Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This person calls me by a name, a name that seems familiar. I do not know him, and yet I think I do. Feelings and emotions linger at the edges of my mind, barely formed because the memories aren’t there with them. Instead there are holes, gaps, vacant spots that are only filled with dried up dirt and burnt ashes, the soil for what used to be there.

He touches my face, brushes my hair back and guides me gently around the house. His eyes are blue, and sad and begging, the skin puffy and red though he hides the tears from me. I do not know what they cry for, I do not know why.

My body is numb but sometimes there’s a tingling sensation, above my ribs, around my neck, the echo of metal touching skin.

I can leave, leave this apartment where he keeps me, but I do not think I will. Not again. Tonight was the first and last. He had found me straight away, surrounded by these men that had spoken words of filth at me and tried to touch where only he has touched. They’d thought me weak, prey, another piece of rubbish in an alley called ‘Crime.’ He’d dropped from the sky, landed in front of me and stopped me from getting rid of them (because they were bad and bad men should die.) He had used cuffs, to tie the bad men up and then dropped to his knees in front of me. He’d been wearing odd clothes, tight and black and blue (so blue, pretty blue eyes, but in the black void of sleep they change to green and the green eyes wake me up) and he’d held me tight, pulled me against that strong, lean chest. I’d stared at the wall, heard the distant sound of cars on the main roads, the scuttle of nearby rats scurrying around the bins and all the while his warmth had tried to fill me up. But this body is cold, and dark. His bright warmth cannot reach me.

He had asked if I was okay and I had looked at him. That familiar but not-familiar face hidden behind a black mask (it was like the other side of a coin that you forget about, lose an exact memory of the particulars until you look at it again.)

I hadn’t said anything, my tongue always fat and heavy in my mouth and words scrambled funny in my head, but after a moment I’d inclined my head to the side. 

It was a movement of curiousity, of not-understanding I think, but he took it as a yes. Though maybe it was a yes, I do not know, it has not been long since I have progressed to thinking in yes’s and no’s rather than exist and fight and move.

Survive.

He’d pressed a callused finger to his ear, spoken to someone in quick short words that wasn’t me (he does this often, but usually in the privacy of another room, his smile strained when he talks to someone called ‘B’) and then he’d taken me home.

I’d followed, hand in his, flowing from one roof to another with ease. We’d gone in through the window, the one I see him come in through late at night while I lay straight-legged in bed, eyes wide at the ceiling. He had put me in the shower, slid off the heavy pants and oversized shirt that went to my thighs, taking off his own clothes - his suit, as well.

He’d washed the blood from my cut and bruised knuckles quietly, not speaking at all except to murmur sounds that made me close my eyes and tip my head under the water at his behest. After, he had wiped me down and put me into soft, thick clothes with funny little patterns in blue, taken me to bed and wrapped me in his blanket and arms.

I could leave, I can leave, but he is the one who: guides me gently, feeds me, clothes me, speaks words of kindness to me.

Of love.

I left because I am wrong and something is not right but the outside is even more wrong than the quiet darkness of his room, than the sweetness of his laughter when I frown at something silly he does, than the vibrancy of his voice when he speaks of his friends. There is no him out there to hold me, no him to try to make sense of the words and thoughts in my head, there is only bad men and bad men should die.

He is not a bad man, he should not die. I will not let him die.

So I will stay here, eyes open, unseeing deep into the early hours of the night. He thinks I am sleeping, for I make sure he thinks so, but I will stay awake and keep watch.

I do not sleep; a symbol burns in the sky out the window and my body tingles, sweats cold and aches bone-deep. The arms around me squeeze tighter and I feel him shake behind me.

He sobs, buries his nose into my hair, splays his hands across the marks, the scars that decorate my body and the wounds that are still healing after all these months (how many months I do not know, but he would know the exact time.)

And I hear him cry,

"Jason."

Chapter Text

I punch; my knuckles having gone past the point of feeling to just a sense of motion now. I rip through the air, my muscles strained and trembling. Things are under my fists, cracking, breaking and now I am into it I don’t know how to stop. It had started off with a scream, like I was finally letting out something that had been simmering inside and it was escaping out through my throat, down my arms and exploding from my fists.

Release.

It kept coming and coming until my face was wet and my arms coiled so tight and my throat raw. It’s still coming and the hard things beneath me are all soft and gooey now. I hear a noise behind me, it means danger, attack, I’m not your son, so I turn and this time it comes out of my legs and shatters ribs underneath my foot.

I’m on the danger in a moment, jaw shutting so hard that I feel the reflexive pierce of pain as teeth cut into flesh. I can’t really see anything except that they’re wearing black and holding a knife - no guns because we don’t use guns so I’ll use my hands instead.

My hands shake, or maybe I’m shaking and I can only just see a bit, but I’m shaking with it, with whatever is still spewing out of my mouth in a wave of scalding fire. It pours from me, my hands go tense and flex and then I clamp them tight around the dangers face (face?) and push my thumbs in. They go, go in deep, down to the insides of the hole but there’s nothing inside. Nothing left but the gunk and useless stuff and it’s nothing like what I’ve got inside, the hole that’s hidden behind my eyes. But I can see it. I know it’s there...

Full of dirt and wood and mother I’ll save you and pain and rage because –

“I won’t be your punching bag again!”

I slam the man’s head down against the cement, thumbs still in sockets, again and again and again until the next bad man comes and tries to hurt me but I won’t let bad man hurt me because I can protect myself.

There’s no one here to save me. No one is coming.

No one. No one. No one came.

It’s leaving now, the hole has been burnt at the edges and now all the ash is just falling back inside, the landscape a snowy black.

 The cement is cold on my knees but it’s nothing compared to a thousand splinters making their home in your skin (the finest mahogany is no different from others when it’s daggers of wood in your hands.)

I slump, my nose is blocked, I can’t breathe through it, I have to open my mouth with my tongue all fat and heavy and producing too much saliva. My heart throbs so fast I feel like it’s not there at all, a useless wet lump that’s just there to block the air in my lungs and the logic in my mind.

Pit-pat, pit-pat.

Tap, tap, tap.

Steps. Steps – getting heavier.

Steps running towards me.

“Ja-n . . . Jas---”

You can’t treat me like this. I gave everything for you and now I’m just back in the same place, a gutter rat lying on the street surrounded by scum.

“Jason.”

Danger. I roll, away from the grasping person, throw a kick out even though it’s like my leg is filled with lead. Lead and wood and pain. Everything tastes like ash and the world is gray. Danger rolls me onto my back, pulls me up into their lap and I see black ringed eyes.

Bats.

I taste it on my tongue again but it’s all burnt out, only ash is left. I’m worth more, I was worth more; I thought I was worth more.

I guess I wasn’t.

“Jason, Jason, listen to me. Focus. Look at me.”

Why no stern tone of ‘Robin’, demanding that I say what wrong thing I’d done now? Why no, ‘go back home’? (Home, isn’t home a two room apartment with messy dishes, a bookcase by two warm green chairs and the light laughter of someone? Wasn’t home a mansion and a plate of warm cookies? Wasn’t it a threadbare blanket, a warm arm and the tv showing re-runs?)

“Jason, Jay, Jay-bird, Little Wing, come back to me, listen. I’m here. You’re not alone.”

My mouth moves and dan- No. Him, he, home, jolts, shards of wood surrounded in fire, something deep in me aches.

His blue eyes water, encased in black and I just want to see his face and he leans over, presses his mouth to my hair and says “you aren’t worthless. You aren’t just a plaything. You aren’t a punching bag. You’re just you. You’re my Jason, my Jay-bird, my Little Wing and you need to come on home.”

Ah, I remember: that taste, that smell. All of ash and burnt anger but I can’t quite remember what I was angry over.

Dick is here, he’s holding me. My limbs aren’t working again, oh, it’s been quite a few months since it’s been this bad, at least of what I can remember. I know I don’t quite remember all of it.

I blink, look around but Dick covers my eyes, turns me back to face him and smiles that smile that seems familiar, like I’ve been seeing it a lot lately. I don’t like it. It feels new somehow. Smiling is what he does, so why is this so different?

I lift up my hand, see the tattered bits of my skinned knuckles and the blood but don’t really feel it and pat Dick’s face.

It’s okay, I try to say, don’t cry.

Maybe he understands, maybe I do get the words out.

He doesn’t cry. But I still wonder why my face is so wet. He helps me up, and presses a finger to his ear, calling someone, a bird that makes me remember flying and soaring through a dark windy world. The person on the end answers and they sound neutral and I taste more ash on my tongue. It falls down the back of my throat, into the gaping hole that spread out inside of me.

A little stockpile of ash and just underneath it, the tiniest ember.

“You’ve been a bad boy.’

“This’ll hurt you a lot more than me.”

The person on the other side of the radio says something and Dick replies, "Thanks Robin, Nightwing out.”

Robin.

The ember catches fire.

Chapter Text

He is not where he should be. Not in front of me, swinging from building to building with flips and turns that my muscles ache to repeat. Nor is he below, on the ground, flitting in and out of the dark corners like a winged predator that only leaves flashes of blue and beaten bodies behind.

I have lost sight of him and I do not think I can catch up. My chest already burns with the crisp air that I am sucking in, my hands shaking with adrenaline and exertion because no matter how often I try to follow him, I am still clumsy and wrong and not-right.

I crouch down at the edge of the roof, rest myself on haunches to peer over the side. I try to breathe quieter because maybe he has noticed I am here, maybe he can hear the rasping of my lungs, the crunch of broken cement beneath my sock covered feet (stupid, stupid, but I hadn’t had time to grab my shoes, you never think ahead Jason.) Maybe he is mad and I do not want him to be mad but I cannot stop. I cannot stay while he is gone. I need to follow, to see why he goes out when the sky gets dark and he thinks I am sleeping. He doesn’t realise I never sleep at night, because that is the time when I need to be the most awake, to escape the long sleeps of black all around me, the walls closing in and the heavy taste of dirt on my tongue.

Pressure, pressure, weighing down on me.

The dark is both my ally and my enemy. I can hide in it but I know something is watching me.

So instead I attack, I go out, because I cannot stay trapped in that room where he tries to fix me and make me less broken, where he gives quick glances at the white strip of my hair like he is surprised every time he sees it. That room where he strokes fingers across my scalp and fingers at that white bit of lock and then he holds his body just that bit more tense. In those times he tries to cover it with touches, smiles, giving me whatever I want to eat though all I can taste is worms.

He says I loved chilli dogs but I can't taste them enough to know and when he asks I nod and lie. They taste good, yes, great, my favourite. At least those words come out right.

Why am I here, what am I doing? Questions, questions they plague me.

He left me, he left tonight. He always leaves. Too often, without telling me the real reason why.

“Work – we have a few parties going on at the bar tonight so I'll be back late.”

“Groceries, it’ll be quick, don’t worry.”

“Just going out on a short errand for a bit.”

“I’m going to see a friend, be back in a jiffy.”

Lies cover with truth. His smile always guileless and teasing. These are the things he wants me to remember in the long hours of his absence. But I cannot.

My head may be an empty graveyard, just the decay of whatever was once there but I remember my training.

Training – what training? Who trained me?

I don’t know, it hurts, I feel a rage so deep-seated that I think it’s always been inside of me. He looks at me as if my wings are brittle. As if I can no longer fly.

“Little broken baby bird.”

I’ll use this fire to burn my pieces back into place, spread the molten fire over the cracks until I’m a crisscross work of flaming strength. I don’t let him know, haven’t told him yet. My mind can't work out what I’m not sure my mouth is ready to say and I don’t know if I would say it right.

Dick hurts, I hurt him. I do not want to but the rage can spill over. If I open my mouth, if I unclench my fist, I’ll burn him from the inside out like I burn from the inside out.

He doesn't care about me, he's too angry at B to want me.

It’s burning tonight, so much that the soil in my head is starting to turn to dust and I hear a timer counting down.

I do not find him this night and so I return to his house.

Before he knows I’ve been gone.

Chapter Text

For all the words he says, Dick is a not a fast-speaker. He thinks, completely and wholly, about what he should say. He speaks like he has recited the lines a thousand times, memorised them so well there’s no rush to get it out. Each time is as sincere as the first.

But tonight there was something wrong. The control too strong. Words were measured but breathless at the end, somehow tired from speaking so slow.

He leaves me, I cannot have him leave me. I cling like a chick to a mother bird and my body is heat. So strange from the cold, the cold that has been all I’ve known since that night he held out his hand to the bleeding and animalistic shell I was, a bottle of empty green at our feet and a woman, dangerous, deceitful, watching from the distance. He'd asked me to follow, ignoring the woman and I had.

Again, I follow, just as I have done for all the nights this week.

I follow, I follow, and he’s rushed and doesn’t quite know. But he’s fast, too fast and I lose sight of him. I’m in an alleyway, something familiar in its layout.

I have been here before, not just recently when I beat those men and saw Dick in his costume the first time but even before that.

I see a sign, I see an old man cuddled up into his fraying cloak and the image of a car imposes itself into the scene. My heavy feet take me to the spot where it’s parked, my breath showing in the air. It might be the end of winter or the beginning, all I know is I used to feel this cold inside my own body and now all I feel is the burning of these wretched marks that stain my body.

I drop to my knees, feel the sensation of the rubber at the tips of my fingers, harder and thicker than most tyres I’ve stolen. I want to rip the wheels off, take them for money. But what is money to me now? I no longer ache for food to fill my belly as I could starve now and not now. I don't need clothes to warm me on the nights when a fire in a bin can just isn’t enough because Dick has taken care of all of that.

There is a man behind me, he says something.

I spin, arms up but no one is there. The shadows are creeping in and I clasp my hands to my head.

Dick is gone, flown away. Dick lied to me, lied to me, he always lies!

I know it, I know him. Where was I before he found me? The memories, they come and go, but they've been burnt out of me and its only when I walk through the ash that I stumble upon them.

Dick was taught well but without the mask on I know his tells.

The tone of his voice, the way his eyes can never stay directly on me when they speak, choosing to flit around instead, to the bandaids on my cut-up knuckles, or the rectangle scar that peeps out the top of my shirt. They are the only things I can remember when he is gone for too long.

They play over and over again, rubbing the inside of me raw, my mind full of the knowledge that understand what each subconscious movement, every slight tell of his body, is really saying.

It’s hard sometimes, because when he remembers to, he lies so good but he's been a liar since the beginning, since his beginnings in the circus that it's no surprise he is so good.

But I can understand better now, things are becoming clearer as I create an awareness out of the dead thing I was.

I need to find him, go, go, go. The rage has left me, the coldness permeating my body again but I know it will come back. The waves of it are getting stronger and stronger each time and in the madness of it all my thoughts run wild and dreams (memories?) take over my sight.

I get up and I leave, the car isn’t there anymore. It wasn’t really ever there, not here in this alley way and not in this time.

My socks are wet and I don't know how long I was lost in old memories but it wasn't raining when I got here. I'm going out of this place, away from the broken and crumbling buildings and back to Dick. This city isn't right, it's not familiar ground. I remember a city with robins and bats that fly through buildings like they're trees.

But when I think of that I am both the robin flying and the hunter on the ground, wanting to shoot it down.

I start to run, I want to go back. Dick is safety, Dick is warmth.

My foot slides on wet cement, dropping my body out from underneath me. I land on my shoulder, the impact jarring up my arm and taking the force of my fall.

There is a cold sting – for though I understand better now, my brain healing, my body’s movements are not yet fully in my control.

In the numbness of it all, that tiny source of pain bleeds through.

Tonight there will be no more lies. No more secrets.

No more playing games.

I get up and look around, keep my body low to the ground, experience has taught me to be safe though I do not quite remember where this experience comes from. I do not remember a lot of things. And now I am aware enough to realise that there is meant to be more, more of me. There are meant to be trees that bear fruit in the dead ashes of my soul.

I want to ask questions, but I do not know what to ask. I do not know how to ask. So I haven't. And now I am here, alone, with my brother gone and I don’t quite know how to get back home. All the skyscrapers look the same but wrong. I know I was used to a different landscape that shines a bright yellow bat symbol in the sky.

I can’t trust my mind. I can’t trust my eyes. Sometimes the bats are laughing at me, 'ha ha ha’ and I have to scream.

I can’t scream now. Have to find him. But where to go? My throat is tight. There is a noise. I turn.

It’s a different one. A different type of bat. Coloured red, with green to outline. I hear laughter, but not the one that screeches. I smell burning, but not the burnt food that Dick cooks. This burning is of tires and petrol and the hum of a silent car.

The bat, no, not a bat, because it’s wrong, it’s a fake, it’s not black at all, is perched on the other ledge. The roof door into the building is beside it, shading half the red and green creature from the moonlight.

I brush a hand down my clothes, not the pyjamas I first went out in all those many sleepless nights ago, but a plain pair of black pants, shirt and jacket made of cotton. I curl my fingers into the hem, ball up the cotton. Thicker would be better. Something more than what I have now to protect my body. I uncurl my fingers, wipe the sweat of my hand on my backside and am surprised at the sensation. I expected to touch something scaly.

That doesn’t make sense.

The creature moves subtly but does not come fully into the light.

So I ask, because I do not know many things and this is a question I can ask. “Who are you?”

The creature jerks back, a noise escapes its throat and I want to go over. But bats can be gone in one dark moment to the next so I make sure not to move.

My shoulder aches from my fall, and I focus on that to keep my mind present.

The fake bat moves but does not. I can tell like I can tell when someone is at the door that Dick doesn’t want me to see. The angles, the line of his shoulders, the stillness that is full of so much. I am still, I can be still, but sometimes restlessness runs through me and I don’t understand. How can one be so unmoving with all that inside of them?

“Hello.”

I startle, hunker down, feel like bearing my teeth.

'Hello Jason, my name’s Talia. I’m here to help you.’

That wasn’t a bat but a viper pretending to be.

This one is different, bat, viper I don’t know, but still it is dangerous.

I don’t know how I know but I do. Sometimes I can’t hold a spoon right, my palms cramping shut and my wrists creaking, sometimes I can’t handle watching tv because the first time I saw a white pasty face and a big red nose I came back to myself with a terrified Dick repeating my name and my fist through the television and sometimes I can’t eat for days because everything is all ash and death. Sometimes these things happen and I don’t know why and I don’t know how to get through them except to listen to my instincts. My instincts say to listen to the one who calls himself my brother, so I do. And now my instincts say to be careful. So I will be.

“Whoa, I’m not going to do anything. Just saying hello.”

The red and green creature tries to calm me and I want to bite but I also want to touch him because that black hair is like brother’s and he dresses in tight clothes as well. So he might know my brother, they might be friends.

Dick tells me family and friends take care of each other.

I watch the creature quietly though I still want to bare my teeth in a snarl to send it away. But nobody talks to me, only Dick talks to me. Dick is gone. Dick is a liar.

I want to find him.

“You seem a bit tense, would you like me to come out of the shadows?” It asks softly and I would. I want to see it properly. See the enemy, know the enemy, defeat the enemy. KILL the enemy.

No. Don’t kill.

'We don’t kill.'

There’s a noise in my head and I’m tugging at my hair and the creature lands on the ground softly in front of me, hands up and showing the lack of weapon. But that’s a lie too. That outfit has tiny grooves and pockets and everything inside is a weapon in itself.

“Are you looking for something?” It asks again, another question. The creature seems to hesitate, then slowly lowers itself down until its cross-legged on the ground, cape spread out behind. “Or perhaps you are looking for someone?”

Yes, someone. Dick. Brother. I just wanted to know what he really does. I want to know what he's hiding from me, why I'm here, who I am.

He says I am his brother and my name is Jason. He says I was hurt badly, that someone hurt me but that he's keeping me safe while I heal.

In the beginning I knew nothing so I believed everything but now I know different.

I know he's lying, I know I was dead.

What little I know is enough to think that maybe I should have stayed dead.

The creature is waiting. Seemingly calm but I know that steady thrum of fight or flight, I’ve felt it myself. I can’t tell where its looking because the mask’s eyes are blanked out but I know it can see me, that its watching, waiting for a response.

It's outfit I know, the R on the chest prominent and part of me wants to rip it off, burn it.

'Boom boom goes the little robin.'

I tug my hair again, try to think, unstick my tongue from the top of my mouth and say, “Dick.”

Am I allowed to tell others his name? Do others know? I just want to go back now because I can’t find the way myself. Maybe this creature can find it for me.

I could follow that red and green easily, its glaringly bright and meant to draw attention. Distraction, a façade. Batman needs a partner.

I jolt, and let go of the tendril that thought caused. It hurts, makes my wounds flare sharply, I don’t want to follow that road. Not yet. Not now.

Dick. I’ll go to Dick.

The creature solemly nods its head. “Would you like me to get him for you?”

I nod, I nod. I see the yellow underside of the cape and yellow bats smile in the background.

I hate. I hate. This creature is bad, its stirring up the dirt of the graveyard in my head.

Kill it. Kill it.

“I’ll call him now then. And then we will just wait here for him to come okay?”

I must’ve made some movement, because the creature has one hand on the ear piece and another on the ground like he’s ready to jump up. No. If it knows Dick then I can’t hurt it. Dick wouldn’t be happy.

It calls.

“Nightwing, I've found your . . . guest.”

Noise, it stops speaking but keeps focus on me.

“He's soaked, shoulder might be dislocated but otherwise fine.”

He throws his voice to me, “Jason and I will just sit here and wait won't we? Wait for your brother.”

Brother, brother.

“Nightwing?”

“Yes, your brother,” the red and green boy says and yes I remember now. Nightwing is Dick, Dick is Nightwing. Nightwing is the blue and black outfit here wears. I'd heard men crying out in fear when Dick – Nightwing – had jumped down and attacked them. And then I'd had to run back before he got home.

What was Nightwing? Why had he fought those people? Is that what he was hiding from me every night? I saw that scene but forgot it until now, everything slips between my fingers like coarse, rough sand.

Are he and this boy friends?

He keeps speaking but my hearing comes in and out, my shoulder aching.

“Understood, Robin out.”

'Robin out.'

'Robin out.'

Robin robinrobinrobin.

His throat is beneath my hand but the cape is high up on his neck and armoured. I want to, I want to tear it off, bare his pulsing artery and dig my teeth into the pulse.

Mine, mine, he took it. Took it.

“Replace, replace.”

He does not move under me, his whole body still. I frame it with my legs, knees on either side of his hips. The colours, the outfit, twisted, changed, different. Just like me.

“Jason,” the voice vibrate through the armour and I squeeze tighter.

“Robin,” I grind out, choking on it like a bird's frantic flutters held within the bite of my teeth.

“Replacement,” I say.

He goes silent, the boy, the Robin, the replacement, so red and green. All I can see is red and green, red and green.

“Jason, no one could ever replace you.”

The words taste like lies, ash in our mouths, a warehouse burning down and the tick-tock, tick-tock of a clock.

“Jason, you are upset. But do you know why?”

Why? Why? Why? Why?

My teeth chattering, clicking together like a laughing circus clown. Someone is muttering, over and over.

“Why? Why? Why?”

“I don't know Jason, won't you tell me why?”

I want to slice his neck with one of the knife's in Dick's kitchen but with that mask, in that costume, I feel like I'd be slicing my own throat.

Maybe it would be best if I did.

I should have stayed dead.

“Robin, Robin.”

“Yes, you were Robin.”

“NO!” I lift him by the neck and slam his head back down. He doesn't fight back, won't fight back.

I always fought back.

The blank spot in my head, in my soul, is a gaping black maw that's eaten everything but sometimes it coughs them back up.

Regurgitated out.

Mushy and deformed, just like me and everything smelling of a long burnt out fire.

“You're Robin, but Robin was me. Replace, replace, replace me.”

“Oh,” the boy says softly, wounded hurt, a baby bird struck down because the parent isn't here to protect it. Silly, stupid parent.

No one came for me.

Maybe if it dies the parent will finally learn, it shouldn't have had another Robin.

The boy's eyes, they look into me, piercing bright. Do they stare through and see the land of dead things inside of me?

Does he look and know I am a burnt husk of something that should have stayed dead?

“I was dead,” I say around a tongue that doesn't work right when I want to speak. It's the first time I've associated all my dreams of pain and death with the reality.

My name is Jason and I was dead but now I'm not.

The fragments are coming together, piece by piece and I know I was better of not remembering.

“You did die, yes,” the little robin speaks, gaining my attention. His voice does not tremble but it's so soft and high, a little baby bird. He has not been clipped, not yet, not the way I am.

I want to break his wings so he stays on the ground with me.

But – his brain works, he knows who I am. I need him to tell me more. There is no going back now and that grave of dead things inside of me is hungry, the dead are always starving, for all the things they've lost.

And I'm starving for vengeance.

“You crawled out of your grave and Dick found you. He saved you from Talia, Ra's Al Ghul's daughter, a so-far immortal eco-terrorist with fanatical assassins that follow his every order. Pretty much not the type of family you want to have any involvement with.”

A woman on the side of the road, coming toward me, a cup of something in her hand that held a green glow and then it was being poured down my throat, scorching my lungs -

“Talia found me.”

“Nightwing had been working on a different case but she is dangerous and when he saw her heading to Gotham he followed her. He fought her off then brought you back home.”

“Not home, not home, not, not.”

“Batman -”

I feel my lips roll back, know my teeth are out and I growl with hatred, a hatred I don't fully understand.”

“Batman, Batman, Batman -”

“Yes, after you – he went mad with grief Jason, he was going to kill someone, I had to step up, to stop him. Batman is a symbol, he can't kill.”

“Can't kill.”

“ . . . yes,” the little robin says but now he is wary, worried. I can hear it in that soft, weak little voice.

“Can't kill. Replaced me.”

“I always respected you when, you were my Robin – I'm not replacing you.”

“Respect? Repect? The replacement respects?”

“You're injured, you know you are. Your shoulder is hurt and your mind is still healing from the accident.”

“Death! Not an accident. Don't try to lie to me pretty little robin. Pretty little robin bleeding to death.”

“Nightwing will be here soon, why don't we go meet him?” The little robin tries to change my focus but all I can see looking at his domino is a big black bat with red smiling lips.

I think I black out because next there’s Dick holding me tight to his chest and in the corner of my eyes I see the creature with a tattered outfit and a bleeding lip.

“Sssh, Jason you’re okay. Tim is a good guy okay. A good guy. He’s your brother too.”

I bite at the chest in front of me, pushing, pulling, I don't know and Dick just brushes my hair and whispers into my ear.

I think I mumble, “. . . didn’t mean to,” but when I turn there’s no one else around.

I do not know how long we stay there, curled into each other, rain peppering our skin but I take Dick’s hand when he offers, run my fingers up the blue strip racing up his outfit like it’s a path showing the way home.

We reach the house, the door opens and light shines out from where I left it on.

Inside is warmth and light and my brother steps in, letting our hands separate when I don’t follow. He turns to ask me something, stops before he speaks and instead forces that smile that pretends he's okay with how something that should have stayed dead came back all broken and wrong.

“Take your time,” he says and I don’t know what I need time for but he moves to the kitchen and I hear the clatter of the dishes and draws opening and closing.

The gust of cold wind is seeping into the house but I stay standing there.

For seconds, for minutes.

At the corner of my eyes I see a flash of red and turn to face it. Replacement is there, perched on the opposite building’s banister. Sightless eyes, cape blowing, the blood gone from his lip.

Robin watches and waits.

