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RED HOOD in block capitals, which Batman had chosen to render in - naturally - red. Beneath it was a surprisingly unflattering surveillance photo, the kind where the subject appeared to be mid-sneeze.
"His territory has expanded again," Batman said, in the voice he used when he wanted the League to understand that Gotham was his problem that he was choosing to brief them on, not a problem he needed help with. It was a subtle distinction. Clark had learned to hear it. "He now controls narcotics distribution across three districts, has displaced two established crime families, and runs what appears to be a shadow social services network."
"A what?" said Hal.
"Shelters. Food banks. Medical clinics." Batman cycled through slides. Satellite imagery. Building schematics. "Funded by criminal revenue."
"So he's... a crime lord who runs soup kitchens," Hal said.
"He's destabilizing Gotham's power structures with a speed and efficiency that is difficult to ignore," Batman said, which was not a yes and not a no, and Diana noticed.
She always noticed.
"You've been ignoring it," she said, pleasantly.
Batman's jaw did something complicated. "I've been monitoring it."
"For how long?"
The silence went on for exactly two seconds too long, and Clark - who had a journalist's instinct for these things - watched six Leaguers silently downgrade their confidence in the briefing.
"The point," Batman said, "is that we need intelligence. His operation is unusually opaque. Standard surveillance has been... insufficient."
"You can't figure him out," Barry translated.
"Standard surveillance has been insufficient," Batman repeated, with the inflection of a man who would rather swallow his own cape than say that sentence a third time.
The assignments were distributed with Batman's usual brisk efficiency.
Clark would do flyovers - X-ray vision, superhearing, the works. Diana would reach out to her network of informants in the criminal underworld (she had one, which still surprised people who forgot that Themyscira had prepared her for war, not Sunday brunch). Hal would do orbital surveillance. Barry would canvas at speed. J'onn would do what J'onn did, which nobody asked too many questions about.
"And Captain Marvel," Batman said, almost as an afterthought. "Background research. Public records, media coverage. The desk work."
"Sure thing," said Captain Marvel, with the sunny agreeableness that made half the League vaguely nervous and the other half vaguely charmed.
Nobody noticed Dick Grayson - present as a "consultant," which meant Batman hadn't been able to stop him from showing up - quietly turn his phone face-down on the table.
Nobody noticed because nobody was looking, which was itself a victory of misdirection that would've made Bruce proud, if Bruce ever found out, which (Dick was confident) he would not.
Under the table, his phone buzzed.
jaybird: they're sending CLARK?? with XRAY VISION?? to spy on my CLINICS???
jaybird: does he not see the irony
dickie: in fairness i think he's mostly going to look at your warehouses
jaybird: oh GOOD my WAREHOUSES. much less of a civil liberties issue
dickie: i'm literally crying trying not to laugh rn
jaybird: suffer
WEEK ONE: FIELD REPORTS
Clark Kent discovered that Red Hood's warehouses were lined with lead.
All of them.
Every single one.
"That's... thorough," he told Bruce, on a rooftop that smelled like rain and pigeons. He was trying to be diplomatic. What he meant was: that is exactly what someone would do if they knew Superman was going to look.
Batman said nothing, which was his way of conceding a point.
Diana approached one of Hood's lieutenants at a bar, in plainclothes, with the kind of effortless charm that had toppled minor deities.
The lieutenant - a stocky woman with a scar across her nose and the weary eyes of someone who had seen too much - took one look at Diana, said "You're too pretty, too tall, and too confident for the Alley, sweetheart, who sent you?" and walked away.
Diana, who respected operational competence even when it was inconvenient, reported this back with something that sounded almost like admiration.
Hal's orbital surveillance produced detailed thermal imaging of Hood's territory, which showed a thriving nightlife, orderly patrol routes, and what appeared to be a regularly scheduled movie night in one of the warehouses.
"They're watching The Princess Bride," Hal reported, baffled. "Is that - is that a code?"
