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Jason has his feet propped up on the desk, so that he can use the claws at the ends of his gloved fingers to pick dried mud out of the crevices of his boots. It forms a steadily growing pile of dirt on the table, which Kyle, sitting beside him, is very politely ignoring. His boyfriend’s attention stays firmly on the monitors, like it’s supposed to on watch duty, but Jason only glances up from time to time, mostly checking to see if his mom’s ship has appeared on the radar yet.
Usually, watch duty with Kyle is more fun, involving rounds of Guess Who where hair color is useless because everyone is hot pink, or spirited debates about whatever show they are watching together at the moment. However, today both of them are anxious for Carol and Selina (and much of the rest of the Justice League) to return home safe.
Being part of the Justice League is dangerous. The statues outside the Hall of Justice depicting Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Zatanna, and all the other members of that early iteration of the League who gave their lives fighting Darkseid make that danger hard to forget. So while Jason trusts his mom to be safe in her role as Catwoman, current head of the League, he’s still nervous.
Maybe that’s why he literally jumps out of his seat like a startled cat when the intruder alarm starts blaring.
“What do you think the chances are that the alert’s just them arriving early on an unexpected vessel?” Kyle suggests.
Privately, Jason thinks the chances are not great, but he gives Kyle a hum that can be loosely interpreted as agreement.
He clicks through the different camera views rapidly until he spots the group of four who are out of place. They look alarmingly like himself, Donna, and Kyle, along with a more alien-looking guy, except if Kyle was a Green Lantern and Jason and Donna swapped which of them dressed in civilian wear and which dressed in superhero getup.
Jason would really prefer not to deal with dimension travel today. He tries to limit his involvement with the Justice League to fighting world-ending threats. None of this dimensional politicking.
“What’s the plan?” Donna asks, breezing into the room, gun in hand.
“Donna, maybe you should evacuate,” Kyle suggests. “You’re not a Justice League operative,”—rather she’s their liaison with the U.S. military—“and protocol dictates non-League operatives get the heck out in case of an attack.”
Personally, Jason would prefer Donna stick around. He’s not exactly looking forward to 2-v-4-ing a group with a Green Lantern, even if he has lover-boy Rayner with him. Plus Donna proved her competency to him long ago. He’d had to mentally graduate her from Kyle’s girlfriend to Kyle’s girlfriend who sometimes crashes our cases to Kyle’s ex-girlfriend who calls the shots when she crashes our cases and shoots with deadly accuracy.
On screen, the strange alien man takes a step away from the group before disappearing entirely. Jason switches the cameras to infrared mode, in case he’s become invisible. But no, he seems to be gone-gone.
“I’m not leaving,” Donna asserts. She peers over Jason’s shoulder at the screens. “Is that me?”
“Think so,” Kyle replies.
The other Donna, Jason, and Kyle have seemingly wrapped up their discussion. The other Kyle starts leading the group towards the teleportation tubes, and, coincidentally, towards them.
In the end, the plan is simple. They’re going to wait quietly in this room until their unexpected guests walk by, knock them out from behind, and figure out if they’re friendly or not once they’re in the containment cells. Seems easy enough.
Except while three pink frying pans make contact with three heads, only two bodies hit the floor.
Other-Donna whips around to face them, a lasso in hand, and for one stupid second both Jason and Kyle turn to look at their Donna, wondering if she too has been secretly hardy this whole time. That’s all the time it takes for other-Donna’s lasso to make one giant loop around the three of them. It pulls tight, pressing them back to back to back with their arms trapped at their sides.
Looking at her now, they should have known that this new Donna was something different. Her hair glitters like the starriest nights, in a way that Jason can’t imagine being achieved through human cosmetics.
Jason curls his fingers, so his claws bite lightly into the flesh of his own palm to ensure he doesn’t accidentally scratch either Donna or Kyle.
“After I release you, you will all disarm yourselves and slide your weapons across the floor to me,” Donna commands.
“Yeah, no,” Kyle says. He’s summoned a giant bubble of ice-water around Donna’s grip on the lasso.
“Of course your willpower would still be stupidly strong,” lasso-wielding Donna mumbles.
“Listen,” and it's his Donna speaking now, “you clearly don’t want to hurt us. We don’t want to hurt you. There are just certain precautions we always take to ensure visitors from another multiverse truly mean us no harm. If you release us, we’ll escort you all to a temporary holding cell until we can verify your intentions. Then you’ll be freed to finish your business in our world.”
