Chapter Text
This girl couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
Objectively, the girl was attractive—long, black hair in loose waves, sharp blue eyes that he could see from across the club, and a body seemingly made to dance to whatever song crashed through the speakers. Normally, Jason would find her attention flattering, but something about her was triggering his finely tuned vigilante anti-hero Crime Alley instincts.
Jason had gotten to the club around 11 to make ‘negotiations’ with Lyle Vandross, a new wannabe drug-lord who aimed to set up shop in Jason’s territories. He made his niche in party drugs designed to “enhance an already good night.” Goddamn if this guy didn’t show up to this meeting with a sales pitch and motherfucking powerpoint on his WayneTech laptop. He’d also done his homework: none of the drugs were conventional date rape shit, the addictive potential was allegedly quite low, and there was a three-step plan to keep the drugs isolated in club-settings and out of the hands of street kids.
Jason might have been impressed if fucking Lyle wasn’t a lying piece of shit. (Also he’d never be impressed by someone who brought powerpoint slides to a club—I mean, for fuck’s sake.) Lyle had all the hallmarks of a well-bred, soulless yuppie from the Bristol crowd (no offense to Tim). Red Hood’s involvement in Crime Alley hadn’t exactly cleaned up the streets per se, but things were a lot more stable now than they had been three years ago when he’d first returned to his neighborhood. Apparently, it was stable enough to attract the godless forces of gentrification, of which Lyle was the first harbinger.
Of course, Jason wasn’t the idiot that Lyle assumed he was. Jason was willing to bet that this specific drug was made purposely to entice Red Hood and get his approval. Between the powerpoint slides that promised a happy little party drug and a ‘safe’ distribution network, Jason could see the architecture of something far more sinister. Lyle would try to get a foothold first, build trust, and then start eliminating or assimilating the small-time networks. This money-hungry jackass wouldn’t be content with staying small-time and within the confines of the clubs. And, while it might be fun to see this guy ultimately come up against big players like Black Mask, Jason didn’t want to deal with the headache and whatever chaos would be left over.
“No.”
“No?” Lyle’s face blanched, but his networking smile stayed fixed on his face. “What do you—”
“I said no, and I mean no.” Jason’s jaw was set behind his Red Hood helmet to lend his voice the necessary gravitas, but he wasn’t even looking at Lyle when he said it. His eyes were fixed back on the girl who’d been watching him all night. She’d come into the club shortly after Jason arrived and over the past hour had been gradually moving closer to the booths in the back where Jason and Lyle were meeting.
She’d been slick about her approach— incrementally moving closer by moving between dance partners. Jason hadn’t been sure at first that she was even doing it on purpose, but her dancing never moved her closer to the exit; it only moved her closer to him. And he kept catching her looking at him when he would tilt his head toward Lyle. With the helmet on, the girl likely couldn’t tell that Jason was still watching her out of the corner of his eye, so when he looked away, she’d let herself surveille him more earnestly.
What the fuck does she want?
“What more could you want?!” Lyle whined (honest to God, whined) at him.
Jason glared at Lyle, even though he couldn’t properly appreciate his irritation without seeing his face. “I want you to get the fuck out of this neighborhood.”
Jason nodded his head to the side and one of his men who’d been sitting at a nearby booth jumped up to drag Lyle out of the club. Lyle sputtered as he was pulled through the throngs of dancing bodies and tossed out of the alleyway door. The music was too loud for Jason to hear and the lights flashing too irregularly for him to read Lyle’s lips, but he knew down to his bones that Lyle had been screaming something about, ‘You can’t do this! Do you know who I am?” And didn’t that just warm Jason’s cold, formerly-dead heart.
When Jason finished smirking to himself and looked up, he expected to see the girl finally make contact. It was clear that she’d been waiting for her opening to make her approach, so Jason sat back and waited.
And waited.
What the fuck?
She’d been present and observant the entire time he’d been here, and now, suddenly, he didn’t even see her on the club floor. Jason craned his head and scanned the room again—a pretty girl like that drew a lot of attention, and it had been easy to track her movements by watching the amorphous shape of the crowd react to her, but now….
There.
Jason tensed and stood sharply when he saw her—her eyes locked on him again from across the room, this time pleading. The girl was lithe, mid-twenties, and no more than 5”3,’ which meant she was dwarfed by the guy wearing a red hoodie who’d pinned her at the wall and then yanked her towards the alleyway door.
Immediately, Jason started to push his way through the crowd, watching as the hoodie guy wrenched open the door and pulled the girl with him by her wrist. The girl stumbled and made a half-hearted struggle, either too drunk or too scared to put up much of a fight.
When Jason finally reached the door after fighting his way through the uncoordinated, gyrating dancers in the club, he kicked it open and pulled up his gun in a fluid motion. The hoodie guy was holding both the girl’s wrists and threw her to the ground when the door slammed open. Under the hoodie, the guy was wearing a balaclava and no innocent Gothamite ever wore a fucking Balaclava. One eye was whited out with injury, but the other was an unsettling, familiar blue.
He spared one glance to the girl who had fallen hard to her knees but was already scrambling to pull herself off the dirty alley bricks. His gun then rested on its target and Jason growled through the voice modulator in his helmet, “I don’t think the lady wanted to dance with you.”
The man slowly raised his hands, but his body was tensed to fight. Jason opened his mouth to tell him was a stupid idea that would be when he felt a hand grab his leather collar and a sharp pinch on his neck.
Needle?
Jason spun and stared at the girl who’d gotten herself off the ground and gotten a goddamn needle in his neck. He knew there was something wrong with this girl. He knew it, but then his fucking hero-complex… His thoughts started to turn mushy as his limbs got heavy and the gun dropped to the ground. He started to fall to his knees, glaring at the woman who had the gall to look amused of all things. Before he slumped down, he felt the hoodie guy grab him by the armpits and start dragging him towards a car that had been tucked at the far end of the alleyway.
The voices were swimming and distorted as Jason started to pass out.
“You going to help me with this?”
“I just had to deal with handsy assholes in a shitty club for an hour—I’ve done my part.”
There was a distant sound of a trunk opening, and then only blackness.