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He spent two weeks building dossiers. He cross-referenced public records with Captain Marvel's intel with Billy's street-level knowledge - and it was interesting, how different those last two sources were. Captain Marvel knew that the Sivana family's legitimate business front was Sivana Chemical Industries, a midsize pharmaceutical firm with a downtown headquarters. Billy knew that the guy who ran the south side cook house was called Needle Nick and had a bad knee and was scared of dogs.
Both of these things were useful. Jason appreciated both of these things.
What Jason was increasingly struggling with was the scale.
"Okay," he said, on a secure call with Billy - Billy, not Captain Marvel, because they'd settled into a pattern where planning happened at Billy's level and execution happened at Marvel's. "Walk me through the Garazzo family again."
"They run the east side. Protection rackets, mostly. Some gambling. Tommy Garazzo is the boss, his brother Pete handles enforcement."
"How many soldiers?"
"Maybe... thirty? Forty?"
Jason was quiet.
"Is that bad?" Billy asked.
"No. That's - " Jason pinched the bridge of his nose. "When I took on the Falcones, they had four hundred soldiers, sixteen lieutenants, and a comptroller with a degree from Wharton."
"Oh."
"The Black Mask had six hundred. Plus metahuman enforcers."
"Oh."
"Billy, the entire Fawcett organized crime scene has fewer people than my Tuesday night patrol rotation."
There was a pause on the line. Then, in a small, slightly offended voice: "It's still bad, though."
"Oh, it's absolutely still bad. People are still getting hurt, the structures are still exploitative, and from what you've told me the police are exactly useless enough to make it sustainable. I'm not minimizing it. I'm just..." He trailed off.
"Recalibrating?"
"I was going to say 'trying not to be a condescending Gotham asshole about it,' but recalibrating works."
jaybird: i'm expanding to fawcett
dickie: you're WHAT
jaybird: you heard me
dickie: jason you can't just. franchise crime lordship. this isn't Subway
jaybird: watch me
dickie: does bruce know
jaybird: does bruce know what, that i'm setting up community infrastructure in a city he's never once looked at? no. why would he.
dickie: because you're EXPANDING YOUR CRIMINAL EMPIRE TO A SECOND CITY
jaybird: community outreach
dickie: funded by
jaybird: creative revenue streams
dickie: JASON
jaybird: look are you going to help or are you going to clutch your pearls
dickie: ...both? i feel like i can do both
WEEK ONE: RECONNAISSANCE
Jason came to Fawcett in a rental car, which felt absurd. He'd arrived in Gotham's underworld via the Lazarus Pit. He'd taken territory from the Black Mask with explosives and a sniper rifle and the kind of tactical brilliance that came from being trained by both the Batman and the League of Assassins.
He arrived in Fawcett in a 2019 Hyundai Elantra, with a duffle bag in the trunk and a twelve-year-old in the passenger seat giving him directions.
"Turn left on Willowbrook. There's a pothole on Sixth, watch for - yeah, that one."
"You have the entire city's road damage memorized?"
"When you walk everywhere and your shoes have holes, you learn the potholes."
Jason added shoes to his mental list. The mental list was getting long. The mental list had started as "operational necessities for establishing a Fawcett presence" and had become, without his permission, roughly 40% logistics and 60% things Billy needed but would never ask for.
They drove through the south side first. Jason had seen the satellite imagery, but he liked to see things from ground level - the texture of a neighborhood told you things that surveillance couldn't. How people moved. Whether they walked in the middle of the sidewalk or hugged the walls. Whether the bodegas had bulletproof glass. Whether kids played outside.
In Gotham, you could map gang territory by watching where people's body language changed. The Narrows moved different from Burnley moved different from Crime Alley, and if you knew what to look for, you could read the borders like topographic lines.
Fawcett was different. The tension was more diffuse, less geographically sharp. People weren't navigating between warring territories; they were navigating around pockets of bad. The Garazzo block. The Sivana south side operation. The port, which everybody seemed to know was bad news without being able to articulate exactly what kind of bad news.
Billy looked at him. "That's... a very specific metaphor."
