Chapter Text
The Red Hood had plans.
Jason Todd clutches a hand to his throat and watches the smoke bleed into the aching Gotham skyline. His armour doesn’t do anything to block out the cold, even as fire licks at his boots.
Contingencies on contingencies. Half a dozen safehouses around the city. A meticulous takeover of Crime Alley. The culmination of his globetrotting years training with the best teachers Talia could find, and it ends like… this.
What did he think would happen? Bouncing from person to person, searching for someone he can finally prove himself to. Nothing would ever be good enough. No amount of scheming, or fighting, or love.
His next ragged gasp tastes like the acrid, bloody moment the warehouse crumbled on his head.
If you’re careless with him, you’ll die. Do you understand?
Bruce’s voice, mocking him even now. When have any of his encounters with the Joker gone to plan? He just — was it too much to hope that Bruce would still choose him? Is it too much to wish he could let go of the boy who died and embrace the creature that crawled out of his grave?
Do you understand?
Yeah, asshole. He understands. His own recklessness got him in way over his head and now his own dumb plan is gonna kill him — again.
All that work for nothing.
The urge to lie there until he bleeds out is tempting, but the instinct to move is overpowering. Blowing out a tender breath, Jason rummages through his ash-covered utility belt until he finds his med kit. He’s no doctor, but he knows a bandage slapped onto an open throat isn’t enough. He needs real help.
Leslie better be at the clinic.
Hauling himself to his feet takes longer than it should. By the time he’s upright, he’s wheezing and blinking away spots at the edge of his vision which look suspiciously like puddles of blood. The smoke hazes everything into a dreamlike blur, but it’s clear his time with Shurik taught him a few things beyond the Joker’s location — the condemned apartment building he chose for their confrontation is a pile of rubble and flames and the flash of a black cape rummaging through the remains.
Red Hood’s plan imploded with Batman’s choice.
Time for Jason to improvise.
It takes every ounce of his remaining strength to traverse the debris, turning away from the man who left him to die. The smoke and the clouds and the dust and the ash all bleed into one horrifying nightmare as he stumbles deeper into Crime Alley, and he sends a prayer up to whoever brought him back that he’s heading in the right direction.
The light shining through the window of Leslie’s clinic feels like it's welcoming him home. Jason leans against the bricks by the back door and pounds his bloody fist against the metal until it opens.
“We’re closed. What do you—”
Leslie stops short at the sight of Jason on her doorstep. It might have only been five years, but it feels like fifty. She’s aged a lot while he’s been gone, tight frown lines pulling at her lips and forehead, but after all the stress she goes through on a daily basis he’s surprised she’s not worked herself dead.
She looks equally surprised at him escaping his early grave.
What must he look like to her? Five years has aged him too, and his time with the League and his dunk in the Lazarus Pit means he’s not the skinny little orphan she might recognise.
Did Bruce tell her about his death? Was she the one that cut the Y-shaped scar into his chest? How many more little broken birds has he delivered to her doorstep while he’s been gone?
“Jason?” she asks, incredulous, but despite everything, still hopeful.
He opens his mouth to respond and blood pours out.
“My God.” She stares for a moment, taking in the tactical gear and the white streak of hair over his head and the empty gun holsters at his hip. “Come in.”
Jason makes it three steps into the clinic before the floor rushes up to meet him.
The next time he opens his eyes, the sun is shining through the cracks in his mould-stained blinds and there’s an assassin sitting at the foot of his bed.
He blinks at her. She rises, smoothes down her League robes, and swiftly exits the room through the squeaky door.
Of course Talia kept tabs on him while he was back in Gotham. If he killed Bruce, she would be the first to hear about it. She must’ve taken him back to Nanda Parbat to recover—
—but he recognises these red sheets, and the popcorn ceiling, and...oh. He’s in the bedroom of his favourite safehouse on the border between Crime Alley and the Bowery.
A bird caws outside and he flinches like it’s a gunshot. It’s… possible Leslie gave him some strong painkillers.
He sags back into the lumpy mattress. The last time his confrontation with the Joker didn’t go as planned, she was perfectly accepting of his failure. How long she tolerates him this time will depend on how much she knows. It only took Ra’s a year to give up on him, after all.
Gun-calloused fingers search his neck and bump over rows of neat stitches.
The door opens with a wail. He keeps meaning to oil the hinges, but it never seemed worth it when he’s been burning safehouses as quickly as he secures them.
Talia, as always, doesn’t have a hair out of place. “Easy,” she says, voice as smooth as hot honey. “Don’t speak, or you will pull your stitches.”
