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Stephanie Brown meets Jason Todd properly for the first time at Star City University's orientation for transfer students.
The blonde doesn't know that he's Jason Todd at that time because he calls himself Jay, no last name, but she learns that he's from Gotham — from the Alley — like she is. The second time Stephanie Brown meets Jason Todd is at Oliver Queen's house.
Dinah had been one of the first people who reached out when Steph came back. They got to know each other during their work with the Birds of Prey. When Steph finally realized she needed to get out of Gotham — that she needed to build herself a life outside of vigilante work — Dinah was her first call.
Red Hood hasn't been seen in the Alley in months, although the gang's presence has still been felt. As long as Hood's territory does not devolve into a crisis, the Bats have always been inclined to leave it alone.
Steph finds out that the reason for Hood's absence is a redhead named Roy Harper and his daughter Lian.
The latter holds up a crayon drawing to show Jason, and even across the room Steph can tell that it's supposed to be Lian, Red Hood, and Arsenal.
"Papa, look!" she calls, and Jason smiles, something gentle and endearing that Steph has never seen before. It looks at home here, in the warm light of Ollie and Dinah's kitchen, but she can admit that it's the kind of soft that Gotham kills. Lian doesn't seem to care about this fact, has maybe never been to Gotham City even, and goes back to colouring once she receives Jason's approval.
"He's happy here," Roy says much closer to Steph than he was the last time she checked. "This place is good for him."
The archer isn't even looking at Steph as he talks, instead watching Jason and Lian fondly. To anyone else, it would be a heartwarming scene — a man watching his daughter and partner while talking to a family friend — but Steph can see the threat he won't say.
He's happy here. This place is good for him.
And if you bring the Bats here to try and take it, there will be hell to pay.
"Dinah vouched for you," Roy continues. "She said you're free from that shitshow and won't drag it here."
"I am," Steph defends before she can stop herself. "I won't."
He finally turns towards her, his green eyes assessing what they find. He nods, once.
"See that you don't."
Roy opens his mouth to say more before he's cut off by the call of "Daddy! Come see what Papa helped me make!"
"Duty calls," he concedes to Steph, before heading across the kitchen to his family.
Steph watches Jason's eyes light up when Roy starts walking over. There's no tension in his shoulders, and he looks ages younger than he ever did in Gotham.
He's happy here, Roy had said. This place is good for him.
Crime Alley kids — kids like Jason and Steph — used to dream of this.
Of getting out.
Of building a family.
Of giving them a safe home.
He's happy here.
This place is good for him.
Jason had made something here.
And like Roy, Steph realizes, she will fight tooth and nail for him to keep it.
𖤓 ⋆˚࿔
The third time Stephanie Brown meets Jason Todd, it's on campus. They have one of their classes together — something about women in 18th and 19th century literature. She's taking it as a required humanities credit for her pre-med degree, and he's taking it for fun. She asks if he wants to study for the class together, and his eyes narrow warily, trying to find the hidden meaning in her words.
It's one of the instincts that the street kids learn early on. Nothing is free. There is always a catch.
She thinks it's fair; Spoiler and Red Hood were never particularly close, despite serving the same communities. Sometimes she wondered if Bruce had done it on purpose. Steph's moral code had always been closer to that of Red Hood's — to Crime Alley's particular brand of justice — than Batman's. Maybe he didn't want them uniting against him.
Not that it matters now. They both got out, and are looking for a fresh start.
Away from Gotham. Away from Batman.
Away from the baggage that comes with being a Robin who died in the legacy Dick Grayson built.
Whatever Jason finds must be suitable, because after what seems like an eternity he finally nods. He tears off the corner from one of his notebook pages and scribbles on it before handing it to her.
"This is my number," he says. "Just… just don't give it out."
Steph has Jason's number. Or, at least, she thought she had his number. What's written on the paper in her hand, though, she has never seen before. It's clearly not one of the burners that Jason has used for Hood business, nor the number he pretended was his personal phone just so Batman had something to track.
Perhaps most damning about all of it is the Star City area code.
It's as much a show of trust as it is a test.
Clearly none of the Arrows have ratted Jason out to the Bats. If they had, Steph knows that he would not hesitate to disappear again. So the number is both a sign of goodwill — that Jason trusts her enough to have this part of him, no matter how small it is — and the thinly veiled threat that if the Bats do suddenly show up in Star City for Jason, he'll know it was her.
