Archive of Our Own

The thing about being Jason Todd was that it came with a specific and well-documented set of occupational hazards, and Jason had, over the years, gotten pretty good at accounting for most of them.

He knew which Gotham neighborhoods had which kinds of trouble and at what hours, knew the city's danger the way you knew weather— not by looking at the sky but by the pressure of the air, the quality of the quiet before something went loud. The way the street sounds changed when someone on the corner stopped talking and started watching instead. 

The particular silence that preceded the particular kind of Thursday at two in the morning that required a different set of calculations than the particular silence preceding two in the morning on a Wednesday. He had the city's rhythms in his body the way you had a language— not consciously but available, retrieval automatic, the recognition arriving before the thought. He knew the difference between someone following him because they'd made the Red Hood and someone following him because they'd made Jason Todd, and he knew which was worse, and the answer was always both, differently. He had contingencies for the Bat. He had contingencies for old enemies with long memories, for the specific category of score that never got settled cleanly no matter how clean the job looked from the outside. 

He did not have a contingency for the parking garage of his local bodega.

Which was, in retrospect, stupid. The kind of thing he would have given Tim grief about— no eyes on the exits, his phone out because he'd been reading something, a review of a book he'd already decided to buy, the small boring domesticity of a Tuesday evening. He'd taken the same route three weeks running because he was tired and it was Tuesday and nothing ever happened on Tuesdays in Gotham that he hadn't already prepared for. The garage smelled like concrete and motor oil and the specific variety of exhaust that meant a car sitting too long with nowhere to go— the ambient smell of a city that kept its vehicles alive past their useful life because it couldn't afford to do so otherwise. The elevator was slow. The overhead fluorescents did their anxious flickering at irregular intervals. He'd been thinking about dinner.

He'd been wrong about Tuesdays.

He'd been wrong about a lot of things in the thirty-seven seconds between the elevator and the moment someone hit him hard enough that the concrete came up to meet him— cold and gritty against his cheek, smelling of oil and old water and the iron ghost of something that had bled here before him and been inadequately cleaned— and then things went dark the way they went dark when your brain made an executive decision about consciousness, when the body decided that certain information was not immediately useful and could wait. 

When he came back around, it was to a room that smelled like old money and fresh blood and the particular chemical sharpness of a cleaning solution that had been applied recently over something that had been there for a while, layered the way you could layer a lie with another lie and still not quite cover the original. The cleaning solution was high-end. The blood was recent. Neither of them was his, yet.

Roman Sionis's brand of theatrical menace had a smell. You learned it, after enough time in Gotham, the same way you learned other things that were unpleasant to learn but necessary. The specific combination: imported wood and expensive fabric and something cooler underneath, the institutional cold of a room that had been built to hold things that required discretion. Jason recognized it the way you recognized bad weather by the ache in an old break.

So. That was where he was.

Roman Sionis had a speech prepared.

Jason could tell because he delivered it with the rhythm of something he'd been rehearsing — not written down, Roman was too vain for notes, but turned over internally until the edges were sharp and every pause landed where he wanted it to. The room was large in the way of rooms built to make a point about themselves with high ceilings, the kind that cost money to maintain and were worth less than they cost for every purpose except demonstrating that you'd spent the money. 

The lighting had been positioned with care— desk lamp throwing Roman into relief, everything else existing in relative shadow, the kind of calculated ambiguity that said power in the specific dialect of a man who had thought very hard about what power was supposed to look like and had studied his way into a working approximation of it. Expensive rugs over concrete floors. The particular combination of someone who had enough to furnish this room properly and had instead chosen to furnish it loudly.

The chair Jason was tied to was, almost certainly, the worst piece of furniture in the room. He'd clocked that immediately— institutional plastic, the kind of thing you found in waiting rooms that were not intended to reward waiting— zip ties slightly too tight on the left wrist, the chair back hitting his spine at exactly the wrong angle, a degree or two off vertical that would become significant over time. Whoever had positioned it either had an instinct for psychological detail or had been given instructions by someone who did. Either way, it was good work in the narrow category of work Jason preferred not to admire.

The room was warm. That was part of it too — the heating running higher than comfort required, the kind of warm that made you aware of your own body in ways you'd rather not be, that made thirst arrive faster and made the head work a little harder.

"You played me," Roman said, from across the room, framed by the desk lamp like he'd planned it, which he had. The mask was off, which told Jason something— the mask came off when Roman felt secure. When Roman was the audience rather than the performance. "You played me again, Mr. Todd, and you were very good at it, and I want you to understand that I knew."

"You didn't know," Jason said.

Roman's expression moved. The particular movement of a man who has practiced controlling his face and still, occasionally, can't quite manage it fast enough. "I suspected."

"You suspected after the fact," Jason said, because he had never been good at the don't antagonize the man holding you hostage strategy. That particular instinct had been removed somewhere around his first resurrection, when his relationship with self-preservation had been substantially reorganized and several things that were supposed to be foundational had turned out to be optional. "You suspected after the merchandise was gone and then you decided you'd known all along, because you can't stand the idea that someone got one over on you in your own house."

The first hit was expected— Jason had been reading Roman's tells for twenty minutes and knew it was coming, knew the exact quality of stillness that preceded it, the particular angle of Roman's jaw. This didn't make it hurt less. It caught him on the left side of the face, ring-weighted, and the world went white at the edges before it contracted sharply back, the pain arriving in the delayed way of impacts that are hard enough to require a moment's processing— a half-second of white, then the full return of everything, copper blooming bright on his tongue, the warm salt-iron taste that he had been acquainted with long enough to map automatically. His head had snapped to the right. He corrected it. Shifted the blood to the side with the careful economy of someone who has learned not to make a production of these things. Kept his eyes level. Didn't give Roman what he was looking for.

"I want to know," Roman said, smoothing his jacket with the deliberate gesture of someone restoring a presentation they'd briefly allowed to slip, "who sent you."

"Nobody sent me. I'm freelance."

"Everyone works for someone."

"I work for myself."

"Then who were you selling to?"

Jason smiled, which pulled at the corner of his mouth where the skin had already decided it was interested in splitting. "Wouldn't you like to know."

Roman looked at him for a long moment with the expression of a man who has decided the direct route is going to become the scenic route, and has made his peace with this, and is even, on some level, looking forward to it. "Yes," he said, measured and deliberate. "I would. We have time."

