Work Text:
Thursday was bolognese night.
Jason was standing over the pot with a wooden spoon, adjusting the heat in quarter-turn increments, when Vasquez called. He'd added the Barolo ten minutes ago - a quarter cup, right after the milk. It shouldn't work. Red wine and whole milk in the same pot sounded like something you'd do on a dare. But the sauce had gone dark and glossy, and the kitchen smelled like what he imagined a grandmother's kitchen smelled like, the kind of grandmother who actually liked you and had opinions about garlic.
He didn't have a grandmother. He had Inez, who had given him the spoon rest on the counter - ceramic, hand-painted, WORLD'S OKAYEST CHEF - and who would want to know about the Barolo discovery. He'd tell her tomorrow.
"Giordano," Vasquez said.
Jason stirred. Slow figure-eight.
"What did he do?"
"Cut product with fentanyl. Sold it to a seventeen-year-old on Breckenridge. Kid's in the clinic. Alive, barely."
Jason's hand kept moving. You couldn't rush a figure-eight.
"If the kid had been smaller-" Vasquez started.
"Yeah."
"He's been buying from a secondary supplier. Cheap garbage. Selling our stuff upmarket and moving the cut product at street level. Pocketing the margin."
"How long?"
"Two months."
"And he's been bragging."
"Like it's a business strategy."
Jason turned the heat down. Not off. The sauce needed another forty minutes and it was going to get them.
"How many at the warehouse?"
"Eight. Card game in the front, muscle in the back. Giordano's playing poker."
"Of course he's playing poker. Set a timer for me?"
"For what?"
"The sauce. Forty minutes. Not a second less. I'm serious, Vasquez."
"...I'm setting a timer for your pasta sauce."
"Bolognese."
"I'm setting a timer for your bolognese. While you go kill a man."
"Multitasking."
He covered the pot. He went to get dressed.
II.
Luis Ferrera had been working for Giordano for five months and had hated every minute of it.
Not morally. Luis didn't have strong moral feelings about the drug trade - he'd grown up in the Bowery, where the drug trade was something that happened around you whether you approved or not. He hated working for Giordano because Giordano was cheap, mean with bonuses, and played EDM in the warehouse at a volume that made Luis's molars itch.
The EDM was going now. Something with a lot of bass and no melody, the musical equivalent of being poked in the chest repeatedly. Luis was standing near the loading dock with the other muscle - Danny, who had the shotgun; Big Pat, who didn't need one; and Rios, who had a pistol and the look of a man who wished he were somewhere else, which Luis related to.
The card game was happening at the folding table in the center of the room. Giordano was winning. Giordano was always winning, because Giordano cheated and the other three guys at the table knew he cheated and didn't say anything, because saying something to Giordano about cheating was a conversation that went nowhere good.
Giordano was wearing his leather jacket. Luis hated the leather jacket. It was the color of a bruise and it creaked when Giordano moved and it came from a store on Fifth Street that also sold replica katanas, which told you everything.
11:47 PM. Thursday. Luis was thinking about the sandwich he had at home in his fridge - turkey, provolone, the good mustard - when something tapped the skylight.
Twice.
Luis looked up.
The Red Hood was crouched on the glass, lit from below by the warehouse overheads, and Luis's first thought - the really stupid first thought, the one he would never tell anyone - was that the helmet looked like a moon. Red moon. Two white eyes looking down.
The Red Hood waved.
The glass broke.
Hood came through the skylight. Not fell - came, like the skylight was a door and he'd just decided to use it. Glass everywhere, catching the light, and Hood in the center of it landing on the card table hard enough to scatter everything. Chips on the floor. Cards in the air. A beer bottle rolling off the edge - and the sound of it hitting the concrete was the loudest thing in the room, because everyone had stopped breathing.
Hood stood up on the table. Tall. Taller than Luis had expected - he'd seen Hood from a distance once, months ago, and thought big guy but seeing him from a distance and seeing him standing on a card table in a shower of broken glass were two entirely different things.
"I was going to use the door," Hood said. The voice was modulated - deeper than human, with a mechanical edge - but there was something warm underneath it that made the whole thing worse. "But I felt like the door didn't capture the spirit of the visit."
Then: "Everybody up. Hands visible."
Danny grabbed the shotgun. Danny always grabbed the shotgun. Danny's entire problem-solving framework was grab the shotgun, and it had never previously been tested against someone who mattered.