"In Gotham, the criminal infrastructure is obvious. It's structural. You can see it in the architecture - literally, sometimes. Gotham's underworld has landmarks. Here it's just... spread through everything. Low-level. Persistent."
"Is that better or worse?"
"Harder to cut out. Easier to replace." Jason pulled over, studying a block of storefronts. Half of them had CLOSED signs. One had a shattered window that had been boarded up and then tagged over. "Less dramatic, though. In Gotham I had to worry about a crime boss retaliating with a weaponized fear toxin. Here the worst case scenario is what - Tommy Garazzo sends his guys after me with baseball bats?"
"Don't underestimate them," Billy said quietly. "They broke a shopkeeper's legs last month. Mr. Patel, on Ash Street. He's still in a wheelchair."
Jason looked at him. Then he looked at the boarded storefront.
"Yeah," he said. "You're right. Sorry. Scale doesn't determine suffering."
He didn't see Billy's expression shift - surprised, grateful - because he was already pulling back into traffic. But he filed the moment away. The kid corrected him without flinching. That was good. Jason needed people who would tell him when he was being an asshole. In Gotham, that was Roy's job. In Fawcett, apparently, it was Billy's.
WEEK TWO: FOUNDATIONS
The first order of business was housing. Not for Hood's operation - for Billy.
"This is unnecessary," Billy said, standing in the doorway of the two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat on Cypress Street, looking at it like it might bite him.
"We covered this. Non-negotiable."
"I have the powers of six gods. I don't need-"
"A kitchen? A bed? Walls?" Jason was unpacking supplies: sheets, towels, a set of pots and pans that Mrs. Chen had insisted on sending ("The boy is too skinny, I can tell through the phone, don't argue with me"). "You're twelve. You have homework."
"I don't go to school."
Jason stopped unpacking. Turned around slowly.
"You don't go to school."
"I... it's complicated. The foster system-"
"We're fixing that too."
"Jason-"
"Add it to the list."
The list. The list that Jason kept in a battered Moleskine notebook that he carried in his jacket pocket and updated compulsively. Billy had seen it once, when Jason left it open on the table. It was organized by category: OPERATIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE, COMMUNITY, BILLY. The BILLY section was the longest.
"I survived fine without-"
"Surviving and living are different things." Jason said it flatly, the way he said things that weren't up for debate. "I know, because I did both, and I know which one I was doing when I was sleeping on the street at your age. You're done surviving. We're moving on to living. You can fight me on this or you can help me figure out school enrollment without triggering CPS, your choice."
Billy was quiet for a long time. Then, very carefully, as if the words might shatter: "The sheets have dinosaurs on them."
"Mrs. Chen picked them out."
"I'm twelve, not six."
"Take it up with Mrs. Chen."
Billy would not be taking it up with Mrs. Chen. Billy would be sleeping on dinosaur sheets.
The operational setup was, by Jason's standards, startlingly simple.
In Gotham, establishing territorial control had required months of strategic violence, alliance-building, supply chain disruption, and at least three incidents that could reasonably be classified as small wars. Taking on the existing power structure had meant going head-to-head with organizations that had decades of entrenchment, access to military-grade hardware, and occasionally superpowered enforcers.
In Fawcett, Jason had a planning session with his Gotham lieutenants and caught himself laughing.
"What," said Elena, his head of operations, via the encrypted video call.
"Nothing. Just - okay, walk me through the Garazzo threat assessment again?"
Elena consulted her notes. "Thomas Garazzo, age fifty-four. Runs protection rackets across the east side. Estimated forty associates, most of them part-time. Revenue maybe two million annually. Enforcement is handled by his brother Peter, who has - " she paused. "Who has a bowling team."
"A bowling team."
"The Garazzo Strikes. They bowl on Thursday nights at Fawcett Lanes. Peter is the captain. They placed third in the city league last year."
Jason put his head in his hands. Not because it was funny - it was a little funny - but because the gap between this and what he was used to was so vast that his operational instincts kept short-circuiting. He was a man who had gone toe-to-toe with the League of Assassins trying to calibrate himself for a guy whose enforcer bowled competitively.
"His soldiers," Jason said, recovering. "Training? Armament?"
