Chapter Text
Pounding on the door woke Jason.
“Yo, yo, fucker, what the hell, your phone die?”
Jason moved and groaned—must have taken a hit or three on patrol last night. Wasn’t Roy at the door, either, and Jason couldn’t think of anyone else likely to call him fucker in casual conversation.
His arms were cold—he’d slept in jeans and a t-shirt. Not his armor, at least, that was a bitch to sleep in, but his helmet stared at him from the pillow, where another face should be. He stared back.
Well, maybe he’d just forgotten to restock this safehouse with pajamas after his last laundry run.
Ugh.
The voice outside continued. “Come on, man, we got a job, come on—” Jason really couldn’t place it; he wondered if maybe the speaker had the wrong door.
Oh, man, he thought, finding out you woke up the Red Hood and called him fucker—but the amusement was darkened by the realization that he’d need to find another safehouse. This one had been perfect for his needs, even if—
He squinted; the room looked weird. Must be the light, or one of those hits was to his head… whatever. He pulled the sheet over his helmet, instinctively cautious, and pushed up to his feet, ignoring the way his back protested.
“Come on, fucker, come on—” Man was whining now, and probably waking up the nice Chilean couple across the hall, too, and Jason didn’t even think the amusement factor would make dealing with this asshat worthwhile. But he got out of bed anyway, frowning at the pangs of soreness as he stretched—usually he remembered, if he took a beating this bad—
“Jay, seriously, I’ve been texting you for hours; we got called in—”
Jason’s head cocked involuntarily as he stumbled through the poky bachelor apartment—Jay? he wondered. Maybe it’s a trick, somehow, a plot to get me vulnerable or—
He barked his shin on the table leg and swore. Had somebody moved the table overnight? Maybe he’d shoved at it or fallen on it or—Jason really looked around for the first time since waking and thought, clearly: Oh. No. Shit.
He could hear the mental periods, like the gongs of fate.
This wasn’t the safehouse.
He’d gone to the wrong apartment.
He’d crashed in the wrong apartment. Talk about vulnerable.
And he didn’t even remember it?
That was—usually, if he was hurt that bad, the Bats carted him off to the Manor. He usually woke up from nights like this in the Cave, or the guest room that was officially-unofficially his (Bruce’s shrine to the-boy-that-was being, still, too weighed down with years-old grief for Jason to feel comfortable in it again). He usually got a patch job from Alfred and, in the morning, a sitrep from Timbo and an unrelenting hug from Dickface, unless he could claim cracked ribs. They were big on… family, and togetherness, and all that sort of Hallmark stuff, and they—the fuck, he’d taken a beating and they’d just let him wander off on his own? With a head wound?
Didn’t ring true.
…were the Bats alright? He should check, shouldn’t he—
“Jay, open up!”
Just as soon as he dealt with this idiot.
“Jason fucking Todd!”
Oh, dealing with this idiot was going to be fun.
Jason reached for his by-the-door gun, and it wasn’t there, because this wasn’t his apartment. He shrugged. Wouldn’t make much difference, in the end. Gun would be faster, but if this guy really wanted him dead he could have shot through the door. It wasn’t like Jason was some kind of slouch at hand-to-hand, if it came to that.
Someone started yelling down the hall. Presumably someone else who’d been woken by this bawling jerkoff, though Jason couldn’t make out their words. He waited out two more knocks and one more “Where are you, man?”, and then he pulled the door open sharp as a shot.
The man on the other side looked like a fish, was Jason’s first impression. Watery grey eyes bulging and mouth half-open, tongue just visible—he’d been about to start whining again, it looked like. A full head shorter than Jason, and scrawny in the old-school Crime Alley way that Jason half-remembered from his childhood. The Italian mobsters that ruled Gotham, before the city got weird: they had big enforcers and little guys. Little weasels. Eels.
This guy was an eel.
“Okay,” Jason said. “I’m up. Now.” He let a smile stretch slowly across his face. “What the fuck do you want?”
Eelman blinked at him. “What?”
“You have been calling me. A lot. Why?”
“No?” Eelman said. “No? No, fuck no, I—”
“You’ve been yellin’ my name for three minutes, asshole.”
“Ass—what the fuck. Are you—where’s Jay?”
“What?”
“Jason. Todd.”