"It's a movie," Dick said, from the corner, where he was absolutely not texting.
dickie: hal thinks princess bride night is a coded meeting
jaybird: it IS a meeting. it's a meeting about how inconceivable it is that people underestimate me
dickie: you're so dramatic
jaybird: i literally rose from the dead, drama is my BRAND
Barry ran through Hood's territory seventeen times in one night, at speeds that should have rendered him invisible.
The next morning, there were freshly painted speed bumps on every road in the district. Not physical ones - Hood didn't have the municipal authority for that - but rather, very realistic trompe-l'oeil speed bumps painted directly onto the asphalt.
They would have done absolutely nothing to slow down the Flash.
It was a statement.
"He's mocking us," Barry said.
"Yep," said Dick, and excused himself to the bathroom, where he laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor.
dickie: THE SPEED BUMPS
jaybird: 😏
dickie: i am going to get CAUGHT because of you
jaybird: that's a you problem
J'onn's report was the most concerning: he could read surface thoughts from Hood's people, and what he found was... loyalty. Genuine loyalty. Not fear-based compliance, not coercion, but the fierce, protective loyalty of people who believed they were part of something that mattered.
"That is... unusual," J'onn said carefully, "for a criminal organization."
Batman's jaw did the thing again.
WEEK TWO: AN UNASSIGNED OPERATIVE
Captain Marvel had been given desk work. Background research. Public records.
Billy Batson had not been given anything, because nobody in the Justice League knew Billy Batson existed.
This was, Billy reflected as he stepped off the Greyhound at Gotham's downtown terminal with a backpack that held everything he owned (which wasn't much), probably an advantage.
He'd done his homework. Captain Marvel had pulled the public records like Batman asked - newspaper clippings, police reports, the sanitized version. But Billy had also pulled up Reddit threads, Tumblr posts, TikToks. The stuff normal people said about Red Hood, when they thought nobody important was listening.
The picture that emerged was... complicated. And interesting. And deeply, weirdly familiar in ways that made Billy's chest ache in a manner he did not care to examine.
So he'd packed his bag and bought a bus ticket, because Billy Batson had been a homeless kid in a lot of cities, and becoming one in Gotham didn't require a disguise. It required a bus ticket and a willingness to sleep rough for a night or two, and Billy had both.
(Captain Marvel probably should have told the League what he was doing. Billy Batson was twelve and answered to nobody and had been making his own survival decisions since he was nine, and old habits - the important ones - don't break easy.)
He arrived in Crime Alley on a Tuesday evening, which - he'd researched - was when Hood's people did their weekly intake at the main shelter. He had his hood up and his shoulders hunched and his eyes moving, always moving, checking exits and sightlines and the faces of everyone around him, because that was how you walked when you were twelve and alone and had learned the hard way what happened when you stopped paying attention.
It wasn't a disguise. That was the thing. He wasn't acting. Captain Marvel was the performance - the big smile, the broad shoulders, the uncomplicated confidence of someone who could benchpress a building. Billy Batson, flinching at shadows in Crime Alley, was not performing anything at all.
A woman at the corner of Miller and Fourth - heavyset, wearing a red hoodie with a small hood-symbol stitched on the sleeve - spotted him before he'd gone two blocks.
"Hey, kid."
Billy startled. Convincingly, because it was real.
"You new?"
"I - yeah. I just got here."
She looked at him. Billy knew that look: the quick assessment. Bruises? Track marks? Shock? Fear? She was checking for the worst things first, the way people who'd seen the worst things did.
"Where you coming from?"
"Fawcett," he said, because the best cover was no cover at all.
"Long way." She didn't ask why, which Billy appreciated more than she could possibly know. "You got somewhere to stay?"
"Not yet."
"Right." She pulled a radio from her belt - an actual radio, not a phone, which was interesting - and said, "Got a walker on Miller. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Solo. Looks clean but cold." She listened to the crackle of a response, then nodded at him. "Come on. I'll take you to intake."