"Handguns, mostly. A couple of shotguns. No body armor that we've identified. No formal tactical training. Peter Garazzo served two years in the Army but was discharged for-" Elena checked her notes again. "For getting into a fistfight with his CO over a fantasy football dispute."
"Elena."
"I'm just reading the file, boss."
"What about the Sivana operation?"
"More serious." Elena's tone shifted, and Jason sat up. "The meth production is centralized - one main cook house on the south side, two distribution points. The cook is a former Sivana Chemical Industries chemist named Dale Hooper, goes by 'Doc.' He's competent. The product is high-quality. Distribution is handled by a network of maybe twenty street-level dealers, overseen by Victor Sivana - that's Doctor Sivana's nephew."
"Victor. What's his deal?"
"Smarter than the Garazzos. Not smart enough to be truly dangerous, but smart enough to be unpredictable. He's built the operation slowly, kept it quiet, avoided attention. He doesn't start wars; he absorbs. Small-time dealers either sell his product or find themselves squeezed out through supply disruption and targeted enforcement - he's got two cops on payroll who will hassle competitors on command."
"Now that's more like it," Jason muttered. "Not the corrupt cops part. The operational structure part. That I can work with."
"You sound relieved."
"I was worried this was going to be too easy. I need at least one guy with a strategy."
jaybird: the main crime family's enforcer has a bowling team
dickie: please tell me you're joking
jaybird: the Garazzo Strikes. third in the city league
dickie: jason
jaybird: i've fought ra's al ghul, dick. i've outwitted the joker. i clawed my way out of a GRAVE. and now i'm running counterintelligence against a man whose thursday nights are OCCUPIED
dickie: i'm going to need you to take this seriously
jaybird: i AM taking it seriously!! that's what's so UNNERVING. i take it seriously and then i look at the threat assessment and it says "peter garazzo was discharged from the army for punching his CO over fantasy football" and i have to go lie down
dickie: okay but like
dickie: these guys still hurt people right
jaybird: yeah. they do. that's the thing. the incompetence doesn't make the damage less real. it just means the damage is fixable and that makes me more angry, not less, because why hasn't anyone FIXED IT
dickie: ...yeah
jaybird: in gotham there's an argument that the problem is too big, too entrenched, too structurally embedded. it's a bad argument but at least it's an argument. here? here the problem is that nobody with any power has BOTHERED
dickie: captain marvel has power
jaybird: captain marvel has the power to punch a guy through a wall. he does not have the power to run a community housing initiative. different skill sets.
jaybird: but he's learning. kid's a fast learner.
dickie: you like him
jaybird: shut up
dickie: you DO. you've adopted him. you're doing the thing
jaybird: i am not doing a thing
dickie: you bought him SHEETS
jaybird: he was sleeping in CARDBOARD, dick, that's not adoption that's BASIC HUMAN DECENCY
dickie: uh huh
WEEK THREE: FIRST CONTACT
Jason's approach to Fawcett was, by design, different from Gotham.
In Gotham, he'd announced himself with controlled violence: strategic hits on existing power structures, a clear message that a new player had arrived and the rules were changing. It was necessary because Gotham's underworld only respected force. You couldn't build a community until you'd first established that you could protect it, and in Gotham, establishing that required a body count.
Fawcett, Jason decided, didn't need that.
"We go infrastructure first," he told his team - a small advance group, handpicked from his Gotham operations. Elena for logistics. Marco, who'd run the intake shelter in Crime Alley, for community setup. Hector (and Hector's grandma's soup recipes) for what Jason was calling "cultural operations" and everyone else was calling "the food stuff." Two of his best security people, Remy and Okonkwo, for patrol setup.
"We're not here to take territory," Jason said, standing in the apartment above the laundromat that was serving as temporary headquarters. The walls were covered in maps and notes and photographs. Billy sat on the kitchen counter, eating an apple, legs swinging. "We're here to provide alternatives. The Garazzos run protection on the east side because small business owners have no other option. We give them another option. The Sivana operation sells meth because people are in pain and have no access to treatment. We provide treatment. We don't go to war. We make war irrelevant."
"And if they come to us?" Remy asked.