Until it inclines its head at the door and we both hear Dick yelp from in the kitchen. I know he must have burnt himself again cooking for me, he sucks at it.

I do not look away from Robin, everything inside me a mess. I remember flying in a suit of my own, I remember pain and clawing, clawing out of wet wet death with mangled fingers.

I remember how tiny and small, how fragile that boy seemed beneath my legs. How he didn't try to hurt me like those men did long ago in that alley.

I step back into the apartment, staring at Robin and thinking, wondering, where the parent is.

The silly silly parent that let that little robin come out and meet me.

I close the door. 

Things are becoming clearer now.

Chapter Text

Dick has been coming later and later, some days not at all and I try to ask what's wrong but he just grins that grin I hate and jokes that work is getting a little too crazy. I don't believe him so I say, “Other work problems?” And Dick just stares at me, something anguished and weighted with old memories in his gaze. I think I'm meant to have those memories too but I don't.

I should be thinking about Robin, about this ball of vengeance inside of me at being replaced but, sometimes I forget about the replacement and then, with how Dick's been lately, I can't keep both worries inside of me.

I know who and what Nightwing is and I know it's a secret. I've heard my neighbours talk about the blue-and-black vigilante and the bad people he's arrested. Dick is Nightwing, Nightwing is a vigilante.

Dick is a cop.

It's funny, no, another word, between funny and unexpected, that's what Nightwing is.

Now Dick doesn't try to hide it so much, I get to see as he leaves through the window, soaring through the skies with a grapple hook. He soars through the skies like he's never touched the ground and I can almost feel how the wind buffets at him, the joyous sensation of free-falling. I want to join him, to help, to take all the anger of my broken brain and take it out on bad men.

But Nightwing says he doesn't kill and I think that's stupid. I think back, to what I can recollect of those first few months, when I was mostly animal and instinct and I went outside. I went outside and, and I saw things and I hurt bad people.

I killed them. I killed them and they deserved but it Nightwing – Dick, came and took me away, he and that little robin called Robin.

Stupid, stupid. They deserve to die. But he's, he's too soft, too kind, if his hands were stained red they would shake but not mine, mine are already blackened and burnt, coated in the ash of whatever form of mercy I used to have.

Killing bad men is a mercy for their victims.

But now what's stupid is how Nightwing – Dick, is having something bad, really bad, happen to him but he won't tell me.

I know, I knnow I'm not right in my head, that I still forget words, that I still waking up shaking and screaming and I don't know if that little robin I see outside the corner of my eye is real or a hallucination (and how torn I am between protecting and destroying it) but I can help.

He needs help, someone to get their hands bloody.

Sometimes I don't think I can remember what it's like to look at my hands and not see red.

Dick took me in, sheltered me and I owe it to him. Not that he was like this for me the first time around.

First time – first first – I.

Tonight when he comes home I help. My fingers, numb, fat things, don't always do what I want, phantom sensations like my nails being pulled out coming in flashes, hot and cold. I help take off Dick's torn, wet and bloodied outfit, knowing the secret catches and security locks to disable. I – I know this instinctively and all the dead thing's in the graveyard, under all the ashy soil, shudder, writhe and try to crawl their way up, clamouring to be uncovered first.

I keep them buried, I have more of my mind now, enough to know that some things I'm not ready yet to know.

I'm just a scared alley boy but I ain't stupid.

Dick's head is bent, the hair wet and smelling foul, like he took a dip in the wrong type of water. I peel Dick's now-harmless outfit down to his hips, the scars on his body as known to me as my own.

“Dick,” my mouth says and the man is trembling now, that foul water drip, drip, dripping from the ends of his clumped hair. I frown, bite at my bottom lip, my thoughts whirring at a sluggish pace. Problem solving is hard and I know it shouldn't hurt this much, shouln't send shards of pain through my temple but it does, still, I try my best.

“Dick,” I try again, “Brother,” I say next but it's so strange in my mouth and unknown to my ears that I don't say it again. I've never called him that.

Dick's shoulders move up and down and now he's crying.

I don't, this is the wrong way, usually I'm the one shaking and blubbering and clawing at my scalp, trying to tear out all the flashes of a bright red smiling face and the tick, tick of a bomb.

Dick starts rocking back and forwards, yanking at his hair, stamping his feet on the floor and I raise the lumps of meat I call arms and wrap them around him. He stays tense, still rocking so I rock with him.

I wish that little robin was here because all I have in me is rage, violence, death. The other half is just confusion.

But Dick is here and I am here and he's trying to be fine but he's not so I move from where I'm standing curling around my brother with his face pressed against my chest and I sit next to him.

My arm curls behind him, my other around his front grabbing at his waist and I pull him into my shoulder, rocking us both.

He said we were brothers, but he's never felt like that type of family. Whatever he feels like though, it is close, intimate, he's seen my flesh carved away and revealing the graveyard of my soul so this is the least I can do.

I scratch his scalp, snagging on wet, knotted clumps so I work on untangling them as I say, “Ssh Dickie, let it out. You need to cry pretty boy so just cry, cry and then tell me who hurt you.”

I hear my voice turn ugly but I don't say, I'll kill them, I'll destroy whoever hurt you and maybe Dick does hear it or maybe he doesn't but either way he's shaking and crying in my arms and it's hard to get my ears to catch every word he says to translate the sounds to proper knowledge in my head but I think I understand.

Blockbuster knows who Nightwing is. Blockbuster knows Dick Grayson is Nightwing.

He's hurt people, going to hurt more people, and it's going to be everyone around Dick.

Well Blockbuster doesn't know about me.

We're still rocking but it doesn't soothe me because I'm gnashing my teeth and everything is turning green.

“Not your fault, no, not, Blockbuster is evil, he's bad. Bad men should die.”

“I – I no, I can figure something out, some way to make this right. We don't kill Jason, we don't – we don't,” Dick fumbles over his words, just like me, stuck in a loop now. He doesn't kill but I think I do.

I press my cheek into the crown of Dick's head, hold his face to my chest and think how easy it would be for Blockbuster to snap Dickie's pretty little neck. Sometimes you have to play by the bad guys rules but I don't think Dick's going to do that.

“I will kill him,” I promise and Dickie's just out of it eough that he doesn't realise how serious I am.

Dick's sobs are quieting now and I'm thinking.

“How does he know?”

“A journalist, her names Maxine Michaels, she found out who I was and Blockbuster found out through her. I have to see her, find out why, find out how much she and him know. Maybe she can tell Blockbuster she got it wrong, maybe -”

“Was it on purpose?”

“What?”

“Did she want Blockbuster to know to hurt you?”

Dick makes a noise of disagreement but I talk over. “She's bad, just as bad as him.”

“No,” Dick defends her, sweet naïve Dick. “Doing her job, she couldn't have known what Blockbuster was going to do – he tried to kill my partner, Maxine, she was trying to report on the corruption on the force, Amy's good, she wouldn't want to take out the good guys. God Jay, they tried to kill her, it's all my fault.”

“No,” I spit, wondering why the good people always blame themselves instead of the actual monsters.

“What if he hurts you?” Dick gasps out, trying to bring his knees up to curl into his body but I”m in the way. “What if – I just got you back! Bruce doesn't even know you're alive!”

I stiffen, that names rings and rings in my head, laughing, laughing.

I.

I push it away.

I push it away and tell Dick it's not his fault, console him, hug him the way he's hugged me so many times even as his shakes change from panic to cold shiver.

I hold on as the shape of him comes apart in my hands and I keep him there as he fights his way into sleep. On the bed he slumps and I ease him back, stripping off his outfit completely and covering him with the blanket. He doesn't want to let go but I untangle myself from his grip and then I sit on the end of the bed, just staring out.

I taste blood on my lips, all the shireks and bumps of the outside world fading away and I tunnel in on Dick's police belt, the one he never took out tonight, the one he carelessly leaves on the floor because he's actually quite a messy person in his own house.

If he was smart he'd keep it with him, but I know when he goes out next he'll be going out as Nightwing, not Officer Grayson. He'll be all alone, one vigilante against this city of monsters, one little bird flying solo, no one else around to care to save him.

I wonder if the-robin-Robin would come, if he knew. I think he would. I think he'd die too, they'd both die, then there would be two little dead birds (three) and someone would have to take vengeance.

It's a good thing I'm not going to let that happen.

Chapter Text

I take the gun before Dick wakes and hide it in my room. It feels heavy and cold in my grip and I flash back to wet soil pushing at me, suffocating me.

I use the breathing methods Dick (re)taught me and work through the suffocation. I've already been through that shit, I can get through it again.

The gun is snug beneath my pillow, the bed already made the way habit makes me do but which Dick never seems to care about. He won't check my bed and I'm not in it, instead returning to his room to watch his fitful sleep.

I could leave, could go and find this Blockbuster, this Roland Desmond but I'm still not right, plans half formulated but my own thoughts confusing me. I don't know quite how to work Dick's computer, don't know exactly where to go to find Blockbuster's goons and threaten (beat) the information out of them. I have two different methods in my head for how to deal with this but I feel like I only have experience with one.

Non-lethal doesn't seem to be working out too well for Dickie and -

Robin isn't here. Robin can't help. Robin stands for hope, for tempering another's merciful side, for keeping them out of the dark.

I live in the dark now.

Dick isn't there, not yet, I can see it. He's still so far from it that he's a police officer that's never even used his own gun even though he should. He has a chance to end this legally, to prevent more people dying and he doesn't. He's wrong, but even though I know that, that it makes a green rage stir up in me like sediment disturbed, I don't stop the slow repetitive actions I've been doing for these near three hours. He sleeps and I brush fingers through his hair, running my cold, heavy hands down his arms, patting and soothing every time he twitches. I sit, cross-legged, staring down at him and I try to think, try to plan but like the white static the TV screen had turned to when I'd punched my hand clear through it, sometimes everything blanks and I don't know how long I'm out of it.

I hear that static now, then the TV, an old movie on with the audio playing too soft for me to hear, hovering just out of clarity, the curling edges giving me a shape of the scene where I'm the one lying down in pain, my head in the lap of someone much bigger, stronger.

I want to reach for the memory but I see soil-crusted bones that reach out and that's all I am -

The skeleton of that boy but my flesh has been made renew, sewn up like Frankenstein's monster and everything is different.

They can't keep Dick safe like I do, couldn't couldn't. Another dead Robin.

Just put another Robin in sight of a crowbar and -

I don't think Replacement's body would handle it any better than mine had. He's so much smaller, so much easier to break.

Would the song he sing be sweeter than mine?

I feel sick green bile at the back of my throat but Dick is moving now, legs twitching, eyes fluttering and I don't have time to chase the various, fleeting bitterness that peppers and salts the graveyard inside me.

Right now I need to keep all that rage for Blockbuster. To be the monster brought to life - and a memory comes to me, words on a page that my younger eyes had seen:

' . . . and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery."

And then another, the warmth of a room bracketed by the smell of books, a soft armchair at my back, the crinkle of a jacket thrown on the ground.

'Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? '

“It's just me,” I say as I feel the minuscule shifts of Dick tensing into awareness, exhausted remnants clinging to his face and refusing to let go.

“Little wing,” he mumbles and I'm taken back, back – No.

I'll remember when I want to remember, I'm in charge.

'I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge.'

“Yeah,” I say, slightly startled by how natural it feels, the inflection more my own than those monotonous yes's I remember giving until now. Inside my head are words that are elevated, formal, evocative, poems and stories coming back that I must have known. But me? I may just be a dead little bird, grotesque and patched together, but I am finding the old stitches of myself.

Dick's sitting up, trying to get my attention and I don't remember that happening.

Guess I'm still broken after all.

Dick looks fond, a little tug at his lip and says, “Did you watch over me this whole time?”

Two responses war in my head, a 'Who else is going to take care of your sorry ass? and the one I actually say.

“Yes, you had bad dreams. You need to sleep longer.”

“Little Wing,” Dick murmurs and leans forward to press our foreheads together. I keep my eyes open, seeing those thick lashes up close and then the blue of Dick's eyes as he opens them.

“Thank you.”

I frown, paw at his neck, fingers curling around the nape. “You, you shouldn't go.”

Dick doesn't try to move back, just reaches up to hold onto my arm. “It's my job Jay, stopping bad guys.”

“But you don't stop them,” I try to explain, squirming with frustration at myself, the situation, him. Inside my head is a new world unfurling but my mouth can't seem to follow along.

His expression is, I think it's hurt but he stays where he is and quips, “I've put away a fare few in my time.”

“But they don't stay away, they come back. Bad men come back because you're - you're nice.”

“- Nice,” he snorts and even that sounds exhausted.

“Too gentle. Blockbuster needs to die.”

His body jerks when I say the name and then he's pulling back, pulling himself away from me and off the bed.

“That's not how we do things Jay – I can't just, it would make me -”

“We?”

Dick falls to a standstill, his body half-turned away from me.

We don't kill, we don't kill.

“We don't kill,” I say it out loud but it's only when Dick jerks, turns to me wide-eyed, face sallow that I realised I've said it.

Dick swallows then hesitantly nods, “Yeah, we don't kill.”

I can feel my face screw up, rage bleeding into everyone of my muscles and twisting my mouth into a snarl. The Adam of his labours, a monster.

“Then you'll be killed and all the people you love will be killed. Innocent people will be killed.” It's coming out of my mouth hot now and each word is like a blow against Dick.

“I'll be killed. Do you want that Dickiebird?”

Dick recoils, face crumpling and I teeter between my rage and my sympathy. But I was the one that died, what right does he have to hurt more than me? He, the golden boy, the one that flew away and DIDN'T COME BACK AND SAVE ME -

“Y-you don't understand Jason,” Dick whispers softly but he's holding himself and not looking at me. “I can't cross that line, I, I did it once and I don't -”

“If you, if you, killed a bad man brother,” - and it still feels somehow wrong to call him that - “then I know it was for a reason. You were saving people.”

Dick somewhat chokes then, a sob, a cough, his scarred chest bare and obviously trembling, the moonlight from the window cutting a glow against him.

“It didn't stick Jay, B – someone else was there and they revived him.”

“You, don't seem happy about that.” If someone brought back a person I'd decided needed to die, I wouldn't really be happy about it either.

Dick laughs, “No, I never really was.”

This talking has calmed me considerably, placed me on the side of sympathy instead of anger.

He, he is a good person. A good cop, a good brother, a good man. I don't want to hurt him but I'm scared, yes, that's what I feel. Scared because his 'rule' puts him in more danger and I have the gun now but I'm not strong enough to protect Dick. I might lose my mind halfway to finding Blockbuster and then wake up back in this house, covered in grime and the stink of outside.

I say, accidentally gruff because my throat is clogged, “Go, eat cereal. Eat and drink water, hydrate, and think about what to do after.”

It's the butchered phrasing of someone else’s instructions, someone from long ago but the advice is still sound.

I can see he wants to fight, wants to say that he needs to go find Blockbuster, find that journalist yesterday, but I walk out past him, heading to the kitchen and carefully pouring two bowls of his super sweet cereal.

He follows in later, arms still crossed over and holding himself, his suit hanging from his legs and sits. I want to tell him to take the suit off, no costumes at the dinner table, but it's another fight I don't want to have, another person's instructions.

I put his bowl in front of him, sit opposite with my own and start doggedly putting one spoon in my mouth after another. I still need to focus on making sure I don't shake, that the spoon goes clearly in my mouth so it's not strange for me to give Dick silence. He eats, though one of the frozen more nutritional meals in the freezer would have been better, puts the bowl away, showers, gets changed into a new Nightwing suit and then leaves, informing me he's heading to the journalist's.

I wait and when I know he's gone I go to my room.

I take out the weighted gun.

Chapter Text

I wander around the house for a few moments which stretches and lengthens and then I realise I've been here too long, the gun a heavy anchor in my hands.

There is something wrong, something I can sense, like a ticking at the back of my teeth, a repeating clicking in my ear but I don't know why I am still here. I don't know, the uncomfortable sensation is like . . . wind, I can't see it, but I can feel it. No, not wind, something darker, heavier, more violent.

Like green gas.

I pace again, looking, checking the corners, rubbing at peeled up edges of paint, trying to see what that something wrong is but I can't. Sometimes my body is solid and numb and unfeeling and other times it's like I hear everything around me, can feel a look on my flesh.

I hear a noise outside, a little girl's laugh. I've heard it before though I can't remember her name. I think I like children, it's so easy for the world to ruin them, to make them like me. I want to make sure she's safe.

This place isn't safe, not now, not with what Dick told me.

I know what type of person Blockbuster is, I can taste it like dirt in my mouth and he wants to hurt Dick, wants to hurt him bad.

I usually go out the window but this time I hesitate, lift the window up, feel the whistle of a gust of air against my nose before I close it again, the muscles in my upper arm hurting from how tense I've been holding my body. I get a jacket, it's one of Dick's bigger ones, thick leather from some undercover operation. I like it, it's got an aggressive look and it's better to look dangerous outside of this apartment than not. I know how to open the window from outside so I don't need a key as I leave through the front door, hearing that little girl's laughter trickle from down the corridor. Door locked, the jacket high around my neck with gun hidden pressed to my stomach, I go towards the girl.

I just want to see her, to know that there is something young and innocent in this shitty town.

I round the corner, head down, peeking out the corner of my eyes but I misjudge and the little girl is there, smacking into my knees. She bounces back, about to fall but with instincts that come and go, I quickly catch her. She blinks wide blue eyes in my arms, her tight black curls springing as her head bobs. Her little dark fingers are clenched around the sleeves of my jacket, their colouring similar, and I hear her Dad rush forward and start to apologise.

He takes her out of my arms and scolds her for running like that before apologising to me.

I haven't – apart from a little birdy, I haven't spoken to anyone that isn't Dick so I freeze for a moment, options of what to say before me shrivelling before I can choose one.

“Hey, you're Officer Grayson's guest aren't you? His brother I think he said.”

I nod, looking at the little girl snuggled into her father's arms, curious of the stupid, mute man.

“Sorry about that, this one's a bit of a handful.”

Say something Jason, say it!

“That is . . . okay,” I say slowly, my heart beating like a slow, heavy pound of someone's hand in my chest, the old Jason trying to get out and take over cause he always had something to say.

“Are you okay?” The dad asks, but then backtracks awkwardly. “Ah, Dick said you've been in an accident so I don't mean to pressure you. Did you want me to take you back to your apartment or are you going out somewhere?”

He's nice, and good excuse Dick, a vague accident that's left me weird. I have a feeling the father is slightly uncomfortable around what he thinks is probably a dumb mute but then again, at this moment I'm not proving him wrong in being uncomfortable.

I may be dumb and weird but I know something's wrong.

“Something is wrong, you . . . should leave. Danger.”

The father starts, a bit confused but mostly disbelieving. “Whoa there buddy, there's no danger, how about we get back to your room?”

“No!” I shake my head, take a step back, feeling the thick gun in my jacket. I look at the little girl, so secure and safe in her father's arms and know she's wrong to think that.

Wrong. Wrong.

I reach forward and I grab the man, ignoring his surprised yell, his attempts to calm me, and I start to drag them both out, out of the building. All the sounds are distorted, the way it sounds when I put my head under the bath water and I don't have time to pay attention to it.

Tick.

My head is a mess, but we don't see any other people and the father is just trying to soothe his daughter, his daughter who is crying now, crying, crying. The man is saying something and now he's turning, getting his daughter to the ground and she's running back inside.

“No!” I scream, try to stop them but the father, apologising, breaks the weak hold I now have and pushes me back, pushes me down the front steps. I fall and roll to my knees, seeing the man disappear inside, the door close.

I sit there momentarily, stunned, but my skin crawling, my tongue itching.

I see laughing faces in my head, a grave marked Nightwing and I -

Tick, tick.

Tick, tock, goes the clock.

There's a grate to the side of the door, that shows below into the basement. It's dark down there but a square shape with red numbers is so obvious when you've seen it before.

5

Oh.

4

It makes sense.

3

The best way to hurt Dick.

2

Is by hurting everyone around him.

1

I feel the heat before I notice the sound and it's a familiar memory, but I'm not in the middle this time, not like the little girl and her father. It should happen too quick for me to see it but my eyes are wide open (this time) and it sparks, climbing its way up from the bottom, blowing out. Meeting me face on, just the way I met my death last time.

I'm thrown back from the force of the explosion, the gun in my jacket useless and I fly.

Fly Robin fly.

I fly until my back hits a wall, my head snapping back into it seconds later.

Everything goes dark.

*

I'm trapped, it's pushing me down and I feel all the breaks in my bones, the blood in my throat, choking me, suffocating me.

White pasty hands around my neck.

The edges beat into me, the coffin thick, unyielding.

I scream and scream and there's no point, I can't claw my way out, the wood won't budge under my bloody nails, the grave dirt is pushing my eyelids down so everything is dark. There's a steady thrum in my ears, in my head, making the whole world move with it and my stomach lurches as it moves the coffin.

He's not coming, he's not coming.

My mouth is moving but it feels so far away from me, like it's not even attached to my body. Maybe it isn't, maybe it's a big wide red mouth and bats are pouring out of it, shrieking, screaming, shrills saying I'm not enough, I never was enough, I'm just a replacement.

The graveyard inside of me shudders and shakes and ash is falling from the sky, smoke everywhere and little, stupid Jason can't save himself.

Please, please.

“. . . please. Please.”

My useless fists beat above me, hot red rivulets of pain cutting down my forearms.

“ . . . No . . . no.”

Not again, not again.

“Let me out.”

I'll kill myself again before being stuck in here.

“Help.”

Do you still think dear old Batsy is coming to save you?

“Save me.”

Aw, how sad.

“Batman.”

Well this was fun, probably more for me than you though.

“Bruce.”

Oh, and say hi to DaddyBatssss for me.

“Dad.”

*

When I come out, lifting the rubble off, seeing my blood stain it, how most of my clothing is singed but the jacket I was wearing was reinforced, the gun leaving a soon-to-be bruise against my chest, I'm half-rabid, seeing two different scenes.

In one: the night is dark, rain pours on a moonlit graveyard and I don't know where I am, who I am, what I am.

In another: the rocks, cement and broken, grinding metal are the floor of a horror scene, a smouldering bombed shell of what used to be a building.

Amongst the war-zone is a figure in blue, frantic, screaming, calling out a name. The name is familiar, the name is mine, but there are two different me's in my head right now and I don't want to be found.

Nobody found me last time, not in time anyway.

What time? 

I - I, I'm crying, I can feel it. Feel it like a burn down my cheeks. I want to run to the man, have him hold me, promise to save me, keep me safe. But it's all just lies, lies.

I can't be found.

The man in blue needs this somehow. Or maybe I'm the one that does.

His body is shaking, he pulls something out of the rubble, the skin marked ashy-grey from soot and blood-loss. The sound of the broken building is loud as it is thrown away, the blue man so carelessly strong.

He pulls the girl into his arms, her features lax, her body limp. She is dead. Neither of us could save her. He holds her body, rocks, keens and in the distance the sound of sirens start, people from the nearby surroundings making their way over.

But I don't go over to him.

Instead I - bloody, nails pulled back from clawing at the rocks, shrapnel piercing the tender, bare bits of my arms, legs and face - remove myself from the scene with faltering, wavering steps. I keep an eye, puffy, stinging, on the man of blue and black, even as I remove the shrapnel, aware that some of my wounds are already closing, throbbing intensely before itching momentarily.

I come back in fragments, though I was never really whole before this and the green wash of rage, the bitterness of my own death and knowing what could have stopped this, is enough for me to piece together a decision. It seems the most important decision I've ever made, it seems like the only one I can make.

I watch Dick let go of the young dead girl and flee into the city, his movements erratic but his all his awareness gone. He is simple to follow, though he fails his rolls on the rooftops often, jarring shoulders the way they shouldn't and nearly misjudging leaps. I follow, I follow, the night creeping closer and then he finally stops, stealing into some small alcove of an apartment building with a fire-ladder beside. He collapses, curls into himself and doesn't notice me across the way, all but collapsing myself, the raw burn of my lungs still not strong enough to break me from this pool of certainty and focus I have fallen into.

I watch him, all night, even as he shivers in the cold that his suit should not let him feel.

He needs to kill Blockbuster, the monster won't stop.

And if I have to let Dick think I'm dead (again) for him to be able to do it, to cross that line, then that's what I have to do.

It's for the best.

I'm doing it to save him.

Chapter Text

When Dick wakes, he is cold, shivering and I want to help him.

I have spent the night with my clarity of thoughts, sifting through what I know even as some memories already have their edges turning soft and curling away from me.

I remember what PTSD is, the definition and examples sliding into my knowing and I know that I had a flashback. I've seen people go through it before, on the streets, curled around their booze as the uncaring walk by, so blind to the poor people society keeps underfoot. It's like a whole new part of my brain has opened up and all this information has slotted itself in, though in reality it is more that parts of my brain were being closed off from me, unable to deal with the trauma of dying and then being alive again.

People had always joked I was tenacious, clawing back from death definitely proved that.

Zombie-Jason, huh, I'm definitely a lot smarter than the ones in books.

I know I died and I know it was a monster that killed me, a monster that should have been put down years before I even met him. I don't remember the monster exactly, that knowledge is still hidden from me and every time I try to push it, my body aches with remembered violence, my throat becomes parched as if I have been holding in screams all night. I have been holding in screams all night; I didn't want to wake Dick.

Dick is uncurling now, stretching out limbs, working out knots in his neck and back muscles, limbering up the way ingrained habit has taught him to do even if his mind isn't there.

I'm sorry Dickiebird, but this is for the best, I think. 

The morning light is a dark orange and it would be ugly on big bird if he was capable of being ugly but even exhausted, with black bags heavy under his eyes, outfit still speckled with soot and the thin fabric at his fingers torn, Dick is beautiful. I think, in the past, I might have felt a vicious, insecure jealousy, that I could never match up to someone so carelessly elegant, so bright. That I was different but I'd loved it, hadn't wanted to stop but that insecurity always underscored every success, that I could be thrown away without any notice.

But now is different, and I don't worry about matching because that isn't my job, I'm not his copy anymore. I'm his shadow and shadow I am as he gets up, staring into the sun long enough that it should make his eyes water, as if he can sear the images of the dead little girl away. Death isn't enough for the monster that did this, he should be made to hurt but the images will stay.

Dick is too kind to forget those who have died, but not strong enough to avenge them. It's a sort of selfishness, just like him, like -

He'll use the dead to spur him on in this useless Mission, but not enough to sacrifice his own morals and kill the murderers.

That will change.

Rotating his shoulders, Dick reaches out to the ladder beside him and uses it to climb up. Rotating my own limbs, cracking my neck and going quietly to the balls of my feet, I am lucky he is so out of it because I do not have a grapple gun like he does; the paths I have to take are longer, louder and more difficult.

Dick makes his way across the city, the sun rising higher, though clouds ominously linger at the bottom, checking in on his various contacts. He watches the police, disappears into the building for a long enough time that I am tempted to go in myself, until he returns with head bowed and an ear piece he places in.

I wonder if he will try to call the little baby robin, if he will ask for help.

He does not.

He makes his way back to the wreck of our building, listening in to the hustle and bustle of the emergency services that are still trying to work their way through the rubble, dogs sniffing and searching for any survives. He taps the side of his mask and I can see him scanning the area, looking for body heat, for anyone alive.