She walked him three blocks, keeping herself between Billy and the street. It was subtle. Protective. Billy noticed because he always noticed, and something small and raw twisted in his chest.
The shelter was not what he expected.
He'd stayed in shelters before - in Fawcett, in Philly during a bad stretch, once in Hub City for three days that he tried not to think about. They were usually the same: fluorescent lights, the smell of industrial cleaner and too many bodies, cots packed so close you could feel your neighbor breathe. Eyes down. Don't make friends. Guard your shoes.
This was... different.
The building was an old garment factory, and someone had put real thought into the conversion. The sleeping area was divided into semi-private sections with actual curtains, not just rows of cots. There was a separate area for families, and a separate one for unaccompanied minors, and that one had a lock on the door that only the residents and staff could open, which was a security feature Billy had never seen in a shelter and immediately, fiercely appreciated.
"So here's how it works," said the intake coordinator, a young guy named Marco with tattoos up both arms and the patient, unsurprised manner of someone who'd done this a thousand times. "You get a bed, a locker, two meals a day from the pantry. Showers are down the hall, towels provided, don't steal them, we'll just give you more if you need more. We've got a clinic on Tuesdays and Fridays - that's real doctors, not volunteer med students trying to get their hours in."
Billy blinked. "For free?"
"For free. Hood's rules. You don't pay for safety, food, or medical. That's baseline."
"What are the other rules?"
Marco ticked them off on his fingers. "No hard drugs on premises. If you're using, that's between you and your body and we're not going to kick you out for it, but we've got detox support if you want it and you can't use here. No weapons in the residential areas. No fighting - if you've got a problem with someone, there's mediation. No stealing from other residents. And the big one-" He looked at Billy directly. "Nobody hurts kids. That's not a rule with a warning. That's a rule with consequences."
"What kind of consequences?"
Marco smiled. It was not a warm smile. "The kind Red Hood handles personally."
Billy thought about that. He thought about three foster homes ago, and the man with the heavy hands, and how long it had taken anyone to do anything.
"Okay," he said. "I can work with those rules."
His bunk neighbor was a girl named Tasha, sixteen, with bitten-down nails and the jittery energy of someone whose body was currently remounting a very loud protest against sobriety.
"I'm on day four," she told him, unprompted, at approximately two in the morning, when neither of them could sleep. "Of detox. It fucking sucks."
"I'm sorry," Billy said, because he was, and because he didn't know what else to say.
"The clinic people are good, though. They gave me stuff for the nausea and they check on me and shit. One of Hood's guys - this big dude named Hector - he brings me soup. Like, homemade soup. From his grandma." She laughed, watery and bewildered. "I tried to detox in Bludhaven once and they put me in a room and locked the door for three days. Here they bring me soup."
Billy stared at the ceiling and thought about the Justice League's satellite surveillance and thermal imaging and orbital scans, and thought: none of you saw this. None of you were looking for this.
"Hey," Tasha said. "You okay? You look like you're thinking too hard."
"Yeah," said Billy. "I do that sometimes."
The food pantry operated out of a former bodega, and it was stocked with actual food - not just canned goods and expired pasta, but fresh produce, meat, dairy. There was a woman named Mrs. Chen who ran it with the iron efficiency of a general and the gentle ruthlessness of someone who would physically force-feed you vegetables if she thought you weren't eating enough.
"You're too skinny," she told Billy, and handed him a container of rice and braised pork and bok choy that was, without exaggeration, the best meal he'd had since before his parents died.
He ate it sitting on a crate behind the pantry, in a patch of sun, and felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't realized was clenched.
This was the thing. This was what the League's surveillance couldn't capture, what Batman's slides and satellite imagery and building schematics didn't show. This wasn't a criminal operation that happened to include social services. This was a community that happened to be funded by crime. The distinction mattered. Billy knew it mattered because he'd been on the other side of it - he'd been the kid that every system was theoretically designed to help and practically designed to lose.