Jason thought, hard, about just slamming this door in the idiot’s face. Instead he gestured to himself, up and down. “Present. Who’s asking?”
Eelman blinked his weepy eyes. “You’re… you’re Jason Todd?”
Well, that didn’t answer his question. Jason treated Eelman to his toothiest grin.
“Holy fuck,” Eelman said, insufficiently cowed. “What happened to you, man?”
Jason blinked. Something must have happened, after all; he’d taken a beating, right? Been abandoned by the Bats, broken into somebody’s apartment and passed out and been found there by someone who came looking for him—
Keep your friends close.
He stepped aside and waved Eelman through the door. “I dunno,” he said, as Eelman slipped through, wary, eyes on Jason, like some kind of hunted woodland creature. “Took a hit to the head, I think.”
“I saw you three weeks ago, man,” Eelman said. “A hit to the head… What the fuck.”
“Really could use an explanation or two, friend,” said Jason. Take the opportunity; you’ve set this up, asshole, don’t waste it when I’m handing you a silver platter—
“You grew,” Eelman said, voice reverent. “You—you sure you’re Jason Todd? You’re not his older brother or nothing?”
“Jesus,” Jason said.
“We were the same height!” Eelman said, and then added, “I was taller.”
Jason stared at him, incredulous. Jason had been 6'3" since he’d shaken off the green. Before that, Jason had been fifteen years old and malnourished.
Officially, if this was some kind of mind game, it was the weirdest one Jason had ever been part of.
“Three weeks,” Eelman said again. “You get shot up with super soldier serum or something?”
Jason frowned at him. “That’s not a thing. Bane venom, okay, but—”
“What?”
“What what?”
They stared in mutual incomprehension until Eelman said, “D’you recognize me?”
Jason didn’t answer for long enough that it was effectively a no.
“Man, what the fuck,” Eelman muttered. “Okay, Jason Bourne, what do you know?”
“Jason Bourne?”
“Yeah, cause he had amnesia after secret government… look, let’s just see, okay? What do you remember?”
Yeah. No. Jason wasn’t falling for this. He stayed silent.
Eelman made a face at him. “What, they take away all your personality too?”
Jason raised an eyebrow and Eelman cringed back.
“Jesus,” he said, “you can’t—we gotta come up with a cover story, man, we got a job. Oh, shit—” His white face paled further. “Tell me you remember the job, yeah?”
Jason cracked his neck. “Sure,” he lied.
“Right. Right, of course, cause nobody forgets Falcone, right?”
Jason concealed the twitch. “Sure.”
“Right. Right. Okay. So, we got a job. We say you’re… you got on some weird supplements, on a trip out of town. Right? Over to Metropolis or something—” He winced.
“We gotta go with Metropolis?” Jason said, doubtful, playing up the we.
“They got all the weird shit, man; oh, or Central City?”
“Central,” Jason said, definite, but— “Wait. What you mean, Metropolis has the weird shit?”
“Well, course they do! I mean, Central’s got its share of super weird shit too, all them speeders, and Star with Robin Hood and whatnot, but Metropolis—” Eelman winced again, habitually. “Come on, they’ve got a alien who flies and has laser eyes. What do we got? We got nothing, that’s what we got. Bout time Gotham got its own vigilante, amiright?”
***
If Jason had heard a record-scratch right then, he wouldn’t have been more surprised.
***
He said, “Right.”
“Well, anyway,” Eelman said. “Point is. I’m Dylan, you’re Jay, you got hit with something in Central—you didn’t tell me you were going?”
“This is a cover story, Dylan,” said Jason.
“Oh. Yeah. You’re amnesia guy. You got hit with something in Central and now you’re—” Dylan’s once-over was neither flattering nor subtle. “You’re jacked, man. You’re, like, big.”
Jason raised his eyebrow again, and Eelman Dylan flushed.
“Whatever,” he said. “You’re Jay, I’m Dylan, we work for Falcone, and we got a job. You coming or you want to sit on your ass playin’ Concentration til the rest of the crew start wondering if we ditched ‘em for greener pastures?”
Jason was leaning more and more towards not a mind game, but he didn’t like the options that left. He figured, better to play along. For now, at least. “Yeah,” he said. “Right behind you.”