Hood drew a pistol and fired in the same motion - one sound, not two, the draw and the shot collapsed into a single act - and the round hit Danny's shotgun and tore it out of his hands. Not Danny. The gun. A pistol shot, from thirty feet, to a moving target, and it hit the gun.
Luis put his hands up.
"I said leave it." Hood holstered the pistol - didn't even look at it going back in, it just went - and said, with what sounded like genuine irritation: "I'm not going to ask again. I have a sauce going."
Luis didn't know what that meant. He put his hands higher.
Hood stepped off the table. Walked across the warehouse floor toward Giordano, boots crunching glass with every step. Not fast. Not slow. He walked like someone who had already finished this conversation and was letting the room catch up.
"Enzo." Hood stopped in front of Giordano. "You signed my terms of service. Section four, paragraph two. You want me to refresh your memory, or do you remember the part about minors?"
"Hood, listen-"
"'Violations involving harm to minors or the introduction of undisclosed cutting agents will be treated as a breach of the most severe category. Consequences are at the sole discretion of Red Hood and are not subject to appeal, mediation, or negotiation.'" Hood tilted his head. "I spent an afternoon on that language, Enzo. I had it laminated."
"You read it," Hood said. "You signed it. And then you cut the product with fentanyl and you sold it to a child."
"He's seventeen, he's not-"
"Do you want to finish that sentence? Really think about whether you want to finish that sentence."
Giordano didn't finish the sentence.
"I want to tell you what happened tonight," Hood said. "A kid - a kid, Enzo, seventeen, somebody's son - bought what he thought was clean product from one of your people on Breckenridge. He took it home. He took too much, because the dosage he was used to was based on my product, which is what you were supposed to be selling, and my product is consistent because I give a shit. Your product had fentanyl in it. And this kid - this kid who thought he knew what he was buying - ended up on the floor of a gas station bathroom turning blue."
Hood's voice changed.
"His mother called the clinic at midnight. She was screaming."
Silence - except the EDM, still thumping, because nobody moved to turn it off. Moving meant drawing attention, and drawing attention meant being a part of this instead of a witness to it.
"Here's what's going to happen," Hood said, louder now, addressing the room. "I'm going to kill Enzo. This is a notification, not a negotiation. The rest of you - you have options. Work for someone else. Come work for me. Leave the city. I don't care. But if you're standing next to Enzo when this is over, I'm going to take that personally."
Nobody moved for a second. Then Luis moved. He walked to the far wall, fast, not running, and pressed his back against the concrete. He felt the cold of it through his shirt.
Danny moved. Then Rios. Then the three from the card table, one by one, chairs scraping, until Giordano was standing alone in the center of the warehouse with broken glass at his feet and the overhead light making his bad leather jacket look worse.
Big Pat didn't move.
Hood looked at him. "You sure?"
Big Pat set his feet.
"Okay," Hood said. Quiet. Almost gentle.
Big Pat threw a punch. Luis saw it - a big right cross, the kind of punch that ended bar fights, fast for a man that size. It didn't land. Hood moved - not dramatically, not with flair, just moved, like water going around a rock - and Big Pat's knee buckled and he was falling and there was a gunshot and Big Pat was on the ground and he was dead.
It took about two seconds.
Luis's ears were ringing. The gunshot in the concrete warehouse was enormous - it bounced off every wall, came back, bounced again. He smelled cordite. He smelled blood. He smelled fabric softener.
Hood stepped over Big Pat. He didn't look down.
Giordano had his Beretta out - the nickel-plated one he was so proud of, the one he'd shown Luis on his first day like it was a trophy - pointing it at Hood with both hands. His hands were shaking so badly the barrel was tracing circles in the air.
"Go ahead," Hood said.
Giordano fired. The shot went wide - two feet wide, maybe more - and hit the concrete wall behind Hood and the ricochet went up and away and Hood didn't flinch. Didn't move. Didn't blink, as far as Luis could tell, though with the helmet it was hard to know.
Hood walked forward. Took the gun out of Giordano's hands - reached out, closed his hand around the barrel, and pulled, and it was his.
He dropped the magazine, racked the slide, threw the whole thing behind him without looking. It clattered across the floor and hit the minifridge.