She sits on the edge of his bed, legs crossed, and holds the glass of water by his bedside to his lips. A thousand questions wither on his tongue, but he opens his mouth to accept the poison anyway. If she wanted him dead, she could’ve left him at Leslie’s to deal with Batman’s wrath.
“Your confrontation… did not go as planned,” she hedges.
Jason couldn’t argue that even if his throat wasn’t held together by string.
“So… what now?”
That’s a good question. The Red Hood had plans. But those plans are as dead and gone as the second Robin, and once again, Jason didn’t think this far ahead.
Numbness seeps through his limbs. Since he crawled out of his own grave, Talia has been unwavering in her support. When he was a zombie who could react with violence and nothing else, she pushed him into the Lazarus Pit. When he spent hours crawling toward the Batmobile to stick a bomb to her underside, she didn’t stop him from killing her Beloved — simply pushed him in a different direction. She never complained about him killing his teachers, and didn’t ridicule him when returned home covered in the same petrol that should’ve burnt the Joker alive.
You remain unavenged, she had whispered in his ear. Bruce made his choice, and that’s as much vengeance as he’s ever gonna get.
He opens his mouth, but Talia puts a hand on his lips before he can speak. “You will damage your vocal cords. The doctor you crawled to advised you to stay silent until the stitches come out.”
He raises an eyebrow and hopes it conveys how am I supposed to answer, then?
“Spend that time considering your options,” Talia continues, hand dropping back to her side. “I must return to Nanda Parbat, but I can order my people to stay behind and take care of you.”
Jason shakes his head. Of course she has to run and take care of her real son, instead of picking up after his failures again.
Talia smiles, all teeth, and brushes the white bangs off his forehead. “I thought you might say that.”
Jason plops his head back on his pillow as the room blurs. Drugs in the water — he should’ve guessed. A sedative, a painkiller, or something stronger?
The Demon Head’s daughter hesitates in the doorway and looks back at him like she doesn’t want to leave.
He blames the drugs when he asks, “Did I make you proud?”
“Oh, Jason.” The expression on her face looks just like his dad’s; stuck between love and disgust. “Rest.”
Jason passes out with the iron taste of his question still unanswered in his mouth.
For the first week of his isolation, he spends his time sleeping, panicking about Bruce finding him, binge watching all the films he missed while he was dead, and raging at all the parental figures who failed him.
By the time he takes his stitches out on the second week, he’s losing his damn mind. Lingering on the fire escape can’t cure his cabin fever, and even if Leslie tells him not to talk unless necessary, there’s still Red Hood business he can look after while he recovers.
The new burner phone Talia left him works as well for texting his team as it does for contacting her. Max, his highest-ranking deputy, forces him to go through several rounds of verification, just like he taught them. He would feel proud, if it didn’t waste an hour of his time.
Most criminals work out of the docks on the outskirts of Crime Alley, and every Gothamite knows to avert their eyes if they see something suspicious down there. Jason claimed he hated the fishy smell when he spent Talia’s endless funds on a crumbling apartment block in the centre of the district, but he really couldn’t bear spending more time than necessary in a warehouse.
As a rule, he’s worked on his own since his death. Bruce taught him that the Dynamic Duo was a pile of stinking bullshit, and how could he trust anyone after that? But there’s no point in taking control of the drug trade when there’s no one to distribute the goods or enforce his rules, so he hired the most desperate and skilled people he could find, and gave them a place to live to ensure their loyalty.
Max is the most trustworthy of all of them. They repeatedly insist over text that they haven’t sat on their asses while he’s been recovering, but the rest of Gotham has fallen into chaos when the rumours that Red Hood was dead started to circulate.
Jason spends an afternoon attempting to wheedle Max into picking up one of his spare helmets and wandering around Crime Alley for an evening by complimenting their workout routine, but it turns out they do have a sense of self-preservation after all.
RH: We’re basically the same height. No one will notice.
M: haha ur funny
RH: I’m serious.
M: respectfully fuck off
He can’t blame them. If they could see the jagged scar on his neck, they would walk right out and never return.
He could ask Talia to send out one of her League assassins to stand in his place until he’s recovered. It’s the smart choice, and it would allow him to test whether she’ll still help him after all of his failures.
But a few weeks of vocal rest can’t stop the Red Hood. It’s not like he’s the most talkative vigilante, anyway. He left that all to Dick.
The suit — well, it survived the blast as well as military grade armour could. Jason turns the breastplate over in his hands, tracing his fingers over the pockmarked metal. Robin wasn’t made of such sturdy material; under the heat, the red-green-yellow burned and melted to his skin. This time, he got out with a few scratches and bruises and an additional pile of daddy issues.