They did, as it turned out, have time.

—

Roman was methodical about it the way he was methodical about most things— not frenzied, not personal, organized in the way of someone who had made himself an expert in a specific discipline and applied that expertise with professional consistency. Each round had a structure: question, non-answer, consequence. He had help for some of it— two men whose names Jason didn't know and didn't ask for, whose professional relationship with violence was legible in how they moved, how they checked their grip before they used it. They worked efficiently, without enjoyment, which was almost worse. Enjoyment introduced errors.

Jason catalogued the damage as it accumulated with the same flat attention he'd learned to bring to these situations, filed it under things being managed rather than things being experienced, because the gap between those two categories was the difference between functional and not, and he intended to stay functional. It was a trick that required maintenance— you had to keep reinstating the distance, keep rebuilding the gap each time something hit hard enough to temporarily close it.

His face took the most of the early work. The left side, consistently— Roman's preference for the specific, a man who picked a direction and stayed with it. The bruising would be building under the skin even where it didn't show yet, pooling in the tissue, and Jason could feel the difference in the left side's responsiveness, the slight drag of swelling beginning its patient claim on the orbital area. 

The cut above his cheekbone opened on the second round— a ring caught at exactly the wrong angle, and then the heat of something that had split cleanly and was going to bleed with enthusiasm. He could feel it tracking down his jaw in a thin line, following the contour, and didn't bother thinking about it because blood was recoverable and the blood was his and it would stop when it stopped.

His ribs registered an objection somewhere around the third hour. This was different— not the immediate bright pain of the face, which arrived and announced itself and then settled into a manageable background register, but something deeper, a complaint from the structural level. The specific kind of pain that made you aware that breathing was a decision you were making, that each inhale was an action with a cost that you were going to pay regardless of whether you wanted to. Two, maybe three, on the left side— he could triangulate from the location and the quality. He noted it and moved on, because it was the same category as everything else: recoverable, manageable, not immediately critical. His body had done this before. It remembered.

The lip split fully around the same time. Two places— the corner on the left and the center, the center one deeper, opening on a particular impact and then staying open with the stubborn insistence of cuts in that location. He worked around it. There was blood in his mouth fairly constantly now, the copper taste becoming ambient rather than acute, something you filtered out the way you filtered out the smell of the room.

In the gaps— the pauses when Roman conferred with people just outside the door, when Jason was left alone in the chair with the overhead light and the tight zip ties— he thought about the room's layout. He'd mapped it in the first five minutes after coming around: one door, outward-opening based on the hinges, two guards stationed outside based on how their footsteps sounded when they shifted positions, the slight creak of weight redistributed on a floor that had a soft spot near the left side of the frame. The window behind Roman's desk was covered with a blackout curtain— heavy, the kind that didn't move in ventilation draft— which meant either they were below ground or the window faced a wall or it was dark out. Based on his internal clock, it was dark out. He'd been here a while.

He thought about the zip ties. His left wrist had a few more millimeters of movement than his right— the work of someone who'd been good at this but not excellent, had done it efficiently and quickly rather than with care. He'd been gaining on it in small increments, movements timed to moments of other activity in the room, reads as weight-shifting, as the involuntary adjustment of someone sitting still for a long time, as nothing. Each increment was fractional. In three hours he'd made maybe half a centimeter of progress. The skin over the wrist bone was raw in the way of prolonged friction against an inflexible edge, the kind of rawness that was heat and damage and would be very informative in the morning. Not enough progress. Also not nothing. Not nothing was the category to stay in.

He thought about Roy.

Roy was the fixed point he kept coming back to between everything else— between the rounds and the gaps and the ongoing cataloguing of the room's dimensions and the incremental work on the left tie. 

He'd said he'd be back by eight. It was past eight by a significant margin; he could feel it the way you felt time when you had no clock and were paying attention, the slight shift in the building's ambient sound that meant the city's had changed. Roy had a system— he'd always had a system, built out of years of hard experience with what happened when there wasn't one. Roy would run the checks. The checks would come back wrong. Roy would know.

Jason had been in enough bad situations to have a calibrated sense of them, and this one was bad in a way that was survivable— he wasn't, at current assessment, in immediate danger of dying. Roman wanted information, not a body. The ribs were the most significant issue, and they were painful and would stay painful, but they weren't going to kill him on their own. His head was managing— the concussion was light, monitoring itself with the vague buzzy quality of mild concussion rather than the more serious version, which had a different character entirely. His wrists were managing. He was thirsty, which was the most anal possible complaint but the one his body kept sending up regardless, the kind of persistent mundane input that didn't care about relevance.

He waited.

Roy would come. 

This wasn't hope in the fragile sense— the kind of hope that is mostly wish and requires careful handling to keep from breaking. It was closer to a calculation, the output of a model built from years of actual data: Roy Harper, when people he cared about were in trouble, showed up. Not metaphorically. Physically, with a bow and a plan and the combination of competence and sheer stubborn investment in the people around him that made him the most reliable person Jason had encountered in a life that had given him a fairly comprehensive survey of people. 

Roy showed up. 

It was the most fundamental thing about him, underneath all the rest of it— underneath the history and the work it had taken to get here and who he'd become on the other side of everything. Jason had understood it early and sat with it for a long time before he'd let himself count on it.

So he waited, and worked at the zip tie, and waited.

The fourth hour was differnce than the first three. Roman had apparently decided that the scenic route was going to involve more rest stops— the pauses between rounds getting longer, the questions starting to repeat themselves in slightly different configurations, which was the tell of a man running out of approaches. Jason answered with the consistently, which angered Roman even more. The blood on his jaw had dried. The thirst had become background. The ribs had settled into their complaint and stayed there, present and specific on every breath, a reliable reminder of exactly where they were.

He gained another two millimeters on the left tie, working through the fifth hour in increments so small they required patience he'd built on purpose for exactly this kind of application.

He waited.

—

Roy found out at 9:23pm.

He'd given it an hour at first because Jason was sometimes late for reasons that were mundane and unreachable— a scene running long, a contact who needed more time, the general unpredictability of a Tuesday night in Gotham. Roy had sat with the patience for an hour, kept his hands busy with the maintenance work that was always waiting: fletching checked, broadheads inspected, the small attentive work of keeping his equipment in the condition that meant the difference between functional and not. He gave his brain the small attentive things. He watched the clock in his peripheral and not directly.

