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Jason wasn’t supposed to be here. Chinatown wasn’t his territory, even if he had been expanding through Somerset. The Bowery and East End kept him on his toes and there was a whole new set of rules on the other half of the island that Jason hadn’t begun to break down.
But he was here anyway, on the trail of some goons to try and find out where Black Mask was hiding his latest shipment. The idiot thought he could hide from Red Hood simply by moving territory, like Jason hadn’t been trained by a man that was referred to as the World’s Greatest Detective. Unfortunately, news of an Arkham breakout had spooked the goons and so Jason was left in the middle of Chinatown, poking desultorily through warehouses and abandoned buildings to see if he could pick up on some clues.
He wouldn’t admit to anyone how the alert nearly caused a panic attack before Jason remembered that the clown was well and truly dead. No one came back from a blown-out skull.
Whoever escaped Arkham couldn’t be as big a threat as the Joker, so Jason continued his search without worrying about whether a Rogue would materialize out of the shadows.
The trouble, as it so happened, didn’t find him. He found it.
It was the last of the warehouses on his list and immediately his suspicions rose. There was a loud bang when he entered, unconnected to his silent entry via skylight, and dim lights shone on the warehouse floor. He could hear voices.
No one stayed to work in an Arkham breakout unless they had a personal investment in the matter.
Jason dropped onto the level of the catwalks and froze.
For an instant, all he saw was green. Red and yellow and black, but that didn’t matter, all that mattered was the shining, gleaming R on the kid that should’ve never had it, on the costume that should’ve been buried with him, on the name that Jason couldn’t even stand to think.
It took a few seconds for the haze to dissipate enough to realize the Replacement’s predicament.
“Imagine my luck,” a huge, hulking behemoth of a man crooned in a voice at odds with his overly muscled mass, “to run into a little bird the moment I’m free. Truly divine providence, is it not?”
The Replacement didn’t answer, because he was currently being strangled a foot off the floor.
“I broke the Bat, but he didn’t break,” the man growled, shaking the kid like an errant kitten. Choked gasps drifted up to Jason as the Replacement tried to pry those thick fingers free. “But you—he broke for you, once. He’ll do it again.” Large, radioactively green tubes threaded into the back of the man’s neck. Jason wanted to destroy them on sight.
The Replacement choked out something that sounded an awful lot like a swear. The man sneered, his grasp tightening, until the kid fell utterly silent. His fingers spasmed on the grip before dropping.
“Don’t worry,” the man soothed. “It will be quick and easy. Like falling asleep.”
“I can assure you it’s not,” Jason called down. “Don’t teach the kid misinformation.”
The man paused, staring up at Jason in both confusion and disbelief, his grasp on the Replacement loosening slightly. It loosened a whole hell of a lot faster when Jason unloaded a clip into that tree trunk of an arm.
Jason ignored the deep bellow of rage as the man swung back, dropping down and grabbing the limp pile of red-black-yellow to haul him away. “Jesus Christ,” Jason swore when he saw that the bullets had only halted the monster of a man for a moment. “What are they putting in the water these days?”
Luckily, Jason had several grenades and judicious use bought them some more time as he retreated with the Replacement to a more defensible position.
“What’s his deal?” Jason asked, turning to the kid and nudging him to be more cooperative. “Killer Croc decide to go vegan or something?” Sheesh, it was like Jason had to do all the work out here. Surely, the Replacement could spare a moment in gasping for breath to at least thank him.
Jason stared at the Replacement’s purpling face and realized he wasn’t gasping for breath. He wasn’t breathing at all.
“Shit,” Jason immediately dove for the kid’s utility belt, ignoring the kid’s writhing to get out a tube and gauze. He was clearly trying to breathe, chest spasming as a hand clawed at his bruising neck, but nothing was making it through the soundless wheezes. “Stay still,” Jason warned as he finally drew out a clean knife.
The Replacement did not appear to be fully onboard with the current course of action, but protests were for people capable of respiration. Jason grabbed the kid’s jaw to hold him still and placed the tip of the knife in the hollow of that fluttering throat.
