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It’s a trap.
It’s such an obvious trap that Jason Todd can’t keep his tongue still. He virulently cusses himself out inside his red helmet. He’s been back in Gotham for a grand total of seven hours, and every single plan he spent years meticulously crafting has already gone up in smoke.
It was only pure dumb luck that he overheard some two-bit thugs laughing cruelly and carelessly dropping the type of intel that would get their tongues cut out by their bosses if they were discovered.
“Did you hear? Nightwing’s been caught.”
“It’s about time someone clipped the bastard’s wings.”
Jason stares at the warehouse that looms in the Gotham night like a derelict mausoleum. According to the intel that the thugs gave him after he put the fear of himself into them and the ringleader pissed his pants, Nightwing is inside.
“It’s a trap,” Jason hisses to himself as he scouts the perimeter of the building.
Yet, like an idiot, he’s still here. Because even though he’s filled with rage at how things played out in the past, there’s still a whisper in the back of his head that says he has to check things out. That Nightwing might need help if this is legit. If Jason is closest.
“It’s a trap,” he snarls, irritated at the childish voice in his head. It belongs to a boy who died in a Robin costume that won't let him walk away.
There’s no question that it’s a trap. The only question left, really, is what kind of trap it is. Is Dick Grayson inside, all strung up and beaten to hell like Jason once was in a warehouse in Ethiopia? Is it a trick meant to lure Batman into the building in a rescue attempt in order to take out the Bat? Is it a lie meant to bring Dick himself, in order to investigate why the word on the street is that he’s being held hostage?
“Just walk away,” Jason snaps at himself. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
From the outside, the warehouse is eerily silent.
One way or another, Jason has to make a decision. He can abandon Nightwing, if the dickface is even in there, and continue on as best as he can, or Jason can give up his own aspirations of vengeance. It’s a decision he's already made, as much as he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. He hates that he’s worried about Dickhead after all these years.
“What are you doing?” he snaps at himself as he completes his cursory surveillance. “How long will it take you to learn that they only bring pain?”
Jason grits his teeth so hard they might actually crack. He was so very close to getting things done exactly the way he wanted. Years of vengeance were about to culminate in his carefully laid plans. If he hadn’t overheard those thugs talking, if he had just ignored what they said, if—
His teal blue eyes close as Jason takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and then repeats this at least four more times until he is calm enough to accept the decision he's made. He doesn’t like the decision, he despises that Dick still has enough power to sway him emotionally, but he accepts it. Jason cracks his neck to get some of his remaining agitations unloaded, and then he makes his way to the rooftop so that he can get inside and rescue his predecessor.
“Assuming Dickface is even in there,” he grumbles.
If Jason is lucky, this will just be an unfounded rumor on the street. Perhaps, if he’s very lucky, it’s false intel that someone “leaked” to draw Nightwing away from something else happening in town tonight. And if that’s the case, Jason will gleefully pick back up every single plan he’s pushed aside to be here, right now, like a stray dog begging for scraps and affection from the master who abandoned it in the first place.
Jason keeps a close eye out as he gets on top of the roof. The last thing he wants is for Batman to see him. Not yet, anyhow. Maybe his plans are destroyed, but that doesn't mean anything has to change. Not in regards to what Bruce owes him.
Like most of the warehouses in the district, there are filthy skylights at the top. It's basically an open invitation to the Bats, or anyone ballsy enough to come through the roof. He rubs the sleeve of his jacket against the glass, but it doesn't do much at all to clear the sightlines.
Jason slowly pries one open, freezing as the metal frame shrieks in protest.
"Oh sh—!"
He rolls instinctively to the side, but there's no hail of bullets shattering the glass and slamming into his body armor. In fact, it's hauntingly silent. Jason grinds his teeth together and waits. Nothing. No bullets, no criminals screaming threats, no mobsters, nothing.
And for the first time, Jason wonders if, maybe, Nightwing's corpse is all that waits in the warehouse.
He doesn't know how he feels about that ... at first. And then, suddenly, Jason knows.
Fear and guilt take him by surprise as he finds himself trying once again to open the shrieking metal-framed window. Jason dying in a warehouse is a series of nightmare memories he will never escape. He doesn’t want to add Dick’s mangled corpse on a warehouse floor to his nightmares as well.
He leaps through easily, diligently scanning his surroundings, desperate to find out what has happened.
As Jason touches down on a catwalk, he stops breathing at the gruesome sight that greets him. Nightwing is chained to a wall and he's so still and so pale from this vantage point that Jason almost loses it right then and there. If Dick is dead, if someone murdered Jason’s brother, then he’s going to—
Nightwing's head moves.