He asked questions. Of course he did. He was a kid, and he was curious, and nobody thought twice about a runaway asking about Red Hood, because every runaway who ended up here asked about Red Hood.
"Is he scary?"
"Oh, sure," said one of the patrol guys, a lanky twenty-something leaning against a wall. "He's real scary. But he's scary for us, you know? Not at us."
"Has anyone ever met him?"
"Yeah, he comes around. Not on a schedule - don't even ask, kid, I know what you're thinking - but he comes. Checks on things. Talks to people."
"What's he like?"
The patrol guy considered this. "You know how teachers are sometimes? The ones that are real strict but you know they actually give a shit?"
"Yeah," said Billy, who'd had exactly one teacher like that in his entire life, and remembered her with a fierce, aching clarity.
"Like that. But with guns."
On day four, something happened that Billy was not prepared for.
He was in the common area of the shelter, reading a battered paperback somebody had left behind (it was a Lee Child novel; Billy didn't love it but he wasn't picky), when a commotion broke out near the front entrance. Raised voices, not angry but scared, and the particular kind of controlled urgency that Billy recognized as someone-is-hurt.
Two of Hood's people came in supporting a third between them - a kid, maybe fifteen, bleeding from a gash on his forehead and holding his left arm at the wrong angle.
"Jumped," said one of the escorts, to the shelter manager. "Three guys, north of the Bowery. Not ours. Outside crew."
The response was immediate and coordinated in a way that made Billy's Captain-Marvel-brain light up with professional respect. Within minutes, the injured kid was in the clinic area being treated by an actual trauma nurse. Someone was on the radio reporting the incident. Someone else was pulling up a map and coordinating a patrol response.
And then - and this was the part that stuck - a woman Billy hadn't seen before came in, went straight to the injured kid, and just... sat with him. Held his hand. Talked to him. Not medical, not tactical, just present. Just making sure he wasn't alone.
Billy watched this from his corner and thought: the League is trying to figure out if Red Hood is a threat.
And then he thought: to whom?
He stayed a week.
He could have stayed longer - should have, maybe, from an intelligence-gathering perspective. But Billy Batson had an unfortunately well-calibrated moral compass, and by day five it had started screaming at him.
These people had taken him in. Fed him. Given him a safe place to sleep. Tasha had told him about her childhood, about the stepdad, about the pills, and she'd told him because she trusted the space enough to be vulnerable, and that trust extended to the kid on the next bunk over. Mrs. Chen had started saving him the good cuts of meat. Marco had quietly checked in on him every single day, casual and easy, the way someone does when they're keeping an eye on a kid without making the kid feel watched.
And Billy was there to spy on them.
It wasn't a comfortable realization.
On day seven, he packed his bag, thanked Marco, hugged Mrs. Chen (she made him take three containers of food "for the road"), and got on a bus back to Fawcett.
Captain Marvel would file his report with the League. Eventually. After he'd thought about it.
Billy Batson sat on the bus with his forehead against the cold glass and thought and thought and thought.
THE RECONVENING
The Justice League's second meeting on the Red Hood situation was, objectively, a disaster.
Clark's report: "His buildings are all lead-lined. I got nothing."
Diana's report: "His people are well-trained, loyal, and deeply suspicious of outsiders. My operative was made within seconds. I was... impressed."
Hal's report: "His territory is weirdly well-organized, they have regular social events including a movie night, and he painted fake speed bumps on the road to mess with Barry. I don't think those are the strategic insights we were looking for."
Barry's report: "He painted fake speed bumps on the road to mess with me."
J'onn's report: "His people display genuine loyalty and believe in their cause. Telepathic intelligence suggests this is not coerced."
Batman's report was a silence so heavy it had gravitational pull.