By the time Steph finishes processing this, and putting Jason's number in her phone so she doesn't lose it, he's already gone in the crowd. She doesn't mind — from what little she's heard about him from Dinah, she knows his class schedule is hectic. Maybe she'll get to hear more about it from Jason himself when they study together.
For now, she will be content with the knowledge that her offer wasn't immediately shut down.
𖤓 ⋆˚࿔
In a lot of ways, Steph realizes, she has always looked up to Jason Todd. She doesn't know which came first — Batman always comparing her to him, or the hero worship.
It wasn't as if the vigilante tried to hide it, either. He would lecture about recklessness or being "too violent" with barely disguised glances at the bloodied Robin suit behind glass. There was a certain disdain with which he discussed how frequently she went to Crime Alley, as if the people there were somehow less deserving of their protection.
The first patrol Steph ever did in Crime Alley was tense. They told her that they hadn't had a Robin since the second one — since Jason.
"He's was one of us, y'know?" one of the working girls had told Steph, appraisingly. "Same way you are, ain't'cha?"
She had nodded, at a loss for words.
Despite its flaws, or maybe because of them, Crime Alley was still Steph's home. She would never stop fighting for it, the same way Jason had never given up on it.
The same way the Red Hood surfaced, already armed to go to war on its behalf.
She loves Gotham; she loves Crime Alley. But she can't go back.
At least, not as a vigilante.
It killed her the same way it killed Jason.
The same way it killed Bruce Wayne and left only Batman behind.
If given the opportunity, it will kill her again.
It's hard to remember sometimes — that she doesn't have to worry about all of that anymore. Batman doesn't care enough to come for her, and even if he did, he he wouldn't be able to.
Not here.
Not in Ollie's city with Dinah watching over her.
"I told Jason that if Bruce ever comes and tries to drag him back, I'll put him down," Roy tells her on a random day. They're both over at Ollie's, waiting for Jason to get out of one of his later classes.
She hums noncommittally, unsure of where Roy is going with this.
"I'll do the same for you."
The casualness of the statement stuns her into choking on her drink. She glances over at the archer who looks nonchalant, as if he didn't just offer to kill one of the Justice League's founding members.
He doesn't even know her, not really. Not in any way that would justify such an offer.
She tells him this, and he just laughs in response. It's somehow neither dismissive nor ridiculing, so she gives the redhead the benefit of the doubt.
"We're not Batman," he spits out, with a disdain that she doesn't think she's ever heard from him before. "We haven't bound ourselves to some antiquated, outgrown sense of moral superiority."
She can sense there's more Roy wants to say, so she waits.
"Like it or not," he explains, "Jaybird has claimed you. You're one of his now, which means you're one of mine."
When she has time to think about it later, she'll find that she does like it.
𖤓 ⋆˚࿔
To some extent, Steph has always known that Jason is smart. The Bat taught all of his Robins detective and tech skills, and, in addition, Jason had all of know-how to survive on the streets of Crime Alley. She's heard the story of how even at eleven, he had figured out how to disable the protections on the actual Batmobile.
When Tim first moved into Wayne Manor, he used the opportunity to learn as much about Jason Todd as he could. He would report back to Steph about what new information he found — including report cards with perfect A's and partially finished essays on Beowulf in the original Old English.
It took a lot to run a criminal organization, especially one as large and as cleanly as Red Hood ran his. She had seen a fraction of the work when Cluemaster was still around, and Red Hood's organization was infinitely more complicated and still better managed.
But hearing about how smart Jason is, and witnessing it first hand are completely different.
Once a week, the two of them meet at Ollie and Dinah's to study together. If she took the time to think about it, Steph would realize that she has seen Jason more at the Queen home in half a semester than she has at Wayne Manor for as long as she's known him.
She's running late this time, so when she finally arrives, Jason is working on a different class, their literature assignment sitting out for whenever Steph got there.
"What'cha workin' on?" she asks, to buy time for her to get all of her own work out.
He answers her in what she thinks is German, which she does not expect, and the question does the opposite of its purpose when she pauses her actions to try and parse what he said. She can recognize a few of the words, and she's pretty sure at least one of them is a name, but other than that she's lost.
Steph has never been the best with languages, but she was smart enough to mostly figure out everything she needed to understand for Bat Business™ with access to the internet. She has no such luxury here and instead blinks helplessly.
"What was that?" she follows up, finally returning to digging around in her bag.
Jason starts answering in German again, his brow furrowing in confusion at whatever emotion Steph's face is portraying. He cuts his answer short and apologizes in English.
"Sorry," he says, and he does genuinely sound sorry.