Then the hour was up and he ran the checks.

The phone was dead. Not off— dead. The specific flat absence of a signal that had been cut rather than powered down, the difference between a candle and a blown-out candle, and Roy had encountered both enough times to know the difference immediately. The way it felt different even through the data, a quality of nothing rather than a quality of quiet. Last ping from the cell tower nearest the Tricorner parking garage. Roy pulled the surrounding camera footage, only to find the garage feed was gone— not malfunctioning, removed, cleanly and deliberately by someone who knew exactly where the recording endpoint was and had planned accordingly. One traffic camera half a mile out gave him a four-second window: a black SUV, plates removed, turning in the direction of Black Mask territory. The footage was grainy and brief and gave him almost nothing, yet gave him everything he needed.

The whole process took eleven minutes.

Roy sat with the output for thirty seconds. He noted that his hands were entirely steady, which was not how he felt. He called Kori.

Two rings.

"Roy," she said, and the way she answered— already slightly there, already paying attention, as if some part of her had been waiting for a call that required that version of her voice— was one of the things he'd always valued most about her.

"Jason's missing. Not voluntarily."

The pause that followed was brief and specific, the sound of a capable person receiving information and organizing it into action without losing any of it to reaction. "How long?"

"Since this afternoon. He had a route, he took it, he didn't come back." Roy was already moving while he talked, pulling gear off the wall, hands working on muscle memory while his attention stayed on the conversation, the two things not interfering with each other. "Phone's dead, not off. Last ping was a parking garage on Tricorner. The garage camera was cut professionally. One traffic cam gave me a vehicle, black SUV, no plates, heading toward Black Mask territory." He was loading his quiver, the familiar weight of it settling into place, the physical routine of it steadying in the way of things that are deeply known. "Jason ran an undercover op inside one of Sionis's operations three months ago. It went clean, but clean and finished aren't always the same thing with Roman."

"No," Kori said. "They're not." He could hear her moving on her end— the particular quality of background sound that meant relocation, destination already in mind. "...Come to you. Where?"

"Safe house on Doyle."

"Thirty minutes." Her voice shifted, just a degree, into the register she used when she knew exactly which version of him she was talking to— not the operational version, the other one. The one that was currently keeping itself very carefully contained. "Roy. Don't go in until I'm there."

"Kori—"

"Thirty minutes," she said again. Not a suggestion. Not quite a request. "We move fast, I promise. But you wait."

Roy put the phone down.

-

The safe house was quiet in the way of places that felt different when you were alone in them than when you weren't, the silence changed by the absence. The refrigerator hummed. The street sounds came up three floors from below— the specific nighttime register of Blüdhaven, different from Gotham, less violent in its texture, not safer but differently unsafe. 

Roystood in the middle of the room and breathed and did not think about Roman Sionis's particular relationship with people who had wronged him, because thinking about that wasn't going to help anything and the part of his mind that wanted to go there could wait.

He went to the window and looked at the street.

Gotham at nine-thirty on a Tuesday. A corner store with the lights on. A woman with a dog that was pulling toward something. A bus that went past without stopping, lit from inside, the faces of its passengers reduced to pale ovals. Roy watched it and didn't watch it, eyes on the street without seeing it, his attention somewhere in the middle distance between the window glass and the parking garage footage that was running on quiet loop in the functional part of his brain.

Thirty minutes. He was good at waiting, professionally. Personally it was a different story, and these thirty minutes— twenty-eight, by the time they were up — had the quality of time actively resisting its own passage, of each minute arriving and then deciding to stay a little longer than advertised.

He breathed. He watched the street. He did not go over the footage again because he had what he needed from it and repetition was not going to produce more.

—

Artemis of Bana-Mighdall arrived at the safe house on Doyle at 9:51pm, two minutes after Koriand'r, and it was obviously a coincidence and obviously also not.

She knocked twice— a specific knock, flat and decisive, announcing without ornamentation. Roy opened the door and found her in the hallway: red hair loose, the Mistress of Bana-Mighdall slung across her back, her coat still holding the cold of outside in its fabric. She was already assessing the room from the doorway before he'd said a word, her gaze doing the systematic sweep of someone for whom a room is always first a tactical situation.

"You knew he was taken," Roy said.

"I didn't know," she corrected, with the precision of someone for whom accuracy matters more than the social convenience of letting a close guess stand. "I came to ask Jason a favor. The circumstances changed." She stepped inside, and Roy moved back because it was either that or be moved, which were both real options with Artemis. "I spoke to Oracle. She's tracking what she can. The trail goes cold at the parking garage, but the pattern fits Black Mask."

"I know," Roy said. "I pulled the feeds."

She set the Mistress against the wall with the particular care of someone for whom a weapon is a tool and tools are respected, and looked at Kori, who was leaning against the far wall with her arms folded, watching. The golden-green warmth of Kori's eyes steady and present, already doing the work of having assessed the room and found it operational, which was Kori's version of visible reassurance.

The moment between them lasted about four seconds and covered the full relevant history without either of them having to say it: two women who were both, in different ways and at different times, people who had mattered to the men who were currently the subject of the conversation, looking at each other across the room with the mutual, unperformed acknowledgment of people who had both done enough hard things to recognize it in someone else. 

"I am Koriand'r of Tamaran," Kori said. “My friend’s call me Kori.”

"Artemis of Bana-Mighdall" Artemis said.

"You were with Jason," Kori said. Informational, not pointed— the distinction mattered and was legible to both of them.

"For a time," Artemis said. "It doesn't complicate anything."

"No," Kori agreed. "It doesn't."

Artemis looked at Roy. "You have a lead."

"Black Mask," Roy said, pulling up the tablet. The building schematics loaded— Oracle's reconstruction from permits and satellite data and the comprehensive architecture of someone who had turned access into something close to omniscience, who had built understanding out of every piece of information that had ever touched a networked system anywhere in the city's radius. "Not confirmed, but it's the best fit. Sionis holds grudges like a second job. The garage, the camera cut, the vehicle — it all fits his operational style. Roman doesn't improvise. He plans and then executes the plan, and the execution is always consistent with who he is."