Not like a twitch of dying nerves either, but like an attempt to lift his head and look around him. His suit is intact as far as Jason can see, but there is a lot of blood on the ground beneath Nightwing. Had he been stabbed? Was he bleeding out?
Jason curls his fingers around the rail of the catwalk to stop himself from vaulting off of it without properly assessing the situation. Nightwing might be an absolute bastard at times, but he’s not weak. If whatever took him down is still around … well, whoever did it won’t live long enough to realize their mistake.
Everything tells him to leap down and rescue Nightwing, but Jason is no longer the type to leap before he looks. The reason his plans are in shambles is because they existed in the first place. He had actually taken the time to make meticulous, detailed plans!
So, even as the puddle of blood on the warehouse floor spreads, Jason knows he has to do reconnaissance before going down there. Ethiopia taught him all too well about the consequences if he doesn’t. He will check to be sure that no one can sneak up on him before going down to Nightwing.
Even though he weighs a good hundred pounds more than he used to when he was Robin, Jason hasn't lost the ability to be light on his feet. He scouts the entire warehouse from the catwalks.
Nothing.
No thugs. No goons. Not even a camera that he can find.
“What is this?” Jason hisses, even more suspicious than he was before. It doesn’t make sense. “Unless—” Jason swallows roughly. Unless it’s a body dump site.
Finally convinced he won't be literally stabbed in the back if he checks on Nightwing (Dick, that's his big brother bound in chains and shackles and bleeding), Jason crosses over to the catwalk that passes right over where Nightwing is strung up.
Then, once he realizes what he is seeing, once he clearly sees what the shadows disguised before, Jason rips off his helmet and vomits in it.
Dick's soul wings aren't tucked safely inside of his skin. They are out and blending into the shadows. Dick knows the rules; no wings in costume. So … Jason doesn’t even want to imagine what happened to get Dick to free them. His black feathers are covered in blood that drips down to join the widening pool beneath him.
Someone pinioned him.
All thoughts of vengeance and planning, all thoughts of hurting Nightwing or his family, stutter to a halt in Jason's mind as he spits the taste out of his mouth. This is … he has no words for how utterly cruel this is.
Jason sets his helmet on the catwalk and, only once he's sure that he can hang on to the ladder without falling off, does he rush down.
How did this happen? How?
Whoever is responsible for this is now on the same list as Joker. Monsters who deserve the most brutal of deaths.
Jason draws up short as he finally hears a sound, a sound that shatters his heart into a million pieces. The soft, whimpering cries of a broken man. His brother isn't dead. Oh, no. Worse, his brother is distraught, broken, and destroyed. Because Jason has a creeping suspicion that not only does Nightwing know how much his life has changed, but he now theorizes that Dick was awake for the whole process.
Jason steps up to the man and forces himself to look, to pay attention to the details, no matter how grisly. He needs to see because maybe it will tell Jason who would dare to do such a thing. One piece of evidence is all he needs to butcher whoever is responsible for this. Just one.
Dick's soul wings are coated in blood. It spills down his feathers like tar, dripping quietly to the warehouse floor like something out of the most macabre horror films.
"J-Jason?" Dick cries, voice hoarse and broken as if he's screamed so long and loud it shredded his throat.
He stills, one hand extended toward his brother. Dick must be in agony indescribable, and yet he still manages to recognize Jason. Years later, more than twice the weight he was the last time Dick saw him, over a foot taller and … Dick really is an incredible detective.
He can’t even be mad that Dick just used his real name in uniform.
"Hey, Dickiebir—" Jason bites his tongue and tries not to throw up again as Dick sobs and flinches.
Dick's wings have been pinioned. He ... the boy who was Robin. The man who has spent more of his life in the air than he has on the ground will never fly again.
And that ... that's just—
"I died?" Dick sobs. "Oh." He shakes as blood drips, drips, drips off his ruined wings. "That's better than living the rest of my life on the ground."
Jason feels sick; he feels shaky. Every bit of his self-righteous rage dies as the man he always looked up to assumes he's dead.
There’s no denying that Jason’s plans for the Bats were harsh, perhaps even cruel. But this … this is just evil. Even at his most enraged, he never would have even entertained this scenario.
"Dick, look at me," he whispers as gently as he can.
“You came for me,” Dick says, voice hoarse and tears spilling from his domino.
Dick must surely believe that Jason is a grim specter that’s come to take him to be reunited with his family.