The outcome is grim and I can tell from the blast that anyone who wasn't incinerated in the centre died from the weight of the building crushing them. Anyone in an air pocket would most likely be dead by now too. I want them to live but they're all civilians and the terror of this experience would most likely break them so maybe it's best. Then again, Gothamites are a tougher breed then anywhere else, maybe they would be okay.

I'd failed that dad and his daughter, not realising the ticking I'd been hearing, been sensing, had been there for hours.

It surely broke me though, Zombie-Jason is just a patchwork of the pieces I used to be but that's okay, it's good enough. I know what my purpose is now and my pieces aren't loosely connected anymore, vengeance is gluing me together.

It's righteous justice.

Dick stays there, time passing, passing, swaying with the breeze, unblinking eyes waiting for them to pull me out. If he would turn he would see the heat of my outline but he doesn't. There is that anger again, but part of it is because he doesn't see me, he never sees me. I don't know where it comes from - I don't like being angry at Dick, and for a moment I second-guess myself, wondering at the stabs of vicious delight at his pain that underlies my decision. I don't want to hurt him, but I think, in the past, that he hurt me.

Old Jason wanted some payback for being forgotten, overlooked.

Old Jason was desperate, vicious, so insecure inside. He just wanted safety and love and praise but it's dangerous to want those things when you'll never get it.

Best to pretend you don't need it, that it doesn't matter. Because It doesn't matter, I don't matter, not now, not when this is so much more important.

Dick leaves and he makes his way to the reporter, to her apartment and he asks her what has she done and why.

I don't like reporters, even if this is the first one I've met in my second life. They poke and they prod and stick their noses into places where it just causes everyone grief and nothing good comes out of it and they think it's their right. They ask questions and sneer and write nasty little comments about 'Street-rat adopted by millionaire' as if that's all I ever was, as if it was some sort of failing to be able to survive in a place that those reporters wouldn't even go to. They couldn't last ten seconds in my life, first or second.

I don't see the sniper, wet and cold outside in the rain, so caught in my own thoughts, in distantly observing Dick's breakdown as he struggles to find some way out of this that doesn't involve Blockbusters death.

The reporter is trying to comfort him, saying that it's the bad guy's fault when it's hers too. She just doesn't want to take any responsibility, for the 34 lives Dick says, that are now gone. I wonder if he's counting me in that number. If he put the fear of death into her, if he grabbed her around the throat and squeezed till the bruises started to form back when she first started investigating him then she would have stopped looking, she wouldn't know -

That Dick Grayson is Nightwing.

That Jason Todd is just a dead Robin.

That there is a third Robin.

That they are all just so easily replace to the Bat -

I don't see the shooter and I don't see the gun until the bullet is slicing clear through the glass and straight into Maxine Michaels' head. She drops and Blockbuster follows the path of the bullet, so close to me where I'm hidden crouched in the neighbours balcony. He doesn't see me at all, and it's funny because that was always the opposite of my job as Robin, being bright, meant to attract, distract, divide.

The new little Robin is much less brighter than I was.

Less of a target. Maybe he's smarter than I first thought.

Blockbuster taunts Dick, saying all the things we all already know.

There is no reason for Dick not to kill him, Blockbuster is actively going out of his way to taunt Nightwing and his only safeguard is that the man under the mask is too confined by his mentor's morals, for the fear of disappointing him, that he won't kill.

Blockbuster and Dick go tumbling out the door. Blockbuster, the monster that he is, aims for an innocent neighbour. Dick saves him with a batarang to Blockbusters hands and I, creeping in through the neighbours window, open the door to pull the man inside to safety.

I tell him, "Go out the window, climb down, run," because I can't tell him to stay.

Blockbuster might have rigged this place to blow too.

I come back out the door, closing it behind me to see a woman on the ground with a scattered bowl of chips beside her. I lumber over, drag her up and push her in the direction of the other man.

"Leave, now!" I bark out and there is something dark in my throat, the memory of how someone else spoke that could scare me witless though I never lost my wits, and it scares this woman too.

She runs and I follow the path of destruction and blood Nightwing and Blockbuster have left behind. I hear Blockbuster's threats, know that he will do what he says, that he will destroy everyone around Dick, anyone who so much as looks at him and it will ruin Dick, break him.

Dick doesn't like being alone, I think he hates it.

I've left him alone.

Blockbuster says he couldn't save his circus, he couldn't save his relationship with -

O. Oracle.

Whoever she is. I don't know the name.

Blockbuster is bleeding on the steel stairwell now, grinning through the blood on his face, the red that's seeped into the spaces of his teeth and he's still taunting with wild-eyed delight. He isn't a man, he is monstrous, an animal. Dangerous animals need to be put down.

But Dick isn't doing it, he isn't, he isn't.

I get out my gun, Officer Grayson's gun and point it at Blockbuster's head. He can't see me and for once, my aim is steady, my arms don't shake.

Everything is cold around, a little bubble of steel I'm in, with that rusted bloody smell in my nose.

I breathe.

Even for me, Jason, one of those 34.

He won't do it.

He won't.

He can't.

I feel nothing.

Breathe.

A woman arrives, costumed, orange. She's holding a gun, aimed at Blockbuster and Blockbuster is so sure, so confident that Dick will sacrifice his own life to save him, because that is what a Hero does, that is what Nightwing does.

The woman isn't asking Dick to kill Blockbuster, she's just asking him to let her.

I wait, everything is still.

Maybe Dick won't be able to kill for me but he won't stop me for killing for him.

Metal in my mouth, a crowbar softly pressing against my heart.

"You killed Jason," Dick says and Blockbuster laughs.

"Who was that, a neighbour you were sweet on?"

Dick turns away. 

And the woman shoots.

Chapter Text

There is a silence in the loud reverberation afterwards.

The woman shoots but I still have Blockbuster sighted down my barrel. It’s almost like I was the one that shot him.

She shoots and he had been turning to attack her, the woman he’d disregarded.

She shoots and he crumples with the impact, the breath leaving my body like the bullet was entering me too, even as it left my gun. Her gun. Our gun.

We did this together.

She shoots and all that evil is made obsolete without a body to house it. The blast of the gun reverberates, echoes, smashes into us as it clangs around the metal staircase, compounding the violent action into our heads; repeating, repeating, an unending noise.

Dick is jarred by it at the landing before the steps, body flinching with each of the shots. Because she shoots and shoots and shoots again.

Then the sound goes soft and the silence rings in my ears. It’s the moment when you lead the last word on the last page of a loved book, how you hold yourself in that time before you close the book.

Dick is staring at the blood on his hands, holding them out as if they aren’t his own. His shoulders are heaving, his mouth stretched in agony. He is held in the moment after he stepped to the side and Blockbuster is shot, but I don’t think he wants to be.

He doesn’t want to be but he’s too scared to shut the book.

The girl opens her mouth, and Dick stumbles, reaching with bowed back from the railing. He starts to lumber his way up and I turn. I get to the roof before him, as similar to all the many other rooftops in this city that I use(d) to perch on. I hide behind a square metallic upstanding box, the inside cables and wires just like every other building, the lingering gun shots, the buzzing silence, all dimming under the frantic clang of Dick making his way up the stairs.

The gun is still in my hand; my fingers tight around it and unwilling to relax even as Dick slams open the unlocked door with the side of his body and comes out clear into the rain.

I hadn’t even noticed the rain.

He falls, inconsolable with his own terror, at his own belief that he’s murdered Blockbuster; the rain is not quick enough to wash away all the red.

In the moments before the woman will make her way up I have the chance to reveal myself, to comfort my brother, to tell him I’m alive and that it’s alright. That piece of trash was dead and it was a good thing, it was a righteous thing, and Dick was allowed to be happy, or at least relieved about it too.

I don’t feel those things though, not happy nor victorious.

I feel disgust. A righteous anger burning through me that’s turned into a brittle, sickened feeling – that man touched my brother, with his evil words and sickened flesh. I should go down and burn the body, to rid the world of his stench.

The door to the rooftop screeches open and it’s her, the girl. I can’t see the gun; maybe she’s put it away. The rain pours down on her, her bun thick with water as she strides over to Dick. Dick who is on the ground, gagging, mumbling.

She touches his shoulder, turns him around on his back and he gasps, “Catalina.”

So that’s her name.

She pushes him back, leg lifting to straddle him and he says, “Don’t . . . touch me. I’m . . .”

She soothes him, consoles him. But her actions are purposeful, there is want in them, resolve.

I remember being on the streets, the money in my hands. People who took just like she wants to take as if it was their right, their right to my –

“-poisonous. Numb. I . . . killed him. We killed . . .”

All the women and men I'd known, hugging street corners, lips sly, and hips angled, clothes revealing the only thing they had to sell to survive in this shitty town. Their bodies used, minds gone, the ones that had died, cut up like a pig because that’s how people saw them, as less than.

Murdered, all those prostitutes murdered. They’d stopped him, the serial killer but it was too late, too late.

‘What’s going on in that head of yours Jason?’

Catalina, the girl, woman, tuts at him and refutes. “I killed him. Now hush.” She’s letting her hair out of the bun, it’s plastered thick all over her face now.

“No, you’re my responsibility. It’s my fault, my fault.”

She tells him to quiet, she calls him ‘Mi amor’ and she’s finding the places where his suit comes undone, as he comes undone underneath her. Dick isn’t even there, he’s mumbling, body twitching and she takes out his penis, stroking it into hardness even as she opens up her own outfit to –

There is a crack of thunder but no lightning and Catalina’s body falls.

You can’t even really tell how the blood spreads out, so thick is the water on the roof and Dick, still half-hard, curls on his side.

I walk over and stare, stare at my brother. I think he’s shivering, shaking. Over what? Over a monster? But that’s okay, that’s okay. He let the woman kill Blockbuster. He did. He did it even though he’s crying now, so weak but I fixed that. I know what to do.

The woman is half on Dick still and I kick her off. She twitches.

She twitches and her eyes open underneath the blood. Her hand is moving, for the gun and she is still alive.

I go for her and I can’t see where the bullet hit but I know I hit her. She should be dead.

She lashes out with a foot, body still tangled with Dick’s but it doesn’t take much for me to swipe it aside. I’ve done this before and she is weak, prey. My fingers, nail-less and dirty from the building explosion, wrap around her throat and it is slick and hard to find purchase but –

I squeeze, I squeeze and I stare at her. Her legs kick, she tries to claw at me, but her gloves are normal and have no edges. I squeeze and her gasps can’t be heard over the rain. Her movements slow, shudder and I squeeze even tighter, feeling the muscle give way.

I stare at her, because she touched him, she tried to –

Her jaw goes slack, her cheeks droop and I strangle her until I feel the life leave her body.

And then, when she is dead, I turn to my brother and do what I have to do.

I tuck him back into his suit and he moans and I hear my own echo it, from times past. Just a bodily reaction, nothing more. Not his fault.

I search for his earpiece, I know it’s there but when I put it in my ear I can’t hear anything. So I look through his suit, peel off his mask and put it over my own face. It clamps around me like a vice, a memory I can’t escape, suffocating me.

I’m on my knees; I want to peel the mask off. I remember flying through the sky with only this to protect my eyes and –

The earpiece is on mute, for both sides, and I turn it back on. I listen, listen, and there it is. A voice I’ve heard of a Robin Red.

“Okay Spoiler, if you need me I’ll be on my usual channel.”

“Or you could get some sleep you insomniac.”

“Who has time to sleep when the world needs saving?” The voice that I know quips back and Spoiler huffs dramatically.

“The world always needs saving bird-brain. I for one will save it tomorrow. Goodnight!”

“Not unless I’ve saved it first . . .” The little robin mutters and I speak before he can leave.

“He needs help,” I say.

There is silence, a click and then. “Nightwing?”

“Yes.”

“Where – I’m coming to you. No, don’t say anything, I’ve taken us off the main channel but that is not a guarantee. Nightwing’s locator is off; I need you to turn it on.”

“How?” I ask for the memory is half-there but always me turning it off.

The voice instructs me how and I do and then he says he’s coming and to get somewhere safe if I can.

I smile, feel it pull at my skin because we’re safe and we are going to stay safe.

The bad men are dead.

Chapter Text

Chapter 10

We are under a bit of roof jutting out, protecting us from the rain when I see him again.

He arrives without fanfare, standing in the rain staring at us. The water slips off his outfit without seeping in and I know it is especially designed to keep the wearer dry. The boy, the robin, does not pay attention to the dead woman on the roof and I wonder if he knows about the dead monster in the building.

He approaches cautiously and even though I knew he was coming, asked for help I –

I hold my brother close to me and feel my lips curl up. The world goes sharper, harder and I see the boy’s gloved hands do not shake but he lowers his body and raises his hands up. He says something, his body trying to soothe me, to pretend he is not a threat but I know he is analysing, I see him take it all in as his gaze flits to Dick.

Brother is unmoving in my arms, he passed out quite a while ago and I know it is better this way. Better. He cannot feel how I hold him, how I try not to squeeze too hard with hands that just killed.

I wonder. Is this the first time I’ve killed? I don’t know. I know it’s not the first time I’ve wanted to kill.

I am.

I am a murderer now. Like all the other scum that have killed.

But mine was right, my murder was righteous. It wasn’t even murder really.

It was ridding the earth of vermin. Yes, maybe that is why I am, why I have been brought back with this empty soul and broken body; the green is filling up this empty vessel with purpose, with the right to cast judgement down on the wicked.

Heaven would not exist without hell, and who best but Satan, a fallen angel, a fallen bird knows how best to judge sinners?

The boy, who appears young, so young, young as they always are when they start, sits down on the ground. The rain is light, the moon is hidden behind bulbous, grey-tinged clouds but I can see the boy clearly. He is green and red, the yellow of his cape a snippet of colour to distract the eye.

I am not distracted.

“Has he been injured?” I hear him ask. Yes, yes. The answer is yes but the injury is inside, deep inside. Even all this rain won’t be enough to wash the memory away, the feel of another’s touch when you don’t want it. Maybe, maybe he won’t remember.

Is it better not to remember?

“Jason,” the robin says, “You asked for help and I am here to help. I have a safe house we can go to, nobody knows about it but me. I can take –”

I do not like that and the boy changes his words. “If you can carry Nightwing, then follow me and I will take us there.” His mask is soulless, so dark and reflecting. I see myself but I am tainted green.

I am holding an injured bird, almost folded around him and it may be suffocating, it may be constraining, but I should’ve done it earlier. A caged bird is a safe one.

Brother mumbles in my arms and I crawl my fingers to his neck, under the protective collar. His pulse is quick, but he does not wake.

The robin is waiting, still and seeming patient. I know he can wait for hours in that held position, but he doesn’t want to; he wants to help brother.

I nod and the boy hesitates as if to test my certainty so I get up with Dick in my arms.

“It would be best for us to grapple but I don’t know if you can hold onto him and swing at the same time.”

I feel the breeze on my face, the freefall through air and the joy of knowing that I can catch myself and fly where I want to. But no, these muscles I have are weakened now as I’ve had to relearn this broken body.

I want to fly but I can’t, not yet.

The robin does not offer again to take brother from me when I shake my head. Instead he moves slowly forward, hands loose but gaze unrelenting.

“We will have to stick to the shadows; the safe house isn’t too far. The rain –”

“-will cover us.”

“-will cover us,” we both say, the same thoughts leaving our lips. The robin pauses, head quirked at an angle and then finishes reaching for the door, opening it for me.

My tongue is a blackened, burned thing in my mouth, speaking a dead kid’s words. Who is that dead kid? He’s so close and yet I feel like I’ve never known. I’m the misshapen cookie overfilling the cutter.

I taste peanut butter, can almost feel my tongue catch the crumbles. The dead boy loved cookies.

I look at this robin and wonder if he’s had the same cookies. Has he been fed with the same sweet lies? All I can see is a sacrifice, a skewered bird with hollow limbs that won’t keep him aflight for long.

I need to save him, like I will save Dick. Like I did save Dick.

We go down the stairs, pass the dead monster and the boy doesn’t ask. We go into the streets, we step into the spaces between the flickering lights and my limbs ache and shake with brother’s weight but I do not slow. I think, instead, of that woman over him, pulling him out of his pants and I feel the rage over me, a burning embrace.

The robin is so green, green, and he keeps turning to make sure I am behind. He speaks words rarely, short and concise and yes, he is a flighty bird, weary and cautious but still straying too close to the snakes.

We reach a building, go down steps and a scanner reads the three of us before the boy types something fast into a piece of blank wall. A door closes behind me, shuttering from the ceiling and then an opening in front of us lets us in.

I am wet, I did not have anything to keep Dick warm with and his outfit is torn, bloodied and barely heated as it usually is. I know because I’d taken this costume out during the day, when Dick had left it home and the inside of it had heated the leftover ice from my fingers.

The robin directs me to a table, nearly chest high and not a bed at all. He leaves and is back with a kit as I place Dick down with a gentleness I don’t quite succeed in.

He is there then, his black hair mixing with Dick’s as he leans over brother, pulling out bandages and other medical devices. He clicks something on the table and then the whole table is lit and Dick’s body has lines of red appear over him. One covers my hand and I stare it, seeing the tiny numbers that make up the straight red lines.

They flicker though, red and green, red and green.

A voice speaks, robotic, and details Dick’s injuries.

Broken wrist. Torn leg tendon. Fractured finger. Abrasion to the face. Limited brain wave response. Patient is unconscious.

The robin is methodical, clinical in his movements. He does not come to my side of the table until he has to.

He is close to me when he says, “You are cutting into your hand, you need to let go of the table.”

I cannot look away from Dick, but I feel the little bird’s presence; he watches me with eyes that don’t blink.

“Please move so I can splint Dick’s fractured finger.”

I take a step closer to Dick’s head, but it’s the minimal amount. The boy presses his lips together, I see him do it and then he steps in close to me, so close. Last time he was this close I had my hands wrapped around his neck.

He’d be a pretty little bird bleeding on the ground.

He focuses on the task but part of his attention is on me. It has to be, everything is still so tinted green and I am vibrating between so many emotions.

I – I remember I used to feel, a lot, before my death. How did my body contain so emotions, I can’t know with the barren, ashen landscape that is my soul now.

The robin that replaced me (replaced me?) inserts something into Dick’s arm and then looks up at me. The safe house is tiled a dark grey, the walls lighter and he is somehow a darker thing against it all.

“You are not like me,” I say.

“We are all different.”

“No,” I cut off those tempered words, because Dick was brightness and joy, determination to laugh past his pain, dedication to see the mission through. I had been – I had been.

This robin is sly and smart, still a baby that could be clipped but I think it would be harder than I first thought. I think this bird has eaten a snake before.

“You see,” I say but he does and does not understand.

I leave Dick’s head with a brush against his nape and step closer into the boy. He lifts his chin, his mask shadowing his thoughts. Does he already have a hand on a weapon?

He should.

“I know those two people that were dead, Blockbuster is well-known and the woman, she is a new vigilante Tarantula. Sources say she’s killed before.”

“Monster.”

The boy had his hand against Dick, I noticed it, I wondered at it. Yes, he loved brother, I could see.

He would see, I would make him see.

“Blockbuster or Tarantula?”

I feel my lips curl. “Both.”

The boy shifts on his feet, he is still wearing shoes and the floor is cold and tiled. I have been barefoot since the apartment, my socks gone and they are grimy with filth.

I can see now the path I’ve tracked in with my wet dirty feet.

“Something . . . bad has clearly happened to Dick, I would not be wrong to assume it involved Blockbuster and Tarantula would I?”

“They hurt him.”

He had to see.

“So you hurt them back,” the boy says softly and I lean down and look into his eyes.

“You see.”

But he flicked his eyes away, turned back to Dick. No.

I grab his shoulders, tiny, small things. He startles and hits out at me. I take the hit even though it forces the breath from me and I take him to the floor. He tries to flip me, gets his limbs in all the right spots but I am bigger and he does not hurt me the way I know he can. This numb body has its uses after all.

I hold him to the floor, my body between his legs, my weakened hands holding his shoulders, sliding up his neck to cup his cheeks.

He has soft cheeks, slicked with rain. If I peeled the flesh would I see the skeleton of a bird underneath? Or would it be the same cookie-cutter robin, stamped out again and again and again.

I hold his face, make sure he can’t turn away. He holds my wrists, in this position he could break them, sweep them out from underneath me.

“Blockbuster knew him, knew Dick. And the woman, she had him, like this.”

I see his rosy lips part, the confusion of a pinched brow that’s hidden behind a mask.

I press closer to him, feel his legs jolt, his fingers close reflexively around my wrists.

My fingers brush his cheekbones, I can hold his head in my palms.

I could crush him before he damages me badly.

“She took him, out of his pants, told him to hush.”

The robin rejects the truth immediately. “No, he’d fight back -”

“He was crying, little bird.”

“No.”

 “She started to lower her own pants –”

“Stop!” The boy shouts, shaking his head, his grip on my wrists is tight but still he does not break them. He has such delicate fingers.

“Blockbuster was killing everyone he knew. He thought I was dead. I let him think I was dead.”

“Why?” He asks, and I see his spark, he is gathering information out of me.

Yes, he can see, such a smart little bird. I will give him what he wants.

“So he would kill.”

“Blockbuster?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

The boy swallows, I feel it.

“But he didn’t.”

“No, he didn’t,” I say but there is no disappointment now, only understanding.

“We’re not allowed to kill Jason,” he says and it is the wrong thing to say.

I grip him hard, lean in and say, “But they could kill me!”

The boy jerks, and then disables both my wrists. I drop onto him and he catches me before our foreheads crash.

“Jason, stop, stop!”

I snarl, feel his tiny body underneath mine, the cold floor beneath us both and –

“Your eyes are green.”

He is green.

“Jason, your eyes are green, why are your eyes green?”

I smash my head into his and he grunts before rolling us both over. My hands hang limp so I wrap my legs around him and squeeze. He gasps and then nerve pinches one leg and then the other but he doesn’t know how green everything is and how much strength it gives me.

“Hey –”

I rise up with my stomach muscles and pull him and my legs down and in, the inertia moving my top forward so now he is on his back again and I am sitting on top him. My hands tingle and zap and this time I hold his wrists down.

Yes, a skewered bird.

His forehead is red, but his body does not shake with pain, too used to hiding it already.

“He didn’t kill Blockbuster but he let the woman do it.”

Such tiny frail wrists he has, but there was strength behind them.

Dick is still and silent above us, unconscious and unaware.

The boy takes a breath, another.

“The monster said he wasn’t going to stop, he was going to kill everything Dick Grayson loved.”

“He should have called us.”

I cock my head. Who was us?

“He – I would have helped him.”

“How?”

“There are, there are ways outside of murder to make someone forget.”

And a muscle in the bird’s cheek twitches.

“But when you can’t?”

“We don’t kill,” he responds, tone flat and sure. “There is always a way around it.”

I don’t believe it. He is too smart not too see. Or maybe too arrogant to think he’s wrong. One day, in the future, I’ll prove him wrong.

“You see, you know. Bad men have to die, some monsters are too dangerous to let live.”

The green of the boys hair seems big and curly now, a cackle in the corner of the room. I turn to it, chasing the sound but there is nothing there but a large computer.

There is nothing there.

I turn back to the boy and his hair is black now, straight strands laid flat against the grey of the floor, still water-logged. My mouth is parched I realise.

He wiggles his hand, a move to end the fight and I realise how harsh my grip has been.

I –

I let go of one wrist, slowly, frowning. I had been so angry, I’d just wanted him to see.

He presses the side of his mask, right now his ear.

“Yes, I’m here.”

Silence as we stare at each other, as he talks to someone through his headpiece.

“I’ve gone back home, I’ve got some homework to catch up on that’s not at the manor.”

He hums an agreement at the person. “I’ll be there tomorrow A.”

A – Who is that?

I feel too much, too much and I can’t think for all the ash in my head. A is familiar but I can’t, I won’t follow that path tonight.

I feel how tiny the boy is, how easily he lies. He finishes the call and I don’t know what to do. I know I should get off him but I can’t seem to make my body move.

“Why were your eyes green?”

Were? Oh, they must’ve gone away.

“You are staying?” I ask back instead because I don’t have an answer, I don’t know the answer. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think I remember a strange woman, after the lid and the dirt, when my fingers became the gnarled twisted mess they have only just recovered from.

“Yes, I need to monitor Dick.

“What about the monsters?” I question and my mouth feels like it’s smaller, and I’m asking my mother. When will the monsters go away? Why do you let them inside the house with their needles and greedy teeth? They keep eating at us and you just let them.

“If there’s any surveillance footage I’ll deal with it.”

I focus on him, leaving the monsters in my memory to deal with the ones now. “Destroy it.”

The bird breathes softly, still so careful, and I can see how his forehead is marked, by me.

I put it there.

“I need to understand the night, understand what . . . happened. I’d never put Dick in danger and if that footage puts him anger then I’ll destroy it.”

“Destroy it.”

Tim turns his face away, as if he can turn away from what he’s about to say. “I can understand the logic of one being sacrificed to save many but there had to be a different way. Nightwing is . . . Dick, he . . . I just need to understand how it got to this point.”

“He was all alone, no one was there.”

I made sure he was all alone.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything,” and he sounds so serious, as if it’s all on him.

I move back, withdraw my body from him though he stays still and pliant for a moment as I look down on that armoured body.

He’s obviating but I let him. Yes, he is a bird flown from the coop much too soon without his protector the wiser and I am the snake waiting for him to fall.

He will see.

I’ll just have to open his eyes

Chapter Text

The robin disappears for hours and then returns. He stays there, hovering and click-clacking at the keyboard that sits before multiple computers; it seems so large compared to Dick’s tiny laptop-based set-up. I do not sleep but my eyes start to crust and when hours and hours have passed I realise the robin has had nothing to drink.

“Water,” I say and the robin pauses, spinning his chair to me. His face, no longer cowled, no longer masked, is refined and not at all like the brutish self I am. He inclines his head towards me and stands up. I dip the cloth I’ve been holding into the bowl of water, wiping at Dick’s brow and throat, my hand going through the red, blue, and green lines hovering above his body.

Dick, who has been held in the throes of nightmares for too long, is a clammy sweating mess. He cries and mumbles, his sleep restless since the robin returned. I wish he would fall back unconscious, deep down in the recesses of his mind where there is nothing but darkness and no awareness of pain.

The girl’s death is a late consolation for the tears that clump my brother’s eyelashes together.

How many night has he cried alone like this? No one as a friend, no one knowing his true self. No one but me.

When he found me, he was alone, just as I was alone, the soil still caked on my body and –

I don’t want to remember that. I don’t, I don’t.

The boy comes back, clear water bottle in hand that doesn’t look like a sip has been taken from it and holds it out to me. It takes a moment, and in it the boy doesn’t take his attention off Dick, but I realise he’s misunderstood.

“No, you need water,” I say through dry lips, dipping the cloth in water and squeezing it out again to start on Dick’s arms.

“I’m not thirsty.”

It is nice to focus on the glide as I rub down my brother’s body. Sometimes I press too hard, and he grunts, sometimes I am too light. I focus on the pressure; I focus on saving him.

He will be reborn, just as I am reborn.

“You have not had a break since you found us. You need water.”

The little robin has been looking up many things on the large screens. I have focused on Dick, but I recognised the bodies: the man and his little girl in Dick’s apartment, the reporter with the bullet straight through her head. The little bird has been connecting the bodies and finding a terrible image.

I clean one arm and go to the other.

“. . . you haven’t had any water either.”

What a little shit.