“I’m afraid my companions and I are on a bit of a time crunch—”
Jason cuts her off, pointing out, “You’re already going to have to wait for your Jason and Kyle to wake up. Plus if you cooperate with us now, our Justice League can help you all achieve whatever you’re working towards.”
“You’re me, right?” Donna adds. “Me as an Amazon? Like Diana?”
“I believe so,” other-Donna confirms, then almost as an aside. “We always seem to be running into ourselves on this journey.”
“Oh?” Donna inquires. “Are Kyle, Jason, and I like a trio in most universes?”
“It seems that way in many except my own,” the other Donna responds.
Jason thinks for a second about bringing up that she literally arrived with the other two in tow. Not that he doesn’t trust her to know her own situation, but he’d appreciate an explanation.
Besides him, Kyle fidgets a little. Jason knows his boyfriend could have freed them from the lasso by now, but he seems to be content to let their Donna try the power of trust and friendship and all that jazz.
Amazonian Donna isn’t convinced yet.
Jason moves as Donna shuffles their little trio around until she is facing her counterpart directly.
She clears her throat, gearing up for one last attempt. “You’re me, so you know I’ll do my best to do what’s right. In less than an hour, Constantine should be back and able to verify that your group doesn’t mean us any harm. Then we can help you. Please let us detain you until then.”
Other-Donna seems to actually consider this proposition. Besides her, Green Lantern Kyle starts snoring. Apparently that’s a trait that remains the same between universes.
“Alright,” she finally acquiesces, and with a flick of her wrist, her lasso releases them. Then she bends down to pick up the passed-out Green Lantern.
Jason is probably supposed to be the one to pick up his doppelganger, except now that they’ve approached this near he can tell that other-Jason is huge.
Maybe half a foot taller than him. Like maybe the height he would have reached without all the childhood malnutrition, and for a second he’s intensely jealous over an imagined better childhood where Jason’s mom hadn’t been struggling to make ends meet and to stay alive until she hadn’t been able to do either of those. Though how that version of him could have got caught up in dimension travel, Jason doesn’t know.
“He looks heavy,” he grumbles, giving Kyle a small hip-check. “Use your lantern-ness to deal with it.”
“You think I can’t carry him?” Kyle wrinkles his nose.
“I think you can barely carry me,” Jason replies.
“That is not true,” Kyle protests, but he uses his ring to help him out, floating other-Jason into a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. Then, they follow the Donnas towards the cells.
Red Hood’s head smarts when he claws his way back to consciousness to find himself, Donna, and Kyle in a cell. This is why he went with a helmet. He should have insisted that Bob allow him to grab it before they started this wild goose chase across the multiverse.
“Welcome back to the waking world,” Rayner snarks.
Jason pays him no mind, trying to make sense of the people on the other side of the cell window. It’s himself, Donna, and Kyle, because of course it is; Jason’s well since stopped being surprised by that. What does surprise him, though, is that this world’s Jason seems to be their version of Catwoman?
Jason likes cats just as much as the next introvert, but that’s nowhere near enough to base all his superhero theming on them.
“You get raised by cats or something after you ditched the foster system?” he asks his counterpart.
“Nah, just one in particular. Selina’ll be here soon. I’m the Alley Cat to her Catwoman.”
Huh, raised by Catwoman. Jason’s never been close to her. As far as he knows she and Bruce weren’t collaborating much during his tenure as Robin, and since coming back she’s been smart enough to avoid the heat that comes with getting involved with any of the Gotham turf wars.
“And what’s their deal?” Jason asks, nodding at his counterpart’s companions.
“Kyle’s the second Star Sapphire based in Sector 2814 after Carol Ferris, and Donna is the Justice League’s liaison with the military.”
This world’s Donna wields a gun, Jason notes. Selfishly, he hopes she gets flak for it, though he can’t imagine Donna getting flak for anything.
He wonders why the gun though… Unless she doesn’t have her lasso?
It would make sense. If Jason is missing his connection with Batman, and Kyle is missing his connection to Green Lantern, then, "I'm assuming Donna wasn’t raised on Themyscira as Wonder Woman’s sister, if Wonder Woman even exists that is.”