Worse, Jason knows Dick is likely wishing for it to be the truth. Because facing a lifetime permanently grounded, unable to touch the sky, would probably be Dick’s worst nightmare. Especially given how Tony Zucco arranged razor-thin wires during what became known as The Flying Graysons’ final performance to slice up their wings when they tried to save themselves from a fatal crash against the ground.
Whoever did this to Nightwing, to Dick Grayson, to this acrobat of the skies, had to have known what they were doing when they passed down this death sentence in the form of cutting those gorgeous black wings.
Carefully, slowly, and oh-so-cautiously, Jason reaches out and cradles Dick's face in his hand. "I'm going to get you out of here. I'm going to take you home," he promises.
As soon as he undoes the first shackle, which, inevitably, despite his care, jars Dick's wings, Dick screams and passes out.
Blood from Dick's wings splatters forward onto Jason's face and clothes. It's hot and wet and tacky and—
It takes every bit of sanity Jason has to cling to the present. A dark warehouse. The smell of blood in the air and the splash of it on his skin is—
HA-HA-HA!
"You're in Gotham. You're in Gotham with Dick," Jason reminds himself as he frees Dick the rest of the way.
He feels like he's clinging onto the present by the tip of ripped and torn and bloody fingernails that once clawed him out of a coffin and his grave. He doesn't have time for a flashback, for his trauma. Not if he's going to save Dick's life.
“Keep it together!” he snarls at himself.
Soul wings bleed an extraordinary amount. The pool of it on the warehouse floor is worryingly large, spreading across the ground like a reservoir about to crash over the top of a dam.
Jason's teeth chatter relentlessly as the physical embodiment of his own attempts to keep himself calm is made known. There’s a thought tugging in his head and it's been tugging since the moment he heard those thugs talking about Dick's supposed capture and arrived to find Dick all strung up in an otherwise empty warehouse.
Where is Bruce? Where is Batman? Has he been captured and tortured, too? Or are Batman and Nightwing in the middle of one of their radio silences due to some stupid fight? It was something they had done often when he was a young teen. Bouts of silence, bouts of arguing, bouts of understanding.
Is that what is happening now?
Jason had seen Batman only days ago as he spied on the man. As of that moment, Bruce had been fine…. Still, the more he looks at the spreading puddle of blood, the more terrified Jason is that Dick will bleed out.
That terror only intensifies as Jason considers his options. Because he can fix this. He can. But if he does, he will never be safe again. He will be hunted for the rest of his life if anyone figures out that he’s the one who found and helped Nightwing.
There’s only one thing in the world that can heal pinioned wings. Just one.
Jason weighs his future safety against the reality of Dick being grounded for the rest of his, hopefully, long life.
“If I kill everyone involved in this … if I—”
But hadn’t this all started because Jason overheard the words “clipped his wings”? If it’s already common knowledge that Nightwing was pinioned— Or was that meant as just a turn of phrase?
If Jason does this, if he actually does this, he’s going to have to vanish afterward as if he was never even here. And that means someone else will need to haul Dick out of the warehouse. His pride, great as it might be, is not worth losing the man he's trying so hard to save. Because what if whatever monster who did this decides to come back? Jason can’t abandon Dick here, not even healed.
He grabs Nightwing's comms device and puts it to his lips. Can he do this without revealing himself? He needs to, that much he knows. Someone needs to come to save Nightwing without being distracted…. He clears his throat and takes a deep breath.
But the word dies on his dry lips.
Jason cannot, absolutely cannot imagine what it will be like to see Batman save Nightwing. To see the man succeed with his favorite child the way he'd failed with Jason. That would hurt in a way that Jason doesn’t have the capacity to deal with currently.
But Nightwing needs help now.
Robin.
As he realizes the answer and switches frequencies to the correct channel, Jason clearly speaks the name into Dick’s communicator, asking for help from the last person he ever expected to reach out to, "Robin."
Silence.
Silence, where Jason needs words. One word would do. A threat. Anything.
B might have not made it in time to save Jason, but ... Jason isn't Bruce. He's not going to leave Dick to die in a warehouse. A strange voice coming over Nightwing's comm on Robin's personal channel should—
"What have you done to him?"
The words are cold and vicious in a surprising way. The kid he’s been stalking for the past several months appeared pampered, well-groomed, and weak. He looks as frail as the bird whose code name he is the third to answer to. Everything Jason has seen led to a belief that his replacement wasn’t anything to concern himself about. But, no. Tim Drake sounds dangerous.
It hurts to breathe but Jason is used to pain.
He's not ready to face his replacement. He's not.