‘Master Jason, please do try to refrain from that sort of language, at least while you are out representing the family.’

I drop the cloth, hand going to my head and tongue curling like it’s going to fall down my throat.

“Jason?”

I yell. I yell because Dick is asleep and this boy does not know me.

“Jason what’s wrong?”

“You, you are wrong.”

I turn on him and he draws the bottle back in to himself, wary. He’s perfect though, an aristocrat. He suits wealth and wealth is suited to him. It never fit me, suits tailored and yet always looking cut wrong. The way I am cut wrong.

“I’m sorry – “

“Stop saying sorry!”

He goes silent, still, waiting for it. Waiting the way I’d seen mum wait for another hit, if only just so they’d get it over with and then everything would be fine for a while.

. . . mum?

“You don’t take care of yourself, you don’t. You are supposed to.”

Nobody saves you; you have to take care of yourself. Did I save my mum? I can’t even remember her face.

“I didn’t feel thirsty is all,” robin tentatively explains.That doesn’t matter, someone needs to make sure he drinks even when he doesn’t realise his thirst.

“He won’t take care of you. You have to – take, take care,” my words are fumbling, my intentions there but jumbled and mixed.

There’s a bat screeching in my ears, the whoosh of a crowbar before it hits.

Everything goes fuzzy but I tried to keep it clear. I rock, I rock and hear the soft beeps of Dick’s heart. I focus in on it, let it beat with my heart.

I breathe.

“Look, look, I’m drinking now,” the boy says, unscrewing the cap and taking big sips. I watch, unblinking and he slows. His mouth goes away from the rim, wet and glistening. It will be wet with blood one day and then he will be a bird choking on his blood, lungs ruptured with protruding bones. The pressure will be too much, and robins have hollow bones.

The bat watches, perched high, and I hate it, I hate him. It’s delusion that fills the bones, makes the bird think it’s stronger than reality.

I hate HIM. He loved me he loved me but he only loved a soldier. I’m not a soldier, I’m a son. I was a son. No.

“Dick is your brother.”

“He – “the robin frowns, so tiny and unguarded. “We are connected I suppose.”

“Family,” I say, forcefully.

“I don’t want to impose –“

“Brothers,” I decide and yes, it is good. If the bat can’t protect them, is too busy staring into the darkness of its cave to see the light outside and the birds flying, then I must fly with them.

I take a step and it’s a near thing but the boy doesn’t take a step back, just tilts his chin up at me, trying not to make it obvious how he grips the water bottle. Everything smells like antiseptic and green fire including the boy.

His face is so clear without the mask, porcelain uncracked and seemingly unfazed.  I am not porcelain; I am the mud brick left out in the sun to harden. I will be the foundation.

I hold out my hand and he passes the water bottle to me. I drink from it and don’t break eye contact. I finish the whole thing, nearly unable to stop myself and everything inside me feels washed. Not washed away, not cleansed, there’s a green river of ash and soil but now I know what’s underneath.

“What is your name?” I ask. Because this is Dick’s brother and if he is Dick’s brother than he is mine. I need to teach him, to protect him but first I have to know him.

“My – I’m Timothy.”

“Timothy?” Such a proper name.

Timothy looks abashed, looking away before ingrained habit forces him to hold fast.

“. . . Tim is okay too,” and then he abruptly takes the water bottle and turns to go back to the tiny kitchenette where he filled it. I say tiny but it is bigger than home, its surfaces shiny and sleek.

I watch him go, those small shoulders rounded and I can see the slightest hint of red on his ears. There are the soft sounds of a tap being turned on, water filling and maybe a normal person would pretend to be busy, but I wait and watch. Tim walks back over, face a forced neutral. He has two water bottles this time and he hands the purple one over to me.

“Thanks Timmers,” I say, staring at him as I do so.

I think I used to tease often. It feels strange now, to do it again.

Nobody saves you; you have to save yourself. If I had been saved would these jokes fall so flat? Would it still feel so odd to trust anyone other than Dick?

Tim busies himself while I go back to tending to Dick, my mind thinking over everything I know and remember about the world. I can feel the holes where knowledge once was, my understanding of the world so limited. I’ve never seen a healing pad like this, I don’t know how to use half of the devices and everything is so much newer than home.

I clench my hands and they are stiff. I lick the water from my lips and lose time.

Tim is back at the chair, then not. He comes from the bathroom and he is not the robin I know.

His hair is parted different, slicked down from the mess it had been before. His suit is gone and in its place is an outfit orderly and pressed. The shirt looks better untucked, the tie hanging loose – that is how I wore it.

My brows crease as I chase the memory. There are good feelings and bad feelings tied with it. Not too dangerous then, not something that will cause my awareness to blacken. I have no time to lose it, I need to keep Dick safe.

“School,” Tim says in response to my unasked question, “I can’t skip out too much, even if I perfectly pass everything the teachers are actually obliged to report me to my parents and that’s a drama I don’t want to deal with right now.”

He checks on Dick’s intravenous drip as I watch.

“What is the name of the school?”

Tim taps a pad on the side of the table, doing something regarding Dick’s vitals.

“Gotham Academy.”

Tim leaves instructions on what to do if Dick wakes, how and when to massage his body so his muscles don’t ache so much when he wakes. He gives me a small phone, teaches me how to send a message and which button to press for an alarm. He tells me to always keep it with me, as if I’m stupid.

“Did I go there?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

Tim taps more buttons even as his eyes flick up at me.

“Yes.”

“I think I liked it.”

Tim takes a breath. “Yes, you liked reading. You liked learning.”

“How do you know that?” Is it just what Dick told hm? I know they talked.

Tim stills and then walks towards the bag he’d placed on the bench. He picks it up and settles it on his back.

“Some of the books at . . . I’ve read some of the books you left behind. You left some interesting notes on the ones you disagreed with.”

It’s a truth made to mislead, and I cock my head.

“Did you know me? Before?”

Tim looks at me straight on and I can’t read what’s there.

“We didn’t know each other.”

I squeeze the phone and stand. Tim breathes, again, so much a still, silent snake. I’d always thrummed with energy, needing to move, to go, to do something.

‘We will find your mother. Patience Jason. Do not impulsively do anything without me.’

The fragments and snippets of conversations and memories are coming on too quick. Is it because of the fighting? Because I shot that woman? It feels like the earth of my mind is cracked and shifting plates, ash falling in the new fissures.

“I will come back after school. Don’t make any trouble until then.”

Tim hesitates, as if he wants to say more. I stare at him, but he adds nothing. He walks to the door, pressing his finger against the scanner and then inputting the code to let him out.

“Goodbye brother,” I say lowly, never taking my eyes off the little bird.

His body is tense and the bags under his eyes from the lack of sleep have been covered but he raises a hand to wave goodbye.

And then the door closes, and I am left alone with only the beeps of Dick’s heart.

Chapter Text

I am on the robin’s computer set-up. Some areas of the system are locked to me, many a file requiring an administrative login.

But the internet, as always, has been free reign.

There is only so much I want to know, to see, but at the same time, knowledge is power.

My fingers, large unwieldy things that I am forced to use with care, clack in many terms.

The explosion

Blockbuster

Woman on roof

It is similar to what the little robin had been searching but those were accessing the police system. I do not have that access and I do not need to see. I know the death, I saw it all. I saw Dick’s reaction and pain and grief as the bodies kept piling up, as that woman tried to twist him to her desires.

She is wrong , but I am right.

I see what the people think and I fear for Dick.

Does the Bat know? Does the bat see? Is its eyes in all the dark corners and shadows, mocking my brother’s pain?

There are no results for the woman on the roof. Nothing.

They speak of Blockbuster, of his reign of violence. They mention the disappearance of Nightwing, some of them blame him. But there is no woman on the rooftop.

I think, try to remember the name Dick gave her then fury overtakes me so much that I cannot stay on the computer. I knew it before, I did, but it is wiped now. I stand up, I pace, I think of Dick crying and I pick up the chair and throw it against the wall.

I find myself in the bathroom later, standing fully-clothed in the shower. I don’t know how I got there but my fists are bleeding. The water lets the blood rush away and when I step out of the shower and clean them, whatever cuts there were are gone.

I go back to Dick still soaking wet. I stand above him, thinking, trying to make plans but my brain is mud, water thickening the ash.

I move Dick’s arms and legs and then I go back to the computer. I stand before it, damp and know what I need to do.

I type ‘The Bat’ into the search engine but do not press enter.

I stare at it, I glare at it. I go to the chair that is on its side on the ground. I pick it up and then I throw it against the furthest wall.

It slams to the ground, a crack left in its place.

I do not press enter. I go back to Dick. I stare and stare and then I go back to the computer.

I delete ‘The Bat’ and search more for the woman. I read everything that journalist, Maxine, posted. I read about the dead body of Torque – the ex-inspector Soames, I read about Nite-Wing and the evacuation of the police station.

All of this happening while I waited at home for Dick. All of it he hid from me, just extracting promises not to go out and to be safe.

My brother is a protector.

My brother is an idiot.

There is a woosh as the door to the safe house opens and I take the empty cup of coffee and throw it full force. It slams through the door and into the stairs leading down.

Robin pops his head up from where he dropped to the ground.

My shoulders heave, my skin tingles and burns.

Robin slowly swivels his head back to me and says forlornly, “I liked that cup.”

It takes many blinks but I make myself lower my arms.

“Sorry.”

It comes out gruff and unwelcome, a word I haven’t said but thought often. I’m sorry to Dick that I’m not right. I’m sorry to the dad and his little girl that I couldn’t save them. I’m sorry I broke a nice cup.

I’m sorry I didn’t kill Blockbuster. I’m sorry I didn’t kill Tarantula sooner. That’s it. That’s the spider’s name.

“It’s – it’s okay Jason.” And the little robin shrugs a shoulder, his tie still perfectly pressed as it was when he left. “At least it wasn’t a bullet, or knife, or my favourite mug.”

He comes in, the door closing behind. I will go out and clean the shards later. He drops his bag and goes to the refrigerator.

I watch as he starts to make a coffee, nonchalant but I see.

I know.

He pretends not to care but he’s scared.

I am scary, but it is not me he should be scared of.

“I see Dick is fine, I checked his vitals a few times during my tests today and nothing had changed.”

Four spoons of coffee go in the mug as the jug boils.

“He sleeps. And has nightmares.”

“Would you like a coffee?” The robin asks, a stilted politeness. His arms are perfectly at 90 degrees, his back straight.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t . . . know?”

The jug reaches a high pitch. He gets out another mug.

“Well, we can always throw it down the sink if you don’t like it.”

“I don’t like wasting,” I say. Tim didn’t ask why I don’t know. He didn’t ask if I don’t remember if I like coffee. He is strange, and polite and Dick needs to be a better brother. Only one brother can be strange and that is me.

The robin gives me one spoon of coffee and adds sugar.

“It’s nearly been twenty-four hours though, if he doesn’t wake up soon I might have to –”.

“No one,” I snarl and Tim knocks the cups into each other.

“No one is coming,” he soothes. “Oracle – I told her he was safe cause she was worrying and Spoiler –” He cuts himself off, head lowered.

He fills the cups. Adds milk and then something creamy. He mixes them and comes over and hands me my mug.

“Careful, it’s hot,” he warns but I feel nothing, the heat barely breaking through my skin.

His lashes are long and he is so much smaller than me.

“How old are you?” I ask. “And who is Oracle and Spoiler?”

I know he is robin, I know I was once robin. Was Dick robin once too?

“They’re – well Spoiler is a girl I know. She doesn’t know that I know who she is. And she doesn’t know who I am but yeah, she fights crime I suppose.”

I hold my mug. Dick Grayson’s heart beeps.

Tim clears his throat. “Oracle is uh, she’s just worried about Dick. She knew bad stuff was happening but not exactly what and he wouldn’t let any of us help.”

“You should help anyway.”

Tim grimaces and takes a large gulp. It must taste horrible. But I cannot taste so what do I know.

“Well, Dick can be stubborn and Nightwing is even more stubborn.”

“Then be the most stubborn,” I say. “He is your brother.”

“It’s awkward . . . he wasn’t particularly happy when I took on this role.”

“ . . . robin?”

Tim is silent for a moment. “Yes.”

I sip my drink, not knowing what to ask, not knowing if I should.

“How much . . . do you remember?” Tim asks curiously. “Do you remember meeting me . . . before this?”

“I remember your throat underneath my hands,” I murmur, not quite aware I’m saying it out loud.

“Yes, I hope that doesn’t become a habit.”

“You didn’t answer,” I throw back at him. “How old are you?”

“Old enough to know what I’m doing.”

“Young enough to be an idiot and do it.” I was young and stupid too once. That’s the only reason why any of us were robins in the first place.

Tim narrows his eyes. “I asked for this role when no one else would. I made my own decisions and I’ve been smart about them.”

Had I not been smart? Is that why I died?

Sounds likely.

“And what is the next decision?”

Tim goes to the computer and all the large screens turn on. My last search is up there.

“I couldn’t find her,” I say and wonder what the boy will say.

His back is still, his neck elegant as it stretches upwards.

“Nobody found Tarantula.”

Tim closes the browser. “They will find Cataline Flores.”

“Is that her name?”

“She will just be another victim of Blockbuster.”

“Bad people deserve to die.”

Tim turns sharply, the coffee spilling over the lip of the mug. “That’s not our decision to make Jason.”

“But you made a decision to hide what I’d done. You protected me. You protected Nightwing.

Tim flexes his free hand, takes another large sip of his drink that has dribbled over his other hand. He puts the mug down and reaches for a tissue to wipe his hand. His skin is pinkened. A slight burn. His skin is so fragile but so is most human skin. Most human skin peels and cracks when faced with a blaze.

“What else was I meant to do,” he says quietly.

I drink my coffee and I taste.

It tastes like vengeance. It tastes like Tim. He is different from Dick. He knows what he has to do.

It won’t take too much to convince him to work with me.

A call rings out and Tim reaches into his pocket. He stares at the screen for a little while before answering.

“Hey Dad.”

A voice on the other end speaks. Tim turns away like he’s going to head into another room but when he takes a step I too take a step.

He glances up at me as his father speaks on the other side of the phone.

“No, just stayed back late to do assignments -”

The man’s voice comes as a rush and suddenly everything else around us goes quiet and I hear him.

“You’re not at the Wayne’s are you? You need to stop bothering them.”

Tim’s body goes still, the throat not even bobbing with a panicked swallow. 

“No Dad, I’m literally at the library which means I can’t speak any longer because I’m in the Quiet Zone.”

There’s a gurgle, from where Dick is, but I do not move.

WayneWayneWayne.

“Well, just make it home for dinner. I’ve ordered soup - you like pumpkin right?”

“ . . . potato is the superior vegetable but yeah, pumpkin is great.”

Tim looks to where the gurgle is coming from, his grip going tight on the phone.

“ I can change it to potato if you’d like -”

Voice rushed, Tim says, “Pumpkin’s great Dad, I’ll be home in a couple of hours. Bye.”

He hangs up, rushing past me and I turn to see Dick, starting to move.

Tim leans to help but he circles around so he can keep an eye on me.

I know he is. I know.

Wayne.

“What’s your last name Timmy?” I ask. I have to ask, even though Dick’s chest heaves as he comes awake and he fumbles for the intravenous tube.

“Tim? What’s happening, where –” Dick tries to speak, eyes flashing in panic.

calls, trying to sit up and fumbling with the intravenous tube.

“It’s fine Dick, you’re in my safehouse.”

“Jason – Jason’s dead Tim,” and he starts crying. Sobs that are intermixed with grunts of pain from the bruises all over his body.

“No, he’s -”

“Last name Timmers,” I ask but I feel the growl of it at the edge, fingers curling.

“Drake - Tim Drake,” Tim says, even as he ever so efficiently withdraws the tube from Dick’s mouth.

The man, the Hero, my brother, gags, tears dripping down easily from the corners of his eyes.

“Look Dick, it’s fine. He’s here.” And he signals with his hand for me to walk over. “Please, Jason, tell Dick you’re here.”

So good, so calm even though we both know I would win a fight.

But I don’t want to fight him. No, not Timmy. I wasn’t replaced, no, he’s just another future casualty. It’s not his fault.

I walk over, a hunkering lumbering thing and know I have to teach Timmy to kill. Or he’s going to get himself cooked over a fire like a poor hunted robin.

I stand by the bed and brush Dick’s tears away.

Blue eyes stare at me. I don’t know what face I’m making, but the fierce, vindictive pleasure at seeing Dick cry out for me takes over all the other emotions. Before, seeing him go through the rubble, it had hurt, to see my brother in pain. He hadn’t killed Blockbuster then though.  

Now though, now I know that even though Dick can’t kill, that doesn’t mean he won’t let someone else do it.

These tears are necessary, these tears prove Dick’s change. Prove that Dick’s eyes are open to the truth. These tears are for me. 

I’ll show them all. I’ll save them. No matter how I have to do it, be a villain, be a criminal, put on a hood and pretend I’m a monster when really this green just scours away all the second-guessing. Gone are all of the doubts and useless ‘mercy.’

One robin let another kill for them, the second robin hid the body.

The third robin is the one holding the gun.

It’s not perfect but as Dick whispers, “Jason?” looking injured and vulnerable I slide my fingers through his hair gently and hold his delicate head.

“Dickie, he tried to kill me. He can’t do that anymore. You saved me.”

“No I -”

“Thank you Dickie,” I say, so close our noses brush. His eyes try to flick away to Tim for support but Tim . . . Tim is silent.

Good boy.

“You saved me Dickie, you saved a lot of people.”

“No, no I didn’t, I’m - I’m a monster, I -”

“Sssh,” I kiss his temple and let him curl into my body, this big heavy thing that holds steady like a rock. 

“Didn’t he do the right thing Timmy?” I question softly and Tim blinks, mouth pressed flat. “Isn’t he lucky to be alive?”

Tim hesitates, then reaches out and put’s a hand on Dick’s shoulder. 

“I - you were unconscious for a while there Dick, I’m relieved to see you’re awake.”

Dick keeps sobbing, his hands coming up to claw into me as he words run into themselves.

I creep one of my hands over to Tim’s, the fingers elegant and so delicate now that I can feel them ungloved. 

“He did what he had to do to survive. I’m so glad you survived Dickie, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Tim’s hand doesn’t shake under mine but he can’t look away as I press my cheek to the top of Dick’s head. The ever-present eyebags are weighing down this kid, his hair limp as the product in it has not lasted throughout the day.

“Didn’t he,” I say again and Tim nods.

“Yeah, yeah, you did what you had to Dick.”

I rub my cheek into Dick’s hair, keep Tim’s hand underneath mine like they are robin eggs about to hatch again, into something different, something strong. 

Something that is mine.

Chapter Text

“I’m good, I can go out.”

“Your right wrist is still broken and that bruised leg isn’t doing you any help.”

Dick scoffs, like the damage is no issue. I remember fighting, hurt, hiding injuries.

Once a robin always a robin it seems.

I sit, hulking, a watching thing and think. Sometimes my thoughts don’t come so clearly but it’s better, much better than it was.

How long have I been with Dick? Since I was found?

Months - maybe, a year? I don’t know.

Time is a blur and this body, well, it was dead once wasn’t it.

He was dead. Jason was dead.

The me that was, died.

The ashy parts of my mind have fallen on something that’s risen, something that I wasn’t before. Or maybe what I was always meant to be, forged anew through fire and death.

I don’t know how old I am and I don’t ask but Dick is a police officer, has graduated school and gone through training.

I think and make a place in this little safe house while Dick heals and when Dick is quiet and resting I talk to Tim, spin my words and throw out questions. Yes, Tim knows, Tim sees.

This robin is a fluttering, watchful sort and very, very smart.

Dick, with his wrist in a brace and loose soft pyjamas on, swings off the table Tim was taking his vitals on.

“I may not have a . . . job to go back to, but I’m still a hero,” and it sounds pleading, Dick focusing on the one thing that’s still there after everything that went on.

He hasn’t mentioned that woman, he hasn’t talked anymore about Blockbuster’s death. It’s too soon but I must be sure I don’t push too late. 

“A hero keeps people safe, and at least people are safe from that bad man,” I say, ignoring Dick’s flinch. Tim doesn’t give anything away even as I saddle up close, going into my brother’s arms with an ease I do not think I always had. 

Back, back before Dick found me, someone tried to take me, poured green down my throat and maybe made me the way I am. But that’s okay, I’m okay with the me that nuzzles into Dick’s slender neck, that revels in the sinewy but deceptively strong chest and arms around me. I let Dick’s legs fall either side and say, “You’re still hurt, stay with me.”

I used to say, ‘Stay with me,’ all the time, when I was told not to follow anymore and kept at home. Outside was dangerous, where the monsters and the bats were and Dick was just a small little bluebird surrounded by carnivores.

“He’s right Dick, you are still hurt.”

“And what about him, huh, I’m surprised B hasn’t -”

And he cuts himself but then I realise oh no, he cut himself off because I’m squeezing so hard around Dick.

“Hey Jaybird, a bit tight there.”

“Batssssssssssssssss,” I hiss, a furious rage rising. “Bats are dangerous and they don’t care if you die -”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Dick leans into the hug, even as it makes his ribs creak and I’m staring  sightlessly at the fridge and shelves embedded into the wall, their rectangles and shapes forming wings that mock me. 

“I didn’t mention anything, and everybody would care if you got hurt, I cared when you got hurt.”

I have visible proof to believe him, I’ve seen Dick crying and tearing through brick and mortar to find my body. Yes, he does care. Yes.

“If I died would you kill the person who murdered me?” I ask and maybe it’s too soon because Dick goes so still and quiet and I pull back and our faces are pressed so close.

“Would you Dickie, Big Wing to my LIttle Wing?” 

“J - Jason, Jason I can’t, we’re not supposed to - we’re,” and Dick starts stumbling over his words, his body going from an uncanny stillness to a shake and I remember not to push. I can’t push too much.

Careful, careful.

I press my lips to his forehead. “Everything’s fine. Timmy is going to go to school and we stay here. Safe. Yes.”

Dick is still shaking and Tim approaches only to take off the arm band that was squeezing Dick to take his blood pressure or something. I don’t really care. All I care about is Dick in my arms and that Tim will return.

Safe.

*

The computer’s are confusing, tricks and ways to navigate the digital screen are different from what I instinctively try to do. 

Dick is sleeping, curled up on the couch with a blanket I threw over him. This safe house needs a proper bed. Tim needs to upgrade.

The control’s are hard to break through. Tim or whoever set this up is very smart but I said I wanted to read, to learn and so the access to the internet is good and it teaches me.

I do not notice the dates, I make sure not to notice the dates. There is a year, a number in my head, born and last alive but I do not focus on it.

No, I want to hear, I want to see.

Tim, little robin that he is, probably sees everything, so he must know as I sync into the channel he has with Spoiler, the one with Oracle.

I hear them, that Spoiler girl is feisty. I like her. 

Tim is snarky with her in a way he isn’t with me, too wary to joke with me like that and too appeasing to Dick. 

Snarky but sweet there is something there.

A crush, love. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved. She’ll make him work for it though.

Dick snuffles in his sleep and I pause tapping at the keys. There is so much I’m missing, too much.

The laughter in my head pipes up, sharp and fragmented like pieces of a puzzle that I can’t see. I rub at my head, hit it a few times and know that I need to know more.

I can’t crack into the computer, not fully but there are names, there are words and I think Tim left some things unblocked on purpose.

I type, ‘Green’, ‘Death,’ ‘Rebirth,’.

And get the answer, ‘Ra’s Al Ghul’.

I read.

*

Weeks pass, Dick gets better and Tim fields more and more calls.

His father. It seems that the school he is meant to be at is a boarding school far from here.

Agent A.

Others.

Bats and jokers and a clock ticking down that burns into fire haunts my dreams.

A body is found, pulled from the wreckage that Blockbuster made and I know who it is. Tim changes the channel before it’s even said but I go back later and watch. 

Tim knew what was going to happen.

Tim covered it up, Tim hid the body and not just that, Tim burnt it.

Burnt her.

I thought, when I saw the little robin, I thought mean, nasty, hateful, murderous things.

Replacement, placeholder, pretender but he’s not that. No.

His bones are hollow and I’ll fill them up with us. 

Dick doesn’t reach out to anyone, he texts and answers the phone once late at night to say he’s fine, a gruff voice on the other side. I sit on the pull out double bed that Tim bought and we set up together and wait by Dick’s pillow. He slips back in and utters a soft, “Jay?”

I say nothing. 

He goes to sleep and I think. And think.

And the days pass. Dick has heavy eyebags, his body loose and limp not with relaxation but with a deep depression. I don’t want to leave him but Tim’s visits are sporadic and I steadily see how the stress builds up in the kid.

One day, I go out. I’m as incognito as I can be, but there’s information I need and I won’t get it by being kept locked in Tim’s safehouse.

It’s not as easy as I remember, my body is heavy, my jumps going further but I go deep into the city, deep into dark parts and I listen. I learn.

I see her - Spoiler. She takes down a group of obviously bad men on the night time street. Robin turns up and instead of congratulating her, he snips and smarts and says she needs to stop before she gets herself hurt. 

Hypocrisy on my little bird is a colour that goes black and shapes like a cowl on his head. I am not happy with it. 

They argue.

“You’re not as smart as you think you are Robin, I told you I’m fine.”

It sounds like an argument told a thousand times in different words but with the meaning all the same.

“You’ve barely even recovered, you can’t risk antagonising gang members after what your body’s just gone through” Robin exclaims back, an odd sort of sentence that I don’t understand.

“What I do with my body is my own business Robin,” Spoiler hisses out, purple cape whipping with a sudden breeze dramatically. “I’m not letting any of Cluemaster sycophants hang around and you can either work with me or stand aside.”

“Spoiler -” Robin starts, the fragments of his teenager stubbornness audible. 

Spoiler, clearly near his age too, gives him a finger and scampers off ignoring his second call to her. I have a moment to debate what to do but I quickly decide to follow the girl, leaving Robin as he calls in the knocked out group to the police

I don’t know why, something calls to me but I do. 

She’s fast, I give her that and then she disappears. I know what this means and I use the grappling hook I stole to take me up high into some business building. I do not have the finesse of Robin or the graceful athleticism of Spoiler, no, I crawl and drag myself up to a safe spot with hard movements that break bits of concrete. 

As long as I get where I need to.

I sit up there, the mask I stole from Robin’s safe house a bit too small on my face and the jacket with its hood stretching where my large shoulders and waist exceed Dick’s. 

I wait, looking up at the moon and feeling when she swoops in. I don’t say anything but she does, almost skipping up beside me though she is a few steps back. She cranes her head up but I know she is not taking her attention off me.

“Hey there, looking at the moon in its waning phase?”

“Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.”

“Uhh . . . please don’t tell me you’re a creepy stalker and that’s hitting on me, because yes, I am amazing, but no, I’m not interested and I will beat you up if I have to.”

“E.E Cummings, you should read more.”

“I read enough buddy and what I’m reading right now,” Spoiler says, rapidly gesturing a pointer finger between us two, “Is that you’re a little bit weird.”

She’s not wrong and I don’t quite know why I’m here. 

Well, I don’t until the first question comes out.

“Do you know Ra’s Al Ghul?”

She rolls with it, “Uh, sounds arabic?”

“What about Nightwing?”