"The forty-seven grand behind the minifridge," Hood said. "That's going to the clinic for the kid."
Giordano's face went white. Not from the sentence. From behind the minifridge.
Giordano sat down. On the floor, among the glass and the chips and the blood. He was crying.
Hood crouched in front of him.
"Twelve points," Hood said. The voice was low. Luis had to strain to hear it over the ringing in his ears. "You almost killed a kid for twelve points on your margin."
"I didn't know the product was-"
"You didn't check."
Silence.
"The terms aren't about control, Enzo. They're about making sure nobody dies who doesn't have to. That's it. That's the whole bar."
Hood stood up.
"You're the example," he said. "Somebody has to be."
He shot Giordano twice. Luis closed his eyes for it but the sound went through his eyelids, through his hands, through the wall at his back.
When Luis opened his eyes, Hood was putting business cards on the table.
Matte black. Red logo. A phone number.
"The Giordano operation is closed," Hood said, like he was reading minutes from a meeting. "If his fentanyl supplier contacts you, say no and tell my people. If you want to work for me, call the number." He picked up one of the cards and studied it. "I keep going back and forth on the font. Does this feel like a serif situation? Sans-serif?"
Nobody said anything. Hood nodded, like this confirmed something.
"Tough crowd. Alright." He started for the loading dock and paused. Reached down and did something to a device wired to the door frame - disarming something, Luis realized. There had been something on the door. If anyone had tried to run-
"Enzo's last charitable donation," Hood said. "The forty-seven K. He would have wanted that."
He stepped out into the wet night. His head came back through the doorway.
"He absolutely would not have wanted that. That's why it's funny."
He left.
The EDM was still playing. Nobody turned it off for a long time.
III.
Luis stood in the warehouse for eleven minutes after Hood left. He counted. Counting was something his body could do while his mind was elsewhere - a place that smelled like cordite and blood and fabric softener and the broken-glass cold of the February night coming in through the hole where the skylight used to be.
Danny left first. Then Rios. Then the card table guys, one by one, not talking to each other, not talking at all. Luis was the last one. He walked past Giordano's body. He walked past Big Pat's body. He stepped over the broken glass. He stopped at the card table and picked up one of the business cards.
Matte black. Heavier than a normal business card. Red logo - the hood, stylized. A phone number. No name, no address, no title.
He put it in his pocket.
He went home. He ate the turkey sandwich. It tasted like nothing, which was his mouth's fault, not the sandwich's. He drank a beer. He sat on his couch and looked at the wall and at midnight he picked up his phone and called his mother, which he hadn't done in three weeks, and she said "Luis? It's late. Are you okay?" and he said "Yeah, Ma. I just wanted to hear your voice" and she said "Ay, mijo" and they talked about nothing for forty minutes - her neighbor's dog, the leak in the kitchen, whether his cousin was ever going to propose to his girlfriend - and when he hung up he felt like a person again.
He looked at the business card on his coffee table.
He thought about calling the number. He thought about leaving Gotham. He thought about getting out of the whole thing - the warehouses and the concrete boxes and the EDM and the men with guns and the smell of fabric softener that was going to mean something different to him for the rest of his life.
He thought about what Hood had said. Come work for me. Like it was a job offer. Like there was a version of this where you worked for a man who killed people and it was just - a job. Tuesday. Payroll.
He thought about Giordano, who had been cheap and mean and played bad music and sold poison to a kid.
He thought about Hood, crouching in front of a dead man, saying twelve points. Saying that's the whole bar. Quiet enough that Luis had to strain to hear.
Luis went to bed. He didn't sleep well. In the morning, he called the number.
"Yeah?" said a woman's voice.
"Uh - Hood said. I mean, Red Hood said. There were business cards. I'm - I was at the warehouse."
"Giordano's crew?"
"Yeah."
"Hold on." Sounds in the background. A coffee maker. A low mechanical hum. "Come to the Lantern on Garrison. Ask for Inez. Bring ID."
"What's the Lantern?"
"It's a bar. My bar. You'll see it."
"And then what?"
"And then we figure out if you're an idiot or just unlucky. Most of Giordano's people were unlucky. Show up before noon."
She hung up.
Luis looked at the phone. He looked at the card. He looked at the sandwich crusts from last night, still on the plate, because he'd been too shaken to clean up, and the morning light was making his apartment look like what it was: the apartment of a twenty-six-year-old who'd made a series of choices that had led him to a warehouse on a Thursday night.
