Jason’s defence, Stephanie Brown (AKA. Spoiler)... she was made for this. Being a vigilante.
“Oh, come on! I don’t even know your name!”
On second thought, maybe Jason had made a horrible mistake.
“My name’s Red Hood.”
She glared at him.
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” After deciding that wouldn’t work, she said, "You know my identity."
"That's different."
Jason was teaching Steph how to use a gun (she wasn't half bad at it), and they had taken a break which had somehow derailed into making coffee and chatting.
Jason liked coffee. He wasn't such a big fan of chatting.
"How is that different?"
"Well, if I remember correctly, it was seeing your face or letting you die."
Stephanie apparently didn't appreciate that much, as she glared at him, and retorted:
"When you almost died, I didn't look at your face.”
"And I'm very grateful," Jason replied dryly.
He really was grateful about that. He wouldn't have blamed her if she did, but with the scarf and his spare helmets, she didn't get the chance. Or, more accurately, she didn’t take the chance.
"Ugh." Spoiler flopped back on her chair. "You know this coffee sucks, right? You have tons of money, why do you buy the cheapest stuff they have?"
"I'm not buying $20 coffee."
Jason barely drank the stuff anyway. He bought it at Spoiler's behest.
"Let's get back to work.”
Stephanie sighed but got up, downing the dregs of her coffee.
She was wearing her spoiler uniform, but with the mask pulled up over her mouth, so she could drink. They were in one of Jason’s warehouses and both of them were in consume in case one of Jason's men walked in.
Two hours later Spoiler could hit a bullseye on a target ten meters away.
Jason would love to claim ownership over her success, but she was a natural at this.
Not that it mattered. She was fairly set on not using guns when in costume but had agreed to learn how to use them in case of an emergency.
"I'll see you next week!" Spoiler called out cheerily, before disappearing out the window.
"Don't be late." Jason called back, even though he was sure she was either out of earshot or ignoring him.
Steph had pretty much stopped following Hood at this point.
There wasn't much more she really needed to know about him. She knew about a couple of his bases (she knew there were more, but she figured she would find out about them eventually and decided not to push her luck), his operations, and she was almost-friends with some of the people working for him. She was certain Red Hood wasn't going to hurt her, and now when she asked questions, he answered. Mostly sarcastically, and often very unhelpfully, but still.
He seemed to have relaxed since they agreed to work together. Or since they had made, as he called it, the Agreement.
Whatever.
But Steph still had one question he refused to answer.
What was his name? Who was he?
She understood that there was privacy and all that, but she was curious. Besides, it wasn't fair! He knew her identity!
She had thought that could convince him to tell her, but that conversation had been shut down very quickly. So, she was back to this: sneaking around and trying to figure it out herself.
Which was why she was currently in the elevator to Hood's safehouse.
Would this ordeal be easier if she read the book she had stolen from him? Probably. But, well, she had been busy, and if Steph was being honest, she wanted to do this herself, without any help. Prove she was capable.
She walked down the corridor, trying to remember which apartment number it was. Steph was pretty sure it was 33B. Just as she was about to punch in the code Hood had told her (part of the Agreement), the door opened.
"Uh..."
Steph was greeted with a man who was about a head taller than her and, if she had to hazard a guess, much stronger.
Guess that was the wrong apartment.
"Hi!" Steph greeted him brightly,
"Hello." He paused, at a loss for words. Well, it can't be every day that a blonde teenage girl tries to, for a lack of a better word, break-in to your apartment.
She laughed, "Sorry, I must have the wrong apartment!"
"You new to the building?"
"No, I'm just visiting someone," she replied, keeping her tone cheery.
The man had streak of white through his hair and green eyes. Like, green green.
"Right. Well, don't let me disturb you." He said, moving past her.
"Wait!" She called after him suddenly. The way Steph saw it, this guy could help her. He could tell her when Red Hood came in, if anyone else came out of his apartment, and so on.
"What?"
"Do you live here?"
Please say yes, She silently begged.
"No. Sorry. I was just, ah, visiting someone."
"A friend of yours?" A friend worked too. Steph just had to get the guy to introduce them.
"Something like that," the guy muttered.
"Can I meet them?"
"...Why?"
Steph was suddenly aware of how pushy she was being. It was fine, she was almost there, she just had to continue this conversation for a while longer.
"I just want to meet the people around here, cause I'll probably be staying here quite a bit," Steph hoped that wasn't true. If she was staying at Red Hood's safehouse then she was probably injured, and she had had quite enough of that.
"Right. Well, you can't, he's not home." He sounded sour when he said that, and before Steph could ask another question that might get a restraining order filed against her, the man said "Bye.", and disappeared into the elevator.
She chewed on her lip. She had no idea which apartment was the safehouse.
At a lack for a better option, she messaged Hood. Which apartment is your safehouse?
It only took a few seconds before the reply came.
33B
and then,
why?
Steph has come up with an excuse beforehand in case she ran into Hood while she was here.
I think I left something there.
ok
Steph's mind was reeling.
Who had just come out of Hood's apartment? Why did he sound upset?
Was that Hood?