"Captain Marvel?" Clark said. "Anything from the public records?"
Captain Marvel - big, golden, standing at the back of the room with his cape draped just so - smiled his easy smile and said, "Nothing that wasn't already in the file. Sorry I couldn't be more help!"
Dick, in his corner, was having what could charitably be described as a coughing fit.
dickie: MARVEL DID NOT JUST SAY THAT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE
jaybird: said what
dickie: "nothing that wasn't already in the file"
dickie: bruce is going to have an aneurysm
jaybird: what do you mean
dickie: oh you'll find out
jaybird: dick
jaybird: DICK
jaybird: what does that MEAN
FAWCETT CITY: AFTER
Billy went home - "home" being a generous term for the arrangement of cardboard and tarps behind the abandoned Woolworth's on Seventh - and lay on his back and looked at the water-stained ceiling and thought about soup.
Specifically, he thought about Hector's grandma's soup, brought to a detoxing teenager by a member of a criminal organization, in a shelter funded by drug money, in a city whose legal systems had failed so comprehensively that a vigilante crime lord had stepped into the gap.
And then he thought about Fawcett.
Captain Marvel fought supervillains. That was the job. Evil wizards, mad scientists, the Monster Society of Evil on a bad Tuesday. He punched things that needed punching and saved people from falling buildings and went to the Watchtower for meetings and smiled his big golden smile, and it was good. He was good at it. He was, he thought without ego, genuinely good at it.
But.
Billy Batson walked through Fawcett every day, and Billy Batson was not an idiot, and Billy Batson had been carefully not looking at certain things for a very long time because looking at them meant acknowledging that punching evil wizards didn't fix them.
The Sivana family had a meth operation on the south side. Billy knew this the way every street kid knew things: through rumor, proximity, and the evidence of his own eyes. Captain Marvel had never touched it because Captain Marvel fought Sivana the supervillain, not Sivana's nephew's drug business. That was a police matter. That was below Captain Marvel's pay grade.
(Billy Batson did not have a pay grade. Billy Batson had cardboard boxes.)
There was a protection racket running out of the old textile district. There were girls being trafficked through the port. There was a landlord on the east side who owned forty buildings and kept them in conditions that had killed two people last winter and nobody went to prison because the landlord was the city councilman's brother.
Billy knew. He'd always known. He'd known the way you know the weather - as a condition of your environment, immutable, something to survive rather than something to change.
And then he'd spent a week in Crime Alley, and he'd seen what it looked like when someone decided the weather could be changed.
Captain Marvel started investigating.
It was not pretty.
He asked questions as Billy first - street-level, casual, the kind of asking where you sit on a stoop and talk to people and listen more than you speak. And what he heard made him angry in the deep, slow-burning way that Billy got angry, not the bright righteous flash of Captain Marvel.
Then Captain Marvel started looking from above. Literally, sometimes - hovering over the port at 3 AM, watching the shipping containers, tracing the routes. But also figuratively: pulling financial records with Solomon's wisdom, tracking property ownership, mapping the networks.
What he found was that Fawcett's criminal infrastructure was, comparatively, boring. There was no Joker, no Penguin, no operatic supervillainy. There was just the same grinding, banal evil that existed in a thousand American cities: men who'd figured out that other people were a resource to be extracted, and a system that had decided that was acceptable.
"Huh," said Captain Marvel, floating over a warehouse where the Sivana operation processed its product, and realized he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Punching didn't solve this. You could punch Doctor Sivana into next week and the meth lab kept running, because the meth lab wasn't about Doctor Sivana, it was about supply chains and distribution networks and demand and poverty and despair, and you couldn't punch poverty.
(Jason Todd, at this exact moment in Gotham, sneezed. He didn't know why.)
Billy sat in his cardboard arrangement and thought about it for three days.
He thought: I'm twelve. I have the wisdom of Solomon and the strength of Hercules and the power of Zeus, and I'm twelve, and I don't know how to run a counter-narcotics operation.