"Then we go to Sionis," Artemis said.

"We're narrowing the location," Roy said. "Oracle has three probable sites; she's working on elimination."

Kori's phone lit up. She looked at it. "She says she's sorry she can't move faster," she said, and then, more quietly, with the specific quality of relaying something that has a second recipient: "She says tell Roy she's working as fast as she can."

Roy looked at the floor. The scuff on the baseboard from six months ago that he'd never gotten around to fixing. He looked at it. He looked at the wall behind it.

"Roy," Kori said, with a gentle firmness she used when she needed him to look up without making a production of needing it.

"I'm good," he said. "I'm already running the approach— if it's the shell property we need to account for the interior room Oracle flagged, and if it's the warehouse we need four points of entry minimum because the sightlines on the eastern face are—"

"You're allowed to be concerned," Artemis said. Flat, not unkind, not softened either— just direct in the way she was direct about everything, the way that required either fighting or accepting, and Roy was too tired to fight. "It doesn't make you less effective. It makes you a person. It only becomes a problem if you let it make your decisions for you, and you haven't done that yet. Jason taught me that."

Roy looked at her. At the level, steady weight of her attention — the complete absence of condescension in it, the complete absence of management, the thing that she gave people which was simply the truth of what she was observing, delivered without performance. 

"Okay," he said.

"Okay," she said.

Oracle came back with two sites eliminated to one. The storage warehouse was out — too much ambient traffic in the surrounding blocks, inconsistent with a controlled holding situation, too many variables for Roman, who preferred control. The Sionis shell property had a modified interior room that didn't appear on the official permits, accessed from the third floor by a corridor that read as utility space on the building's public record, a room with no windows and a single controlled access point and an HVAC modification that was doing more work than an office building needed it to do. Roy knew before anyone said anything.

"The office," he said.

"Yes," Artemis said, at the same moment.

Kori looked between them. "Walk me through it."

"Roman Sionis doesn't use warehouses when he can use somewhere that makes him feel like he runs something," Roy said. The words came out flat, the flatness of someone who has studied a subject long enough to find it thoroughly exhausting. "He wants a desk. He wants the right lighting. He wants the person in the chair to look across a room and understand the distance between them and him, and you don't manufacture that in a warehouse. You manufacture it in a room that was built for it, that cost money, that says something about power just by existing. He'd pick the office." He paused. "It's not even a question."

Kori nodded once, clean and decisive. "Then we go."

—

Kori went up. Straight up, the way she always did— the starbolts warming in her palms with that greenish-gold light that was its own specific color, nothing else in the visible spectrum quite like it, warm and vivid and somehow both hotter and cleaner than fire. She went up through the cold air above the roofline and the city's ambient light went amber-grey below her and Roy didn't watch her go. He was already moving east.

Artemis went through the front. Roy heard it more than saw it— the sound of an entrance becoming significantly less of an obstacle. The way you knew a storm had come through by what it had done rather than by having been there for its arrival. She had the Mistress in her hand and the expression of someone for whom this was just a  Tuesday, which it was.

The east service entrance was where Oracle had marked it: a metal door flush with the building face, a keypad lock blinking amber-green in the dark. The alley smelled like garbage and wet concrete and January, the particular cold that had been sitting in the alley all day and had gotten comfortable. Roy was through the door in forty-three seconds, which wasn't his best time, and he knew why his best time wasn't available tonight.

Inside, the air had the processed, slightly chemical quality of a building working harder than it needed to for what it claimed to be— the HVAC doing something specific in here, the air carrying the faint edge of it. The ventilation was running too strong for an office building on a January night. There was an underlying smell that Roy had encountered enough times to identify and preferred not to spend time identifying, something that had been here before them and would be here after and was none of the things he needed to be thinking about right now.

He moved through the service corridor with his bow up and an arrow nocked, which he hadn't consciously decided to do. The fluorescent strips buzzed faintly overhead, that particular high-frequency hum that was just at the edge of audible, the kind that you stopped noticing consciously and started noticing as a headache. Through the soles of his boots he could feel the building— the slight vibration of people moving on upper floors, conducting their business at whatever pace Roman had them conducting it, and then the different quality of vibration that meant Kori had started working on the exterior. The building registered it, faintly. Attention had been successfully divided.

First two guards in the corridor: dealt with, fast, the arrows placed with efficiency, the gap between seeing and responding compressed almost to nothing. He was past them before the second one finished landing.

East stairwell. Careful on the stairs, precise with his feet, the deliberate quietness of movement that required more concentration than moving fast did, more control, the effort of staying slow when everything in him was pulling in the other direction. One hand barely touching the railing.

Second floor. The corridor was carpeted— grey, industrial, the kind that was bought for durability rather than comfort, the pile compressed by years of foot traffic in the patterns of a space that had been used a specific way for a long time. Lit fully, which meant he was visible, which meant he moved fast.

Third door on the left. Fourth on the right. Fifth on the left. The one that wasn't in the permits, that appeared on the plans as utility space and read differently the moment you stood in front of it: the door slightly heavier, the frame reinforced, the keypad on this one newer than the others.

Two guards at the door. One of them was looking at his phone, the screen lighting the underside of his face blue-white in the corridor's yellow. Roy evaluated and moved, and they went down without a lot of noise. The keypad on the door took one arrow, the mechanism took a second and then the door was open.

The room was warmer than the corridor, with the close, slightly stale quality of a space that had been occupied for hours— air that had been breathed and recycled, the contained warmth of bodies and heating and time. The smell in here was stronger: copper and sweat and the specific chemical sharpness of cleaning solution that was doing work it hadn't quite finished. The desk lamp and the overhead working together meant good light, which was both what he needed and what he'd been, on some level, bracing for.

He registered the room in layers: three guards already reacting, already in motion by the time the door had finished swinging. He dealt with them fast— faster than was strictly necessary from a tactical standpoint, because they were between him and the other side of the room and he needed to be on the other side of the room, and the part of him that had been compressing for two hours and fourteen minutes had opinions about the speed.

He crossed to the chair.

He crouched down in front of it.

The left side of Jason's face had been worked over with the methodical thoroughness of someone who wasn't doing it out of anger— anger was faster, less even, left different marks— but out of something colder and more organized, something that had been applied consistently and with attention to detail over a sustained period. 