Jason knew Stephanie didn't leave anything in his safehouse. He also knew that for them to trust each other, he had to not question everything she does. Still, he was surprised when she showed up out of the blue.
Besides, it's not like he could give her a random apartment number.
He was just walking out of the building, he had to do some shopping (he was getting the second cheapest coffee they have, just to spite Stephanie) when he got her text.
He'd have to come up with a lie that sounded plausible so that he'd have an answer for when he next saw her.
That gave him a little over a week, if he was lucky.
Steph had come to the conclusion that the man she had met was not Hood.
First, she hadn't seen Hood without his helmet, and she didn't think he would walk out of one of his safehouses as a civilian. With how paranoid he it was a minor miracle he took it off at all.
Second, the man seemed annoyed that the 'friend' he had been visiting hadn't been there. Hood was smart, and if that was him then he could have said he was dropping something off or something.
Third, Hood would have just told her. If she ran into him outside of his safehouse, then there was no reason to lie. It wasn't like she was going to tell anyone!
Plus, she was pretty sure the man she met was taller than Hood.
So, no, the man was not Hood.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t know Hood.
And from what she could tell they weren't friends, per se.
You see, Steph knew quite a bit about failed relationships, having had quite a few herself, in fact, she considered herself something of an expert on them. And he had the look of somebody who was regretting doing something nice for someone else. Steph had worn that look herself quite a lot (it’s not her fault that all of the boys (and some of the girls) she knew didn’t get her. Or she didn’t get them. Whatever, it’s over now).
But Steph was still at a standstill. She hadn't talked to Hood since then, and she wanted to figure out this mess before she saw him again.
Which left her with one option: the book.
That evening, once her mother was asleep, she rummaged around in her top draw and drew out the book she had stolen from his safehouse.
There was a lot of stuff about becoming a Crime Lord (starting a gang, building his reputation, a disturbing plan about beheading rivals, blah blah, nothing very useful right now), somebody named Talia (the name was mentioned in passing, somebody who’s help was “Plan F”, and who had a “stupid secret” that could be used as blackmail (Steph would have to see if she could find out more about her later)), and then some stuff about a British guy only referred to as "Alf" (she had no idea what Britain had to do with anything, but the guy from the safehouse didn't have a British accent either, so she moved on). And... and that was it.
She flipped through the rest of the book, but all she was greeted with was blank pages.
She had spent two hours practically decoding that fancy fuckass handwriting for nothing. She knew next to nothing about Red Hood.
She threw the book across the room in frustration.
It fell open on the first page, and Steph's eyes landed on something she hadn't noticed before.
A small scratched out patch on the back of the cover. she rolled off her bed and picked up the book. The word had been scribbled over so many times she could hardly see what was underneath, but she hoped the indentations from the pen hadn’t been completely destroyed.
Holding it up to the lamp she had on her desk, she could see it was two words.
Maybe it was a name?
She could make out a J and an s in the first word. The second word began with either an I or a T... she squinted, moving the paper close to her face. maybe the last word might be Too.. Tomd... Todd! It was definitely Todd!
That was it! Okay, the first word definitely began with a J and... there might be an n at the end...? She had no idea.
Well, it was better than nothing.
Picking up her phone, she typed J Todd into the search bar. The first thing that popped up was a photo of a kid wearing a suit, looking very out of place at what she assumed was a gala or another rich-person event.
The text under the search bar read: did you mean: Jason Todd?
Sure, she though, why the hell not?
Jason Todd was a kid from Crime Alley who was adopted by Bruce Wayne when he was twelve. A real rags to riches story, Steph thought dryly. He excelled academically and was short for his age.
He was also, as she soon found out, as dead. No one knows exactly how Jason Todd died, hence the number of true crime podcasts that explore his supposed murder, and the rabbit hole of reddit forums Steph disappeared into for a couple hours.
In short, it unanimously decided that Jason Todd was super-duper dead.
So. Bummer.
But while she couldn't do anything about his death, she could solve her own case. The identity of the notorious crime lord, Red Hood.
Why did Hood have a dead kid's notebook. Did this have anything to do with the safehouse guy?
Actually, now that she thought about it....
Steph brough up a headshot of Jason Todd on her phone annnnnnd... yup. Dead ringer for the safehouse guy.
...
Red Hood was maybe-friends-possibly-dating a billionaire's dead son.
Jason was freaking out a little.
He was meeting up with Spoiler in - he checked the time – a minute. He had no lie. He had no excuse or reason that would justify a random guy being at his safehouse.
“I’m here!”
Spoiler’s cheerful greeting probably would have made him flinch if his time at the League hadn’t trained that out of him.
“Hello.”
They were both wearing their suits again, and they were at the same warehouse as before. It was an easy meeting place, under Jason’s control but not a place he used regularly.
“What’re we doing today? Shooting again?” She still sounded cheerful, like nothing was different.
Jason was glad. He wasn’t planning to bring up their accidental meeting, and if she didn’t bring it up then they could both just move on, like it had never happened.
“Yes.”
He was planning on giving her moving targets this time, seeing if she could get the hang of shooting in situations closer to what she’ll actually have to face on patrol, if she ever chooses to use guns, that is.