Spoiler dances back a bit, and then leans one booted foot up on the parapet of the building. It looks like something bought at a cheap store, the grip of the soles already starting to wear away. She’s angled in a way that her body is shrouded in the cape.

“Okay - I know that one. So did you just follow me to ask me random questions?”

I stop looking at the moon and look across at her. I try to discern injuries, and I do know where and how to do so. She doesn’t seem injured and Robin seems to be thinking she should be recovering. 

“Sometimes it’s hard to get information, you look like a person I can ask.”

The black mask she has on completely covers her face, form-fitting as it is. “I don’t think I have any answers you want and what would I get for telling you anything anyway?”

“Curiousity.”

“What?” She reacts frankly. Around them the streets and night life of Gotham continues, the ever present sound of sirens in the background. Some light poles are around, only half of them actually lit, the other ones having hanging wires in various states of broken disarray.

“You’ll be curious now, and I can tell that means you’re going to look into it, because you don’t know who Ra’s Al Ghul is.”

Spoiler heavily taps that booted foot on the parapet. 

“Is Ra’s Al Ghul in Gotham?”

“I don’t think so, not right now.”

“Then I don’t care, I have other concerns to worry about.”

“Like your body?”

She can’t quite contain the flinch so she goes with it, spinning around and then tucking her arms into each other so they push her breasts out as she lets out a fake flirtatious laugh.

That laugh pierces into something else for a moment but I’m not here for that right now.

“Are you looking at little ole’ me and my banging ass body?”

“. . . I don’t think that’s what Robin meant,” and then, because I actually do feel weirdly uncomfortable, even though I’ve known women who’ve had to use their bodies - I did know women, I knew one that let them do anything to her as long as she got her next hit - 

“He’s too young to be doing that, thinking that.”

Spoiler pops upright and wiggles her gloved fingers at me. “So you know his age?”

“You don’t?”

“I know he likes sticking his beak into other people’s business but doesn’t like it when they do the same thing back,” she answers, tone mulish and with a lot of history behind it.

“I’m here to give you some advice.”

My skin is like the wait before an explosion, the sulphur hitting the air. Just a little friction, a bit of static electricity and the flames will spark.

“I don’t need advice,” Spoiler says, unimpressed with a tinge of irritation.

“Oh, no, you see, you’re out here trying to stop bad people aren’t you?”

“Villains, psychos - of course.”

“But I'm telling you, these monsters, these villains, they just keep living, again and again, coming out like cockroaches and what do you do?”

“Uh, defeat them, usually punch and kick them a few times and send them off to jail,” she mimes driving her elbow into someone’s solar plexus. 

“See, that’s all, you just knock them out and put them back in prison. Things have to change.”

Spoiler hops up to the parapet, acting like it’s just to move around but it’s clearly to try and see if I have anything behind my back. She is good but the green helps me.

The green helps me see.

“I’ve made changes, and if I hadn’t been around then a lot of people would’ve died in the earthquake a few years ago and No Man’s Land was all-round lawlessness. I’ve seen what this city is like without police and jails,” she shrugs. “Even as corrupt as they are.” 

I think, try to recall and don’t know if I existed when this earthquake happened. I know the date now, in a part of my brain I refuse to acknowledge, but I don’t know when I stopped being underground and started being above. No Man's Land was when they cut Gotham off from the rest of the world.

It would have been the best time, the time to purge all the bad ones and leave only good people behind. 

It doesn’t matter. “But people still died didn't they.”

“Well yeah, it was an earthquake -”

“People died because of villains.”

She shifts. “ . . . the earthquake affected the prisons and they got out. And No Man’s Land was . . . of course things got a bit hectic. A lot of stuff went down.”

Almost imperceptibly her hand goes to her belly and hovers there. Her fingers curl into a fist and she cocks it on her hip.

“What’s your point?”

“Imagine if you could have just stopped them forever,” I say, staring at her.

“Stop criminals from criminalling? No thanks, that’s what the psychs at Arkham are for.”

I keep staring at her, the slits of the mask let her know my attention. 

“What else are we meant to do? Kill them?” and she laughs. “We can’t do that though, however much I want to, however much it would make things easier.”

I don’t laugh. I look at her and I remember holding a crowbar I never held. I want to slam down, into that laughing body. Again, and again and againandagain.

Her laugh fades.

“. . . I’m a vigilante, I’m one of the good guys. No killing is what separates me from the bad ones.”

“No, being good is what makes you different. And sometimes getting rid of bad people forever is the good thing to do.”

Everytime I say it, it feels so right, like a holy light of righteousness is above me, as if the very city of Gotham herself has marked me as her knight to spread her truth. 

Wary now, clearly taking me as a potential threat, she says, “You . . . you definitely aren’t a friend of Robin’s.”

“I am, he just doesn’t know it yet. And I'm a friend of yours. You’ll see.”

“Batman wouldn’t let you -”

*

I’m back at the safehouse, standing in front of the counter. 

“ -son, Jason?”

I blink, look down and turn on the tap. I grab whatever I can and am lucky there’s an empty glass. I fill it and step to the side.

Tim is behind me, in an oversized baggy shirt, loose pants and thick-rimmed glasses. It is not often I see him so dressed down. They might even be pyjamas. 

“ . . . everything alright?” He asks, and it's Robin’s voice. 

“Dick needs water,” I say and Tim makes a little a-ha noise. 

“Well he’s in the shower and he definitely is the type of person to tip his head back and drink shower water so I don’t think he’ll be drinking that any time soon.”

“I will put it in the fridge, so it’s cold,” I say and make myself walk to the fridge. Tim watches me, his attention so pervasive in that I can tell he is always aware of me even when he’s pretending not to be.

I use my right hand to open the fridge, see my left hand put the water inside.

I notice the blood and scruffed up skin on my knuckles. 

I close the refrigerator door, put my hand in my pocket and go to the bathroom.

“He hasn’t been in that long, I don’t think you need to check on him,” Tim says, less timid with me now for the weeks we’ve been holed up here.

“Toilet,” is all I say and Tim doesn’t argue with that.

Dick takes hot showers, the steam hits me as I open the door. 

Dick is sitting on the floor, the forlorn tune his humming quiet under the falling water.  

“Jay?”

I close the door, take my hand out of my pocket and grab the medicine-grade soap. I start washing my hand, palms and fingers scrubbing over it quickly.

“Jay-Jay,” Dick sings, sounding a little better than how horrible he has been. 

“Brushing my teeth,” I lie and continue scrubbing at my hand. When it’s done, I do grab my toothbrush.

When it’s done, Dick, with his splint wrist wrapped in a plastic baggy to cover it from water, steps out and stands there. I give him the towel and he takes it with a soft hum, almost swaying on his feet.

When it’s done I help him back to the main room and give him the chilled water.

When it’s done and everyone is asleep, I check the day and the time.

When it’s done and everyone is asleep, I wonder where the missing ten hours went and I wonder where the blood came from.

I can’t remember.

Chapter Text

“Jason . . .”

“Yes, Tim.”

“Timmy,” Dick whines into the conversation, completely plastered.

Out of his Robin costume - he always hides the outfit from me, Tim’s eyes blink over Dick who is giggling on the floor. I sit beside him with my back against the newly added couch - upholstery fabric a muted dark grey, a cup of tea beside my thigh and bread in hand that I’ve been feeding to Dick.

“He . . . how did he get, I don’t keep any -”

“He went to a bar.”

“A bar,” Tim asks, the most bewildered I’ve seen him since that night we came here.

“I went and found him.”

Tim just stands there quietly before sighing and puts down his backpack on the table. It’s not fully zipped up, the red of a cape peeking out at me.

It doesn’t set me off even though it does something, but right now my focus is Dick.

Tim sighs, cracking his neck like he’s older than his teenage years and comes over. He squats before Dick and Dick makes grabby hands at him. Tim’s dark hair is flat over his forehead but strands stick up all frazzled. Honestly, between the three of us, I am somehow the one that looks the most kept together and I have the literal scars of an autopsy on my body.

It nearly makes me laugh, which is such a strange feeling. I haven’t laughed in a long time even though my head rings with a laughter not my own. It times with ticks, counting. Counting down to what, who knows.

Tim, still squatting, lets Dick grab him.

As soon as they touch Dick stops begging and squeezes the little robin close to him.

“I’m a failure Timmy, I’m sorry you have to see this. I’m sorry, you’re always picking up all the shit I leave around. First Bruce, now - now this.”

And the tears start to pool, Tim carefully looking up to see my reaction. I lift up the bread and take a bite out of it. It’s not the first time Dick has said this name. I’d lost a few seconds, half carrying Dick out of the bar. Maybe not seconds, I don’t remember how I even got back here.

Bruce is Batman, Batman is Bruce.

I know but I don’t know. That name brings an all-encompassing fury that wants to burn away anything but the desire to go make alight this entire city.

There’s an odd shape in my head, formless shadows that peel off like bats from a cape. I refuse to look too closely at it.

The Jason that I am is broken, the Jason that I am is reformed.

The Jason that I am has a goal. First, I must gather all the other little broken things and teach them that birds together are stronger. And that the best birds are predators.

For now though, I tear off a bite-sized piece of bread and offer it to Dick. 

I cannot begrudge him, sometimes touch is too much and too overwhelming for Dick. Sometimes the bad memories come through and his showers burn so hot that his skin starts to blister and it’s either me or Tim who has to pull him out.

I know what it’s like to not know your body, to hate what’s touched it. 

“Dick, I’m here now, back in Gotham. Whatever you need I just - I think maybe you need more.”

Dick lets go of Tim and covers his weeping face, skin still so soft and bottom lip trembling. He’s still beautiful even when destroyed. I think the me of long ago might have been jealous of that; I’m not jealous now.

Dick doesn’t take the proffered bread. I want to force him to eat. 

“I think Doctor Thompkins might be able to help.”

Tim once couldn’t believe Tarantula had done what she did. It didn’t take very long for Tim to change his mind even if it means his view of Nightwing as untouchable is gone. He’d been untouchable to me once too, the untouchable older brother that rejected me.

“I need to go back. Gotta patrol Bludhaven,” Dick says, muffled. “I tried - I went there and then, then I saw my old building and I, I -” Dick devolves into heaves, body shaking with horror. I contributed to that, I made him think I blew up in that building.

“The bar was in Bludhaven,” I say to Tim and then Dick is muttering, saying things that aren’t true.

“I’m a monster, I’m filth, I let him die, you shouldn’t touch me. She’s out there - she’s -”

“She’s not out there,” I say. “She’s dead, remember Big Wing.”

Dick looks up with wild wet eyes, “No, she was alive when she - how could she?”

“Because I killed her,” I say as I have said to him before.

Dick shakes his head, trying to get out from between us. 

“Oh god, I made you kill her, did I make you kill her? ”

“Hold him,” I say to Tim and Tim, the good obedient little soldier that he is, listens.

I hold Dick’s face and croon, “I had to. I wanted to. I killed her so she would stop hurting you but it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“No, no, Bruce is going to hate me,” Dick hiccups and Tim has an imperceptible shiver where he holds Dick against me. I know Dick would have kept going but Tim draws out a syringe he must have grabbed early, holding it upright to push the air out before plunging it swiftly into Dick’s neck.

His eyes flutter, his legs jerking where they splay out across the tiles and he goes limp. I card my fingers through his greasy hair and look at Tim who seems remorseful at what he’s done.

“You look tired baby bird,” I say and Tim backs up and off us both. Dick stays where he is, smelling of alcohol, the olive tone of his Romani heritage looking off from its usual bronze. 

“Nothing coffee can’t fix.”

“Don’t live with your father, stay here,” I say, shrewd eyes watching to see how Tim slightly sways towards me, so clearly wanting affection.

Dick must see it, surely, it’s so obvious how touch-starved the little robin is. 

I remember the head ruffles, the names ‘Chum’ and ‘Jaylad’.

Tim turns away and throws the syringe in the rubbish bin he has specifically for such things.

“We should put Dick to bed -”

He is cut off by his mask beeping from where it sits flat on the computer desk and then the computer is taken over and a voice comes out.

“Robin, I know he’s there, I’m coming in.”

The voice echoes, and repeats and Tim is there immediately at the computer like I blinked and he moved.

“Give me a moment, I just got out of the shower,” he says cleanly, not a waver in his voice.

“No you didn’t, you just returned,” the deep gravel voice says. A threat.

I see green, tugging Dick close into me, probably bruising in my grip.

Ashes, I taste ashes on my tongue. No, not here, not him. He abandoned Dick, batsbatsBATSBATS.

I’m hissing it, then the stubs that are my fingers burrow in at my own head and I’m trying to rock with knees pulled up but Dick, Nightwing, brotherwhoLEFTmeALONE is in the way and no, I have to protect him.

Tim is there, taking Dick and pushing me away.

I can’t even say words, teeth snapping, a deep almost growl coming from inside me that parries the building screech of a bat in my head.

“Jason - in the escape tunnel. Now.”

“Kill, I’ll kill him,” oh, I guess I can make words.

Tim is frantic, he pushes, cajoles and then is pressing at a square of the wall and its opening. He tries to get me to go in but I plant my feet and refuse to go.

“Please, please Jason, please he can’t handle this right now. I can’t manage this with Dick passed out,” baby bird keens, begs.

“Not leaving you, replacement. Replaced. My replacement. ”

The outer door that gives a little warning ping to the computer terminal to let us know someone’s coming in goes off.

He’s in.

All the lights blind me, but everything is tinted green. Cold metal crawls under my skin, biting like mites and I knock my head as Tim hits my weak points in an attempt to get me inside the little square tunnel.

But the green made me strong. I don’t have weak points anymore.

Dick is listless on the ground and I can’t fathom leaving them alone to face The Bat alone. 

But I have a goal. I remember it, remember I need to be the one protecting my brothers.

I look Tim in the eye, “You tell me everything after this.”

“Jason, this isn’t the time.”

Steps hit the ground ominously, coming closer.

I grab his chin, put us forehead to forehead and demand, “Promise.”

Wide-eyed, Tim is still in my grip but the twitching is there in the muscles of his face. I don’t let go.

“Yes, yes I promise,” it comes out in a rush. 

I duck down, retreating quickly and the square tunnel panel is closed and I am left in darkness until the soft muted line of lights show in the bottom edges of the tunnel leading the path out. I can feel the burn of ice as my lungs try to suck in breath, knees aching where I squat, every tremor in my body seeming to vibrate my surroundings.

I don’t know if I’m ready. I’m probably not. Baby bird robin could tell when we first met that I was just skin wrapped around a bomb waiting to explode.

Ah Ha HA HA.

My hands go down to steady me and put my ear to the panel and listen.

There’s a drag and then -

“Why is Dick on the ground?”

I’ve been in small places like this before, usually with dust and spider webs around, my mother - the mother I thought was mine - hiding me from her Johns.

“He’s . . . I’m hydrating him.”

“ . . . he is intoxicated.”

“Yes.”

There’s a quiet moment, soundless movement that I don’t hear. The steps before were on purpose, a punishment to Tim perhaps for not answering Batman’s calls.

Batman, yes.

Batman.

I do not remember being dead, I only remember waking up.

“He has been here for weeks.”

Yes, because we care, I care, Tim cares. How could he not - Tim regards Dick like he hung the moon and stars and I remember that, I remember that desire for him to look at me, to see me. 

I think he’d been angry then, replacement, replaced just like me - I can’t remember. But still. He protected me when I came back even though he hadn’t killed the one that killed me. But he has the potential. He just needs the push,  the push that the batman outside won’t let happen. That Batman, Bad Man needs to go away, he makes them weak, naive, prey instead of the predator they need to be. 

“His apartment was blown up,” Tim says in explanation, almost like an excuse, already faltering at the implication the man outside is not happy with his Robin.

If Dick had just killed Blockbuster none of this would have happened. I know that deep in my soul, my mind. If only I’d known I would’ve gone out and killed Blockbuster myself but Dick had been hiding too much from me. 

“I am aware - 34 civilians were killed.”

Silence, the weight of it in the small vent is almost oppressive. I’m on all fours with my face close to the shut panel and even if I wanted to shift it’s like I’m stuck in this moment. What a change, to go from nurturing and caring to this tense anxiety, ready to go into fight so quickly.

Nothing is ever safe, you must always be on your guard. I think I learnt this long ago, when child me hid under the bed because that’s where mum put me.

Rather than be pulled out I’d charged, better to come out fists swinging then curled up and defenceless. 

‘Hit first or their hit will be your last,’ someone once said to me. I don’t remember who.

I don’t like where I am now, I don’t like waiting.

“He will come home, Alfred has been wanting to see him.”

Cookies, tea and food made nutritious to make a young boy’s body grow. I didn’t know back then what he was doing, I just knew it tasted so good that I’d eat as much as I could before the other shoe had to drop. This vent smells like nothing of aromatics being fried but more of stale air that hasn’t moved a lot. There’s a faint whiff of alcohol that comes from my jacket that I’d put on to go grab Dick, something still too tight for me even though Tim had brought it. 

“I don’t think -”

“Timothy, I am taking my inebriated son home whether he likes it or not,” the tone brooks no argument.

The voices come closer to where I’m located, probably where Dick is still sprawled out on the floor. I picture myself bursting out, but in my mind’s eye I’m flying forward like a grapple is in my hands, booted feet outstretched to kick the bad man batman away from the robin he abandoned.

“He won’t like it.”

He always abandons.

“Sometimes things happen that we don’t like. I let Dick go to Bludhaven, he wanted to be independent but I am not unaware that Haly’s Circus was burned down and that Dick was fired from the police force.”

Perplexed, Tim asks, “If you knew why didn’t you -” 

My palms are flat on the cement floor so I can’t curl them but the anger that sweeps through me lets my heel press down too hard. The cement floor cracks slightly.

“He would not have let me but I had hoped he had enough sense to come to me if he truly needed help. I thought he would have learnt from J,” the man’s voice stutters and quickly slides on as if a mere bump on the road, “ - from past experience when to ask for help.”

It’s lucky the space is wide enough for my body and the elbows of mine that point out as I drop myself lower and closer to the wall. It’s not as filthy as it could be and I wonder if Tim has little robots that go through and clean.

Cleaner robots. 

I don’t think Dick would do it, the state of his apartment had only been clean where he’d kept me, the dishes washed right before use. When I’d been more monster and less Frankenstein I’d practised cleaning the dishes with my thick thumbs.

I’d torn through sponges, crumbled them like biscuits. I’d broken glasses and plates and bent knives. Dick had just brought back more. 

“And I would have thought my Robin would tell me he found Nightwing.”

Once there was a young robin who looked at his comms and thought to call for Batman. Once there was a desert and a lone warehouse, sand everywhere - in the air, in my eyes, in my cuts. Even if I’d wanted to call for help, Batman wouldn’t have come.

No, smarter not to call at all and not give away your position. 

“ . . . he didn’t want me to.”

“If I can’t trust you Robin then -”

“You can trust me, you can,” Tim pleads, then says in that voice that makes me remember how young he is. Too young to be on the streets fighting. Or maybe it’s a ploy, maybe he’s using that babyishness to get what he wants. “I just thought if I could get him healed first . . .”

I’ve seen Tim cajole and flatter and keep himself safe when my thoughts grow green. 

Smart little baby bird.

“It’s been weeks. Why is he drinking? Tell me everything that happened. Does he know who shot Blockbuster?”

His wounds are barely healed, the mental ones still there. How dare he push, not knowing the cost of it to Dick.

Dick should kill him, I’ll make Dick kill him. Then it will all be better. Eat the bad man, the bad bird and take his place. 

“He was unconscious when I found him. I did find a gun and run a test on it - it matched Catalina Flores, Tarantula.”

Her body gyrating, her body collapsing. The hatred in her, the need to consume. 

She’d become the violence she sought to stop, turned her sights on the wrong target. 

“A violent vigilante, she was arrested for murder,” there is harsh judgement there.

Staircase, a body falling back. Rooftop, water running off the edges, pooling in the indents around where the old building was falling into disrepair. With the way Bludhaven was, perhaps it had never truly been new. 

I was always like that, even at a young age I’d never had that baby soft pudge, I’d come out tarnished, bones steel with bruises already formed, everything about me poisonous. 

Green venom in baby teeth because that’s what Gotham spits out - victims, monsters or something in between that takes to the streets and tries to make change. A vial had opened up into my mouth when reborn, a taste of salt that burnt my tongue and throat like acid. 

“Correct, she may have taken advantage of Nightwing and Blockbuster fighting to shoot him.”

“Blockbuster was shot cleanly through the front of the forehead, she either hit from a sniper position or made herself known.”

I put my head down, rest my forearms on the ground and close my eyes so I can listen. 

“You saw his body?” Tim asks, digging for information.

“And read the autopsy notes.”

Tim changes topic. “How long have you known he’s here?”

“Since you stopped going home as often.”

“I was just giving my dad time with his physical therapist,” the answer comes benignly but nobody trusts it. Not me in my little tube and not the man outside.

There’s an obvious sound of a glass being returned and I think it must be Tim letting me know where he is. 

“Who else is here Timothy?” Comes apropos nothing, no hint that there has been suspicion of where I hide.

Tim answers with feigned confusion, “I’ve just been taking care of Dick.”

“There is a third cup being used and it is not coffee.”

“I would never give away Dick’s identity.”

There’s a push there, a robin always listens to batman.

“But you let someone in here. Was it Spoiler? Or another unknown?”

Spoiler?

“ . . . I know you don’t want her to patrol but she’s not going to stop.”

But this robin is tricky, flighty, smart.

“Not if you encourage her and let her stay in what is meant to be a safe house for Bats only.”

Safe and small and everything nearly in one room. Safe and small and Dick in the bathtub, Dick on the floor of the shower. Bludhaven had been safe and small except not, because it was only safe when Dick stayed inside and didn’t go out as Nightwing or as an officer. But he did, every night, again and again, leaving me. 

“She didn’t see anything.”

Spoiler, Spoiler - that girl dressed up like Nightwing but different colours, different city, same rot that stunk its way into the pavement. Not a bat. She’d spoken and I hadn’t expected it,the green had taken over and she was flat against the wall, sliding along as she moved away from me.

The gargoyle turns and its fangs are out, dripping green blood and I don’t remember, I don’t remember what happens next. What happened next?

“And she won’t see anything more. You are coming home, you will stay the night - no patrolling, I will get Alfred to call Jack and then you will attend school tomorrow and spend the rest of the week with your father.”

“Are you benching me?”

I rock forward, rock back. I remember being benched, the almost wriggling worms in my body (HAHA) that made me need to move, to go and do something. I needed to find her, my - 

“I am doing this for your own good - it is not your responsibility to take care of Dick, it is your responsibility to attend school and only if you are able, then you can patrol as Robin.”

“But I -”

“No arguments Robin. Grab Dick’s phone as well - he hasn’t been answering it and its location has been turned off.”

“I think it got blown up.”

My eye twitches, I roll my shoulder and breathe, the raspiness of it growing too loud in my enclosed space. It’s danger and alcohol and I don’t remember death and I don’t quite remember me but I remember being young and I don’t want that. Not right now.

Not with that little robin outside, a big bat that won’t take care of him, that will prey on him.

There is the noise of a person being lifted, subtle and quiet but for the slight increased heaviness of Batman’s steps.

“The Batmobile is nearby, make sure we are not seen.”

“I have some tests running so I’m going to keep everything online - can I come back and check in tomorrow? It’s not patrol, it’s just casework.”

“Set the results to duplicate to the Batcave.”

Defeated, Tim says, “Yes, sir.”

There is tapping and then the footsteps move away and no more words are spoken.

My shoulders feel too big, the metal of my surroundings are different than what I’ve known but still just as claustrophobic. 

I wait. I wait for Tim to come back. I wait for the batttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttman to return. I war with myself, to follow Dick out, to save him.

I wait, I wait for a long time and then the computer is beeping that the tests are done.

I shuffle forward, the heel of my palm hitting the wall and popping it open. I come out arms first, protecting my head and look up to see the low-lights left on, the brightest thing the glaring main computer terminal and the smaller screens that surround it. There’s the night-light in the bathroom peeking out from the slightly ajar door, the one that Tim set up for me because waking up in pure black upsets me sometimes. Most times. Every time.

The shadows can wrap around me like a blanket but so easily change to a coffin lid holding me down.

I scramble out, hips banging into the sides, my body moving from stillness to frantic motion. The fresh air is a relief and yet this tiny safe house is just as enclosed. 

I get up. I see the leftover water cup has been moved to the small kitchen counter, the bread out of sight. My cup of tea is no longer by the couch.

No one is here.

No one, no one.

I’m all alone. 

I wait. I wander. I want out.

I brush my teeth - Dick always wanted me to brush my teeth. It tastes minty and fresh and I gag over the basin, holding onto the porcelain while my stomach heaves.

I do not eat, I do not hunger. I smell the blanket Dick and I laid on, his sweat left. I run my hand over the chair Tim sits in. So young, a child in a chair too big.

I see the tests Tim was running, I chase where he duplicates it to and then I’m on another server, another system. 

I move around quickly and then a message comes in.

ACCEPT FILE

It hangs there, I take the mouse and click on it.

A file downloads and opens a message.

I can’t get to you. This is everything I’ve tried to summarise. If you wait a week I can get back to you or NW will - he’s better but being kept under sedation. 

Once NW is awake he’ll know what to do. You can come home. They want you home. This is where you’re meant to be, not me.

R.

I read - my own autopsy report, the mission clinically reported on, the fatality, my full name.

I know Dick was off-world. I find out how few months it took to be replaced.

I see the charge, I know the one who killed me still BREATHESSSSSSSS and LIVES and walks around when I was rotting in the ground with worms nesting in my skull.

I read names, some I recognise, some I don’t - Babs.

She’s in a wheelchair. Oracle, no longer Batgirl, another one has already replaced her. Another victim, another casualty of a monster that no-one stops because the Bats War means no killing.

No killing except us. No killing except the ones that don’t deserve it. 

More pictures, more statistics. The reality that Gotham grows more and more corrupt even as more and more vigilantes strike out.

Superboy-Prime triggered ripples in the fabric of reality - I’ve talked to Zatara who talked to SuperMan . . .

Superboy-Prime tried to escape the paradise dimension in which he was trapped, he created parallel timelines that . . .

Extreme changes . . .

. . .  temporal ripples

A world in which Jason Todd survived the attack by the Joker  

Talia Al Ghul seen leaving Gotham on . . .

Talia Al Ghul - goal? Relationship with Batman.

Talia Al Ghul. League of Assassins. 

Lazarus Pit . . .

Lazarus Pit known side effects . . . 

Joker still alive

Joker victims

Joker Joker JOKER JOKER

The joker killed Jason Todd and Batman did NOTHING. 

NOTHING

*

When Timothy Drake returns to the safe house at the edges of Bludhaven one day later, there is no brought-back-to-life Jason waiting there for him.

He can’t hide it for long - his frantic searches lead him to Jason’s last movements.

Jason withdraws money from one of the many bank accounts accessible through the safe house's computers. There’s a receipt of Jason booking an aeroplane with an older face overlaid one of Dick’s false aliases to Quetta International Airport. 

Tim debates getting on a plane, debates calling Bart or Conner to take him as quickly as possible to the airport. He’s still thinking about it when he returns to the manor, Batman’s benched rule requiring him to also see Tim’s complete homework everyday.

When he doesn’t come back with Jason, Dick is immediately distressed. When he tries to prevent Dick from going to the safe house - Dick gets suspicious.