The bruising had been advancing for hours, doing the patient unhurried work of subcutaneous damage, the eye swollen to a narrow aperture on the left, the skin around it a complicated geography of purple and red with the newer, darker overlay of the most recent impacts. The cut above his cheekbone had bled and dried in tracks down the line of his jaw, dark against his skin, and there was additional bruising at his temple and along the cheekbone itself. His lip was split in two places— the left corner and the center, both dried now, both having done their bleeding.

The way he was holding himself — every breath slightly shallower than normal— said something about his ribs in a way that didn't require confirmation. His wrists at the zip ties were raw in the way of someone who had been working at them for a long time, the skin over the left wrist bone abraded and hot-looking even from this distance.

The whole left side of him. Consistently, methodically, with the patience of someone who was not rushed.

Roy put all of that somewhere and kept his face what it needed to be.

"Hey," he said. His voice came out lower than intended. "Hey. Jason."

Jason's eyes— which had been tracking him with the focused, slightly-delayed way of someone running on will and not much else— found his face and steadied. Something in them changed. Not relief exactly, because Jason's face didn't do relief the way other faces did it, didn't have the vocabulary for it that would look legible to most people, but something went still, the way tension goes still when it finds somewhere to put itself. Like: there. That. The thing I was waiting for.

"Roy," he said. Level. Doing the thing with his voice.

Roy knew the thing with his voice. He'd been watching Jason do it for long enough to know what it was underneath. "I've got you," he said. "Okay? I've got you."

"Took you long enough," Jason said, which was the Jason Todd version of I knew you were coming and I held on and you're here, delivered in the register of someone for whom that admission was easier sideways, and it hit Roy somewhere behind his sternum with the full weight of everything he'd been keeping in a sealed compartment for two hours and seventeen minutes, the compartment suddenly considerably less sealed.

Roy pulled aknife from his boot. The zip ties came away — wrists first, careful and slow, watching Jason's hands for the tremor that would mean nerve damage, cataloguing with the same attention he'd been applying to everything since he walked through the door. No tremor. The hands were steady, abraded and raw and slightly cold but steady. Roy took his first real breath since the parking garage footage.

Ankles next.

"Can you stand?" Roy asked.

"Yes," Jason said, which meant probably, give me a second.

Roy got his shoulder under the angle— the right angle, the uninjured side, accounting automatically for the ribs. Jason got his feet on the floor and then got himself vertical, which took more time and more visible effort than he would have wanted Roy to see, and Roy watched without commenting, because some things you watch without commenting. His breath caught sharp on the ribs at a particular moment in the process, audible and specific. His knee required a private negotiation that lasted about four seconds. Roy watched and kept his hand steady at his back.

He was up. Solid and warm and alive and vertical, and Roy kept his hand at his back.

Roy turned.

Roy looked across the room at Roman— standing in the light of the hallway like a man who knew the energy he could give off. Like the man who had spent the better part of an evening applying his particular expertise to Jason Todd with the patience of someone who had nowhere to be and every resource to do it properly. Who had looked at Jason Todd in that chair and thought: this is manageable, this is mine.

Roy felt the thing he'd been containing for two hours and seventeen minutes reach its structural limit.

He crossed the room in four steps. Roman didn't step back — he was not a man who moved for other men, it was one of his defining characteristics, a feature of his self-conception that he would maintain even when it was inadvisable. Roman Sionis stood over him but Roy didn’t flinch. Roy kept his voice quiet, which was worse than loud.

"You've seen who I have outside. They are a whisper away. You're going to think very carefully about whether this was worth what comes next."

Roman looked down at him and did his math and didn't like the sum.

"Think carefully," Roy said, and went back to Jason.

Jason had made it three feet from the chair under his own power and had run into a philosophical disagreement with his left knee, and was in negotiations with the wall about it — one hand flat against the concrete, applying weight, working through the problem with the focused expression of someone who has elected to approach a mechanical issue rather than a physical one.

"I had him," Jason said.

"I know you did," Roy said, getting back into position.

"I was at about a centimeter on the left tie."

"I saw the abrasion. That's hours of work."

"Roy—"

"You had him," Roy said. "I showed up and ruined your whole independent exit strategy. I'm sorry. Can we go?"

Jason, who could recognize a graceful exit from a losing position, accepted this and focused on moving. He did it carefullly, and Roy matched his pace and kept his hand at his back and let him do it.

"Pain level," Roy said.

"Manageable."

"Jason."

"Ribs," Jason said, with the reluctant precision of someone providing information they'd rather withhold, understanding that withholding it is not an available option. "Two, maybe three. Left side. The knee is old, it'll settle. The face—"

"Oh, I can see the face."

"The face looks worse than it is."

Roy said nothing, because some things didn't need commentary, and they moved.

The stairs were harder than the corridor. Roy felt it through his hand at Jason's back — each step its own small battle, the rib accounting applied to every footfall, the cost of the downward impact visible in the set of Jason's shoulders, in the way he exhaled at the bottom of each step rather than the top. Roy watched Jason's jaw. Kept his mouth shut. They made it to the bottom of the stairwell, and the east door was ahead of them, and Jason was still moving, and that was the information.

They came out into the cold.

January in Gotham had a particular feel to it— wet concrete and city exhaust and the kind of cold that got into everything before you'd decided it had, not the sharp immediate cold of high altitude or open country but the close ambient cold of a city that held its chill differently, in the walls and the pavement and the air between buildings. The night sky was that amber-grey color it went when the light pollution was doing its work; no stars, just the glow of the city reflecting off low cloud cover. Roy had Kori on comms before the door finished closing behind them.

"We're out. East exit. Jason's ambulatory— ribs, probable concussion, needs a clear route to extraction."

"Copy," Kori said, slightly breathless in the specific way of someone who has been working hard and efficiently and hasn't stopped yet. "Exterior is handled. Artemis is finishing the front." A beat. "Roy. She's very good. I like her."

"I know," Roy said, and meant it without reservation. He had his hand at Jason's back, steady, navigating them toward the extraction vehicle, and Jason hadn't said anything about the cold, which was its own piece of information— either managing it or not registering it, and Roy wasn't sure which was more concerning.