"Then Captain Marvel and I will handle it. Which is the other difference between here and Gotham." Jason glanced at Billy. Billy grinned - and for a second, Jason could see it, the flash of something bright and powerful behind the skinny twelve-year-old exterior. "In Gotham, I'm the biggest stick. Here, the biggest stick is a demigod who can move at the speed of lightning. That changes the calculus."
"Does the demigod have operational experience?" Elena asked, not unkindly.
"No," said Billy, cheerfully. "But I'm very enthusiastic and I hit really hard."
Elena looked at Jason. Jason shrugged.
The first shelter opened three weeks after Jason arrived.
It was a former textile warehouse - Fawcett had a lot of those, remnants of an industrial heyday that had ended decades ago and left behind a skeleton of empty buildings and unemployment. Jason had acquired it through a shell company, one of several he maintained for exactly this purpose. The renovation was fast and efficient, because Jason had done this before and had systems in place.
Marco ran intake. The protocols were the same as Crime Alley: beds, lockers, meals, medical care on schedule. The drug rules. The no-weapons rules. The big rule, the one about kids.
"We had fourteen people on the first night," Marco reported. "Twenty-six by the end of the first week."
"Demographics?"
"Mix. Families, singles, a few unaccompanied teens. Two elderly folks who'd been sleeping in their cars. One vet." Marco hesitated. "And a lot of people who aren't homeless but just... came for the food. The pantry's getting more traffic than the shelter."
Jason nodded. That tracked with what he'd seen. Fawcett's homelessness problem was smaller than Gotham's - everything here was smaller than Gotham's - but the food insecurity was widespread. Working people who couldn't make rent and groceries in the same month. Families choosing between heat and food. The quiet, grinding poverty that didn't photograph well and therefore didn't generate political will.
"Expand the pantry hours," Jason said. "And start reaching out to local food suppliers. I want the same deal we have in Gotham - we buy in bulk, we pay fair prices, and we build relationships with the vendors so that when we need favours later, we've got goodwill."
"We're building goodwill with grocery suppliers," Elena said. "This is our criminal master plan. Goodwill."
"You have a better word for it?"
"No, it's just - this is not what I expected when I signed up to work for a crime lord."
"Life's full of surprises. Speaking of which - how's the revenue situation?"
This was the part that required finesse. In Gotham, Jason's operations were funded by his control of the drug trade: he'd taken over the existing distribution networks, eliminated the worst products (fentanyl, anything targeting kids), maintained quality control, and used the profits to fund community infrastructure. It was morally complicated and he had never pretended otherwise. But it worked, and in Gotham, working mattered more than purity.
Fawcett needed a different funding model. The drug trade here was smaller, more centralised - he couldn't just step into it the way he had in Gotham. And frankly, he didn't want to. Gotham had forced his hand in certain ways. Fawcett offered the chance to try something... cleaner.
"We've got the Gotham revenue stream covering startup costs," Elena said. "Long-term, I've been looking at the Garazzo protection rackets. If we can displace them - and I think we can, their infrastructure is honestly embarrassing - we can convert those relationships to legitimate security contracts. Small businesses pay us for actual security services instead of paying the Garazzos to not break their windows. Legal, taxable, sustainable."
"And less profitable."
"Less profitable than extortion? Yes. Enough to cover operations? Also yes. The overhead here is a fraction of Gotham. Real estate is cheap, labor costs are lower, and we're not constantly rebuilding infrastructure because a supervillain blew something up."
"The Gotham reconstruction tax," Jason said dryly. "My favourite line item."
"Also," Elena said, and here her voice got careful in the way it did when she was about to suggest something she wasn't sure Jason would like. "There's grant money."
"Grant money."
"Federal, state, and nonprofit grants for community development in economically distressed areas. Fawcett qualifies for basically all of them. If we set up the shelters and clinics through the right nonprofit structure - which I've already drafted the paperwork for - we can access significant public funding."
"You want me to fund my criminal operation with government grants."
"I want you to fund your community operation with government grants, and keep the criminal stuff separate and self-sustaining. Which it will be, once we have the security contracts in place."
Jason stared at her. Then he started laughing, the real kind, the kind that made Billy look up from his homework (he had homework now; Jason had enrolled him in an online program, which was a compromise between "you need school" and "CPS cannot know you exist") with a surprised, pleased expression.