Tim is a good liar but he’ll be better in the future. 

For now Dick doesn’t believe Tim and things devolve.

Things devolve and they are in the Batcave even though Dick has been sequestered to his room and suddenly everyone is there.

Tim tries to distract because Dick is in no state to but Cass returns with Bruce after they helped each other with Ivy and then things escalate and Cass signs that a man approached Spoiler recently - is this who they are looking for?

“They’re looking for someone?” Batman asks.

Dick tries to leave, bedraggled as he is, stubble over his chin. 

Voices raise, Alfred who’s come down looking for Dick because he’s made dinner, tries to intervene and Bruce finally forces Dick to tell him what he’s been hiding.

It all comes out - Blockbuster, Catalina and what she did though Dick shies away from saying what Tim knows to be true and Jason.

Dick tells Bruce about Jason.

Nightwing tells Batman about the second dead Robin.

And it’s all on Tim to reveal he’s lost Jason, again, his last whereabouts on a plane leaving Gotham, a reenactment of the last time Bruce saw Jason alive. 

Nobody takes it well.

Chapter Text

Months pass.

At first Batman doesn’t believe Robin, and he places Dick on, essentially house arrest. The only reason Dick stays is because Alfred feeds him and drugs him at the same time.

At first Bruce doesn’t believe Dick, doesn’t believe Tim. But Tim has video proof from his safe house, Bruce pouring over it again and again with tense shoulders and unblinking eyes. His click-clacks on the keyboard are perfectly calm and measured, each hit a sound that makes Tim flinch.

His mother used to do that, calm, precise tapping on the keyboard, never letting him know when she was about to snap. Her writing could be disownment or approval of transfer of funds to buy a better camera.

Months pass and they can’t find him.

Bruce interrogates Spoiler - Steph, for every moment of their interaction, trying to figure out Jason’s goal. Tim is careful with his words, carefully weaves around what Dick and Steph reveal. Bruce convinces himself that Jason wants revenge for his death, that he is going to turn to violence that he can’t come back from. He is worried, he is scared and he hides it under his no-kill rule and belief that everyone needs to agree with him. Tim doesn't know what to say about . . . about Tarantula and so he says nothing.

Once again, Batman and Bruce spiral. Because of Jason. And Tim does his best to pick up the pieces and put the two egos back together. 

Jason wants more than revenge against Joker, he wants revenge against Batman. Tim sees it so clearly, the near-comatose body that Jason had been in the beginning turning into a person that points out all the flaws in Batman’s methods. Tim has logically thought about the repercussions of taking out key members of Gotham’s gangs and what really, is a few lives on his conscience compared to the thousands it would save? Still, Batman has saved many lives himself, helped root out corrupt officers and put Gordan in power as Commissioner. Tim, the Robin that he is, isn’t ready yet to let go of all the good Batman does.

And Jason is hurt, the green of his eyes a sign of the Pit.  

They confirm it was Talia, here in Gotham that night and so coincidentally running into newly resurrected Jason.

Tim and Bruce both don’t like coincidences.

They need to find him, help him. Bruce searches to see if Jason has returned to Talia, knowingly designing a surprise encounter between him and the daughter of Ra’s. They flirt and giggle and fight and possibly fuck (though Tim turns off the comms for that bit) and Batman returns with no potential leads but the confirmation that Talia did give him the water of the Pit.

‘A gift,’ she’d said. ‘To return your child, for it was not something human that crawled out of that grave. The waters at least brought Jason’s soul back but he ran.’

Bruce had asked why she hadn’t told him and Talia had said it was a family matter the moment she knew Dick had found Jason.

They don’t talk, Dick and Bruce. Rarely, barely. Short, sharp words that give Tim hint to what their final days before Dick left for Bludhaven the first time must have been like.

They need Jason back, back to being Robin, the way it’s meant to be. Tim knows his place, and it's being a placeholder. It’s alright, he can do this. He can bring this family back together. At least that’s what he tries to do. Until his father finds out about Robin, until he’s forced to quit.

He still investigates in his spare time, he still messages Dick, Dick who has returned to Bludhaven for some unfathomable reason that is fathomable by every witnessed interaction in the Wayne manor.

And then Steph - Spoiler, his ex, his first-everything, becomes Robin.

It stings, not because he believes she’s incapable but because it happened so quickly. He wonders if this is how Jason felt when he was first brought back to life and saw those colours on Tim’s body, that outfit in a dark alleyway, replacing him.

He tries not to lash out at Steph, she flies through the skies like so many of them have done, eager to fight, a burning need in her to take down crime that Tim could never compare to. What is he compared to them all? Those who have been so hurt by crime, by killers? Just a little ex-rich kid, so desperate for affection he’ll take cracked ribs and harsh words if it means they let him stay close.

His words now are short, sharp, giving hint to his resentment to Steph because Batman isn’t there to take the comments and Tim has always found it difficult to argue against Bruce.

It’s not safe, she’s risking too much by being Robin, a double-standard in his head that worries about Steph. A double-standard as she finds a place to shine and he withers in the background.

Things get worse, much worse.

There’s a world out there besides Gotham, one with magic and meta that doesn’t play by the awful but well-known rules of Gotham. Because Gotham is its own world and it runs on greed and fear and corruption. 

His dad dies.

His dad dies.

Boomerang kills his dad, his father, the last biological parent he has left. Even though he wasn’t that great, even though Tim can remember hits that were almost as bad as the absenteeism. But his dad got better, his dad got a partner who brought out the good in him. 

His mother and father had only made each other worse.

And now they’re both dead.

Dead, dead, dead and for no reason, no reason at all. His own father’s death isn’t even a part of the main narrative, just a distraction that wasn’t even meant to die.

He wants to hold onto that kid he was, the one that looked to the sky and saw Robin and Batman flying, protecting all they looked down upon. But that’s not what happens is it. The killers keep escaping prison, keep coming back, keep killing innocent people.

The Joker did it to Jason and he’s still around.

It creeps into his head, thoughts of Jason, the knowledge he’s out there. His words, his viewpoint.

And really, is Jason that wrong?

Shouldn’t bad men die?

*

Being Robin is great, the best! 

Steph’s finally in a position where people don’t question her, don’t belittle her attempts. The upgrade in armour and weaponry is a help too.

It’s great until it isn’t.

He tries to fucking bench her. Her? As if he’s trying again to stop her from doing what she needs to do.

Well, she’ll show him. She’ll prove just how capable she is. She isn’t like Dick or Jason or Tim, no, she’s a girl and girl’s always have to fight for the respect that men inherently get.

It makes her so angry, so so angry.

She knows Barb would understand, knows Catwoman uses it to her advantage.

She just wants to make it so obvious that she’s capable that there’s nothing they could ever say to take away from it. She just has to make them.

She can make them. Right?

That’s what she plans, what she thinks. 

Being Robin is great, the best! Until it isn’t. Which in hindsight happens pretty goddamn quickly. But then again, her life has had a lot of bad rather than good.

The one true good thing she’d given up, made sure that her kid wouldn’t have to have a teenage mum with a villain for a grandfather. She tries not to think about it, and if she does it’s idyllic in her head, a rosy red life of unconditional love and support for her kid. She knows Tim would have made sure the kid got sent to a good family, probably super wealthy but not wealthy like their assholes. Tim’s parents had been assholes.

She shouldn’t think that, considering Tim’s dad just died but she thinks a lot of things she doesn’t say out loud.

It’s all those inside thoughts that make her spiral, make her do something stupid. Make her do something just so the father-figure she shouldn’t see as one will acknowledge her.

She dies for it.

She thinks she’s going to die for it.

She’s there in Leslie’s hospital bed, barely able to breathe, just enough to ask Batman if she’d ever truly been a Robin. He says yes, crazy as that is, crazy after he fucking fired her. 

It all goes black, she gets moved. She knows it, she knows that Black Mask won, that she spun Gotham into a citywide gang war because she didn’t know Matches Malone was actually Bruce. She dies okay, that’s what happens.

Except it doesn’t. 

And when she wakes up she’s taken care of. Not just by Leslie that's gone more often than not, but by a ghost. By a remnant. 

She’d say it’s herself, a dead robin but it isn’t.

He’s got a white streak in his hair but he looks just like a grown-up version of a guy she’s only seen pictures of, videos of. His voice is deeper, husky like he smokes and his eyes blaze green whenever she winces from her still healing wounds. She recognises who he is now, when she didn’t before - the boy on the rooftop.

He doesn’t talk a lot except for the times where he can’t stop, where he tells her things low and deep and intense and makes her realise how much more everyone had hidden from her.

She’s not the first Robin to be fired, hell she’s not the first one to die, though it took a little better for Jason. She’s resistant at first, though she can’t force herself to try and reach out to any of the Bats - even Barbara. They all think she’s dead anyway, courtesy of the Doc that is, and maybe death is what she deserves for screwing up so badly.

Jason says something different, Jason thinks she got pushed into a bad situation. Jason said she had the right idea, she knows what it’s like with villains - how they never really change. Does she think Batman's going to kill Black Mask for this, because he won’t. 

She doesn’t want Batman to, she didn’t even think to want it.

Still, it hurts to check online and read that Black Mask broke out of Arkham and just went back to business - to see everything go back to its old ways, even after all that she’d done.

Jason helps her, holds her, heals her. Holds out a branch and moves aside for her to climb on, to see from his point of view. She doesn’t want to, she went out originally to spoil her father’s criminal plans and that’s what she wanted to do with Batman. But maybe it’s the criminal in her, maybe it’s in her blood. Still on shaky legs, Jason is there to catch her when she tumbles and pushes her as she exercises to regain her stolen strength. It’s constant, his vigilance, the way he hulkers near the windows and doors, always watching and flexing his fingers like they've gone numb, making sure no one can get in (and she can’t get out.)

It doesn’t take that long for her to see what Jason’s pointing out. Logically she can see what the betrayal and then isolation is doing to her psyche, especially away from Barbs and Cass. Emotionally (and hasn’t she always been too emotional), she’s got too much in common with Jason for her to be able to turn away. He even smiles at her jokes sometimes and once she got him to whip a crack back. 

She should leave, leave this life, leave Gotham. She thinks for a brief moment that she doesn’t allow herself to keep dreaming, about finding that child she gave up for a better life. 

Nah, she was born in the grunges and that’s where she’ll stay. The people that fix the worst of society are the ones that lived it. And after all, Jason’s got a point.

Birds of a feather should stick together. 

Chapter Text

“Ready, Little Red?” I ask and she hisses at me.

“Red Riding Hood, RedRide, Red Riding, Riding Red - I don’t like any of them.”

“That’s why Little Red’s the best.”

“It isn’t, it doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of our enemies you know.”

“Little Red killed the wolf dead.”

“Yeah, after it swallowed up her grandma, and in some stories she has to wait for the hunter to save her!”

“Am I the hunter then?” I ask as Little Red rolls on the balls of her feet, watching the group of criminals below all bicker around the low-lit table. 

“I’ll be the hunter thanks,” Little Red says, body lithe and tone as blunt as the chainstick she wields.. “Ready to go then? Seems like the perfect moment, theatre kid,” she continues, referencing the rabble of noise as it turns to questions, all the criminals finally asking who organised them all to be here..

First impression, first intimidation - so I make it good, stepping out to make myself visible, the shot hitting the centre of the table to get their attention.   

Then I hold up the gun, one of my bigger ones to really make a statement, helmet covering my face and changing my voice. I step on the lower metal rung of the upright to answer the group below.

“It’s my meeting, I invited you.”

A clamour of yelling, those that scream the loudest do it because they’re frightened they didn’t see me coming. 

Someone says something about me wanting to die, and I scoff under my helmet.

I know all about dying dickhead.

Little Red is still behind the pillar in the darkness - I’ll get her to like the name eventually, it’s an allegory, though she’s less inclined to respecting and understanding the beauty of the written word than I would like. Prefers podcasts.

Heathen.

They’re “Yelling at the guy holding the AK-47,” I hear myself saying, much better at staying in the moment now but still apt to losing time. My body and mouth keeps ticking even without me though, and Steph’s there to keep me in check.

There’s no leeway for this to go wrong, but if it does go wrong then I’ve got a lot of practice shooting now.

Old Batsy would be so upset to know his whittle robin has gone BAD, that voice says in my head, laughing and laughing but the Pit rises and squashes it.

Voice harsh, I say, “Listen to me, you drug-peddling dirtbags. You eight are the most prosperous street dealers in town.”

Not that hard to find out, harder to find out when we were trying to keep our investigations and presence unnoticed. 

I say the spiel that’s been prepared, the deal that they work for the Red Hood with protection from the Black Mask and Batman, of course with the conditions of no dealing to kids, at all. Some idiot, next to another sunglasses-at-night-wearing idiot, snaps back, “Okay crazy man, this all very generous” - which 40% of the money earned, is quite generous. “Why in the hell should we listen to you?”

I do smile under my mask, it’s the moment I’ve been waiting for.

I hold out my hand, the other waving the gun in a sharp no-no to make sure no one does anything silly. 

Little Red slips out, the wolf-stylised mask covering her face, the red hood around her head that connects to the red slip of a cape. She hands me the duffel bag, she knows what’s in there even though I was the only one that got my hands dirty. 

I’m a bit calmer now, a bit more settled than I was in the beginning but it’s one thing for Steph to see my side - the only way to really make a difference, and for her to actually kill a person. 

It’s a splash of power, as the second ripple of panic goes through them realising I have an accomplice, one they all didn’t notice. She fades back into the darkness, the openness of the room and the height of the roof making every nook and cranny even more disconcerting to the underlings below.

Like a stage hand retreating to the wings, the play now reaches its climax.

I throw the duffel bag right into the centre of the table, my heart beating steadily. Steph helped with that, she helped a lot with the Green, the Pit.

The twelve heads that I’d severed come spilling out.

“Inside the duffel bag are the heads of all your lieutenants. That took me two hours, you want to see what I can get done in a whole evening.”

Steph had stayed back at our base, going through her studies. We may not be able to graduate, being dead and all, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let her abandon her education.

Again, there’s swearing, gasps of outrage but it’s all undermined by the heavy poignant fear.  

They stand around the table, chairs flung back, teeth gritted and arms pointed up at me and they do what I want. I knew they would, I know exactly what type of people they are. 

They leave after everything is organised and Little Red and I stand around the table, bloody marks left on it but the head taken by each of their leaders. 

“We really did it,” Little Red says and I nod. My gloves don’t creak as I clench my hands, too well oiled for that. The tips of my fingers feel a little numb.

Little Red touches my gloves, rubs and pinches where I can barely feel. She’s good at noticing these things about me now, just as I notice the soreness of her left stomach that extends to her hip that needs a good warmup and good warmdown for it not to ache the next day. 

Black Mask had nearly tugged her leg off. I plan to tear his off in recompense.

Dick might’ve - I cut the thought off.

“Next step, they’ll get what’s coming to them,” Little Red says, her hood covering the hair that’s braided back. 

“Black Mask,” she says. “And him.”

She’s slightly tilted onto her right side, the teeth on her mask bared. 

“Still with me?” I ask Little Red, Steph, my fellow dead Robin.  

She shrugs, casts an arm wide to the empty room we’re in. “I’m twelve severed heads in, there’s no backing out now.”

And then much quieter, “Not while they’re still alive, still hurting people, killing people.”

“We’ll stop them,” I promise. 

Unlike others, I don’t break my promises.

*

Steph has the hood up, the wolf mask on, but that doesn’t mean she’s taking on the name Jason decided.

Little Red? Please, Spoiler was a much better name.

You’re not Spoiler anymore girl, she tells herself, watching above as their gangsters make work on taking control of the docks where a shipment of Black Mask is arriving.

Man, her own gangsters, she doesn’t know how she feels about that but it’s just another step in her father’s world she supposes. And she took that first step years ago. And here she is years later, the same monsters on the streets, escaping prisons like Blackgate and Arkham as if it’s just a resort to rest in before coming back out and terrorising the people of Gotham.

Black Mask isn’t here tonight, Red Hood has confirmed he’s not even in the city for the night. So there’s no chance of her running into him. 

Jason had said he could come with but she needs to start being alone, to prove that she can do this. The first time she’d gone off alone he’d watched her anyway, paranoid she’d run back to the others, even from all the way where they were hiding out in Africa, hanging with Leslie in whatever village she was taking care of. 

No. That’s not happening.

Steph blinks painfully, the oil in her left eye building. She takes in the gangsters that have just gassed the guards around the shipment, blinking rapidly to get the oil to do its job and stop bothering her. It’s done that ever since it fully healed, a scar over her eyelid from Black Mask slicing it. 

They don’t kill the guards, less because Red Hood cares but more because they want Black Mask to know exactly who attacked him -  drive the man wild as they hit harder and more often. 

Anything to get him out, to get him vulnerable. And the guards, the underlings, sometimes they’re terrible people but mostly they’re desperate and poor and have turned to crime to make a living. She won’t excuse it, didn’t live on the streets like Jason did, but she at least understands it.

And she doesn’t have the Pit - ‘the Green’ as Jason calls it, to excuse going on a murder spree, now that they know that’s what happened to Jason. 

She wants to find Talia and punch her in the face, and wants to smack the others for hiding who the half-feral, mostly comatose man who’d met her on the rooftop had been. But she and the other Bats didn’t really trust each other at that point and -

She’s not going to think about them, not right now. 

Her gangsters do their jobs more efficiently than she expected, the severed heads of their lieutenants must have really freaked them out. Not enough to back away from a new Crime Lord’s protection though. They get the container detached from the boat and slide it onto the dock. Then hammer around, realising there’s a lock on the shipment that they can’t get open. 

She calls, the one leading it all answering, with a rough echo that is the lap of waves she can hear both in person and on the phone.

“Guy to the right, at the entrance of the helm. Had something around his neck that he pulled under his shirt when he started falling over.”

“You’re watching us?” The leader says back, voice as predictably surprised and annoyed as any grunt she’s ever heard. Learn your place, minion.

“Always, even when you sleep,” she says back and hangs up. Her sight is zoomed in and she sees the leader keep talking, realise she’s hung up and then put the phone away in his pants pocket as he mutters something she should probably hit him for. 

Steph shifts on feet, keeping her blood flowing. It’s a cold night, the air fogging for the gangsters down below. She’s crouched on top of a shed that’s closer to a dry docking area, the ship that’s pulled in for Black Mask still berthed in the water. The city is like a burning candle behind her, always lit but casting more shadows for each point of brightness, the smog of it lying low. 

There’s always a chance someone else will turn up tonight but it’s quiet so far. 

The leader finds whatever it was the unconscious guy had and he holds it up to the sky now that he knows she’s watching. Steph zooms in, sees its some type of digital block and scans the database she and Jason have set up to see what it is.

Before he ran away and tee’d up with Leslie, Jason made sure to get himself set up. Seems like digital fraud and embezzlement sticks with you even after death and while he won’t talk about it, Steph knows Jason did actually reach out to Talia. 

He won’t say anything more but Steph is waiting for Talia to try and pull something; using the Pit isn’t something Talia Al Ghul would do without expecting something in return. 

You can’t trust crazy.

The scans come back, it’s an RFID lock. Basically a fancy card reader.

Steph calls back, but it’s Little Red’s short, sharp words that come through.

“Scan it.”

They do. And that’s when shit hits the fan.

The phone is on so she hears the whirr as something starts and sees the beam of red as it bursts straight through the guy's chest, the phone clanking to the ground as he crumples.

“Fuck,” she says and jumps down to the ground. She opens a line to Jason as she makes her way forward, the gangsters all screaming and yelling, shooting their guns wildly.

“It’s Superman!” One idiot yells, when the form of Amazo comes out, grabbing the side of the shipping container and crumpling it in his hand. The green pants and the big ‘A’ on it really give the android’s identity away.

It’s Red Hood on the line immediately, “Problem?”

“Black Mask somehow got his hands on Amazo and it appears he has Superman’s laser eyes still,” she says, the hit of landing jarring up her body and getting her adrenaline going. 

She can do this, back into it. 

You got tortured to death girl, what’s a power-copying android on that?

“I’m on my way,” Red Hood says, a clatter in the background and words spoken to whoever is with him.

“He should have a shutdown button right?”

“Can’t say I ever fought against him,” Red Hood so helpfully answers. “If it was that easy he wouldn’t be such a pain in the Justice League’s arse.”

Steph pulls out a couple of throwing knives, ones that will explode when they land on Amazo. The gangsters are all scrambling away, not even trying to shoot and she slinks in between their running forms but sticks to staying out of sight. 

“Can’t let Black Mask have him, and can’t let it ride wild in the city.”

“Little Red, I’ve got a big bazooka coming with me, don’t go fight it.”

“I can do this,” she says, a little breathless, riding the high from the wind she’s just tumbled through. She gets up close enough and flings her weapons. They land on his chest and shoulder then boom!

“He, it? Not sure what to use really,” she wonders.

“Don’t die, you aren’t allowed to die,” Red Hood growls and there’s the bit of the Pit in there, enough to remind Steph of the fear she felt back in the beginning.

She’s not scared anymore, and Jason’s anger will never be at her but at anyone that would dare to hurt her. It’s probably best for Amazo to get fucked up by her and not him. He’d use so many explosions any patrolling Bat would see it from the city. 

Really, she’s doing it - him? A favour.

The line of red comes out again, tearing into the cement of the docks. One of the gangsters is close to her and she grabs him. 

“Get the others, retreat and distract anyone that tries to come here.”

The gangster’s shaking but she nods and hoists the large gun she hasn’t been using over her shoulder, calling out to the others.

Amazo comes swinging, bare muscular arms that can only be drug, supernatural or engineered bulging as he takes out a storage box that sends life vests flying into the air and nearby water. Steph rolls her neck, eases up her shoulders and lets herself fall back into a fighting mindset. 

Her style’s a bit different now; she’d always been a bit of a scout, a bit more likely to use things around her - like just now as she launches herself off a rope and leg kicks Amazo into a wedged spot where the back of his knee smacks into a mooring pollard. But Jason’s a hard hitter, brutal, direct and even better when he gets someone on the ground. 

She’s lighter but much better at hitting with the intent to destroy, not just disable. Where she used to play and flit around now she does it with every movement designed to take out a body part.

The knee gets hit and the leg goes down and she takes out her new and improved boom-stick. She spins it up high like a cowgirl then flings in forward and its front whirrs and opens into a large pointed spear that stabs straight through Amazo’s shoulder and pins him to the container behind him. She flicks her boom-stick, unchaining it from the rest and the spear part is left embedded in Amazo’s shoulder.

His eyes go bright red and another line of laser comes out that she rolls out of the way of.

She’s got two parts of her versatile baton left, a lot of throwing shurikens, grenades and spiked jacks.

Also, there’s the gun.

She goes for Amazo’s other leg even as he pulls forward, her boom-stick turned spear tearing into the shoulder and ripping back the skin to reveal metal as he wrecks his man-made body.

She aborts her attack as she hears a familiar fwip through the air,  the soft shing of a batarang before it makes impact. She disappears into the darkness, hides amongst the containers before it even hits Amazo, who pulls himself up, large hand on the mooring bollard throwing all his weight on it so that it half cracks.

She breathes a shaky breath, her cape settling around her, blood red. She retreats further, knees bent as she crosses foot over foot to move away, Amazo roaring in a scream of metal vocals as the two intruders make their way to the fight.

She sees two gangsters in the background, up beside a battered car, hanging cuffed from a long sliver of metal that’s half torn off a container. God, how hard is it to get good-quality gangsters? It was useful when she was on the other side, but now it’s just annoying.

“Don’t come Hood, Batman and Nightwing are on site.”

Jason says nothing.

“I’m coming home now,” she says. “Hood, I repeat, I’m coming.”

Weird, she says home and it means Jason now, even though there’s still an odd ache about her mother. She knows she’s doing well though, Wayne Industries having hired her as a pharmaceutical nurse.

Amazo attempts to shoot the Bats with his laser eyes but Batman is precise, exact, fast - a train on tracks that know exactly the way forward. Nightwing flings himself around with a few smiles and witty comments but there’s a sharpness to his smile and he’s always been lean but he looks too thin.

They work together as well as any past-Robin and Batman do.

Something in Steph’s chest hurts so deeply she can only compare it to her labour pains.

She needs to leave, now.

And as Amazo picks up the container she was hiding behind, she makes good on her thoughts.

She flees, making sure to uncuff the two gangsters who admit they told Batman who their boss was, and when she makes it out of the docks, and through the city, Red Hood meets up with her grappling over the rooftops.

His feet land with a thump that shows how angry he is, his shoulders rounded and one hand permanently on a gun.

He jumps with her till they make it street level and then till they make it to their base.

He opens the door to let her inside, closes and bars it behind her as Steph throws off her cape and hood. She makes it to the fridge to get a glass of water, gets a second one for him and then sculls it so quickly she nearly chokes. 

Jason is behind her, chest to her back and slips an arm around her front, pressing an ungloved hand to her heart, over her breasts. The glass is cold in her hand, her lips and chin dripping with the water that’s dripped down her face. She lets the glass go into the sink and puts her wet gloved hand over Jason’s. His face is pressed into her neck, his nose on the knob of her spine. 

A year ago Black Mask touched the same spot as he punched her in the face over and over again, as he grabbed and twisted her flesh and made a point that he was going to kill her because she hadn’t killed him.

“I’m alright,” Steph says, convincing herself, trying to convince Jason.

“No, you’re not,” then he nuzzles her. “But you will be, you will be.”

She holds his hand that is curled like it can grab her heart directly through her ribs, and leans back into him. The gun is at her thigh.

“Yes, when we kill him.”

Jason makes a noise of affirmation but she has this awful feeling that maybe, maybe, they’re not both talking about their killers.

Chapter Text

Steph flings her hands in the air, turning her back on me and on the conversation.

“He’d agree with me,” I say again and Steph huffs so loudly I know she’s also rolling her eyes. She is very expressive, but that doesn’t mean it always reflects what’s going on inside her head. 

“Of course, if it was logical he would jump off a cliff - he always thinks he and his big brain know best.” 

There’s history there, though I don’t know a lot of it - I don’t like that, it could come back and bite me in the ass. I suspect they were in a relationship that soured, but then she also seems to have something going on with the new Batgirl, who used to be called Orphan. 

A depressing name but nobody who is happy takes up a mask. Still, I’m glad I got her first, she’s on the outside of the Gotham vigilante group but close enough to the others. 

What a man throwest away, another will take only too gladly.

If that MONSTER/MAN/BAT will be a fool, will fail another Robin, then it has to be me who saves her, she who saves herself. Robins take care of Robins.

“Baby bird helped me take care of Dick and he didn’t tell - ” I change what I’m going to say because sometimes I still get caught up on things and then time disappears and Steph has to throw a glass of water on me to knock me out of it. 

She says I don’t scare her anymore but that doesn’t change how she sometimes shakes after. She says that’s not me, that it’s just all the other bad shit that’s happened. Well a lot of bad shit has happened to us, so I don’t talk about the shakes and she doesn’t mention the green eyes.

I feel less like a zombie these days and more like a wild dog, chained to my desire to rid the world of evil, right all the wrongs. Okay, maybe I can’t right all the wrongs, but I can definitely shoot a lot of them. I’ve taken to a gun easily, like maybe I was always meant to hold it and now it’s a comfort in my hands, a shape that means vengeance.

“I want to save him,” I say because Tim Drake may have been raised rich, but his parents are dead now too and he had been so desperate for Dick’s attention that I know he’s broken just like the rest of us. 