"Here," Artemis said through the comm, and appeared around the corner of the alley thirty seconds later. She'd been working at a pace that would have flattened most people; she showed it only in the slight displacement of her coat, something darkening at her forearm that wouldn’t even be a bruise by morning. She stopped when she saw them and took in Jason's face and posture with the rapid, practiced assessment of someone trained to read a body's condition at a glance and something moved very briefly in her expression. Not the assessment. The thing underneath it. She managed it back down with the efficiency of long practice.

"Jason," she said.

"Artemis." His voice went to a different register— warmer and more careful at the same time, the two things not contradicting each other. Roy had noticed this about Jason with Artemis. He filed it where he filed things that weren't his to examine. "You didn't have to—"

"I was already here," she said, and came to his other side without making it a discussion, without waiting for acceptance or invitation. Between her and Roy they had him properly supported, and Jason let them without manufacturing reasons why he didn't need it, which was the clearest indicator yet of how the evening had actually gone.

Kori landed in front of them— quiet and precise, the starbolts fading from her palms as her feet met the ground, the gold-green light going out and leaving just the alley and the amber sky and the cold. She was breathing normally, which was Kori. She looked at Jason's face with the direct attention of someone who needed to see it and was seeing it, doing it without flinching, which was also Kori.

"Hey, Kori," Jason said, doing the casual thing.

"Jason," she said. "You look terrible."

"Thank you."

"Not a compliment."

"Received it as one anyway." The corner of his mouth, the undamaged one, lifting the fraction it could manage. "Good to see you."

Something moved in Kori's face— relief, mostly, the kind that had been under pressure and was releasing now, the specific texture of caring about someone's continued existence and having just confirmed it in person, which was different from confirming it through data. She looked at Roy over Jason's head. Roy looked back. 

"Medical," she said.

"I know," Roy said.

"Not the cave," Jason said.

"Not the cave," Roy confirmed. 

—

Roy drove.

Practical division of labor: Kori in the passenger seat, Artemis and Jason in the back, Roy with his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and the deliberate blankness of someone who is not thinking about the thing they are not thinking about, which requires ongoing maintenance. The city moved past— Gotham at midnight, wet and amber-lit, the streetlights doing their thing over dark pavement, the occasional lit window of someone up too late or up early, the bus routes still running their insomniac loops.

"You're doing the face," Jason said, from the back seat.

In the rearview mirror Roy could see a sliver of him — the line of his jaw, the careful wayhe was sitting, upright rather than settling because settling would require committing weight to the ribs. 

"I don't have a face," Roy said.

"You have a face."

"I'm concentrating on driving."

"Roy—"

"Seven minutes," Roy said. "Tell me if anything changes. Any new pain, anything getting worse."

A pause. "No," Jason said. "Nothing new."

"Good."

Kori was looking out the passenger window at the passing city. In the back, Artemis was checking Jason's pulse at the wrist, her own stillness making space for the reading. Roy could see her hands in the mirror. He watched the road.

"Pulse is strong," Artemis said. "Fast."

"It's been a long night," Jason said.

"Yes," she said. "It has."

---

Leslie Thompkins had been the Outlaws' medical contact for a year and a half, which had come about the way most things with Leslie came about: she'd found out they needed someone and she'd decided that if someone was going to patch Jason Todd up in the middle of the night on a semi-regular basis, it was going to be her and not whoever they'd been making do with before. She'd presented this to Jason less as an offer and more as a statement of fact, in the way that Leslie presented things she'd already decided— the offer was a formality, the conclusion was already reached, and the remaining conversation was just covering the gap between them— and Jason had accepted it with the particular quality he reserved for Leslie, a combination of genuine gratitude and the slight sheepishness of a person who had always found it difficult to accept care and had given up arguing about it with her specifically, at some point that neither of them had formally marked.

She was waiting at the door of the secondary safe house when they arrived, coat over scrubs, her medical bag over one shoulder, with the focused patience of someone who had been given a time and had arrived prepared and was now simply waiting for the work to begin. Roy's safe house— not the Outlaws' main base, his, the one on the fifth floor of a building only he knew about, that he'd set up for exactly this kind of situation and had told himself, for a while, he'd set up for practical reasons.

Leslie took one look at Jason's face under the building's exterior light and said, "Inside. Sit down." The words flat and immediate, the voice of someone who has assessed and moved to the next step before most people have finished assessing.

Jason sat down without argument, which was the clearest indicator yet of how the evening had actually gone. He lowered himself to the edge of the bed with the careful economy of someone who has done a thorough accounting of their body's current objections and is moving in a way that respects each of them, and the process of it, visible in the set of his jaw and the quality of the breath he took at the end, told Leslie everything she needed to know before she'd even done anything.

Roy stood in the doorway.

Kori came to stand beside him in the quiet way she did things— present without requiring acknowledgment, warm in the specific way that her presence was warm, not performing anything. Artemis went to the corner of the room with her arms folded and watched Leslie's assessment.

Leslie set her bag on the table and opened it with the efficient movements of long practice and put on gloves and moved to Jason. Her hands— the sureness of them, the long history of sureness — moved over the damage with focused attention.

"Two ribs, at least," she said, not looking up, her fingers at his left side, feeling along the line of them with careful pressure that made Jason's breath catch twice at specific locations. "Maybe three. I'd want imaging to be certain, but the presentation is consistent with fractures on six and seven, left side." She moved to his face and was cleaning the laceration above the cheekbone as she spoke, the sharp medicinal smell of antiseptic cutting through the room's ambient air. He hissed quietly at the contact. She didn't apologize, because apology was not what was required. "The orbital damage looks worse than it is — the swelling will be significant tomorrow, worse before it's better, but it'll heal. This—" she examined the cuts on his lip with the specific care of someone who had known this face for a long time and had opinions about things being done to it — "needs sutures. Two, possibly three. This one above the cheekbone needs two or three as well. Hold still."

He held still. The suturing was quiet and careful, Leslie's needle moving with the sureness of her hands, and Jason's jaw was set for the duration of it, the muscle working steadily, and he was quiet. Kori had closed her eyes briefly at some point during this and opened them again and looked at the wall. Roy watched.

"Knee?" Leslie said, when she'd finished with the sutures and pressed the last of the tape down with her thumb.

"Old injury. Aggravated."