"Elena. You're a genius."
"I have a business degree from Columbia. You hired me for a reason."
WEEK FOUR: THE GARAZZO PROBLEM
The Garazzos noticed.
Of course they noticed. Jason had been discreet, but you couldn't open a shelter and a food pantry and a free clinic in a neighborhood where people had nothing without people talking about it. And when people talked, the people who'd been profiting from those people having nothing paid attention.
Tommy Garazzo sent a message first. It was almost quaint - a couple of his guys showed up at the shelter and told Marco that "the neighborhood already has management" and that "new businesses need to register with Mr. Garazzo."
Marco, who had once handled a similar visit from one of Black Mask's lieutenants by calmly describing the last three people who'd threatened a Hood shelter and what had subsequently happened to them, found the Garazzo approach refreshing.
"They were very polite about it," he told Jason. "One of them apologized for interrupting dinner service."
"What did you tell them?"
"That our management structure was already established and that we weren't interested in additional oversight. Also that the soup of the day was minestrone and they were welcome to a bowl."
"Did they take the soup?"
"One of them did. He said it was really good. He asked for the recipe."
Jason considered this information. In Gotham, an emissary from a crime boss showing up at his shelter would have ended in drawn weapons and a tense standoff. In Fawcett, it had ended in a soup recipe exchange.
"I need to talk to Tommy Garazzo," he said.
"Are you going to threaten him?"
"I'm going to do something worse. I'm going to make him a reasonable offer."
The meeting with Tommy Garazzo took place at Fawcett Lanes, because Tommy Garazzo conducted all of his business meetings at Fawcett Lanes, because Tommy Garazzo was exactly the kind of crime boss who had a regular spot at the bowling alley.
Jason had dealt with crime bosses who operated out of penthouse suites, underground bunkers, and once, memorably, a submarine. A bowling alley was new.
Tommy was a heavyset man in his mid-fifties with a thick mustache and the kind of face that had been described, in various police reports, as "intimidating" but which Jason - calibrated as he was to Gotham's standard of intimidating - would have described more as "somebody's uncle." He was wearing a bowling shirt. It said GARAZZO STRIKES on the back.
"So you're the Red Hood," Tommy said, not offering to shake hands. His brother Pete stood behind him. Pete was bigger, meaner-looking, and also wearing a bowling shirt. "Heard you set up shop in my neighborhood."
"Your neighborhood's doing badly," Jason said. "I'm here to improve it."
"Improve it. And what's my end look like in this improvement?"
"Better than you'd think." Jason sat down uninvited, which was a power move he'd learned from Talia al Ghul and which worked significantly better in a villain's lair than in a bowling alley. "You run protection on, what, thirty businesses on the east side? Take in maybe two million a year?"
Tommy's eyes narrowed. "You've done your homework."
"It's what I do. Here's the thing, Tommy. I'm not here to take your revenue. I'm here to restructure it."
He laid it out, and Tommy - to his credit - listened. The protection rackets were unsustainable. They depended on fear, which was a depreciating asset. Businesses were leaving the east side, and every business that left was revenue Tommy lost. The neighborhood was dying, and Tommy was killing it, slowly, by squeezing the life out of the only people keeping it alive.
Jason's proposal: convert the protection operation into a legitimate security firm. Tommy's guys already knew the neighborhood, already had relationships with the business owners. Put them in uniforms instead of tracksuits, give them actual training, and charge a fair rate for actual services. The businesses get real security, Tommy gets reliable income that doesn't require him to break anyone's legs, and the neighborhood stabilizes.
"And what do you get?" Tommy asked.
"A stable east side. Happy businesses. A neighborhood where my shelters and clinics can operate without interference. And-" Jason paused, because this was the part that required honesty, and Jason had learned that honesty, deployed correctly, was more disarming than any weapon. "-a Fawcett where I don't have to go to war with you. Because I can, Tommy. I want to be clear about that. I can do to your operation what I did to the Falcones and the Maronis and the Black Mask. But I'd rather not, because this city doesn't need a war. It needs infrastructure."
Tommy looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at Pete. Pete shrugged.
