Chapter Text
Judith Rowe has long known the taste of death—bitter as burnt sugar, metallic as iron on the tongue. It seeps into her marrow and curls around her bones like a parasite too stubborn to die. She has felt the grim reaper's phantom hand slip past her throat, fingers pressing cold against her heart, squeezing until the chambers convulse, until breath is an afterthought and her body is no longer her own.
She knows what it is to be consumed, to retch until she is hollowed and raw, a vessel turned inside out, yet still, the thing that seeks to unmake her remains. It is a poison with no known antidote, a slow oxidation that no alchemy can reverse. Years pass, and though she learns the delicate art of forgetting—of burying memory beneath layers of routine and careful fabrication—the truth remains immutable. What lives inside her does not forget. It does not forgive. It does not stop trying to kill her.
Judith has mastered another science: the chemistry of deception. She knows how to distill her anguish into something palatable. How to feign the stability of solid ground when, inside, she is dissolving, one atom at a time. She is an architect of pretense, but beneath the practiced equilibrium, the reaction is volatile. The reaper has not let go, and neither has she.
She refuses to die, refuses to let the indifferent world snuff her out like the guttering embers of a cigarette flicked onto rain-slick pavement. Gotham trickles from her pores and saturates her lungs—a city of rust and ruin, where the air is thick with motor oil, copper, and secondhand smoke, where neon gutters flicker like dying stars and alleyways breathe in shadows. It is a place that chews up the weak and spits out the bones, and by all rights, she is an insignificant thing, a scrap of sinew meant to be ground beneath the boot of something bigger, colder, richer.
Nonetheless, having pulled herself from an early grave once before, she knows she'll do it again.
Her plan is stitched together with fraying thread, riddled with holes wide enough to fall through, but it has carried her to her final year at Gotham University, and she will hold onto what remains if it means escaping this godforsaken city.
Judith is a chemistry student by trade, though most know her better for her other services. The Alchemist does not discriminate.
She deals in destruction and desire alike, disintegrating morality into its base elements. To the mob bosses who slither through the underbelly's rotting veins, she sells explosives—a little thermochemical persuasion for their enemies. To the bored socialites, insulated by wealth and discontent, she offers powders that burn electric through their bloodstreams. To her own classmates, drowning in caffeine and desperation, she delivers little blue pills that take the edge off. The Alchemist sells all, a neutral agent in a city steeped in entropy, and the profit is just enough to keep the lights on, to scrape together tuition, to afford the hole in the wall where she rushes her thesis between transactions.
But even chemistry has its limits, and Judith is a capricious mixture of ambition and pessimism, clutching at the last remnants of her carefully calibrated existence before the whole thing detonates in her hands, and with the arrival of the imposter, it certainly comes close.
A new hallucinogenic begins to circulate the city, its maker stamping it with the unmistakable symbol of Judith's trade—the hangman's noose. Whether it's a mistake, an oversight, or a copyright infringement, it puts at risk everything she has worked to build. Her signature now taints every false transaction and illicit dose. The Alchemist is no longer a ghost in the shadows. She has become very real to Gotham's underbelly, and with that reality comes unwanted attention.
What was once a quiet exchange of chemicals is now an open war for control. Clients who never needed to know her face are suddenly demanding answers. Criminals with an eye for profit, vigilantes with a skewed sense of justice, and eager buyers are all uttering her name, now synonymous with the poison flooding the streets.
Among these new, unwanted visitors is a particularly trigger-happy nuisance—convinced that Judith holds the key to the havoc consuming what he deems to be his domain. The temptation to run is great, but she will not leave behind the one thing she has forsaken everything else for—her degree.
Instead, she must help the Red Hood investigate the imposter's true identity, even as the web of lies, deceit, and peril chokes the resolve out of her. Still, she has vowed that this city will not be the death of her, and so it will not—no matter how many times it tries.
Jason Todd knows the taste of death. It is the bitter tang of betrayal, the hollow ache of loneliness that fills the spaces between breaths. It is the poison of misplaced hope, a slow burn that seeps into your lungs until the air feels aflame. He knows what it's like to long for something that was never coming, to hunger for the impossible until desire itself becomes an insatiable beast. He knows the weight of memory—how it morphs into a merciless enemy, a voice that echoes your failings and slaps you awake in the dead of night. He knows what it is to be forgotten, to be erased from the lives of those he bled for, buried under their indifference like a discarded relic of a life that no longer matters.
But he is moving past that now—or at least, he is trying. He, too, has mastered the chemistry of deception, learning to cleave away from the remnants of who he once was. A revenant in his own right, he is learning to live. The work helps, of course. The streets are riddled with filth and corruption, and every lowlife he purges brings a small measure of satisfaction. There is catharsis in the certainty of playing by his own rules, with no master to kneel before, and revenge has always been a poison he's willing to swallow.
So when the city erupts once more into chaos, he welcomes the distraction. Another criminal to eliminate with a bullet through the skull. It will be convenient—easy, even. He expects the usual defiance, the stammered denials that every felon spews when confronted with the consequences of their actions. It is her he does not expect.
A dying creature hell-bent on living, burning with a tenacity that matches his own.
She knows more about the game she plays than he does, and he knows better than to underestimate her. At best, she will help him unmask the true mastermind behind the rising violence. At worst, he'll end her himself, and that will be the end of it. But Jason forgets that even death isn't enough to erase the ghosts he's trying to leave behind, or the ones he has managed to create along the way.