Eelman—Dylan—grimaced, but didn’t protest, and led the way out of the apartment. As Jason crossed the threshold, Dylan asked, “You ain’t locking up?”
Jason nearly replied, “I’m the Red Hood,” before he caught himself. Whatever this was, it wasn’t his territory. Wasn’t his place or his safehouse; he wasn’t free to let his guard down here.
He said, “Slipped my mind.”
Dylan said, “Right,” doubtful, and Jason tried to be inconspicuous about hunting for the key.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Dylan, shoving the door back open and grabbing a keyring from a corkboard behind the door. “Jason fucking Bourne.”
***
Dylan drove like he was trying to overcome a death wish through aversion therapy. Jason had gone along with him, in an attempt to get his bearings, but Jason was currently debating whether hurling himself from the moving car would be the safer option. Jason was no stranger to exciting driving, obviously, but Dylan was clearly trying to set some kind of—
“Jesus,” Jason said, as they took a corner at nearly thirty miles an hour. “You want to get us where we’re going, or you want to end up wedged in a wall in—”
“Wall’s better than Eli wondering where we are,” Dylan replied.
“Eli,” Jason said, slowly. Something else was bugging him; something in the city, in the air. He couldn’t place it—it wasn’t toxin or gas or even anything out of the ordinary, nothing he could put his finger on. Something in the background; something so obvious he hadn’t seen it yet—
“Look, if you don’t remember Eli, I don’t know, what the fuck, pretend you do, okay? This job was our way up the ladder, don’t fuck it up cause you took a daytrip to Central.”
Jason squinted at him. He couldn’t tell if Dylan remembered that he himself had made up the story about Central City no more than fifteen minutes ago. Flexible attitude to reality, there, Dylan.
“Eli Garibaldi,” Jason said, questioning, and Dylan relaxed a little. “Big guy.”
Dylan snorted in derision, barrelling north over the Tri-Gate Bridge. “Not as big as you, now, Jason.” Pretty clear he was harping on the Bourne thing still.
Jason laughed, kinda, and pushed away what he was thinking. Need more data, still, he told himself, with a voice that sounded like Bruce’s. But Eli…
Yeah, Jason remembered Eli Garibaldi. Eli Garibaldi used to be the deputy head of Johnny Viti’s operation. Never made it to heading one of his own, though, because… well. Because the last thing Jason remembered about Eli Garibaldi was Eli Garibaldi’s head, staring at him out of a duffel bag.
Eli Garibaldi.
Alive.
In Gotham.
Working for Falcone.
Despite the Bats’ propensity for it, coming back to life really wasn’t all that common. And Dylan, whatever else he might be, seemed excitable. He’d probably have mentioned, if Garibaldi had recently been reanimated.
No Red Hood, here, thought Jason, ignoring his cautious Bruce-shaped instinct to hold off on conclusions. No vigilantes in Gotham at all.
So… what happened to Bruce?
More urgently, if not more important: was he looking at time travel or dimension fuckery? Dylan knew someone named Jason Todd, but maybe—or maybe it was a magic spell? Maybe all of this was in his head, which would suck, because he had more than enough messed up in there already—
“Garibaldi,” Jason said again.
“What?” said Dylan, rounding another corner at Mach 3. Stupid way for the Red Hood to die, Jason thought, in an accident after all this—
He said, “Nothing.”
***
The clock in Dylan’s car said 12:53 pm when he finally pulled to a stop outside a curling rink. Jason breathed again and pointed at the clock. “Clock’s busted,” he said.
Dylan looked at him strangely. “What?”
“12:53 pm.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s dark.”
“It’s Gotham.”
Which, yeah, fair. Jason squinted at the sky. “Huh. Thought it was after sunset.” He paused. “Eli Garibaldi’s meeting us in the middle of the day?”
“He’s not meeting just us, and why wouldn’t he? That super soldier stuff make you nocturnal or something?”
Jason almost laughed. He said, “Or something,” and Dylan shot him a dubious glare. Jason shrugged. “Seems weird, to do stuff midday, is all.”
“Okay,” Dylan said. “Whatever.” He got out of the car.