"You did all that?" Tommy said. "Falcones, Maronis, Black Mask?"
"Yeah."
"In Gotham."
"Yeah."
Tommy was quiet for a moment, and Jason saw the calculation happening - not the chess-master strategic calculation of a Gotham boss, but the practical, earthy math of a man who'd been running a mid-tier operation for twenty years and knew exactly how fragile it was.
"I want to keep the bowling team," Tommy said.
"I don't care about your bowling team, Tommy."
"And my guys keep their jobs."
"That's literally the point."
"And you don't come after my family."
"I don't hurt families. That's a rule, not a negotiation."
Tommy picked up his bowling ball. Turned it over in his hands. Set it down.
"Okay," he said. "Let's talk details."
Jason - who had spent months planning the overthrow of the Garazzo empire, who had contingency plans for six different conflict scenarios, who had prepared for the possibility of a protracted turf war requiring Captain Marvel's direct intervention - blinked.
"That's... it?"
"Kid, I've been running this thing since I was thirty and I'm tired. My knees hurt, my brother's got gout, and last month one of my guys got arrested and I had to bail him out with money I was supposed to use for my daughter's quinceañera. You're offering me a way to make money without going to prison. Why would I say no?"
He picked up his bowling ball again and rolled a strike. It was, Jason had to admit, a pretty clean release.
jaybird: i just negotiated a crime lord into going legitimate over a BOWLING GAME
dickie: i'm sorry what
jaybird: tommy garazzo. east side boss. i made him an offer. he said yes. in a BOWLING ALLEY
dickie: was it a good offer
jaybird: it was a great offer. elena structured it. there's an LLC
dickie: you made a crime family into an LLC
jaybird: Garazzo Security Solutions. we're filing the paperwork tuesday
dickie: jason
jaybird: what
dickie: bruce spent TWENTY YEARS trying to take down organized crime in gotham through fear and violence and you just walked into a bowling alley and did it with a BUSINESS PLAN
jaybird: different city different approach
dickie: bruce is going to kill you
jaybird: bruce doesn't know
dickie: bruce is going to find out and then he's going to kill you, not because of the crime stuff but because you did it BETTER THAN HIM with a POWERPOINT
jaybird: elena made the powerpoint actually
dickie: THAT MAKES IT WORSE
WEEK SIX: THE SIVANA PROBLEM
The Sivanas were not the Garazzos.
Jason had known this from the start. The Garazzos were local, entrenched, and fundamentally small-time - a family operation that had never aspired to be more than what it was. Tommy Garazzo wanted to make money, take care of his family, and bowl on Thursdays. He was not an ideologue.
Victor Sivana was something else.
Not a criminal genius - Jason had dealt with criminal geniuses, and Victor was not that. But he was smart, in the cold, calculating way that made simple problems complicated. He'd built the meth operation carefully, kept it insulated, and - critically - maintained connections to his uncle's legitimate pharmaceutical infrastructure that gave him access to precursor chemicals, lab equipment, and a distribution model that was harder to disrupt than a typical street-level operation.
"We can't offer him a business plan," Jason told the team. They were in the apartment above the laundromat, which had evolved from temporary headquarters into actual headquarters. Jason had a whiteboard now. He was using the whiteboard. Billy found this unreasonably delightful. "Victor's not in this because he needs money. The Sivana family has money. He's in it because he likes the power."
"And Doctor Sivana?" Elena asked. "The uncle?"
"Supervillain. Captain Marvel's department." Jason looked at Billy. "How often does he cause problems?"
"Every couple of months. Giant robot, death ray, the usual." Billy said this with the casual exhaustion of a kid describing a recurring homework assignment. "But he doesn't overlap with Victor much. Uncle Thaddeus is all about mad science and world domination. Victor just wants to sell drugs and feel important."
"Family values."
"The Sivanas are weird."
"I've met the Waynes, kid. This doesn't register."
The plan for Victor was different from the plan for Tommy, because Victor was a different kind of problem. You couldn't buy him out. You couldn't reason with him. You had to make his operation unviable - cut off his supply, disrupt his distribution, provide alternatives to his customer base, and make the cost of doing business higher than the revenue justified.
