Chapter Text
Jason had been chasing the same woman around Crime Alley for the past half an hour, and he was getting sick of it.
Most of the time, these chases were over before they even began. Jason was stronger and more agile than most of his opponents, and even if they did get away, he knew the neigbourhood like the back of his hand and could use rooftops to take shortcuts. Catching her should have been near effortless.
…The problem was that this person was magical. Because of course she was. So every time Jason got too close, the magician would fire off some spell or something, disappear in mid-air, and then Jason would have to spend the next few minutes trying to figure out which alleyway she was in now. He didn’t know why she only teleported a few alleys over, but he also didn’t know why she had decided to attack Jason in the first place, so maybe she was just stupid.
At this point, he was almost ready to give up. As Jason’s frustration grew, so did the green tinge over his vision, and if he didn’t have a way to vent it soon he was going to do something stupid like punch a wall or some random civilian.
But just as that thought crossed Jason’s mind, he turned a corner to find the magician at the end of an alleyway, wheezing. Evidently using whatever teleportation spell she had been using, even if it had been short range, had exhausted her.
Jason’s lips turned up into a manic grin under the mask. Finally.
As he stalked towards her, relishing in the way she was clearly shaking with fear, the magician fumbled for a notebook. Jason was too deep in his satisfaction and glee to realize that letting someone who clearly knew magic to look through a book of what was obviously spells was a bad idea.
“You messed with the wrong person,” Jason’s voice echoed throughout the alleyway. The helmet made his voice sound flat and unaffected rather than excited at the chance to finally vent his frustration, but the magician still stumbled back and fell against the wall. The book fell from her hands and landed open on a random page next to her.
Jason laughed and took another step forward. The magician’s eyes flitted towards the open book by her side, and she shot her hand out towards Jason as she shouted something unintelligible.
For one single second it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Jason was still at least a little bit lucid, because he finally noticed the notebook and took a step backwards instead of continuing his intimidation, but it was too late. Something was already happening.
On the next step back, he somehow tripped over his own feet and barely managed to catch himself on the pavement.
Vaguely, Jason registered the magician heaving a sigh of relief and standing up on wobbly legs, the notebook back in her hands. But then his vision was swimming in and out of focus and every part of his body started tingling painfully, and just as he registered the feeling of his body shrinking, he passed out cold.
Jason woke up to someone nudging him in the ribs with something cold and hard.
“D’ya think it’s dead?” a fairly young voice asked.
“Dunno,” a closer and older voice responded, and then the nudging turned into a full-out kick.
Somehow, this kick was enough to briefly lift Jason’s body off of the pavement, and his eyes flew open as an instinctive yowl flew out of his mouth. A yowl?
“What the hell!” the younger voice, coming from what looked to be a young girl, exclaimed.
Jason meanwhile scrambled to get his footing. Everything was wrong. He wasn’t an idiot, he could feel the fact that he had four paws and no clothes and a tail, and also that he wasn’t even a foot tall, so it didn’t take much thought to realize that he was somehow now a cat. Goddamn magicians.
“Jesus,” the older person said, voice tinged with disgust. “I really thought it was dead. Let’s go, Katie, black cats are bad luck.”
With two wary looks backwards, the two people hurried out of the alley, leaving Jason alone to take stock of his surroundings.
Right. He was a cat. A quick glance back proved that the magician was long gone, but the sky didn’t seem any darker or lighter, so he couldn’t have been unconscious for that long.
Using the cat’s limbs seemed instinctive, because it didn’t take long for Jason to figure out how to jump up onto a rooftop (via a dumpster and a window ledge). From his new viewpoint he took a quick scan of the neighbouring alleyways for the magician, but he couldn’t see anything.
Great. She could be anywhere now.
That was a problem for another day, Jason decided, because he felt exhausted . But he was also extremely cold, so he had to find a place to nap. Why had he made all of his safehouses impossible to enter without half a dozen steps that were impossible to do in his current form, exactly?
But whatever. Jason knew what it was like to live on the streets, so he found somewhere warm enough for the rest of the night eventually, and curled up into a ball.
When he woke up again, the sky was bright, and Jason was now hungry instead of tired. By a stroke of luck though, he actually knew someone who left out food for stray animals (a rare exception in Gotham), and he wasn’t too far from her place.
Navigating Gotham in the daytime was substantially harder than during the night. As the person from last night had said, he was a black cat (which a look at his own paws confirmed), so melting into the shadows was kind of his main defense against being kicked by random people or kidnapped by cult members or something. But whatever, he was Robin the Red Hood, he could handle it.
So he did, and the old lady was there crocheting on her back porch (honestly he wasn’t sure what else she ever did). When she saw him, she brightened and immediately went in to bring him some cat food. It was disgusting, but Jason had eaten far worse.
…And now what to do with himself.
Find the magician, obviously, that was his main goal. These spells usually wore off with time, he remembered that much from working with magic users in the Justice League, but he couldn’t really afford that what with his goals of becoming a crime lord in the near future. Not to mention his other, more distant, plans of finding the new Robin and permanently grounding him.
…Actually, on the topic of Robin… now that was a good use of his time. The Red Hood couldn’t be seen picking fights with Robin until the big showdown, because then the Bat would come in and ruin his plans. But some random alley cat attacking the kid? Nobody would bat an eye at that.
His cat lips couldn’t properly curl into a grin, but Jason felt a rush of glee at the thought. Maybe he would be fine being in this form for a little while.