Steph is no stranger to people who think they know more than her trying to talk over her or using unnecessarily fancy or technical language to try and confuse her. She's gotten to know Jason some over the weeks and can tell that that's not what's happening here.
"To answer your question," he continues, and she's only moderately surprised that he does, "I'm writing an essay on trans themes in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Except it's for a German literature class. So the book is in German. And the paper's in German. And every thought I've ever had in the last two days has been in German."
He holds up a well-worn paperback, that Steph can just make out the title Die Verwandlung past the faded edges and weathering on the cover.
It's her first time experiencing how smart Jason Todd truly is, and later when he's pointing out some abstract theme that she would have never considered in their assigned reading of The Female Quixote, she will mentally pat herself on the back for getting him to study with her.
She never has the chance to feel bad about it, because later Jason asks for her help with his biochemistry homework. For all of his knowledge on people, practical skills, and language, the man is absolutely helpless when it comes to drawing molecules. It's a fair tradeoff, she thinks.
𖤓 ⋆˚࿔
Stephanie Brown meets Jason Todd with some regularity, and she thinks she's starting to get to know him. She learns that his favourite tea is actually an herbal "tisane", that his favourite book has been Frankenstein ever since he came out of the Lazarus Pit, and that he and Roy got drunk married in Vegas after a successful Outlaws mission. Their witness was Starfire.
Despite this, she also finds out that there's so much to him as a person, and that she might never actually learn everything about who Jason Todd is.
When there's a bomb threat, Jason ushers her and the other students to safety, promising to be right behind her. He's not, and she'll discover that he went back to disarm the bomb. He tells her that he failed to defuse the bomb in that Ethiopian warehouse, and that after the Pit, Talia made sure to send him to every conceivable type of bomb maker so that it would never happen again.
She learns that he's an older brother. Not in just the colloquial way the working girls called him hermano and told him of people bothering them, nor even in the way that street kids put him down as their guardian or emergency contact, but legally. She finds out that Jason Todd, who is actually Jason Harper, is also Jason Head when Damian al Ghul breaks into his apartment.
Steph is babysitting Lian so Roy and Jason can have date night when she hears the window slide open.
Although she had stopped vigilante work, Steph remained in shape, just in case. She's been training with Dinah, and is grateful to have the extra confidence that brings when she grabs one of the weapons Jason and Roy keep around the apartment before she goes to confront the intruder.
The intruder is a teenager — who looks a little too much like Bruce Wayne for it to be a coincidence — demanding to know where Akhi is. She doesn't know what to make of the situation until Lian appears in the hallway asking Tio Dami if he'll come draw with her. He acquiesces, and Steph promises to call Jason.
It feels like Jason materializes in the apartment out of nowhere. Steph is almost certain that there is no legal way to get from the location of their date to the home in the amount of time that Jason did it, but she doesn't hear sirens and decides that it's not her problem. At some point, the teenager reappears and Jason introduces the two of them properly.
Damian, it turns out, is the son of both Talia al Ghul and Bruce Wayne. He lives with his mother in Metropolis and has never met his father. When Steph asks if he ever wants to, Damian says no and cites Jason's batarang-slit throat as the reason why.
Steph also learns that Batman killed Jason Todd.
She's unsure what it means that she isn't surprised.
𖤓 ⋆˚࿔
Steph's first year of college ends two weeks before Jason and Roy's anniversary.
They had invited her to the get together that Ollie and Dinah were hosting.
It's not until she's being introduced to Artemis and Bizarro that she realizes what gift Jason has given her.
For the longest time, Batman claimed that Jason was always a loner. That he needed to be assimilated into the Bats because he had no friends, and they were his only family. Steph had believed him at the time because she had always seen herself in Jason, and she was alone.
Somewhere between Talia al Ghul introducing herself and her partner as Jason's mothers, and Lian calling her Tia Steph because she's "Papa's sister, duh", Steph realizes that Jason had built a family already, and was sheltering them from the Bats and their drama.
Jaybird has claimed you. You're one of his now, Roy had told her.
Jason makes eye contact with her across the room, and waves from where he's tucked into Roy's side. Lian and Damian are showing the couple the new art project they've finished. She waves back; he smiles softly, and she finds that it no longer looks out of place on the crime lord.
Steph doesn't know when he decided that she got to be part of his family too, but she realizes she's grateful.
It's been a year since either Steph or Jason have been back to Gotham, but as she finally convinces Kori into telling the story of Jason and Roy's wedding, there's nowhere else she'd rather be.