So, Dylan, Jason thought. Excitable, flexible attitude to reality, rolls with shit pretty damn well—pretty unconvincingly well, really; if Dylan had been working for Jason and brought along someone without any kind of real vetting at all, just based on the assertion that something unspecified but weird had happened… well. If Dylan had been working for Jason, Dylan would have been out of a job.
But Jason wasn’t empowered to fire Dylan and, well, Falcone deserved the enforcers he could get.
And you could say this about Dylan: he could drive. It had taken them only—
Oh shit.
That had been what Jason had been seeing. What had been lurking in the back of his mind, and he should have picked up on faster, except that everything was so messed up that it hadn’t really registered as weird.
They weren’t in Crime Alley. He hadn’t come from Crime Alley. He couldn’t imagine a Jason Todd, any Jason Todd, who didn’t live in Crime Alley. Didn’t have it in his bones.
But they’d come from the south. “We’re by the docks,” he said, getting out of the car himself.
“Yeah?”
We’re west of the stadium. No connection to the Alley at all.
He’d been dead, for a bit, which of course he didn’t remember, and then he’d been briefly undead, and then he’d been Pit-mad, but through it all, except maybe the dead part, Jason had known where he’d come from. If this world’s—spell’s?—Jason, if he wasn’t from the Alley…
It was like the planet had turned beneath Jason’s feet.
Dylan said, “You got more weird geography stuff? Garibaldi’s waiting.”
***
Garibaldi was.
In the very animate and non-decapitated flesh. The makings of a crew were gathered around him: a couple of heavies, a greasy guy who was probably a driver or in IT, a gunman. Lanky guy in a suit, an accountant or maybe a lawyer. The sort the mafia kept on retainer.
Jason gave the room in general a nod.
“You’re late,” said Garibaldi. Not so high up he wouldn’t talk for himself, then, that was good. His eyebrows beetled over dark, deep-set eyes, surveying Jason. “And you brought a friend?”
His tone was ominous and Dylan jerked up. But then, instead of the (stupid) story about Central City, Dylan blurted: “Jason’s got the flu! This is his cousin. Uh. John.”
“John,” repeated Garibaldi, and the look he was giving Dylan almost made Jason regret killing him. Dylan flushed. “Huh,” Garibaldi said, turning his attention to Jason. “You going with that?”
“Nah,” said Jason. “I’m Jason.”
The accountant-maybe-lawyer looked hard at him, but Garibaldi just nodded, with the impersonal mien of the guy in charge. Not making things a thing, not yet. Jason knew the look, because he’d given the look. Garibaldi said, “Didn’t you used to be smaller?”
Jason shrugged. “Didn’t we all?”
Eli grinned, sharp. “Recently.”
Jason shrugged again. “Pills.”
A pause. “No way?”
“Yeah,” Jason said, improvising wildly, “guy I knew in Central, he was working on a supplement.”
“Huh.”
“Kinda unstable, though—”
“But you’ll get more of it?”
Aw, shit, now the Falcones would be wanting magic steroids. Jason tried, “Was a one-off sorta deal—”
Eli interrupted. “One pill for that?”
Jason was getting the sense that other-Jason-Todd was, uh, not a particularly impressive physical specimen. Well, he thought, somewhat irrationally, s’what happens when you turn your back on the Alley.
He thought fast. Central was weird, Dylan had said, speeders and things, so hopefully they had their share of explosions too: “Yeah, see,” he tried, “his lab got raided, and it kinda blew up. I’ll see if anybody salvaged anything, but I ain’ hopeful.”
“You do that,” said Eli.
“Well, like I said. S’a bit unstable. He’d only just figured it out. I was patient zero, kinda. And he died in the raid.”
“Just like Captain America,” said the lawyer / accountant, a craggy-faced man with a rude smile. Face destined for a duffel bag, if ever there was one.
“Um,” said Jason, drawing it out. “I mean, I guess, if you’re a nerd?” That was the second Marvel reference someone had made this morning, and if this was a dream or particularly weird dimension fuckery, and Captain America was real—But the rudeness had done its job. The lawyer looked irritated but Eli just snorted.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s see if it’s any use.” He half-turned away. “But also,” he said over his shoulder. “Miller.” Dylan stiffened. “The next time you bring in somebody I’ve never seen before, you’re gonna want a better heads-up than jus’ walking in. And the next time you—either of you—lie to me, or hide anything from me, or try to…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.