But when has the world ever cared about what Jason wants?
If Dick's soul wings were back in his skin, Jason wouldn't have contacted anyone at all. He would have hotwired a car or motorcycle and gotten Dick to safety. But Dick has massive wings with an enormous wingspan. They won't fit in a regular car and they'd drag on the asphalt if Jason put him on a motorcycle; the speed and road would rip his—
Jason shakes his head sharply as if he can force his brain to change tracks and not play out the consequences in vivid detail.
His own voice startles him as he speaks. "Nightwing's bleeding out. Medevac. Now."
He makes sure the comms device is no longer connected and then stares at the ruinous mess of Dick’s wings. "You're going to live, Dick, do you understand me?" he orders quietly.
Dick rouses from his faint as if Jason’s voice has dragged him back into awareness. Dick raises the white-outs of his domino mask with trembling, blood-stained fingers.
“J-Jason?”
"You're going to live and you're going to get past this, but for now I need you to hang on. Robin's coming."
The words don't evoke any sense of security in Dick's eyes that Jason can see, but the man is looking at him like he's seen a ghost. Which, technically, he has. Too bad Jason didn't think to put his domino mask on earlier. Then again, he hadn't planned on getting sick in his helmet. He hadn’t planned on taking it off at all.
That Dick recognizes him, even with the scarring on his face, is deeply touching in a way he hadn't expected.
"Jason?" Dick calls again, and his voice is racked with confusion and despair.
"Hang on, Nightwing," he says in a loud, clear voice. "Do not give up on yourself."
"Now that I'm d-dead, can I f-fly with you?" Dick rasps with a broken, hoarse cry.
Jason stills as if he's been frozen in place with Mr. Freeze's gun. He will never forget the biggest point of contention that he ever had with Dick before his death. Unfailingly, whenever Dick was in Gotham, he offered to fly with Jason. And Jason refused him every single time.
Jason has never shown anyone his soul wings. It never felt safe enough. Not after his death. Not after Bruce took him in. And certainly not any time before that. They sprouted from his back when he was a kid and as soon as he realized what they were, what they meant, he tucked them back inside his skin. He's only released them a handful of times since.
It doesn't matter that he's tall and strong and an adult now. If the wrong person finds out, just one person, Jason will spend the rest of his life drugged to the gills as part of a wealthy monster's menagerie.
Because Jason has seraph's wings, bright and shining white, and his feathers have the power to heal. The power to heal other people.
It's a cruel irony that the power of his wings doesn't work on himself.
Jason stares down into Dick’s pleading eyes, and then a plan finally begins to form in his mind. Dick may or may not remember his scarred visage, but he will wake up believing that he saw Jason. That's okay. That can still be worked around.
He can play this off as a blood-loss-inspired hallucination.
He's going to heal Dick; he's going to make sure his brother gets to fly again. He'll lend his power, his strength, to Dick and then he'll disappear once again. He'll sink into oblivion and let them keep thinking of Jason as the broken, dead teenager that Bruce failed.
It won't be perfect, but Jason will still have options. Jason's going to save Dick's life by fixing his wings and then he’ll have time to think.
Jason's hands shake as his wings slip out of his skin and phase into the real world. They tremble as he plucks two brilliant white primaries with a pearlescent sheen.
Dick Grayson is Robin. Jason and the Replacement are just people who borrowed his name. But it's Dick who's really Robin. Dick is the one who's magic. And after all of the times that Dick's magic saved someone else ... Well, it's only fitting that it's his turn to receive a miracle.
"Little Wing?" Dick asks, looking more alert than Jason would prefer, given his intentions of slipping away after this.
Jason presses one white feather to each of Dick's wings, where the bleeding is worst, where some vicious bastard pinioned Jason's brother. Dick's blood soaks into the feathers. As soon as all of the white is gone, as soon as they're saturated with the red mess that's meant to be inside of Dick's body, not out of it, they vanish as if they had never existed at all, leaving Dick's wings whole and hale.
"No, Dickiebird, I can't fly with you," Jason rasps as he folds his wings back into his skin. "I'm dead but you're alive."
"J-Jason!" Dick calls out as his voice grows in strength thanks to the healing performed.
There is little choice but to ignore it and Jason hopes and counts on his seraphim wings to help convince Dick that he's still gone. That he only came back to help Dick. He doesn't want Dick to know what his real intentions had been or what he may end up doing in the future.
He just wants Dick to fly again, to fly and to live.
Jason knows he's running out of time to be near the man he so admired. He wishes he had taken a chance and flown with Dick somewhere far away from civilization, and he wishes he had that chance now, but Dick needs to rest and Jason is going to have to disappear.