Luckily, he has a spare.
Suiting up feels like crawling out of his grave all over again. The eye sockets of the helmet sitting in his closet stare emptily at him as he runs through a basic warmup to get his heart thumping enough to prove he’s still alive.
One plan failing does not make him a failure.
So… what now?
Until he can answer Talia’s question, he’s gonna carry on doing the one thing he excels at: crossing the line.
Traversing Crime Alley without sixteen escape routes from patrolling Bats in the back of his mind is a lot more fun than the 4D chess he’d been playing with Bruce.
Flying between the buildings, he can ignore the tight tug of the scar on his throat. In the space between the cement and sky is the only place he’s ever felt free. Felt magic.
Jason doesn’t have his eyes on any big fish tonight, so he focuses on the small crimes he’s confident he can stop even if his opponent gets a lucky hit in. Beating muggers and would-be-rapists into the ground in silence is much more satisfying than another fifteen Disney movies, even if he finds it hard to resist the urge to leave them as a splatter of guts and meat on the sidewalk.
When they get out of hospital, they’ll spread the word of Red Hood’s gentle rampage across the city.
He has no idea what he’s trying to prove — or who he’s trying to prove himself to. Batman didn’t kill him, and Bruce’s rejection won’t stop him, and no one’s left to care but him.
A scream echoes over the rooftops, and Jason fires his grapple before he can think the motion through. His boots cut through the ear-splitting wail with a resounding thud, the kris dagger Talia gave him already in his hand, but there’s no sign of trouble — just one woman tucked at the end of the alley, mouth hanging open.
She tilts her head like a startled bird, taking Jason in. Wavy blonde hair, with brown peeking through at the roots. Thick makeup that doesn’t quite disguise her age. Clothes far too skimpy for the October weather.
“You’re not—” She bites her lip and wraps her arms across her chest defensively.
“Dead?” Jason glances back toward the mouth of the alley. There’s something — a prickle in the back of his neck, a shiver running down his spine. This scene isn’t adding up.
“Good enough,” a strange voice says from above him.
Jason moves on instinct before he catches sight of the man, but he’s too late. Metal, burying into his neck again. His hands fly to the turtleneck covering his throat, but through the phantom slick of blood, he finds a dart.
Not ideal. He yanks it out and tosses it into a puddle, shoving his kris back into its holster to unsheathe his gun instead. Up. He needs to look up, it came from above — there.
A man on the fire escape. Hood up, face hidden in the darkness of Gotham twilight. Talia bought him the time of the best marksman in the world, and now he never misses. He—
The bullets bury themselves in the wall next to the man’s head, brick dust swirling around him, and he laughs.
hahAHAHaha
Jason puts his hands over his ears, but it’s not enough to block out the ringing of the Joker’s laughter in his ears. No — that’s not possible — he left him for Bruce. He’s in Arkham by now.
He sucks in a breath through his teeth. In. Hold. Out.
The buildings sway like trees in a whirlwind. They’re getting closer — they’re going to topple on him, crush him, again—
No. Drugs or poison. It’s not real. Get a grip.
In. Hold. Out.
Jason raises the gun, shuts one eye, and fires again. The man or the fire escape shifts, seesaws from side to side, clutches his arm — ah! He hit him.
Cross the line, Talia’s voice instructs him.
Raise the gun. Breathe in. Hold. His hand wobbles dangerously, and Jason staggers forward as he tries to stabilise the shot. He needs to—
— A heavy weight slams into his side and the gun clatters out of his hands. Pain jolts up Jason’s spine, and it’s only as he looks up at the glittering, ethereal woman standing over him that he realises he’s on the floor. Her mouth moves, but he can’t make out the words. For a moment, he sees blonde curls and thinks of Sheila.
“...wanted a Bat,” the man says with an accent Jason can’t quite place. He melts through the fire escape and onto the floor in one fluid movement. “This one will do.”
Jason tries to haul himself to his feet, and finds himself flat on his back instead. The alley shrinks with every one of his breaths, the walls closing in on him. Being crushed might be a nicer death than smoke inhalation.
Or the poison could kill him first.
His fingers itch to take off his mask so he can have one last deep breath of clean air, but his body is far beyond cooperating.
This is it, then. For real this time.
Will Bruce know he died? Will he care? How much grief can one man expend before he disappears so completely into himself he can never be found again?
In the stars dimmed by the light pollution, the answer to Talia’s question finally reaches him. Saving people is all well and good, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t save yourself first.
He wants to live.
Jason stares up at the collapsing Gotham skyline, and a familiar pair of blue eyes blink back at him in return.