He got dressed. He went to the Lantern.
IV.
The bolognese was perfect.
Jason knew before he tasted it, because the kitchen smelled right - deep and complicated and patient, the smell of something that had been given enough time to become itself. The Barolo had done something to it. He'd figure out the chemistry later, or he wouldn't. Some things were better when you didn't know why they worked.
He boiled the pappardelle - never spaghetti, spaghetti was wrong for this weight, he would die on this hill and suspected he had killed on it, once, right after the Pit - while he cleaned the guns. Seven minutes for the pasta, about the same for a full breakdown and reassembly. He had a glass of the Barolo on the counter because he wasn't going to waste a good bottle on a quarter cup and he might as well drink the evidence. His knuckles were bruised from the grab on Big Pat and there was a scratch on his shoulder from the skylight frame that was going to scab annoyingly.
He served the pasta in the hand-thrown bowl from the potter on Eighth Street. Grated the Parmigiano by hand. Sat at the kitchen table with the helmet on one side and the wine on the other and took a bite and closed his eyes.
Yeah. Perfect.
He ate slowly. He didn't always - there were nights when he ate standing over the sink because the day had been long and the body needed fuel and the food was fuel and that was fine. But tonight the bolognese deserved attention. Tonight the bolognese was a complete, unreasonable thing, and rushing it would be disrespectful, and Jason had not survived death, the League of Assassins, and Bruce Wayne's parenting in order to disrespect a pasta sauce.
He texted Vasquez:
Done. Giordano plus one. Crew released with options. 47k from the minifridge for the clinic.
How was it?
The skylight was maybe unnecessary.
You always do the skylight.
The skylight is ALWAYS unnecessary. That's why I always do it.
He washed the dishes. He put the leftover sauce in a container, labeled it - BOLOGNESE 2/13, BAROLO BATCH - and put it in the fridge. His handwriting was neat. It was always neat. Alfred had taught him penmanship before he'd taught him anything else, sitting at the kitchen table in the manor with a fountain pen and a pot of ink and the quiet attention of a man who believed that writing well was the foundation of thinking well. Jason had been nine. He'd loved it - the careful strokes, the deliberate pace, the way the letters became themselves under his hand. He still loved it. The penmanship had survived everything that came after it.
He opened a beer. He sat on the couch.
His phone buzzed. Inez.
Heard about Giordano. You okay?
The bolognese was transcendent, Inez.
I meant physically.
Bruised knuckles. One scratch. The sauce was the real event tonight.
You're deflecting.
I'm SHARING. I added Barolo. Quarter cup. After the milk. Write it down. Laminate it.
Goodnight, Hood.
Goodnight. I'm serious about the Barolo. This changes everything.
He put the phone down. He drank the beer. The apartment was quiet. The helmet was on the counter, reflecting the overhead light, and for a second it looked like someone else was in the room - a red, featureless someone, patient and still. He'd gotten used to it. The helmet was company. The other version of him, resting, waiting to be put on again. They had an understanding.
He finished the beer. He went to bed.
He thought about the kid in the clinic. Seventeen. Somebody's son. The mother calling at midnight. He held the specifics - the age, the dosage, the gas station bathroom - the way you hold a coal. Not because it burned. Because you needed to remember how warm it was. The kid was alive. If he'd been smaller. If he'd been thirteen. If he'd been one of Jason's.
Jason closed his eyes.
He slept.
In the morning, Inez called.
"Got a walk-in from Giordano's crew. Kid named Luis. Twenty-six. Seems okay. Seems scared."
"Scared of us?"
"Scared of everything. He watched you kill two people last night, Hood. He's recalibrating."
"Is he an idiot or just unlucky?"
"Unlucky, I think. I'm going to try him on lookout for a few weeks. See if he fits."
"Your call."
"He asked me something, though. At the end of the interview. He asked if the terms of service were real. Like, a real document. That you actually laminated."
"They're real. You've seen them. You helped me write them."
"I know. I just thought you'd like to know he asked. He wanted to read them before he signed."
Jason was quiet for a moment. Standing in his kitchen, coffee in his hand, morning light on the counter where the helmet had been.
"Give him a copy," he said. "And Inez?"
"Yeah?"
"Laminate it."