Donna clears her throat. “She did. And for some time I was raised with her. But after Diana died, the Amazons wanted to close their ranks, and they refused to let me leave the island. I made a bargain with Circe: my powers in exchange for transportation to meet Steve Trevor. He was old and ailing, not like how he had been in my sister's stories, but he helped me get an education and get started in the military.”
Diana had existed. Past tense.
“What about Batman? Is he…?” Jason can’t quite bring himself to say the word ‘dead.’
“Huh? Yeah, he died in the attack that wiped out all of the League’s founders a few years before I started running with Selina. Robin still operates out of the Batcave. I work with him sometimes.”
It seems strange to Jason that he could be adopted off the streets by someone and it would apparently have nothing to do with Bruce. When he was younger, it felt like the kindness to take an orphan from the Alley, care for him, and love him was singular in its nature, possessed only by one Bruce Wayne. But Alley Cat disproved that notion.
“Hold up, so Hal Jordan may have died. But what about Guy and John?” his Kyle demands.
“Oh, they’re around, working for the Green Lantern Corps,” Star Sapphire Kyle replies. “They work with the League part time like Jace and I, but being a League member is too dangerous for them to commit to, especially with their lack of secret identities.”
The conversation lapses into silence, and Jason appraises his alternate self. He’s significantly shorter. Probably the height Jason would have been had the dip in the Pit not taken care of all the childhood malnutrition for him.
He feels a flash of jealousy he knows to be irrational. Just because this other Jason hadn’t died doesn’t mean he hadn’t experienced tension with his mentor. There are so many ways for your parents to fail you, and Jason knows several of them far more intimately than he should.
Still, it can’t have been too bad. This Jason is a part of the Justice League, and at least partially looking forward to Selina’s return.
Jason wonders when Bob is going to get back and free them from this cell. Being cooped up makes him antsy. Or, he surveils the locking mechanism, if they break out they could probably take them, considering both other-Donna and other-Jason are powerless.
Donna’s considering gaze swoops over the group outside their cell. “And you three are… close?”
“We’re not a throuple,” Star Sapphire Kyle protests. “Just because I use the Power of Love doesn’t mean I’m polyamorous—not that there’s anything wrong with polyamory—but people always assume. I only dated Donna for a few months, and we were broken up for at least a year before Jason and I got together.”
Jason makes startled eye contact with his own Kyle. He doesn’t look as disgusted as Jason had expected, choosing to point at himself and fixing Jason in place with a questioning stare.
Jason shakes his head no.
He doesn’t have a crush on Kyle, or at least he doesn’t think he does. The Green Lantern may have a well-muscled frame, irresistible charm, and the loud sense of justice one often sees on leading men in the movies for a reason, but Jason has higher standards than that. Like being able to tolerate Jason’s presence—that one’s pretty important.
“Jason’s gay in this world?” His Kyle asks, then, “Wait. I’m gay in this world?”
“You’re bisexual, idiot,” Alley Cat points out. “Weren’t you just told that you and Donna dated?”
Jason finds he takes a weird amount of offense to another version of him calling his Kyle an idiot for reasons… Reasons that he probably doesn’t want to spend time considering right now.
“I’ve been told you three aren’t a trio in your world?” other-Donna inquires.
No one seems in a particular rush to explain. They probably don’t know what to say. Jason counts it as a win that Kyle hasn’t instantly jumped on the opportunity to clarify Jason’s status as ‘not a hero’ like he usually would.
Instead, it’s Jason himself who responds. He keeps the explanation simple. “I don’t really run with the hero-types in our world.”
“So what do you call this?” other-Kyle asks, gesturing at the three of them.
“A mistake,” Jason smirks.
Kyle rolls his eyes, and if Donna has any reaction to the comment, she doesn’t let it show, but the reaction Jason’s really interested in is Alley Cat’s. Can he tell that Jason’s heart wasn’t really in the remark? That Jason has almost started to think of them as a real team-up, and one that he wouldn’t mind extending past this little trip?
Other-Jason slips off his mask, kicking his feet up with a flippancy that does not match the knowing look he’s leveled at Jason. “Mom says being a hero or a villain is a matter of perception, more than anything real. And that it’s a label the world feels comfortable trying to define you by, even if they have only the smallest pieces of information to work with. She was deemed a villain long before she became the premier hero at the head of the Justice League. And literally nothing’s changed about her philosophy since her ‘villain’ days.”
That’s nothing Jason doesn’t already know, though it does make him wonder what would have to happen in their world for the Red Hood to be considered a hero again without having to compromise his ideals. Because he won’t.