To his surprise and delight, everything continued as usual for the rest of their meeting, and while Spoiler still missed half her shots (shooting at moving things was a lot harder than sedentary targets), she was doing very well for a beginner.
They had packed everything up, moving the foam balls Jason had her shoot at while he threw them into the air into a closet in the corner of the warehouse.
He was just about to say goodbye when she spoke first:
“Thanks for giving me the apartment number the other day.” Her tone was light, but Jason could hear the tension underneath the surface.
“Yeah, it’s, uh, no problem.”
“Right.”
There was a beat of silence where Jason prayed the topic would change, but alas.
“By the way I thought you should know that there was someone else there.”
If this was her telling Jason she knew his identity then she was phrasing it really weirdly.
“Oh?”
“Um, yeah.” She hesitated before going on, “He seemed pretty upset though-”
Jason was not upset when he bumped into Steph. He was caught off guard and trying his best not to feel the bullet wound in his arm, but he was not upset.
“-and I don’t know what that was about-”
Why would she think he was upset? Was it just his face?
“-and I’m not asking, cause that’s your business-”
Jason remembered thinking Talia was mad at him when he first came to the League, but she said she wasn’t, so maybe it was something like that.
“-trust me, I don’t get involved in other people’s love lives, I learnt that lesson a long time ago-”
Then again, Talia was a notorious liar, and she was good at it, which made it harder to know when she was lying. So maybe she really was mad at Jason back then...
“-but I just think you should fix things up with your boyfriend because he seemed pretty mad.”
This again! Jason wasn’t mad! He wasn’t even that hard to read and-
And-
“What?”
“Look,” Spoiler shuffled back, “I know it’s none of my business, but I just think-”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that part,” He didn’t, but that’s not the point, “what did you say he was?”
“Your... boyfriend?”
This was it. This was Jason’s way out; this was his lie. His mind was quickly forming a plan. If he could just pretend to date himself for a few weeks and then slip into the conversation that he had broken up with, well, himself, then that was it! He found an out!
“I didn’t mean to assume!” Spoiler hurriedly corrected herself.
“No, he is my boyfriend,” he reassured her. God, this plan already felt stupid.
“I- Okay. Well, I didn’t tell anyone. Just so you know.”
“Right. Thanks.”
"How are things with your boyfriend?"
They were training again (knife throwing, Red Hood had the weirdest checklist of things he wanted to teach her) and Steph was... well, bored, curious and desperate for some drama.
Red Hood missed the target, stumbled, and spun around to face her, “What?"
"Uh-"
"Oh, um," He sounded tense, "yeah, it's good."
Steph could tell he was lying. Anyone would be able to see that he was lying.
"Riiiight. Okay."
"You need to fix your posture," Hood said, changing the subject very unsubtly.
Steph allowed it.
“Soooooo.”
“So?”
Spoiler had managed to track Jason down while he was on patrol. It was a fairly quiet night, otherwise he doubted she would be here. As much as she liked to make jokes, Spoiler didn’t mess around when it came to protecting people. It was something Jason appreciated.
He was currently standing on a rooftop overlooking the majority of Crime Alley. If something began to go down, then he would know about it.
“Anything new in your life?”
“Nope.”
Spoiler hummed, clearly looking for a different answer.
“How’s Jason?”
Jason threw her a sharp look.
How had she figured out his name? Or his fake-boyfriend-who-was-actually-himself's name?
Had he told her? Maybe. Honestly there was so much going on he might have just forgotten. He also hadn’t slept in a while, which probably wasn’t helping.
“He’s fine.”
“Cool. Good.”
What was the best way to end a fake relationship?
What was the best reason for a breakup that wouldn’t get Spoiler involved?
The fake-dating-your-secret-identity-plan was becoming harder than Jason thought it would be.
Spoiler seemed to be determined to keep herself updated on the status of Jason’s relationship, and Jason was starting to crack under the pressure. I mean, shoot outs and severed heads are fine, but fake dating himself? Apparently, that’s his breaking point.
He was in the safehouse Stephanie knew about, which, looking back, might have been a mistake. This became obvious when somebody started knocking.
“Hi!” Stephanie, like always, greeted him brightly.
Jason was not, for the record, wearing his helmet. Or his armour. At this point he was half hoping that Stephanie would just figure out who he was just so he could stop doing this. He had never dated a person in his life. He has never even wanted to date a person in his life.
“Hello,” Jason said cautiously. This was only the second time he had spoken to Stephanie out of costume, and he had to make sure he didn’t act too much like Hood. “Can I help you?”
“Yes! Or well, um, I want to help you! Kind of.”
“What?”
She laughed a little nervously.
“Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot. Can we talk?”
“We are talking.”
“Right. Yes. So, um, I was not completely honest last time we met, because I know your, um, boyfriend.”
Jason was done with this.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t have another conversation like this.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Stephanie’s eyes widened.
Thank God, she had figured it out. If there was one thing Jason had learned from these past few weeks, it was that he was a terrible fake boyfriend andhis identity was not worth it.
“You guys broke up?!”
Are you fucking kidding me?