Steph grumpily flicks her ponytail and I notice it’s knotted. 

“He can save himself - where are you going?” Steph starts her rant, voice going high and angry when she hears me walk away. 

I find the brush in the small ensuite and brandish it like a threat as I go back to her. It is a threat, she’s terrible at taking care of her hair but refuses to cut it short.

Her eyes widen and she picks up a wooden spoon that’s on the long counter and holds it up, her tank top raising a bit and showing her belly with stretch marks. “No, we’re having an argument, this is not time for forced grooming!”

“We talk while I brush,” I say, smacking away the spoon as it’s thrown and then following Steph as she runs around the second-hand couch I’d got. I have the funds, being a crime lord helps with that, but there’s no use wasting it all on trackable purchases. Also this is just one base of many. Nothing will be home until all of the bad people are dead and gone and I know my robins are safe.

There’s one out flapping around in the big ole’ world and you - I - am not there to keep him safe, two voices fight each other and I smack my head with the brush to get them to stop. Steph sees it and concern flashes on her face before she finds another thing to throw.

“He’s going to die,” I say, not quite smacking my fears out. But the fears are right, aren’t they? The fears are just me finally seeing the truth, the reality of it all.

Robins DIE, that’s what they - 

Steph is in front of me, callused fingers over my beat up knuckles and unravelling my grip from the brush. She’s got my elbow, rubbing it and she’s humming something I know. I listen, it’s my favourite musical. She tries the higher bit and I say, “Christine’s a little too high, you’re more a Meg.” She scowls but her head is dipped, looking up at me and taking stock of where I am. Ever since that run-in with . . . with those two, I’ve been worse. Or maybe not worse, maybe just on mission. 

Take over Crime Alley, take over the wharfs, destabilise Black Mask’s control, save all the robins and then kill THEM. 

We need to get Dick, but he’s been in the Bat’s orbit constantly, always on-call with Oracle-who-is-Babs, who is watching 24/7. Guess she feels bad about letting Steph die. 

I know they know about me, I know what the little robin said. I know that the Bat scours for anything about me but he won’t find it, he won’t find it and he thinks I’m halfway across the world but I’m not. And if I still was he won’t go, he won’t leave Gotham alone, not when all the other vigilantes have left and it’s just Nightwing and Oracle and all the monsters in the city.

No Batwoman, no Huntress, no one has seen Catwoman. I died, Steph died, Babs got put in a wheelchair. There’s no denying it, Gotham is becoming more and more corrupt and it needs a real saviour, it needs people that are going to make the hard choice, the right choice. 

That could be us: Me, Steph, Dick, Tim, maybe even Cassandra if I can get her back. And I know Alf - I know the Bat’s butler was/is a military man. Sometimes you need to kill so the bad things stop happening.

I’ve heard Dick, speaking into the comms quietly like he’s hoping I’m listening (I am listening) and he says, “Please Jay, Jay-bird, if you’re there, come back, please - I, I miss you,” but there’s a heavy silence around it and I know I’m not the only one listening.

Dick’s bait, it’s clear as the answer to a bad Riddler pun. Well, I’m not going to bite until I’m ready. Until we’re ready.

Stephie sits on the ground between my splayed legs, undoing her hair from the ponytail though she hisses when the band gets caught on a knot. She’s got pyjama pants on, and I have a matching set.

“I told you,” I say and when she’s untangled her hair finally she slingshots it to land on the corner of the computer monitor. 

“And I told you no to kidnapping Tim, but you’ve been chewing at it like a kid with gum so what’s really going on?” 

I start brushing her hair, careful and gentle with my big fingers and big hands and her hair is so soft where it isn’t knotted. She’s broken and has been put back together but she’s done it so much better than me. I don’t think there’s anything soft left in, just burnt ashes if you can call that soft.

I think, which is easier now than it was months and months ago but sometimes my thoughts are too clear, too sharp. I do need my mind to pull off this crime lord business, I can’t make Steph do all the work.

“Tim Drake is stupid.”

Steph snorts, the loudness of it echoing off this one-bedroom apartment, the lounge room stacked with most of the stuff that we use to keep our operations going. 

“Cass said that to me the first time I told her about one of mine and Tim’s arguments. Nice to hear another person realise the truth.”

“He is stupid, because he takes care of others and not himself. Which means he’s perfect to kidnap - better us than someone else.”

Steph bends her head down to let me get at a nasty clump at the nape of her neck. 

“When he’d give me shit for an injury I’d just find one on him and hit it. His brand of caring can be more than a little patronising.” 

It is good to get insider knowledge, though I can clearly see Tim’s actions were soured by others' perspective of Steph’s self-made beginnings. The daughter of Cluemaster, Spoiler had stood up against her father’s actions and I think that’s worth celebrating instead of judging. Or he’d just been worried about her. Doesn’t make it any less patronising. 

Still, I say, “He didn’t run from me when he should have and he kept me as Dick’s secret because he is loyal. Even though I was dangerous. Even though he’d get in trouble for it.”

“You ain’t dangerous to mister Bubble Butt, anyone can see that,” Steph teases and she doesn’t know the things I did. I have not told her. I let Dick hurt so he could understand, and I watched him cry till he wanted to puke. I let him hold that small dead girl, knowing that he didn’t save her. I wish I’d saved her.

I regret that he made me do that, I do not regret doing it.

I find it soothing to fix Steph’s hair and as I do I breathe deep. Steph is the sun when it peaks up in the morning, all the light fixed together and so bright. It sears the eyes and leaves a blur of shape that is fixed onto your retinas for minutes after you look away. But I take the hurt that is her because I accept all of her, not just bits and pieces of her.  

She throws a mean punch though, and it’s only gotten meaner as Little Red. 

“ . . . It’s better if we’re all together and I need him to help me get Dick without others knowing.”

“You can get Dick yourself, he literally hid you from B and that’s pretty wild considering what an suffering-eldest-sister vibe Dick’s got going on. That guy is more high strung than Tim, he just hides it better.”

I remember Dick working himself into dust, grinding himself down like he could keep patching up a leaky pot with tissues and towels. It barely worked then and it won’t work now.

On my computer there sits a message, an answer. Before I was in that small African town with Leslie, Steph barely able to sit up, I’d made my way to - 

Couldn’t make it to where I died. Ha, ha HA - where I died. That’s crazy old chum, this old chum died because the Clown smacked and smacked and the Batsss wasn’t in the sky and couldn’t fly to save -  

I start to braid Steph’s hair, the now slightly wavy strands untangled. 

I’d gone somewhere else instead, probably best because going to that blown out warehouse in the middle of nowhere would have been an obvious place for Dickie to look. I’d gone where the green called me and found her and now I know why I’m alive. Well, she said she’d just found me wandering but now I know why she’d helped.

She saw the future for her little boy and couldn’t handle it - the knowledge that the Bat wouldn’t protect her kid, let alone avenge. Well, I’ll take it, like a crowbar to the ribs and I’ll do what needs to be done. For me, for the others, for that poor kid that’s gonna have severe issues from growing up in The League of Assassins with a mother like Talia Al Ghul.

“I need to kill the clown, you need to kill Black Mask and I need all the Robins to understand it’s the right decision so we can fix this fucked up city,” I tell Steph, finishing her braid. She shifts around, already ruining my hard work and leans on my knee. She looks up at me, the thickness over one of her eyelids a scar that I know makes her vision go a bit off sometimes. 

“Cass isn’t a Robin but we can’t leave her out.”

“You wanna get her?”

“No,” Steph rejects that quickly, almost nervous at the prospect. “No, she’s Batgirl, but her upbringing really messed her up. She doesn’t ever want to kill again and I don’t want to make her.”

There’s no clock in here to tick, cause I can’t stand the sound but there’s a calendar and digital time on the wall and I think about the timeline. Three months and we’ll have control of not just the worst areas but the harbour as well - three months and we’ll have Black Mask isolated, poor and furious. We’ve already absorbed all the insider traitors from the other criminal groups we took over. There’d been more than Black Mask would like, the villain doesn’t have as good a grip on his people as he thinks.

An Arkham breakout will ruin that, but three months might be enough for some convenient interactions with Batgirl where I can gather how amenable she’ll be to letting others kill in her place. I just need her to turn the other cheek. 

“She doesn’t need to kill, we can do that.”

Steph hasn’t killed yet, but she’s held a gun. 

“Let’s do that all later, yeah? Why not do all the other stuff we gotta do first?”

I disagree, she perseveres.

“B is looking for you, you heard Nightwing say it on comms to him,” Steph reminds me. Nightwing had got in trouble, told “No names” and then been silenced for the rest of their patrol. I remember being silenced, the comms not for anything other than emergencies.

What is given can be so easily taken away, if you don’t play by rules somebody else made up.

The swing of a crowbar, up and down, back and forth.

“If we get dumb, no self-preservation Tim, B will go on high alert and then be immediately there when we kill the clown.”

Steph is good at using other names, because certain things still set me off. 

“He won’t interfere with Black Mask and we’re getting rid of that fucker first.”

“Black Mask doesn’t care about the current Robin cause he’s not here. And Nightwing has beat him up before,” Steph shrugs, like she doesn’t feel that comparison to the great Boy Wonder. 

No, I don’t feel that, or if I do it’s changed. Me and Steph have both died, so neither of us compare to Dickie. But Dickie’s been fucked up in other ways - fucked - 

I killed Tarantula and I don’t regret it. I killed Tarantula and Tim said nothing. 

“We kill Black Mask and then get little flyaway Robin and then we get Nightwing and kill the clown,” I say.

“Perfect,” Steph slaps my thigh and stands up, pulling her braid from me. She goes and gets the hair tie, slipping it on. She’s not looking at me but I can tell she’s mulling over what’s been unsaid.

“To be honest, he’s probably going to be pissed at me,” Steph says, like I haven’t figured out why she’s so resistant to getting Tim first. “Maybe we could get Nightwing first so he can tentacle-hug Tim and then the yelling will be muffled. I did sort of think he cheated on me, then made myself Robin then died in the suit after he found out I took his job.” 

Steph tries to laugh it off but I see through it. “It’ll just be really awkward considering how we left things. You know, I’d much rather work on being a crime lord.”

“I think our minions find Little Red quite intimidating,” I say and she groans. 

“Red Wolf - or Red Hunter? Red Woodchooper - just anything other than little, I’m not little,” she refutes the name even though it’s what all our members have been calling her. Remembering our gang members, I put the current conversation on hold and check in to the comms I’ve set up: neighbourhood patrols completed, reports of criminal deeds, a list of names of people that are still selling drugs to kids even though we warned them not to, the smaller crime heads that are scared peddling what we tell them to and gathering information. We’ll need to talk to the working girls directly for their information - which they always get paid for. 

I finish my side and while Steph is still talking through how to follow a money trail to one of the boot-lickers, I start cooking dinner. She wanders around the room, pyjamas pants rolled up at her hips to shorten the length so she can practice kicking. 

I play Phantom of the Opera quietly and think about the dumb kid I used to be, and how anyone that’s been a Robin is the same type of naive-stupid. I finish making dinner and Steph says it’s pretty good though she adds an obscene amount of pepper. We go to bed together, because I’d kept getting up from the spare mattress and standing watch over Steph which had freaked her out. I snuggle her from behind, her feet curling around mine and my nose against the unknotted nape of her hair. She’s woken up a few times in a nightmare and elbowed me in the solar plexus. Sometimes my need to touch her is at odds with her need to be left alone but we’ve worked it out, mostly.

Two days later I go to Teen Titan’s Tower and kidnap Timothy Drake. 

*

Tim is alone, in darkness and nursing a headache. Wonder Girl would say it’s from too much coffee, he would say not enough. Raven would say he should drink tea instead and then Beast Boy would interrupt with some non-sequitur, transform and probably break some tech that Cybord would have to fix.

Tim knows it's probably from a combination of lack of sleep, lack of food and hours spent in front of a blinding screen. He’d only just turned it off, reluctantly preparing for bed because his vision is going and he can only reread the same data sheet over and over again.

So he sits in the darkness, when he should be having a shower and brushing his teeth and then laying down. Like that will stop the thoughts, like he’ll have anything other than nightmares.

Steph, what you would say now, seeing me sit here in the dark? You’d probably call me a loser. 

Tim blinks, the darkness settling so he can see the outlines of his room. He thinks, I am a loser. A loser and a failure and I need to fix this.

Batman isn’t violent the way he was after Jason’s death, but he’s closed off. He’s sent everyone away, including Tim as Robin but Dick is still around. Tim is surprised, he’d thought after all the hiding, after what . . . what Jason said Tarantula did, after Blockbuster, that Dick would be long gone.

But he hadn’t explained to Tim, just given a tight-lipped smile and agreed it was a good idea for Tim to stick to the Teen Titans Tower. Tim thinks he might be working with Oracle on the down low but keeping a close eye on Bruce. If Bruce has tried to get Barbara out it hasn’t worked and Tim doesn’t think he’s ever seen the woman bow to Bruce or Batman or her father. Bruce, who needs more than Alfred’s steadfast support, who needs Robin even if they all keep doing is dying.

Tim doesn’t want to think about it, so he does his own investigation and he fails. He can’t find Jason cause he’s somewhere in Africa, he can’t bring back Steph, he can’t clone Conner and a few days ago he saw his stepmother Dana for the first time since she’d checked herself into the mental hospital in Bludhaven.

It had been good to see her, the guilt for going so long without almost choking him with the hug Dana had given him. He’d wanted to cry, but all he could manifest were a few tears.

Near the end she’d said "Will Stephanie come with you next time?...Oh, I'm sorry, Tim, I forgot . . . ” and it had been awful and made him want to go down the path he’d gone with Conner. Because he can’t clone anyone but Jason . . . Jason was brought back with the waters of the Lazarus Pit and maybe he can get some, maybe he can bring back Steph -

Steph would hate him if he did that, he knows. 

But you’d have her angry and hating you as long as it meant she was alive, Tim acknowledges in his own head, knowing the exact type of person he is. 

Calculated, obsessive and with a tender heart that he tries so hard to hide. And god, he’d loved Steph - wildly, almost like it was a feeling outside his control when all he’s ever known is to keep his emotions close to his chest.

The tower is quiet, the hum of Tim’s computers low now that he’s put them into rest and he is so tired his eyes are dried raisins. But he knows sleep will be difficult so he thinks maybe he’ll go to the kitchen, have a hot chocolate to kick start his brain for sleep time - because his part-time maid-slash-nanny had always snuck that for him even though his parents said no to any sweets.  

The tower continues its eerie silence as Tim walks the hallway to the main kitchen. Only Raven and Cyborg would be up at 3am in the morning but he doesn’t hear or see any sign of them. Actually Raven in particular tends to work at this time because the barrier between the demon realm and earth likes to thin out around the witching hour. There must be something in the daily cycles of the two realms but that is a whole lot of metaphysical science and knowledge that the magically-inclined vigilante members know more about than him. If he starts thinking about Trigun’s demon realm circling a demon sun he won’t be getting to sleep even during what has to be the quietest night to ever happen at Teen Titan’s Tower.

Tim gets the mug without any light and, following his spatial memory, starts to fill hot water in (yes, he does a little bit of hot water first and then adds the chocolate, which is smart) but no hot water comes out.

He tries again, grumbles that someone’s stuffed it up and then fills it with cold, intending to use the microwave to heat the water up. The microwave doesn’t turn on and he smacks at the start button like that’s going to magically fix it, which hey, a classic off-and-on again tactic does tend to work.

It doesn’t this time. 

He’s tired, he’s exhausted but he’s also anxious, paranoid and a little bit OCD - according to Kori and Black Canary. 

Beast Boy changes forms in his sleep sometimes, so a growl or hiss or any other type of noise is to be expected and unfortunately, certain smells too. Wonder girl mutters and hits the air, and Connor used to watch white-static TV or blare heavy metal. But there’s nothing, not even the filtered air ducts that keep them from being poisoned.

Tim isn’t tired anymore, Tim is awake and suddenly this well-known, peaceful place becomes dangerous and unknown to him. Tim taps his watch, sending out an emergency signal that doesn’t go through when he gets no vibration of confirmation. He’s in plain clothes, unmasked because after the debacle with Steph he’d finally just let the team know his real face. He has no weapons, he has no comms and everyone is sleeping. He needs to change the playing field so he finds a knife from the drawers and leaves the kitchen with a hushed breath and his skin tingling because someone might be here, right now, watching him.

Unprepared, careless, he tells himself and then pushes that away. He needs to check on his team, he needs to make sure they're safe.

His mind goes through all the potential enemies - and there’s a lot. The last person who successfully broke in like this was Slade Wilson during Dick’s time. 

None of the doors of his team mates open, all locked and not able to be overridden because the place is either locked down or completely without power. 

He’s careful with his steps, following the map in his head but each refusal of a door to open makes the darkness of the tower seem so much more encompassing, the still air like a trap about to close on him. His breaths are shallow and his bare feet preemptively flinch with the worry that he’s going to step on his would-be attacker. His elbows keep jutting out like he wants to hit someone away and when he makes it to their command room so he can check on the tower’s defenses, that door is also barred.

Ram it? Disable the weak points? Because there are weak points, but they’re ones only Bats know about. It also wouldn’t be able to stand up to Superman breaking it in.

He holds the knife and whispers, “Wonder girl, wake up - Superman, can you hear me?” Batman hates calling for meta help but Tim’s not in Gotham and he has no idea what he’s up against. 

Superman doesn’t appear in front of him, Wonder girl doesn’t wake up. If Raven was in soulform he’d see her but it’s just him, all alone. 

All the doors are closed but not his room. His room! Which he only put the computers to rest recently so maybe his room was unaffected?

Why would my room be unaffected, that doesn’t make sense - unless the invader wanted me to come back to my room, Tim realises but it doesn’t change that he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

He walks the hallway, he holds his knife. The door to his room is ajar, the barest of light seeping through so he slips in without easing it open. It’s his side table lamp that’s on at its lowest setting, not enough for the whole room but just enough that he can see a person is on his bed, fully covered. 

He’s big, muscled, with a red helmet covering his face and the shape of the gun is visible as he raises it. Tim recognises him immediately.

Red Hood, Gotham’s newest crime lord, points the gun and says, “We do this the easy way or the hard way Robin.”

Tim debates, his grip steady on the knife. “How about the honest way?”

Red Hood cocks his head, the tinny speaker not hiding the lower Gotham accent, “Oh yeah, and what’s that?”

Tim thinks about what he knows about Red Hood, an up-and-coming crime lord with his trusty crime lady. Little Red tends to disable people - a knee cap hit backwards, a shoulder dislocated. Hood hits hard, hits fast and doesn’t hesitate to shoot. Tim knows he’s out of his league here.

 “You tell me who you are, what you want and why you’re doing this and then I decide if I want it easy or hard.”

Red Hood’s hold is steady on the gun, unwavering from where it’s aimed at Tim’s chest. The chances of him successfully dodging it are low, especially without his cape. But they’re not zero.

“Nah, can’t spoil that yet, wouldn’t want to leave a clue for anyone listening in.” Red Hood holds up something and Tim, shifting on his feet, realises it’s his mask. “I’ve blocked everything but you never know. And I want them to come, to find what I’ll leave but it will take a while to get enough blood from you to leave a message.” 

Tim’s heart beat kick starts and he throws the knife with pin-point accuracy as he lunges back to the door. He’s not quick enough, even when the knife finds its target in Red Hood’s hand. 

The gun goes off and Tim takes it straight to the chest. 

Chapter Text

The blood doesn’t take too long to draw, the dart in Timmy’s chest knocking him out pretty immediately courtesy of the stash we got from the doc. Then I get through coating the place in his blood in under an hour. 

I saw the Hall of Remembrance when I first broke in and knocked everyone out with a sleeping gas through the air system. I’d made sure to turn off the sensors that would identify the gas and set off the alarms. Tim was meant to be asleep but it wasn’t a surprise that he was every bit a night owl as the rest of us. It was easy to adapt and maybe some part of me still wants to peck at him, to fight for my place so he understands that I am bigger, stronger and that he should come to me for protection. 

There’s no plaque for Jason Todd, no statue for the reckless, angry boy. But hadn’t I laughed too? Hadn’t I joked and made a difference? I’d been much more than that angry little street kid but it seems they don’t remember that. I’d only gone on a few missions anyway, it’s childish to be hurt about not being included.

Well, they won’t forget this time -

ONE DEAD ROBIN, TWO DEAD TOO, THREE DEAD ROBINS WITH NO STATUE 

Okay, maybe it’s a little spiteful and nobody seems to realise that Steph died in the red and green suit either so I’m making a point.

I want to sign it: Jason Todd , I want to sign it: Red Hood . But Steph’s going to be furious when I bring pale, at the edge of too much blood loss Timmy back, so I don’t sign it. It’ll drive them all crazy anyway but the man that is Bat won’t let them into Gotham. He’ll shut down and bar anyone from entering. Which is good, because this is Gotham business and nothing to do with the others - others who only make statues for the fallen heroes they like.

I clean up the blood from my gloves in their sink but I keep the counter messy for some added psychological warfare. Okay, I’m pretty pissed but I breathe in the way Dick taught me but with Steph’s add-on which is three quick nose inhales. It’s good for when I’m shallow breathing, puts a hit of oxygen in me; helps me think.

I curl my hands, the gloves squeaking with blood and water and let the silence surround me. 

I’d had to put a light on downstairs and at any time someone could try and contact the Tower so I need to haul ass. But I am older, bigger and in a body scarred, my hair streaked with white with a soul that has killed and been killed. Last time I was here I was young and hopeful and I’d thought they’d want me, thought they might ask me to stick around.

They hadn’t.

The Pit inside me - because Talia confirmed it is the green waters of the Lazarus Pit, surges with anger, with the need to seek vengeance but I stick on mission. Talia had asked if I’d wanted to come learn under her, sharpen my skills, and that she felt a sense of responsibility for me. 

If Steph hadn’t been with me, I might have gone.  

But Steph is with me, so I return to Tim, carefully gathering up him and the intravenous cord I have lodged in his arm. We leave the medical bay and then I set him softly spinning on the chair in their operations room as I change the Tower to receive communications. It’s enough that any attempts won’t make outsiders realise the Tower’s on lockdown but it keeps the titans trapped, unconscious in their rooms and with no way to call out.

The longer before they realise Tim’s gone, is more time for me to make sure he’s secure in the hideout with me and Steph.

I leave with Tim and only Tim and if I make sure his mouth breathes against my neck so I can feel the air go in and out, that’s between me and all the other dead things at this time of night. I make it to my motorbike, zipping Tim and his packet of nutritious fluid in a jacket and popping the helmet on his head. I drive us back, thankful Tim will be out of it for a couple of hours until I can get us loaded onto a transport train heading back to Gotham. I’ll have to keep him out for the day and a half it’ll take to make it to Gotham but he’ll need that to heal from the blood I took - hence the fluids. 

And I do get him back, get him sorted in our bedroom and put a fresh catheter in so he can relieve himself and then I come out just as Little Red is coming back, doffing the mask and throwing it on the couch. 

She sighs, rolling her shoulders back with loud, grinding cracks.

“Well the shipment Black Mask was so excitedly waiting on is now on the sea floor, most likely alongside a bunch of dead bodies.” 

She adds, “Not ours, we didn’t kill anyone, I’m just saying gangs and cops definitely like to use the waters around the port to get rid of problem people.”

The door is open behind me but Steph, so focused on venting, starts flinging off her clothing.

“Nearly four days out and about is my limit, also I think something big is going to go down. Nobody’s seen the Bats for like the last two days, I’ve already got some low level criminals trying to rob pedestrians and stores.” 

Steph finds the container I made for her before I left, though it's half-eaten, and pops it in the microwave. She rubs her eye, wincing as it hurts and then leans against the cold fridge. 

“So radio silence from the Bats but I don’t care about that right now - how’s Leslie?”

Because that was the lie I made up - Leslie was dropping by Keystone city, home of the Speeders and was giving us more vital supplies that I’d transferred her money for.

I’d like Steph to be in a better mood but it’s better to rip the bandaid off. 

Steph clocks my stillness immediately, frowns, her fringe stuck to a sweaty forehead and asks, “What, she try to convince you we should go back to Africa?”

“No,” I say, my lips sore for some reason, my legs feeling like straight metal poles as I stand awkwardly. 

Better now or never.

“I -”

There’s a groan from the bedroom and Steph’s eyebrows raise in confusion then suspicious shock. Then they change to recognition as Tim groans again.

“You did not, Jason Peter fucking Todd, I swear to -”

*

Tim wakes up to a room that is not his own and the horrible, never-forgotten feeling of a catheter in his groin. 

Last memory? He thinks to himself, trying to untangle the blur of information. There’s a scattering of tasks that his mind reminds him off, like tabs on a computer booting up. Nothing to do with where he is - a small room, off-white walls, a single dresser and a basket to the side that’s full of clothes that are either cleaned or need to be cleaned. The bed isn’t too steady, creaking as Tim flexes his legs and hands to find he is not cuffed.

His eyes water though, not liking the light that hangs as a bright bulb above him. His mouth isn’t cotton-like, which means someone’s washed it out. That shows a level of attentiveness that means it's more than the usual goons.

Clothes? Changed. No emergency beacon to press. They knew enough to get me undressed - and with a catheter that means I’ve been out longer than I’d want.

He remembers the Tower, darkened. All the rooms were locked and he couldn’t wake anyone up.

Someone had been on his bed.

That changes it to something more nefarious, his kidnapper wanting his mouth fresh for different reasons other than Tim’s comfort. He’s been sneaking into the dangerous parts of Gotham since he was a kid, he’s seen women working the corner and has saved more than his fair share of people being sexually assaulted. The worst he’s experienced personally has been the comments from Ra’s Al Ghul, which while not accompanied by touch, were dealt with a leer that made Tim feel just as violated.

A shot to the chest, the memory of it hitting him from a man with thick legs and a red helmet. It resounds in his ears but it’s actually the door slamming open. He doesn’t have anything to defend himself, doesn’t know why he’s been taken or how they broke into the Tower. All he can do is yank the blanket up even if it's flimsy at best, trying to groggily get to his knees and behind the bed. 

He doesn’t get far, legs tangled and the catheter painfully pulling from where it’s lodged in. Whoever’s at the door can take him out can -

He looks and Steph’s there. Staring at him, her arm being the one that has thrown the door open though that doesn’t make any sense. Her arms will have had the meat decayed by now, wasted away as her carcass loses its form until only bone remains.

She’s half undressed, but he hadn’t seen what she’d been wearing at her funeral - a closed casket had been her mother’s request. Her hair is a knot at the nape of her neck and her eyes are that bright blue with a shine of violet that means she’s close to crying. 

She hates crying and every time she’s cried, on him, because of him, by him, it’s something that he’s tried to detach himself from. Because it hurts to see and so if he can step away and just be there mentally, then he’ll know the best thing to say, the right thing to do to make it hurt less. 

Cassie always said, ‘Ignoring the feelings doesn't make them any less real Tim, just less heard.’

Batgirl - Cass, had touched him in the chest one time and gone, ‘Heart always feels, even when your brain pretends differently.”

Over her shoulder is Jason. Who doesn’t smile but looks at Tim with the same intensity he did all those months ago when they ran into each other in a dark alley. 