A small, neat incision. Jason had always been detail-oriented. He threaded the tube in with fingers that did not tremble, and packed gauze around the wound until he could no longer see it. The tape job was haphazard, but there was air whistling through the tube as the kid stopped fighting and started breathing, and Jason sat on his haunches and inhaled deeply.
Jesus fuck, he wanted to say, or perhaps, that was too close, or maybe, don’t you ever do that to me again. Unfortunately, that was when he registered the footsteps.
“Goddammit,” Jason exhaled, straightening. He felt a pang of loss for his rocket launcher, which would’ve sure come in handy when taking on a guy that appeared to have taken a bath in steroids, and stalked out to face his opponent. “Oi, fuckface! Who the hell are you?”
“They call me Bane,” the growl came out of the wisps of smoke like a real monster. Unsurprisingly but definitely disappointingly, he’d shrugged off a grenade to the face the same way he’d ignored the bullets. “Who are you? Who dares to interrupt my feud with Batman?”
Jason was almost offended. “If you’re feuding with Batman, you’re going to have to get in line, pal,” Jason sneered. “I’ve already called dibs.”
“Have you?” Bane settled into a fighting stance. “Then I’ll just take it from you!”
The guy was fast, Jason had to admit, incongruous for his size, but Jason had tangled with the League of Assassins and a single doped-up meathead wasn’t going to stop him. The tubes were the target—he didn’t know what the fuck those were pumping into the giant, but best case scenario, destroying them would incapacitate Bane.
Jason jumped clear of Bane’s swipes, lashing out with his knifes at every scrap of skin he could reach. The wounds were nothing but mosquito bites to a man like that, but mosquito bites still fucking stung.
Bane roared, loud and vicious, spinning forward with a kick that would’ve taken Jason’s head clean off if Jason hadn’t ducked underneath it and slammed a steel-toed boat against Bane’s knee. The man stumbled back, caught off-guard, and Jason grinned in vicious satisfaction when Bane retreated, limping, to lick his wounds.
“I haven’t heard of a new vigilante in Gotham,” Bane growled, moving in a slow, careful circle.
Jason matched him, unwilling to cede any ground. “I’m not a vigilante.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” Bane cracked something that might’ve been a smile. “What are you doing here, then?”
“Making sure you pick on someone you own size,” Jason snarled, lunging for the attack.
Bane met him head-on, but instead of swiping with his knife, Jason stabbed it home, hoping it hit some key nerves in its slash through Bane’s wrist. Before the giant could react to that, Jason spun around him, using the man’s mass against him as he swung the second knife—slicing clear through one of the green tubes.
The liquid escaped with a hiss as Bane shouted.
Jason didn’t waste any time. The kid was somewhere in the warehouse, incapacitated and unable to defend himself, and Jason needed to take Bane out long enough to grab the kid and escape. He wasn’t in the habit of wishing for an inconveniently timed Bat to appear in the rafters, but right now, he was hoping that the Replacement had had the common sense to call for backup before he’d been used as a punching bag.
Three grenades left, and Bane moved too fast for aim to be of any use. The guns, next—Jason was no slouch at marksmanship but he couldn’t get a clear angle on the tubes and every bullet slamming into Bane’s back just seemed to make him angrier. By the time Jason was rifling through his pockets for more ammo, gaze on the heaving, bloody figure glaring at him, he was staring to think he was in over his head.
He maybe should’ve gotten a crash course on the Rogues that popped up during his time away before he barreled straight into a fight with them.
“You will lose this fight,” Bane intoned, voice at once a threat and a warning. “Even the Bat himself couldn’t defeat me.”
“Good thing I’m better than him,” Jason quipped back, slotting in his last cartridge of ammo.
Jason was more sparing this time, waiting to have a clear shot, ducking and dodging Bane’s attacks. The man barely looked winded while Jason was starting to feel the burning sensation of exertion through his limbs.
It only took a second.
One second where Jason was too slow to dodge, one failed block, one clipped punch that felt like a sledgehammer to the ribs. Jason couldn’t stop himself from doubling over with a wheeze, reacting too slow to prevent the thick hand wrapping around his neck.