He thought: I could learn.
And then he thought: or I could ask someone who already has.
THE OUTLAWS CONNECTION
Roy Harper was having a perfectly normal Tuesday - which, in his life, meant he was cleaning his bow in his apartment while his daughter napped and a true crime podcast played on low volume - when his phone rang with an unknown number.
He almost didn't answer. He answered because Roy Harper had made a life out of being the guy who picked up when nobody else would.
"Hello?"
"Hi! Is this Roy Harper? Arsenal? This is Captain Marvel."
Roy blinked. He looked at his phone. He looked at the ceiling. He looked back at his phone.
"...yes?"
"Great! I'm sorry to call out of the blue. I got your number from, uh - actually, I'd rather not say, is that okay? I promise it wasn't nefarious. I just wanted to ask you something and I thought calling was more polite than showing up unannounced, because I know that can be startling, especially for people with kids, and -"
"Marvel," Roy said, because the man could apparently talk until the heat death of the universe if nobody interrupted him. "What do you need?"
"I'd like to talk to Red Hood."
The silence was long enough that Lian stirred in the other room.
"...why?" Roy said carefully.
"I have something I want to discuss with him. About Fawcett City."
"Fawcett."
"Yes."
"Hood doesn't operate in Fawcett."
"I know! That's - actually, that's sort of the point. Look, I know this is weird. I promise it's not a setup. It's not from Batman. Batman doesn't even know I'm calling you."
"Batman doesn't know," Roy repeated flatly.
"No. This is... a Billy thing."
"A what thing?"
"Sorry, I meant - a personal thing. A me thing. I just want a conversation. One meeting. He can pick the time and place and terms, and if he says no, I'll respect that completely."
Roy was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "I'll pass it along. No promises."
"That's all I'm asking. Thank you, Roy. Really."
He hung up. Roy stared at his phone, said "What the fuck," and called Kori.
Kori, as it happened, had received a very similar call approximately four minutes earlier.
"He was extremely polite," Kori said.
"Yeah, he was polite to me too. That's what worries me."
"He said it wasn't from Batman."
"Kori, everyone says it's not from Batman."
"Yes, but he meant it. I could hear it." Kori paused. "He also said 'a Billy thing,' and then corrected himself. What is a Billy thing?"
"I have absolutely no idea."
"Should we tell Jason?"
Roy sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, we should."
Jason, to absolutely no one's surprise, was suspicious.
"No."
"Jay-"
"No. I don't take meetings with Leaguers. They want to bring me in, they can try. They want to spy on me, they can keep trying." He was pacing. Roy could hear his boots on the floor through the phone. "This is Bruce. This has Bruce written all over it."
"He said it wasn't Bruce."
"They all say-"
"-it's not Bruce, yeah, I said that too. But Kori says he meant it."
Jason stopped pacing. Kori's judgment was not something he dismissed lightly.
"He said it's about Fawcett," Roy continued. "And Jay - you don't have anything in Fawcett."
"I know I don't have anything in Fawcett!"
"So what's the threat? He wants to talk. You pick the location, you control the terms, and if it smells wrong, you walk. When has Marvel ever come at anybody sideways?"
Jason was quiet.
The thing was - and this was the thing Jason didn't want to examine too closely - he remembered Captain Marvel from before. From when Jason was Robin, fourteen and furious and trying so hard to prove he deserved the cape. Most of the Leaguers had treated him with the particular condescension reserved for kid sidekicks: oh, how cute, another Robin, hope this one lasts.
Marvel hadn't done that. Marvel had talked to him like a person. Marvel had been - and Jason could admit this now, with the distance of years and a death and a resurrection and a lot of therapy he'd never actually attended - kind. Not in the performative, look-at-me-being-nice-to-the-kid way. Just... kind. The way people were kind when they actually saw you.