"We go after the demand side first," Jason said, drawing on the whiteboard. "Detox clinics. Addiction treatment. Mental health services. We don't criminalize users; we give them options. That shrinks his customer base."
"Simultaneously," Elena said, picking up the thread, "we identify and cut his precursor supply chain. If we can figure out which Sivana Chemical products are being diverted-"
"I can do that," Billy said. Everyone looked at him. "Captain Marvel can visit Sivana Chemical Industries. Publicly. As a concern. I'll say I've had reports about product diversion and I want to make sure there's nothing going on. I won't find anything - they'll clean up before I get there - but it'll spook them. Make it harder to divert without getting caught."
Jason looked at him with an expression that Billy couldn't quite identify but that Elena, from across the room, recognized immediately as pride.
"That's good," Jason said. "That's really good."
"I listen when you plan," Billy said. "I've been taking notes."
"You have notes?"
Billy pulled out a notebook. It was covered in stickers - lightning bolts, mostly, and one that said FAWCETT ROCKS - but inside, in neat handwriting, were pages and pages of operational notes, supply chain diagrams, and strategic observations. Some of them were things Jason had said. Some of them were things Billy had figured out on his own.
Jason took the notebook. Flipped through it slowly.
"You mapped the distribution network," he said.
"From street level. I walked all the routes. I know where the handoffs happen, when the shifts change, which dealers are scared and which ones are loyal."
"Billy, this is professional-grade intelligence work."
"I'm a street kid. Street kids see everything. We just usually don't have anyone to tell."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Okay," Jason said, and his voice was steady in the way it got when he was feeling something he didn't want to examine in public. "Okay. Here's the plan."
The dismantling of the Sivana meth operation took eight weeks.
It was - and Jason would admit this only to Dick, only via text, only at 3 AM - satisfying in a way that Gotham operations rarely were. In Gotham, you won a battle and the war shifted. You took down one operation and two more sprouted in its place. The ecosystem was self-replenishing, hydra-headed, endlessly recursive. You could spend years and never feel like you were winning.
In Fawcett, when you cut the head off the snake, the snake stayed dead.
Captain Marvel's public visit to Sivana Chemical Industries made the local news and sent Victor into a tailspin of paranoid supply-chain restructuring that disrupted his production for three weeks. During those three weeks, Jason's team opened two detox clinics and a needle exchange, and redirected six of Victor's street-level dealers into legitimate employment. Three of them came willingly. Two required persuasion. One required Red Hood showing up in person, full tactical gear, helmet on, and explaining - in the polite, conversational tone that was somehow more terrifying than shouting - that career alternatives were available and that the window for voluntary transition was not permanent.
The dealer, whose name was Chris, now worked at the food pantry. He was good at inventory management.
"I never wanted to sell meth," Chris told Marco, during his second week. "I just didn't know what else to do."
"Yeah," Marco said. "That's kind of the whole thing."
Victor Sivana tried to push back once. He sent a group of his more aggressive associates to vandalize one of Jason's clinics - broken windows, trashed equipment, a spray-painted message that said GO HOME.
Jason assessed the damage, noted the cost, and responded with proportional precision. Not violence - well, not much violence. Red Hood and Captain Marvel showed up at Victor's distribution hub at 2 AM. Red Hood handled the security (nonlethally, which he was getting better at, which Billy privately thought was one of the more impressive things about Jason Todd). Captain Marvel removed the building.
Not destroyed. Removed. He picked it up - the entire structure, a corrugated-metal warehouse - flew it to an empty lot on the outskirts of town, and set it down.
The product inside was confiscated. The equipment was donated to Fawcett General Hospital's underfunded chemistry lab. The building was later converted into a community basketball court.
"Was that excessive?" Billy asked, floating next to Jason on the rooftop afterward, the city spread out beneath them.
"A little."
"But effective?"
"Extremely."
"Cool." Captain Marvel's grin was, in that moment, entirely twelve years old. "That was really fun."