"I know it's old. How bad is the aggravation?"

"It’s fine."

"That's not what I asked."

Jason looked at her with the expression he used when he'd been outmaneuvered and knows it and is deciding whether to keep trying. He decided not to keep trying. "Bad enough that I felt it on the stairs," he said.

"Good. Honest." She moved to examine it, her hands matter-of-fact around the joint, not gentle in the performed sense but careful in the functional one, which was more reassuring. "Ice, rest, no weight on it for at least a week. The ribs will tell you the same thing and you'll be tempted to ignore the ribs, which is going to be tempting because they're not going to be able to stop you and you know it."

"Leslie—"

"I know, Jason." She said it like she was finishing his sentence, which she was, the way you could finish the sentences of people you had known through enough situations that the sentences became predictable. "You know what you need to do. You're going to do most of it and not all of it, and I'm telling you now that the part you skip is going to make the recovery longer, and I need you to actually hear that rather than just nod at me."

"I hear you," he said.

"Mm," she said, which meant she'd noted the response and reserved judgment on its accuracy. She looked at Roy in the doorway then, with the comprehensive attention that Leslie applied to everything in her vicinity— the look of someone who kept the picture to herself with the professional discretion of a doctor and the personal discretion of someone who understood that some things were not for commentary. She'd known Roy through Jason, which meant she'd been watching Roy's orbit around Jason for long enough to have drawn her own conclusions and filed them in a place she didn't open in front of other people. "He needs monitoring tonight. The concussion is mild but it wants watching. Two-hour checks minimum."

"I know," Roy said.

"Roy—" Jason started.

"I know," Roy said, and the way he said it closed the door on the argument before it had decided whether to open.

Leslie looked between them with the expression of a woman who has known both of them long enough to understand exactly what she's looking at and has no particular interest in offering it as text tonight. She began packing her bag — the efficient zip of each compartment, the sounds of a practiced process. The room was quiet enough that all of it was audible. The antiseptic smell was doing its work on the air, clean over copper. "Call me in the morning," she said, addressing this to Roy, then looked at Jason: "With your actual honest assessment of the pain level, not the one you've decided is acceptable for public consumption."

Artemis offered to walk her out. Leslie accepted this with the unflappable equanimity she brought to all unexpected offers and then it was Roy and Kori and Jason, and the room had the quality of aftermath: antiseptic and warmth and the lamp on the bedside table doing its small work against the dark, the sounds of the building settling into its overnight register.

Kori looked at Jason. "You're an idiot," she said, warmly.

"The route," he said. "I know. I let it get static."

"You know better than that."

"I do," he agreed, without resistance, without the impulse to defend the decision, which was the thing about Jason that Roy found most consistently true: he could be honest about his own failures in a way that other people manufactured the apparatus to avoid. "I got tired and stopped doing the thing I knew I should do."

"Yes," she said. "You did." She held his gaze for a moment with the warmth of someone who is stating a fact because the fact is important and then is done with it. Then she leaned down and pressed her lips to his temple — the right side, uninjured, unhurried— her hand briefly at the back of his head. She straightened. "Roy."

She came to him and hugged him, which she hadn't announced and which hit him with the specific force of something he hadn't realized he needed until he had it— the solid warmth of her, the unhurried quality of it, the way she held on long enough for it to mean something actual rather than something performed. Roy put his arms around her and held on.

"Call me," she said, against his shoulder.

"I will." 

She left, and the room was smaller without her in it, and differently quiet.

Artemis came back from seeing Leslie out and paused in the doorway— assessed the room, assessed them, located the geometry of the situation with quick precision.

Roy looked at her. Jason looked at her. The three of them had a moment that was its own particular shape — not quite a triangle, not quite anything with a clean name, but something with geometry, something that acknowledged all three of its angles without making any of them smaller.

"Tomorrow," Artemis said, to Jason. "The favor."

"Tomorrow," Jason agreed.

She looked at him— at the sutures and the bruising and the careful quality of his sitting — and then said what she'd apparently come back in to say: "Artemis," Jason started, and stopped, and then said with his face what he wasn't going to say with his voice, the whole of it visible in the set of his jaw and the quality of his eyes. "Thank you," he said. "For coming."

She looked at him with the level, warm attention she had, the directness of someone who does not look away from things. "You would have," she said.

"I would have," he confirmed. "I'm still saying it."

She nodded once, and the nod had the weight of what it was — the acknowledgment of people who have been close in one way and navigated their way to a different closeness, a genuine one with different dimensions, and it landed cleanly, without anything spilled, because Artemis didn't spill. She looked at Roy briefly, one direct assessment, and then said "Goodnight" and left, the door clicked shut with the quiet certainty of a person who knows exactly when to make an exit.

Roy stood in the room with Jason.

The lamp was warm. The radiator did its periodic ticking, the expansion of metal in heat, the sound of the building doing its ordinary, ongoing work. Jason was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees, and he looked at Roy with the open, unguarded quality his face had when he'd stopped performing any version of it— not the face for strangers, not the face for enemies, not the face he'd been wearing in the chair for six hours doing the thing with his voice and waiting. Just the real one. The one Roy had needed a while to earn and had never taken for granted once he had it.

"Sit down," Jason said. "You've been standing in doorways all night."

"I'm fine."

"Roy."

Roy pulled the chair from the corner— the one he'd positioned there months ago, when he'd set the room up, close to the bed but not presumptuous about it— and sat in it. It put their faces at the same level and reduced the distance between the chair and the edge of the bed to something that was functional rather than calculated, and Roy looked at Jason.

Jason looked back with the patience of someone who has a lot of patience available, who has been spending it for six hours and has budgeted accordingly.

"I knew you'd come," Jason said. Just like that. The register he used for things that were so true there wasn't any point in finding a way to approach them sideways. "I was waiting the whole time. I wasn't—" He paused, finding the word that was accurate, declining the ones that were easier. "I didn't let it get dark in there. Because I knew you were coming."

Roy exhaled, and the exhale had everything in it that he'd been compressing since 9:23pm. The whole two hours and seventeen minutes of it, released at once in the quiet room, in the warm lamp light, in front of the one person it was for.

"That's—" he started.

"I know it's a lot to put on someone," Jason said.