"Fine," Jason said. "One meeting. My terms."
THE MEETING
Jason chose a diner.
Not one in his territory - neutral ground, a twenty-four-hour place in Coventry with cracked vinyl booths and coffee that could strip paint and a waitress named Dolores who had been there since the Eisenhower administration and did not care about anything that happened in her establishment as long as you tipped.
He arrived first. Of course he arrived first. He was in civilian clothes - leather jacket, jeans, a hoodie pulled up - with two guns he was confident Marvel could survive anyway and a knife he was less confident about. He sat in the corner booth with his back to the wall and a line of sight to both exits and waited.
Captain Marvel walked in at exactly the agreed time, because he was the kind of person who was exactly on time to things, and Jason had forgotten how big he was. Not just tall - he radiated, somehow. The diner's buzzing fluorescents seemed to warm when he walked in. Dolores looked up from her crossword, blinked, looked back down.
"Red Hood?" Marvel said, sliding into the booth with the particular caution of a very large man trying not to break diner furniture.
"Captain." Jason didn't offer a hand. "You wanted to talk."
"I did. Thank you for meeting me. I mean that."
"Uh-huh. You said this was about Fawcett."
"It is."
"I don't have operations in Fawcett."
"I know."
"Then what-"
"I want you to."
The silence that followed was profound enough that even Dolores looked up.
Jason stared at Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel looked back at him with those ridiculous, earnest blue eyes - and yeah, Jason remembered that look, that was the same look he'd given Robin at fourteen, the one that was warm and genuine and made you want to trust it even when trusting things had historically been a terrible idea.
"You want me," Jason said slowly, "to bring my operation. To your city."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Captain Marvel took a breath. And then - and this was the part that Jason would replay in his head for weeks, the part that shifted something fundamental in his understanding of the guy across the table - the warmth in his expression didn't change, but it deepened. Got rawer. The smile dropped, and what was left underneath was something that Jason recognized with the bone-deep certainty of someone who'd worn the same expression in the mirror.
"Because I can't do what you do," Captain Marvel said. "I can punch Sivana through a building. I can fight Black Adam to a standstill. I can do - I can do a lot. But I can't run a shelter. I can't build a clinic. I don't know how to break a protection racket without just - hitting the guys running it and hoping that fixes things, and I've been around long enough to know that it doesn't."
He paused.
"I spent a week in your territory," he said. "Recently. And I saw - I saw what you built. Not from the outside, from - from inside. I saw the shelters and the food and the detox support and the patrols and Mrs. Chen's braised pork."
Jason's eyes narrowed. "You were in my territory."
"Yes."
"How? My people would've flagged any Leaguer within-"
"I wasn't Captain Marvel when I went."
And there it was. Hanging in the air between them. Jason's mind, finely tuned to operational security, was already spinning: not Captain Marvel. Meaning civilian identity. Meaning-
"I have a secret identity," Captain Marvel said, quietly. "Like - a really secret one. Not even Batman knows."
"Batman doesn't know your-"
"No."
Jason sat back. This was an enormous piece of intelligence to just hand over. In the world Jason operated in, a secret identity was leverage, currency, vulnerability. You didn't give that up for free.
"Why are you telling me this?" he said.
"Because I'm asking you to trust me, and that starts with me trusting you."
"That's naive."
"Maybe." Captain Marvel - and there was something shifting in his expression now, something that made him look younger, somehow, despite the adult body and the magic and the lightning. "Or maybe I'm just somebody who's been on the wrong end of systems that don't work, and I'm tired of pretending that punching bad guys is enough."
Jason looked at him for a long time.
"Mrs. Chen's braised pork," he said.
"It's really good."
"Yeah. It is."
He was quiet for another moment. Then: "Tell me about Fawcett."
And Captain Marvel - Billy - lit up. Not with lightning, not with magic, just with the desperate, hopeful energy of someone who'd been carrying something too heavy for too long and was finally, finally being asked to set it down.