Jason - behind the helmet, where nobody could see - smiled.
jaybird: update from fawcett
dickie: hit me
jaybird: garazzo's security firm is operational. filed taxes last week. tommy's thrilled. his daughter's quinceañera was beautiful, i was invited
dickie: you went to a mob boss's daughter's quinceañera
jaybird: former mob boss. legitimate business owner. and yes. the cake was spectacular
dickie: okay what else
jaybird: sivana operation is functionally dismantled. victor's down to three dealers and no cook house because marvel MOVED HIS BUILDING
dickie: moved it where
jaybird: to a different location
dickie: he picked up a BUILDING
jaybird: it's a basketball court now
dickie: i have so many questions
jaybird: shelters are at capacity, we're opening a second one next month. food pantry serves 200 families a week. clinic's got two full-time doctors now. elena got us a HUD grant
dickie: a HUD grant. your criminal enterprise got a federal housing grant
jaybird: through the nonprofit arm. it's all above board. elena has a flow chart
dickie: i want to see the flow chart
jaybird: it's genuinely beautiful. she color-coded it
dickie: how's the kid
jaybird: ...
jaybird: he's doing his homework
dickie: JASON
jaybird: he's eating three meals a day. he sleeps in a bed. he has SHOES that FIT. he goes to school, kind of, it's an online thing but it counts. he's... he's good, dick. he's good.
dickie: you adopted him
jaybird: i did NOT
dickie: you moved to his city, bought him an apartment, enrolled him in school, and you go to dinner at the former mob boss's house together. you adopted him.
jaybird: i am providing community infrastructure to a minor in need
dickie: that's literally what adoption IS
jaybird: GOODNIGHT DICK
dickie: 🥲
MONTH THREE: RESULTS
The numbers told a story.
Property crime on the east side dropped 40% in the first two months of Garazzo Security Solutions' operation. Not because Tommy's guys were better at security than they'd been at extortion - they weren't, yet - but because a legitimate security presence changed the character of the neighborhood. Businesses reopened. Foot traffic increased. People stayed out after dark.
Drug overdoses citywide dropped 30%, which was the number Jason cared about most and talked about least.
The shelter network - two locations now, with a third in planning - housed an average of 120 people per night. The food pantry served 300 families per week. The clinic had treated over a thousand patients.
And Fawcett, gradually, began to notice.
Not Red Hood - Jason kept his profile intentionally low, because Fawcett wasn't Gotham and he didn't need or want the same kind of public presence here. But the infrastructure was visible. The shelters had signs. The clinic had a website. The pantry was listed on Google Maps. People talked.
"There's a Reddit thread," Billy told Jason one evening, over dinner in the apartment above the laundromat. (They had dinner together most nights now. This had not been planned. It had simply happened, as it does between people who are building something together and who are, whether they'd use the word or not, family.) "Someone asked why Fawcett City suddenly has all this community stuff, and nobody can figure out where it came from."
"Good. Let them wonder."
"The top theory is that it's a secret government program."
"Even better."
"The second theory is aliens."
Jason looked at him.
"Fawcett is weird," Billy said.
"Fawcett is wonderful," Jason said, and meant it, and was surprised to realize he meant it.
Because the thing about Fawcett was: it worked. Not perfectly, not easily, but tractably. The problems were real and the suffering was real, but the systems were small enough to change and the community was strong enough to hold. In Gotham, Jason felt like he was bailing water from a sinking ship. In Fawcett, he felt like he was building something.
He looked at Billy across the table - skinny, still, but less so. Eating real food. Doing homework. Looking at Jason with an expression that was equal parts twelve-year-old kid and ancient champion, that contained multitudes without breaking apart.
"We should get Mrs. Chen out here," Jason said. "Into the Fawcett branch of the pantry."
"Mrs. Chen would love Fawcett. The produce here is way better than Gotham."
"Don't tell her that, she'll take it personally."
"She'll figure it out in thirty seconds and then she'll take it as a challenge and then we'll have the best-fed community infrastructure in America."
"That's... actually the plan, yeah."
Billy grinned. And Jason - who had crawled out of a grave, who had raged against a world that had failed him, who had built an empire in the darkest city in America because nobody else would - sat in a warm kitchen in Fawcett City and ate dinner with a twelve-year-old demigod and thought: huh.
This might be the best thing I've ever done.
Somewhere in the Watchtower, the Red Hood file gathered dust. Batman would update it eventually.
He was going to be very confused.