"Nightwing?" The voice sounds frantic over the comm when Jason turns it back on. "I'm coming, Nightwing. I'm almost there."
That's my cue, Jason thinks.
He can't be here when the Replacement arrives. For all Jason's plans to throttle the brat who took his place, he's more than aware of how much of a genius the newest incarnation of Robin is. If the Replacement catches even a glimpse of Jason, it'll undo all of the work that Jason just put in to convince Dick that Jason is dead and he's hallucinating from blood loss and pain.
Even knowing that ... even knowing it'll undo all of his work, even knowing it'll decimate what can be saved from the plans he's destroyed with his actions tonight, Jason can't bring himself to fire his grapnel and escape.
Not when Dick's reaching for him with desperate, shaking hands. Not when Dick's whimpering his name in the same agonized, grief-stricken tone of voice he used earlier as he sobbed with pinioned wings.
Not when Dick's begging, "Don't go. Not again. Please not again."
Footsteps pound across the roof above them without an ounce of stealth or caution.
And still ... Jason stays.
The Replacement uses the same window Jason did. He can hear the screech of metal and, of course, beyond Dick's pleas he can hear Robin shouting, “Get away from Nightwing!”
Jason glances up and sees the boy brandish some kind of staff as he leaps into the fray.
It's not as reckless as it sounds, though. Jason doesn't have to be a mind reader to know that the third Robin is constantly taking in his surroundings and looking for traps or thugs to ambush him. He knows because, despite how quickly he's moving toward Jason and Dick, the Replacement moves in the same calculated way he has since Jason's been spying on them all.
He still hasn't left, though he should have a long time ago.
"Get away from Nightwing right now!" Robin growls like an attack dog.
Jason looks at him and he can see the instant that recognition hits by the way that Robin's jaw drops in horrific surprise. The scarred face, white streak on his widow's peak, being far bulkier and taller than he'd been at the time of his death, none of it fools the little genius.
Somehow, that pretender sees right through Jason the same way that Dick did, only without the advantage of having known or spent any time together.
"You’re...."
"Dead," Jason insists.
"Here," Robin corrects. "How are you here?"
"I'm not," Jason says, even as Dick latches onto him.
He should kick Dick off of him, drop a smoke bomb, and release a hallucinogen to make them think they imagined his presence. He should—
"Little Wing, you're alive," Dick says, sounding stunned and awed and terrified all at once.
Jason should punch Dick in the face and run. He should— He could— If he just—
Years of rage and so many plans, all flushed down the toilet like so much sewage, because someone dared to pinion his brother.
Dick's blood is on his clothes. His brother's blood is on his face.
There's blood on Jason's face and he's in a warehouse. There's a pool of blood spreading across the warehouse floor. A warehouse Robin is still inside. And it doesn't matter that Jason can't hear Joker's deranged laughter. It doesn't matter that he can't see a countdown to a bomb. Because he's in enough mental and emotional pain to make it seem like he never left that warehouse in Ethiopia.
Calm down, calm down, calm down, he repeats to himself, but he suddenly can't breathe and the air tastes like smoke and fire.
He knows his heart is racing too fast and he is not some Victorian heroine; he is not going to swoon or pass out. He's not.
Or is he?
Jason feels light-headed. I have to get out of here, he thinks to himself. Only, maybe he says it aloud, too, because Nightwing is getting to his feet and moving in on Jason the same way that Robin is.
"Come on, Little Wing. Let's get you out of here," Dick says as if he's now the rescuer.
And Jason would likely fight if that instinct wasn't warring so badly with his flight response that he's just standing there, frozen in both panic and incredulity.
“Let’s go home.”
The adrenaline crash hits instantly and brutally. Jason feels like he's going to shake apart. He collapses like a puppet whose strings have been sliced. But he doesn't smash into the dirty concrete floor of the warehouse.
Dick and the Replacement catch him. They hold him between them, whispering his name over and over in a mess of anguish-filled awe.
"Little Wing."
"Jason."
Their voices drown out the memories of Joker's laughter.
His plans, the plans he's put so much time and effort into, are useless now. They're worthless and pointless and even thinking of some of the stuff he had in store for Dick and Tim makes Jason want to throw up everything he's eaten in the last month.
But as they lean against him, one on each side, his arms around their shoulders as they support his weight, Jason can't bring himself to regret discarding all of those plans.
He doesn't know what the future is going to look like now. Not anymore.
But ... Jason has a strong suspicion he won't be alone.
That's enough.