He fired all the bullets in his gun. Even at point-blank range, Bane only grunted. He didn’t let go, and Jason saw stars as his windpipe constricted under the pressure.
“You have deprived me of my prey.” Bane’s voice was both too-close and distant. “So you shall serve instead.”
The grip on his neck tightened and let go. Jason had just enough time to realize he was flying through the air before he crashed into shelving. He dragged himself free, gasping for breath, but couldn’t dodge the kick that sent him sweeping across the floor.
“First, to pay you back in kind.”
The kick came when Jason was trying to scramble back up. It bore down on his knee, slamming him back against the ground with a sharp crack that echoed through the warehouse. The scream was first, almost before the pain, as Jason clutched desperately at his broken leg.
“Let’s see how much trouble you can cause after this.”
Another kick, slamming into his ribs, and when Jason coughed it tasted like blood. The heel of a boot crushing his fingers and winning another hoarse scream. A blow aimed at his shattered knee and pain washed fully over him as he writhed against the ground, unable to withstand the onslaught.
It wasn’t like Jason hadn’t had beatdowns before. He’d grown up in Crime Alley. He’d been murdered by the Joker. But he’d never been batted around by a villain so far out of his league.
“Have you learnt your lesson now?”
Jason couldn’t help it; he laughed. It was a choked, wheezing thing, thin and high with low oxygen, broken by the fire coursing through him, but it was there nonetheless. He tilted his helmet to see Bane in his blurry vision. “I never learn my lesson,” he forced out, harsh and bitter. “Worse men than you have tried.”
“Well.” He couldn’t see Bane anymore, only dim blobs of light. “I shall have to try harder.”
A sudden sensation of weightlessness followed—Jason assumed he’d been picked up to be thrown again and braced for the landing. Instead, he was slammed straight down.
The pain was beyond words. Jason screamed, or cried, he couldn’t tell. His view of the world spun dizzyingly, fresh fire lancing agonizingly up his spine as he landed in a limp sprawl. He couldn’t see Bane, he couldn’t hear him, he couldn’t breathe—it hurt, it hurt so much, so fucking much—his spine, it was his spine, he couldn’t breathe—make it stop, make it stop, please for the love of anything, make it stop—why was it always a fucking warehouse—
Jason’s last thought before the darkness consumed him completely was that that patch of shadows looked a lot like Batman.
Awareness came slowly; a drop of color bleeding through the fog. First was the ceiling, with dots of glimmering paint on a dark blue sky. A familiar pattern, and he traced it with his eyes, mapping out constellations, before he understood why it was so familiar.
Bookshelves against the far wall. The door to the closet, covered in a band poster he remembered getting from the Titans, music he’d never really followed but unwilling to get rid of their present. The window, right where he remembered it, the barest glimpse of the greenery visible in the sunlight. The bedframe of solid wood, the bars he curled his fingers around when he was having trouble sleeping. Even the sheets were a familiar shade of navy.
The teenager curled up in his armchair, tapping away at a tablet, was new.
Jason didn’t know if he’d made a sound—his body felt curiously distant in a way that made him leery of investigating—but the kid looked up, brushing dark hair out of his eyes and blinking at him. His curled up posture in the large, comfy armchair made him look smaller. Or perhaps that was the dark, vivid ring of bruises around his neck.
Jason winced when he saw the gauze taped over the incision wound.
The kid opened his mouth, shut it again, and gestured with his hands. Jason squinted. The kid’s face scrunched up before he stilled and repeated one of them, slow and deliberate. Hand up, fingers near the lips, before pulling forward. Thank you.
“No problem,” Jason tried to say, voice barely a rasp. He coughed and tried again. “What happened?”
Tim started signing again, blew out a frustrated breath, and turned to his tablet. Within seconds, a disembodied, mechanical voice echoed from the tablet.
“Bane collapsed my trachea. Fixed it, but I’m not supposed to talk for a while.” No mention of the slit throat. “Thanks for helping.”
Jason snorted. The movement made something ache in his chest. “I wasn’t going to just leave you there, kid. Batman would’ve murdered me if I let you die.”