He talked for an hour. About the Sivana operation, about the trafficking through the port, about the protection rackets and the slumlords and the way the foster system chewed kids up and spat them out. About the shelters that would turn you over to CPS, who would put you back in the home you'd run from. About the cardboard boxes and the cold and the way nobody, nobody, seemed to see.
Jason listened. He didn't interrupt. He asked questions - sharp, specific, operational questions that revealed the architecture of the mind behind the Hood. How many people in the Sivana operation? What's the police corruption level? Who controls the port authority? What's the housing stock like in the vulnerable areas? Where are the existing community organizations, and are any of them salvageable?
And somewhere in the middle of it, without either of them quite noticing when it happened, it stopped being a meeting and started being a planning session.
"This is going to be a massive undertaking," Jason said, at the end. He had notes. Jason Todd, crime lord of Gotham, had pulled out a notebook and taken notes while Captain Marvel described the criminal infrastructure of Fawcett City. "I can't just transplant what I've got in Gotham. Different city, different power structures, different community."
"I know."
"I'd need local assets. People who know the ground."
"I know people. Street people. They're not organized, but they know everything."
"And I'd need you. Not Captain Marvel. Well, both. But I need someone inside the system who can - wait." Jason stopped. Looked at him. Really looked. "How old are you?"
Captain Marvel met his eyes. Steady. Not flinching.
"Old enough to know what a bad foster home looks like from the inside," he said. "Young enough that the system still thinks it has jurisdiction over me."
Jason was very still.
"I'm fine," Captain Marvel said quickly. "I'm - I've got the powers, I've got-"
"Where do you sleep?"
"I-"
"When you're not Captain Marvel. When you're - whoever you are. Where do you sleep?"
The silence was answer enough.
Jason closed his eyes. Drew a breath. When he opened them, there was something in his expression that Billy recognized, because he'd seen it in the mirror - not Captain Marvel's mirror, the big golden one in the Watchtower bathroom, but the cracked one in the gas station restroom where Billy Batson brushed his teeth.
"Okay," Jason said. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to come to Fawcett. We're going to fix your city. And you are going to have a place to sleep that isn't a cardboard box. Non-negotiable."
"That's not-"
"Non-negotiable. You want my help? That's the price of admission. Red Hood doesn't build a community and leave a kid sleeping in the street. Even if the kid can bench a planet."
Billy opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Okay," he said, very quietly.
"Okay."
Jason flagged Dolores down. "Two slices of pie," he said. "Whatever's good."
"Nothing here's good, honey," Dolores said.
"Two slices of whatever's least bad."
She brought them cherry pie that was, against all odds, pretty decent. They ate it in silence, and the silence was comfortable in the way that silence is only comfortable between people who understand each other in the places that matter.
EPILOGUE: WATCHTOWER
Dick's phone buzzed during the next League meeting. He glanced at it under the table.
jaybird: so
jaybird: i have a question
dickie: shoot
jaybird: did you know captain marvel was a homeless twelve year old
dickie: WHAT
jaybird: yeah
dickie: W H A T
jaybird: he slept in CARDBOARD BOXES dick
jaybird: i'm going to fawcett
dickie: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE GOING TO FAWCETT
jaybird: i'm going to fawcett and i'm going to fix it and i'm going to feed this kid and nobody can stop me
dickie: jason
jaybird: NOBODY, dick
Across the room, Captain Marvel caught Dick's eye. He smiled - the big, golden, easy smile that everyone knew.
And then, just for a second, he dropped it. And the kid underneath - tired, hopeful, brave - looked at Dick Grayson, and gave him a tiny nod.
Dick looked back at his phone.
dickie: ...okay
dickie: need help?
jaybird: yeah
jaybird: i think i do
dickie: then you've got it
Somewhere in Gotham, Mrs. Chen started doubling her braised pork recipe. She didn't know why yet.
She would.