He refuses to waste time and effort conforming to the standards of heroism that would allow him back into the hero community or give him the chance for public perception beyond the Alley as something a little more complicated than a crime lord. Not when doing so would only detract from his ability to execute justice.
But knowing that the line between hero and villain is mostly made up doesn’t mean he lives any less of a lonely life.
Kyle, his Kyle, is giving him an inscrutable look—inscrutable at least to him because the only emotions he’s actually seen on the other guy’s face have ranged somewhere between annoyed and incredibly pissed. He raises an eyebrow at Rayner, and the guy flushes and looks away.
Donna, ignoring their attempts at silent communication, steers the conversation back towards their goal: finding Ray Palmer.
This universe’s Justice League comes bustling into the interrogation room like it’s an active hostage situation, not three already contained dimension travelers. Jason catches a glimpse of a few people he recognizes in the chaos, but after confirming that they had been contained and were probably not threats, the only ones who stick around are Alley Cat, Star Sapphire Kyle, Donna purportedly because she was the one who made the call to trust their story, Constantine, and Catwoman.
Jason tries not to be jealous when Catwoman ruffles her Jason’s hair before opening their cell and entering. Constantine joins her, whipping out a book that he assures them is not a Bible, but an artifact he uncovered during his travels in Eastern Europe that, unlike a Bible, is actually capable of making sure they tell the truth.
Each of them takes a turn putting their hand on the book and swearing, “I have no intentions to harm this world or any of its population. I came to this world searching for Ray Palmer from my own dimension. I will leave upon finding him or confirming he is not in this world.”
In return, Catwoman assures them they will help with their search.
Word goes out through the Justice League and all its associates to be on the lookout for a man resembling the original Atom, and to report if they’ve had any encounters with him in the past month.
In the meantime, Jason, Donna, and Kyle are escorted to a lounge where they can refuel and rest up.
Catwoman pauses at the exit after showing them the space. She searches the room until she meets Jason’s eyes. “Jason, come here.”
He doesn’t even contemplate refusing.
Once he’s in front of her, she grips his shoulders, leaning up to press a kiss to his forehead. Jason feels slightly bad about receiving it. He is not her son. But she offered it freely.
“This version of you has grown so large,” Selina says. “What did I do wrong, my kitten?”
Jason’s arms twitch at his sides. Should he embrace her in return? Can he?
He thinks he would like to, so he does.
“It’s what you did right,” he tells her, truthfully. “You seem good for your Jason.”
He releases her, and Selina gives his shoulders one more squeeze before leaving the room. She surely has more questions, but she doesn’t ask.
It’s just as well; Jason doesn’t want to explain his death, resurrection, or dip in the Pit right now. And maybe Selina was familiar enough with him to tell that this was all information she’d be getting, or maybe she’d decided that if he insisted she’d done a good job, it must be true.
Across the room, Donna and Kyle are peering at him.
Jason’s all for being a spectacle when it serves him, but he’s not feeling it right now. “What are you two looking at?”
“Nothing,” Donna claims with a smile.
Kyle doesn’t even bother to deny it, still staring at Jason as if he’s never seen him before.
Jason shakes it off and helps himself to some baby carrots sitting in the Justice League fridge.
“What are the odds Carol’s going to come in here?” he asks Kyle.
“Huh?”
Jason takes another big bite of baby carrot, letting Kyle figure it out.
“Oh, Carol. God, I kind of hope not. I don’t really know her that well. Not like you and Catwoman.”
“Barely ever talked to her,” Jason clarifies. “But I might see about changing that now. Once we get back home, I mean.”
If there had been a revelation for Jason in his alternate self’s speech, it wasn’t that good comes in different forms, but instead that Selina has always been out there trying to do good for Gotham.
Even if it’s good that isn’t conventionally seen as such. Jason likes to think he’s doing the same. Maybe talking with Selina could give him some perspective.
It’s something to be considered after Ray Palmer has been found. Along with the fact that Jason might be gay. But right now, he’s going to eat good food and enjoy that he, Donna, and Kyle are practically getting along.
Eventually, Bob returns, and it turns out that Ray Palmer is not in this universe. There’s not even a trace of him having been here like there sometimes is. However, Jason can’t bring himself to call their visit here a complete waste of time. It’s nice to know that some version of himself is not alone.