Tim narrowed his eyes. “If that’s what makes you feel better,” echoed, deadpan, from the tablet. The little shit.
“Speaking of,” Jason had to clear his throat again, “uh, why am I here? Kinda expected to wake up in a hospital.” Or in the grave.
As though Tim could read his thoughts, he responded, “You’re dead.” Jason stared at him. “Legally,” Tim clarified. “Bruce decided to bring you here for both privacy and security.”
Bruce didn’t have to bring him anywhere at all. Jason didn’t really think that Batman would’ve dropped him off in Arkham, but plopping him in a hospital as a John Doe wasn’t that hard.
Tim was busy typing again and Jason waited. “You freaked him out big-time,” came out in that same eerie, impersonal voice. “He’s never going to let you out of his sight again.”
“I didn’t—”
“I don’t know if you’ve met Overprotective Bruce, but get ready for a reintroduction—”
“Tim?” called out a voice from the hallway, tired and soft. “Are you talking to someone—”
The door opened, too fast, too soon, and Jason shrunk back into the pillows, caught between hiding and playing dead. Bruce blinked at the two of them, one hand still on the doorknob. There were dark circles under his eyes and unshaven stubble and Jason was struck by how old he looked.
Something pinged from Tim’s direction and Jason jerked his gaze that way. The kid held up his tablet so Jason could see. Have fun, was scrawled messily across it, and the kid shot him a smirk before jumping up from the armchair. He patted Bruce on the arm as he slipped around him and left.
Jason swallowed. Somehow, between his dad and the kid he’d beaten into the ground, he wanted the kid back.
“You’re awake,” Bruce said, sounding lost. “You’re—you’re awake.” There was too much hope in that tone for Jason’s comfort, tugged between fear and desperation.
I can see you’re a detective, flashed across Jason’s mind. What gave it away, got stuck in his throat. You look like you’ve seen the dead, danced on his lips before Jason swallowed it back down.
“Yeah,” he said inanely. “I’m awake.”
Bruce drew in a shuddering breath and nearly collapsed on the bed. “How—how are you feeling?” he asked, hoarse and intense. His gaze kept roaming over Jason’s face like he was worried it would vanish.
“Doped to high hell,” Jason said. Everything was fuzzy and distant and sickeningly cloying, like he was wading through cotton candy. “I assume that’s your doing.”
“I—you were—the injuries—” Bruce took in another deep, shaky breath and closed his eyes for a moment. “You’ll make a full recovery.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not Jason.
“Well, yeah, if death couldn’t keep me down, I doubt some meathead with more muscle than brains will manage,” Jason snarked, trying to beat down the tide of emotions. His throat was prickling, eyes itchy, and he curled the hand not mummified into the bedcovers.
He made a mental note to hunt down Bane with his rocket launcher. He wanted to see that guy’s insides on the outside.
“Don’t,” Bruce choked out, like he could see Jason’s thoughts. Jason narrowed his eyes—if Bruce thought he could stop him from revenge—
But Bruce laid a hand above the cast, achingly gentle, and when he looked at Jason, his eyes glimmered with unshed tears.
“I lost you once,” Bruce murmured, voice breaking. “Jay, I can’t. I can’t lose you again.”
Jason swallowed thickly. His eyes were beginning to prickle, face going warm in a familiar sensation and he wished dearly that he could hide behind his helmet. “I wasn’t trying to,” he muttered, scowling at his feet. He could feel the weight of the brace strapped around his knee and the one digging into his back. “Next time I’ll let the Replacement expire, how about that?”
“Jay,” Bruce said, low and mournful, and Jason snapped his gaze back to his father. “I don’t want to save one son at the cost of another,” he said.
The words were soft, but they sliced deep.
I’m not your son, Jason wanted to spit back. Fuck you, another great choice. Why didn’t you murder the clown, then, and all the pent up rage and frustration and hurt he’d pushed aside in favor of ignoring the Bats.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. He held his eyes open as long as he could, but it didn’t stop the first tear from spilling over and tracing down his cheek.
Bruce reached out and brushed it aside. “Oh, Jay-lad,” he said in the same hushed, solemn tone. “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”