"It's not," Roy said, and his voice had the rough quality it got when he stopped managing it entirely, when the management was done and what was underneath was available. "It's not too much, it's just—" He looked at Jason's face. All of it. The stitches, new and precise. The bruising doing its vivid patient work, purple-green advancing in the lamplight. The careful quality of every breath. "You were there for six hours before I knew. Before I—"

"I know."

"The camera was cut before I could catch it on the feed. I had four seconds from a traffic cam half a mile out and then nothing, and I was—" He stopped. "I was very calm about it. Very operational. I ran everything right."

"You did," Jason said quietly.

"I was not fine," Roy said.

"I know you weren't."

Roy looked at his mouth. The stitches, new and precise. The bruising that had been building while Roy was running feeds and waiting for Oracle and telling himself he was functioning correctly, which he was, which wasn't the same thing. The whole left side of his face and what it represented: six hours that had happened while Roy was sitting in a safe house on Doyle watching time refuse to move.

He leaned in.

He kissed him.

He did it carefully, because careful was necessary — slow and deliberate, aware of exactly where not to press, the stitches and the split lip and the ribs that had opinions about sudden movement. One hand at Jason's jaw, the right side of it, the uninjured side, the warmth of him against Roy's palm. The kiss lasted four full seconds and was not enough. It was the first sentence of something rather than the whole of it. He pulled back and stayed close, the distance between them reduced to something he could feel.

Jason's eye— the one that could fully open— was looking at him with an expression Roy had never quite seen on his face in that particular combination. Surprised was there. Warm. Something else that was paying very close attention, that was taking the information in and integrating it with other information it had been holding for a while.

"Okay," Jason said. His voice was different. Lower. "So we're—"

"We're," Roy said.

"We've been," Jason said.

"Yeah," Roy said. "For a while."

"You could've—"

"I know," Roy said. He kept his hand where it was. The warmth of Jason's jaw, real and present, specific in the way that the footage of a black SUV turning in the dark had not been specific, had been all absence and negative space. "I was working up to it."

The corner of Jason's mouth moved— the undamaged corner, lifting slightly. "Six months is a long approach."

"I had reasons."

"Name one."

Roy looked at him. At the whole of him — the stitches and the patience and the thing that had been present between them since well before either of them had said anything about it, that had been organizing itself in the background of two years of working side by side. "You're a lot," he said, and the way he was looking at Jason when he said it made it land as the opposite of a complaint. 

"Yeah," Jason said. "So are you."

"I know."

"I've been working up to it too," Jason said. "If that changes the timeline."

"It doesn't," Roy said. "I knew."

"You knew" Jason said acussingly.

"Yes."

The radiator ticked. Outside, the city was doing its midnight thing— quieter, not quiet, the sounds of Gotham changing register the way they changed between two AM and four AM, the particular texture of a city that never quite went all the way to sleep but had opinions about its hours.

"We should talk about it," Roy said. "Properly."

"We are talking about it."

"Properly," Roy said again. "When you don't have cracked ribs and fresh stitches. When I've slept more than—" he paused— "a while." 

Jason looked at him with the calm, clear attention of someone who has made a decision and is not in a hurry for anyone else to catch up, because he's been sitting with it long enough to have stopped being in a hurry about it. "It's going to be okay," he said.

"I know it is," Roy said. "We're here. That's—" He exhaled. "I know."

"I meant all of it," Jason said. He held Roy's gaze and there was nothing performed about it, nothing managed or produced for an audience. Just the real version of his face, in the lamplight, looking at Roy with the steadiness of someone who has done the work of being sure. "It's going to be okay."

Roy sat with that in the warm room, with the lamp and the radiator and the city outside. He reached out and put his hand over Jason's on his knee— flat-palmed, steady, the warmth of it deliberate. Jason's fingers were still slightly cold from the alley, the cold that gets in and takes time to leave. Roy's hand was warmer. Jason turned his hand over and Roy felt his fingers settle, and that was its own thing, that settling.

They sat like that for a while, with the lamp doing its work and the city doing its thing outside, the sounds of it distant and ongoing.

"You should sleep," Roy said.

"You need it more than I do," Jason said.

"You have a concussion."

"Mild."

"Jason." The word had the full weight of the evening in it — not a reprimand, not anger, just the weight, placed deliberately, allowed to be what it was.

"Okay," Jason said, quiet. Not a joke. The acknowledgment of someone who has heard something and is choosing to accept it. "Not a joke. You're right."

Roy exhaled. "I'll take the chair."

"Roy—"

"I'll take the chair. I'll wake you every two hours." He looked at Jason. 

Roy stayed in the chair. He kept his hand on the edge of the bed, which made the chair geometrically inconvenient, and he didn't move it.

Jason settled back against the headboard with the measured care of someone working around their ribs, making small adjustments, accounting for each of them, and he looked at the ceiling for a moment and said: "Artemis is going to want the favor early."

"What is it?"

"Don't know yet. Something with an ARGUS archive. She's been trying to access a specific record in the Qurac files and her usual route got closed."

"We'll deal with it in the morning," Roy said.

"She's not as difficult as she seems," Jason said. "Artemis. You can say it."

"She carried you out of a Black Mask operation," Roy said. "I'm going to send her something."

"She'll hate it."

"I know. I'm going to make it a very good gift basket."

Jason made a sound that started as a laugh and then very quickly had to reconsider itself on account of the ribs— the sharp intake, the pause, the careful exhale. "Don't," he said.

"I didn't do anything."

"It was the gift basket thing, the way you said it—"

"Go to sleep," Roy said. "I'll wake you in two hours."

The room went quiet. The radiator ticked. The city did its thing. Roy sat in the chair with his hand on the edge of the bed, and the lamp made its warm claim on the room, and after a while the quality of Jason's breathing changed in the way that meant he was going somewhere, not sleep exactly but the approach to it, the slow release of the evening's particular vigilance.

"Roy," Jason said, from the approach to sleep.

Roy looked at him. At the lamp-lit right side of him — the uninjured profile, the line of his jaw and the dark of his hair and the careful quality of his breathing settling, the person who had spent six hours in a room that smelled like someone else's power, working at a zip tie in half-millimeter increments, and had known the whole time.

"Thank you," Jason said. "For coming."

Roy looked at him for a long moment.

"Always," he said.