“Am I dead?” Tim asks, because that’s what Steph is but Jason isn’t. Except maybe he’s so hard to find because he’s died.

Steph’s mouth opens and then she turns and grabs Jason by the hair, yanking that white strip.

“I told you not to!”

Jason’s neck is bent, Steph tugging him down to her level and Jason wraps an arm around her even while being attacked and bodily picks her up. Her legs kick at him and he’s over to Tim’s bed in two steps. 

“Leslie faked Steph’s death then absconded with her to Africa,” Jason says like the words he’s saying make any sense. They don’t. There was a funeral. Except Tim thinks fast and he’s seen aliens and magic and worlds colliding. He’s tried to clone his best friend back into existence. He knows all about things that seem like they shouldn’t make sense, being the only thing that make any sense at all.

“Move over,” Jason demands and Tim, who’s good at doing what he wants but even better at listening to orders, shuffles aside. The catheter moves in his dick in a way that’s awful. His body aches but no worse than a sparring match and he remembers how quickly he went down now. He remembers that Red Hood was sitting on his bed and he wanted to kill Robin.

Jason puts Steph down next to him, who tries to get up immediately and Jason pushes her back into Tim’s arms. Tim can’t help but hold her, and she is alive and wild and warm. The smell of her sweat is there, the frayed ends of her hair. It’s instinct to reach from behind and place his hand over her heart, feeling it beat, the softness of her breasts underneath it.

She stills and doesn’t quite turn back to him. 

“Steph?”

She’s tense and Jason is an immoveable wall half on the bed, always so much larger than life, the way he has been since Tim first saw him as a child.

Red Hood took Tim from his room in the Titan’s Tower and Jason and Steph are who Tim woke up to.

“Steph, he loves you. He’s happy you’re alive.”

Tim has no idea what the fuck is happening but Steph slightly turns to him with her temple against his chin, palm over his and fingers gliding in between his own where it feels her heart through the shirt she wears. 

This could be a trick, they could be clones. He could be dead or this could be his own hallucination.

“Hey, Boy Wonder,” she says, a hesitant whisper, the anger from before gone. And it sounds so much like her, the cadence, the choice of words. His breath is shaky and her backside slots so nicely into the cradle of his hips, if not for the catheter attached though the bag seems empty. His mind whirls away how much time must’ve gone since he was taken but it doesn’t matter if it means she’s really here. 

He wants to speak, looks at Jason like he can confirm she’s not a ghost. 

“She’s real Timmers, flesh and blood like you and me.” Then Jason cocks his head, the eyes shining green. “Well, more like you than me.”

“Steph?”

“Yeah,” she clenches his hand. “Yeah, it’s me.” 

Tim gasps like he’s going to say something but his words leave him, his mind gone blank.

Jason grins, “Surprise.”

Chapter Text

Dick is there when Batman gets the call. He thinks if he hadn’t been, Bruce would have kept his mouth shut tight. As tight as the leash he has on Dick. That Dick is letting him have because Bruce hasn’t said it but he knows that his father figure is betrayed Dick kept the truth from him. That he hid Jason. Old habits always come in and Dick is meant to be hiding secrets with Bruce, not from him.

“It appears to be a message for you,” Wonder Woman says, her stance neutral though there is a hint of compassion. She’s been around since he was in those green shorts, a second mentor that pulled him aside and said if anyone ever tried to touch him wrong then it didn’t matter what Batman said about his no-kill rule, what mattered was that he protected himself.

He’d always thought she’d meant it for the criminal guys that leered at him, never thought about a woman - well, he doesn’t know what she’d say about Tarantula because she’d been misguided because he hadn’t pushed her off. And she’d killed for him, she’d just been trying to comfort him the only way she knew how. 

Something drops in the pit of his stomach at the thought that Wonder Woman would agree that he overreacted, that he let an innocent woman die. Because if he’d just done something, if he’d just pushed Catalina off him, then Jason would have never seen it and killed her. It makes him sick to know Jason did that, but Jason grew up on the streets, he’s been cared for and cares for all the sex workers and it makes sense he’d react so violently to seeing Dick - it’s different though. It’s not like it was ra- He can’t think it. It was just a misunderstanding.

Dick’s breath is short, becoming obvious and he clenches his fingers and forcibly calms himself down. He can’t ever let Wonder Woman know, he must make sure he stays away from her lasso. 

“The Titans need to be tested for any cloning or imposter potential. We do not want another Speedy situation,” Batman says from beside him, keeping it together the way Dick wishes he could. 

She nods and Dick bounces on his toes because he needs to contain the energy somehow and also he sorta wants to run from her, his shame more than whelming. His ankles click and his fingers are numb from how tight he’s clenching them so he puts them on his hips and keeps doing the leg raises.

“Martian Manhunter is working through their memories now.”

It’s not good enough for Batman, who growls, “We need more than that, isolate them.”

“They will want to help Batman,” Wonder Woman says sharply. “Robin is -”

“Robin was left to defend himself,” Batman states, his opinion on the team's lack of response a clear judgement. Dick remembers being that young, remembers how much a blow like this hurt. “This is a matter for Bats and Gotham.”

And it is, but Dick’s running on water and he wishes Wally was here because he could at least stay afloat. Dick doesn’t know how he’s staying afloat, thankful that at least Barbara is only a call away and Alfred a quiet consolation. 

Wonder Woman’s stance is upright and self-assured. But even she recognises a losing battle as she says, “Batman, you will need all the help you can get. We have no idea where he was taken.”

“We will be there soon Wonder Woman,” Batman says and hangs up.

They get in the plane that Dick hates because it’s the one that brought Jason’s dead body back even though Dick was off-planet and never got to see it.

“They said it was a lot of blood,” he can’t help himself from saying, twitching with anxiety.

“One point five liters is in the report.”

“Yeah, did they mop it all up?” He snips. “Cyborg and Raven only got the message out an hour ago.”

And he wishes the call had come straight through to him but it had gone to Watchtower. Flash had zoomed in to find the exhausted heroes, Raven having projected herself out until she’d finally made contact with someone who could help them. Raven had inspected all the rooms and immediately notified that Robin was missing, his Mask placed under a message written in blood.

Dick can only hope the blood is fake, or not even Tim’s. 

“Joker’s in Arkham,” Dick starts, listing off all the potential assailants. “Slade -”

“Deathstroke,” Batman corrects him, always hating when Dick uses his name. Well Dick hates that they’re saying Robin when it’s Tim, their Tim, his Timmy, that’s been taken. Dick wants to rock, remembers the burning fragments of his building and how he’d thought Jason had been inside. 

God, he can’t lose another brother. Not again. Not after Stephanie. Not after Barbara’s permanent disability, not after all the others who didn’t come back from the dead. 

“What if he’s dead Bruce? I can’t,” and he gets choked up on it while Bruce stays steady in the pilot seat as Batman, face hidden behind the cowl. Dick doesn’t need to know his expression anyway, the set of it, the anger roiling underneath, the no-nonsense attitude. 

“We don’t have time for you to break down Nightwing, keep it together,” Batman says and Dick wants to hit him. But he’s wanted to hit his father-figure multiple times so it’s nothing new to swallow it down. 

It doesn’t mean he goes quietly.

“You shouldn’t have sent him away.”

“You shouldn’t have lied to me about Jason.”

Dick throws his hands up. “I can’t deal with you, Jason was barely able to talk and any time he saw anything about a bat or a clown he freaked the fuck out!”

“Because I wasn’t there to help him manage. You didn’t even let Alfred have the chance.” 

Oh throwing Alfred in, low blow.

“And you didn’t tell me he was dead or invite me to the funeral Bruce! Maybe I’ll be so lucky to attend Tim’s since Steph’s mum didn’t know why she really died.”

Batman faces straight ahead. A wall between them that Dick has climbed over and broken down many times before but it’s always there, always an obstacle and sometimes he just gets so sick of it, so tired of having to fight to get Bruce to open up. 

“God, god -” And he starts muttering in romani, needing his native tongue even though he knows Bruce can understand it.

He gets up and goes to the wider area of the plane, where he can flip and practice his hits with his escrima sticks and not keep looking at all the information coming through to their terminal. He’d kept in touch with Tim the best he could, knowing Tim felt ostracised by being sent away from Gotham, punished for helping Dick hide Jason.

He’s going to puke, there’s hands on him and Catalina’s voice in his head, ‘ Mi Amor,’ telling him to calm down and just relax. Let it happen.

He should’ve followed Tim, stuck it out at the Titan’s Tower no matter what Bruce said, no matter that it was leaving him alone with just Babs since Bat Woman hasn’t been around Gotham for a few years. Another family member scared away, running away from Gotham and its claws that dig in deep. But he didn’t, because he does what he always does with Bruce - he listens and follows and obeys like a good boy. Every push against Bruce has been hard won but Dick stayed away after Jason died and it brought Tim into this world. If he leaves now, there’s no Tim to stop Bruce from spiralling and he knows Babs has no patience for Batman. How can she when they both know she’d still have her legs if Bruce had just let the Joker die. 

So he’d accepted that he needed to stay and he’d wanted to use the Bat computer to find Jason, though it's hardly been easy.

The plane lands and Dick’s out quicker than a speedster. 

“Nightwing,” Wonder Woman is there, body and stand hard but her tone soft. He’d like a hug from her, or from Uncle Clark but there’s no time for it. 

“One and a half liters isn’t enough to kill someone but he’s so tiny,” is what’s ripped out of his mouth, a plea for her to say Tim’s alive, that Tim will be okay. 

Diana takes him by the shoulder before he can go in, her grip stabilizing, the other Justice League members flitting in and out of the lit tower. 

“Prepare yourself.”

“He’s prepared,” Batman says, walking past the both of them and heading in.

They take the lift up, the electronics back on. They step out into the trail of blood and follow it to a lounge room that has all the Titans on the chairs. They’re in various states of undress, having been resting or already asleep. 

“Batman,” Beast Boy yips, part-animal with clawed fingers, a spikey tail and fangs that he talks around. “Nightwing.”

Batman passes them, following the trail while Nightwing can’t look away from where it’s pooled on the counter.  

The Titans talk to him as he stands there staring at the blood, trying to explain as much as they can while also seeking comfort he cannot provide. The smell of blood never grows old, no matter wet or dry, if it’s mixed with other things - it always takes Dick back to his family on the circus floor, bleeding from their heads.

He eventually moves past the counter to the message that’s been left behind for them, Batman silently investigating the crime scene. Below it is Tim’s mask, five bloody fingerprints on the front. Someone wanted them to know they’d hurt Tim and then ripped his mask off with their hands.

“You’ve scanned the fingerprints?” Batman asks from where he is crouched near the end of the message as the Flash zips in. 

“Yeah, gloves - the attacker wasn’t nice enough to leave us anything to use.”

Batman doesn’t remark on that and Dick can’t help but be drawn to the mask. 

“Did they forcefully take it off?” Dick wonders.

“No sign of skin, he either willingly took it off or didn’t have it on in the first place,” Flash says, putting his work skills to use. 

Batman grunts, “He is not supposed to have it off outside of home.”

Cassie comes up from the couch. “This is his home. And he takes it off all the time now.”

Batman strides away and Dick tries his best to give Cassie a wobbly smile. “Thanks Wonder Girl, good to know he didn’t get hurt like that.”

Cassie folds her arms, “He would’ve put up a fight.”

Dick nods. “I know,” and follows where Batman’s gone.

The bedroom.

The bedroom has a ruffled bed, the computer turned off, empty mugs that split between coffee and green tea because Tim would rather drink than ever bother with chewing food. It’s hard to think about his little brother’s quirks when the trail of blood starts right on the bed. Batman is bent over it and Dick can’t look at the bed so he analyses the blood splatter that’s soaked into the carpet.

“That’s not from a wound,” he says, mind focusing on it like it’s any other case and not about someone he knows.

“No, the blood was purposefully bottled then spilt from here.”

“The medical area,” Dick says because he knows the layout of this building like the Manor because it has always been another home. 

Batman nods and they go and check it.

They work together, finishing each other’s half started sentences, detective work a decade strong together. The puzzle starts to piece together and Dick is going to puke, his skin gone clammy as he remembers Jason’s death, Steph’s death. Cassie, Bart and Kon used to be there with Tim, keeping him safe but Bart and Kon are gone and now so too is Tim. 

Dick checks in with Cassie before they leave, pulls her aside to see if there’s anything more she knows. And he hopes she knows something. Anything.

“I told Batman everything, I want to find him just as much as you both do,” she says, frustration brewing.

“I know, I know,” Dick rubs his hand through hair, bopping up on his toes as he thinks.

“We’ve all got our own enemies, unless he’s upset someone new then I don’t know who would have the skill level to take us out like this. The system is meant to ping if any gasses are in the system, but it didn’t. Almost as if they knew all our protocols and defense systems.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Dick hates to agree but it’s the only thing that makes sense. “Only a Titan or a mentor would have that insider knowledge.”

Or a Robin, Dick thinks and he knows it’s exactly what Batman’s thinking except it doesn’t make any sense. 

Because why would Jason hurt Tim?

“So it’s one of us, an inside job or the information’s been taken. That’s why Batman’s got all our blood being tested.”

“A mental or psychic attack that a hero doesn’t remember is a risk to us all,” Dick can’t help but explain even if he doesn’t think it’s what happened. But Batman is right to check all possibilities because the one time they don’t is when it’s actually the reason. 

“Unless . . .” Cassie starts, hip popped. He waves his hand dramatically for Cassie to go on.

Her eyes stare at him. “That message was about Robin, Robins.”

“Yeah,” he says airily because he can’t seem to quite catch his breath, hasn’t been able to for months now. “Seems to be.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I know Jason died in that suit and Tim told us about Stephanie - Spoiler.”

“We don’t know the state of security right now, we should keep to Mask names.”

“If they’ve been able to get inside then they know all our names.”

Dick can’t disagree with the assessment.

“It could just be about Robin and this is something to distract us.”

“Tim doesn’t have the wealth he used to, the Drake Industries was bought out by Wayne Enterprises,” Cassie says, an inflection of annoyance when she says Wayne Enterprises. If she knew who Batman was under the cowl he suspects she’d be even more annoyed. 

“True, people could be upset about that. His father made some bad financial choices that sent their business into liquidation before it was bought out; a lot of people lost their jobs.”

“I don’t know why you’re trying to cover it,” Cassie huffs out her nose. “But somebody has it out for Robin.” 

“Bad guys always have it out for Robin.”

He can’t talk about Jason. He can’t talk about Steph. Cassandra is off on the other side of the world, relearning how to fight after losing her body-reading skills. She was never made Robin, so at least she is safe from this. 

“Let us help, talk to me.”

She doesn’t know about Jason but it doesn’t make any sense. Dick can’t wrap his head around it. If Jason turned up Tim would’ve gone willingly. Unless . . . 

“Thanks Wonder Girl, I’ll keep you informed,” Dick ends the conversation and Cassie calls out to him as he leaves. Because Dick has seen Jason’s eyes go green, stole Jason from Talia’s grip before she could leave Gotham with him. 

Maybe that’s where Jason went, he can’t believe he didn’t think of it before. Back to Talia, who stole Jason out of his grave and brought him back to life for some unknown reason. Ra’s Al Ghul. That’s where Jason had to have gone. And maybe he got put in the Pit, in the waters and Dick knows what those waters do. They turn you aggressive, violent. 

Jason had attacked Tim the first time he saw him, in Robin colours. 

Dick curses and speeds to find Batman. 

“I think -”

Batman is nodding to Wonder Woman, Black Canary there too. “In the ship, Nightwing.”

He wants to shout what he thinks has happened but this is a family thing, the two other women don’t need to hear it. Black Canary signals for him to come talk to her if he needs, a little two fingered movement she'd created when he was a teen leading other young Superheroes. He nods in thanks to her but doesn't plan on taking her up on it any time soon. 

He goes into the ship, the grate loud beneath his steps where usually he walks so light. Batman follows soon after and the second the ship is secure Dick spits out what he thinks.

“I suspected so when Jason first left Gotham.”

Of course he did.

“So you’ve reached out to her then, Talia,” Dick pushes for an answer.

“Yes,” is the useless one-word reply.

“And what did she say?”

“She said she assumed that my first Robin told me about Jason, that one of her ninjas had reported Jason wandering from his grave during all the fighting that was happening in Metropolis. Which explains why we were unaware of his revival.”

Dick remembers that awful time in Metropolis, SuperBoy Prime fighting and killing everyone and anyone around him. Dick had been injured severely and it had been just after he recuperated that he’d found Jason. Batman and Tim had gone on a journey of self-discovery, sharpening their skills and their partnership and Dick had declined to go.

It is a horror to imagine what would have happened if he’d gone. If he hadn’t found Jason. If Talia had taken him back to Africa and brought him straight to the League of Assassins.

“I told you why I didn’t say anything.”

“He was my son, and you kept him from me.”

“And you kept his death from me, his funeral,” Dick shouts back, never able to let it go. He’s talked to Alfred, to Dinah, to Kori and Babs and Wally. And he knows Bruce better than he thinks Bruce knows himself at times.

Just because he understands the headspace Bruce was in, the grief and denial, doesn’t mean he has to forgive it. He doesn’t. He doesn’t think he ever will.

“And now he’s been taken, because you made the decision.”

The conversation from there is more reminiscent of when Dick first left for Bludhaven. As in it is not a conversation but a screaming match. And while Batman growls and gruffs, Bruce is a yeller, who goes for the soft bits.

Dick gives as good as he gets until it goes into mulish silence between the two of them. A message is sent from the Bat plane to Agent A and Dick takes a nap while Batman keeps going over all the evidence.

Seven hours later they arrive in Africa.

Chapter Text

“You don’t understand,” Tim says, every so often reaching out and touching Steph to make sure she’s there. Five days into living together, Steph has gone from accepting of Tim’s anxiety to slightly annoyed. Still, she lets him hold her wrist, his fingers wrapped around so he can feel the pulse of her heart. It makes holding the game controller, which is partly wedged between her knees, a feat of dexterity. She’s taking it like an added difficulty level.  

“He needs me,” Tim continues on, saviour complex ramped up. She’d felt that for a little bit as her small time as Robin, but mostly she’d just felt pissed that Bruce didn’t realise it. Grown ass man needing teens to save him, he may as well - Just. Let. Them. “He’s going to go - I have to go back.”

“Thought he sent you away, babybird,” Jason hits back, sitting on the arm of the singular couch, hulking in a way that Steph feels is awfully reminiscent of Batman. Tim said Jason had been the bright, happy fun one of the Robins but she sure missed that run. Then again Tim had a clear crush on Jason so she doesn’t really trust his perception of pre-dead Jason. 

Tim squishes his lips together in a way that means he’s holding back nasty, nasty words. She can tell because he did that often in their arguments. She thumbs the controller to spin her character away from the obvious ambush, keeping it in mind for when she has her hand back. 

Back straight but still holding onto Steph, Tim says, “That was then, this is now.”

“He has Dick.”

“He,” Tim sounds incredulous. “You don’t know -”

“I know a lot, Timmers,” Jason says and Steph is extremely aware of the growl in his voice, the green flash of his eyes. Her focus leaves the game. 

Tim reads it too, a little bit better at social cues since her death. Guess a woman dying is always the push guys need to finally get some emotional maturity. That’s pretty fucked.

“Jason.”

“TimTim,” is the cute phrase but it’s said in a voice that isn’t joking.

Tim’s fingers are cold, they always are, and Steph brings her hand up to go back to that ambush because she doesn’t want to listen to this fight again.

Tim twitches like he’s going to look at Steph but keeps his gaze on Jason. The crouch creaks underneath them, the seat of the sofa dipping as Jason pushes his feet down. The two are glaring at each other as the sound of Steph’s character slashing and killing becomes the awkward backing music to the tense situation.

She gets merked, the screen flashing ‘You DIED’.

She throws the controller to the side table, Tim’s wrist following and then regards the two children beside her.

“They’re not here anyway,” she says. “In Gotham.”

“Where are they?” Tim asks, always so annoyingly quick to catch a clue. 

“You want to tell him or should we just wait till he hacks into the computer?” Her eyebrows are raised and she’s annoyed at them messing up her game but also because of this entire last week. She’d let Jason have it, and though he apologised for upsetting her he was unwilling to have any actual regret for taking Tim. So she’d been pissed, given Jason the silent treatment for two days until he’d baked her favourite cake. Then, after the peace offering, she’d followed him out for a short time to make it clear that if they were going to be a team, then he couldn’t do that again. And that had got through to him. She said if he did something like that again she was leaving, she was done. She’d had enough of being with a vigilante who didn’t trust her and she’d ended up dying because of their messed up relationship. She wasn’t going through that again. She’d rather go alone then be distrusted in a partnership, trying to prove her worth.

And then Jason had truly apologised, and she’d smacked it out of him that he’d been unable to sleep, having nightmares of Tim getting taken by the Joker because he was alone and he’d been sent away. 

They’d hugged it out, Jason going out to mess up Black Mask’s business even more and Steph had come back down into the safe house to keep Tim contained until they could get him on their side. He was stubborn though and that’s why Steph didn’t want to get him till after they were done. Because he kept trying to get them to talk to Batman, or even Nightwing, or Oracle, or anyone. And that was an idea that couldn’t even come to fruition.

And there’s a nervousness under it all, rattling around. She doesn’t know why, guess it’s strange to have Tim here. Tim who had reacted . . . badly when she’d gone out. Badly when he’d found the wolf mask - not that she’d been hiding it. Jason had let that secret go when he went into the Titans Tower as Red Hood and left a bloody message for the Bats to find.

Jason regards her now, his lashes obscenely thick and unfairly beautiful. The white streak that flicks a lock of fringe over his face is also appealing, his body coiled both as a weapon and as a living reminder of the abuse it’s gone through. Sometimes when she looks too long it’s like a reflection of herself is looking back, scarred and broken and animalistic in its rage.

She wonders what Cass would see, looking at the both of them. Tim gave her a little update about Cass, and why she’s not in Gotham but Steph had been too much of a coward to push for more information.

Tim’s hand around her wrist is familiar, just as the constant weight of Jason’s gaze is but there used to be another, the presence of her Batgirl who always knew what to do and what Steph needed.

She needs her now, she’s needed her a lot of times. But that’s just being selfish and Steph never wants to be selfish. Never wants to be anything like her father.

Superheroes aren’t selfish. But she’s never claimed to be one. Just a vigilante doing her best, just Spoiler before it all. 

“. . .”

A sigh of annoyance. “They’re in Africa, in particular they’re fighting Ra’s at the moment.”

“They believe I’m there.”

“Ra’s is pretty creepy with you,” Steph acknowledges though Tim has always brushed it off. “But, if they’ve got two brain cells between them they’ve probably realised Jason is Red Hood and Red Hood was brought to life - I’m not quite sure on the sequence of events - by Talia Al Ghul.”

“Talia resurrected Jason? For what purpose?”

Steph shrugs.

“She did not resurrect me, I woke up and crawled out of my grave. Clawed actually.”

Tim’s eyes blink slowly as he absorbs this. 

“My hands were all fucked up the first couple of months from it. Dick didn’t tell you anything?”

“Dick said he found you wandering . . . I checked camera footage but the video from the graveyard had been destroyed while we were fighting SuperBoy Prime. I thought it might have been caused by temporal issues that occurred because of the event, many places had their technology friedI assume that in fact, this was the night you revived?”

“Yeah, don’t remember a lot. It was probably Talia that wiped the footage though.”

“Why?” 

It’s a question to an answer Steph would like to hear as well.

Jason presses his fingers in hard against his temple. Steph throws a cushion to make him stop. His dazed reaction lets her know he’s slipping in and out of reality.

“Don’t, you need to keep your brain intact.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jason absently waves her concern off. He gnaws on his lip, Tim unabashedly watching cause he’s always been sort of a weirdo like that. It’s even more intense during sex, had flustered her a number of a times so much she’d put her hand over his eyes or just wrapped herself around so she couldn’t see how intensely he watched her. 

Steph is no longer able to distract herself with the game. 

She doesn’t hold Tim’s hand back but just sits there, mind idly going over all the tasks for their little gang and how close they are to taking Black Mask finally down. There’s a quell of nausea that she ignores, remembering her often she’d puked when pregnant. Her back has never really fixed itself since, a persistent pain that is managed by daily stretching and lots of heat packs. 

The world is an awful place for kids but hers got out, went somewhere good. She knows that. 

“She’s not that bad y’know.”

“Talia?” Tim’s voice goes flat, echoing exactly how Steph feels about the villain. .  

Jason shrugs. “She’s got her ninja’s watching Gotham all the time, she is pretty obsessed with - him. She said they saw me crawl out and so she came and found me. She said I was with her for a while but I kept wandering off.”

“And the Daughter of the Demon couldn’t keep you under her control?”

“She was trying to keep my state quiet, think she was keeping her distance from her dad or something. And I was similar to the walking dead, with a habit of biting. I do remember biting someone.” 

“ . . . the Lazarus Pit changes whoever is brought back from the dead permanently. I have met Ra’s Al Ghul.” Tim shakes his head and notes. “He becomes more insane after each dip in the Pit. And more dependent.”

“Anywho-hoe-way, I went on a little zombie promenade,” Jason mimes a zombie staggering. “And was found by Dickie. The end.” 

Tim is unsatisfied and pushes for more information. Jason is dismissive and avoidant and Steph ends up speaking over both of them.

“She wanted to bring him back to the League but was laying low because she was protecting some precious item her father wanted. She said she helped Jason because she loves Bruce and wanted to take care of his son. She had a vial of Lazarus waters - just in case - and ended up giving it to Jason because he wasn’t getting better and the longer time that passed between Jason waking up and getting to a Lazarus Pit, the more diminished its restorative abilities would be. I think that about sums it up.”

Tim squeezes her, the flesh of her wrist fortunately a cushion for her bone. He is one-hundred percent about to turn the interrogation onto her.

Jason interrupts, “You read our messages.”

“Of course I did,” she snips. “Got a copy sent to my tablet as soon as I realised you were communicating with her.”

Jason hasn’t reacted too harshly to the words she said, names that remain mostly unspoken.

“I’m not his son. Even though she said that.”

“He adopted you,” Tim pleads, ever so stupidly. “He loves -”

“Tim,” Steph says, wrapping an arm around his head and covering that stupid mouth with her hand. His lips are cold, he’s always been so cold. Cold and pointy, like a vampire. She used to warm him up, rub up against him like a cat, get friction to heat him up and share body warmth. 

There’s a distant desire to do that again but mostly Steph is tired and her body is sore and aches and she wants to kill Black Mask and then lie down for a very long time. She doesn’t know how to feel about her relationship with Tim, sometimes wonders how fucked up she must be to be teaming up with Jason, who’s even more fucked up. 

She misses Cass like a ghost of a loved one that haunts her every waking moment. 

Truly, she is her father’s daughter. Always wanting something she can’t have.

Jason breathes in, purposefully, loudly. 

“They are gone from Gotham so it is the perfect time.”

Tim’s thin lips move behind her palm, kissing her skin as a side effect.

Jason is right though and Steph is happy to leave this bunker, because she’s stayed here with Tim the whole time apart from that brief walkout and is getting a little antsy. 

“We’ve blocked and destroyed all drugs coming into his not so secret manufacturing facility hidden under his shitty family’s old steel mill. He’s tried to take out a few of our members but we’ve bought out pretty much all the properties his goons live in, so they know if they take any of our people out then I’ll fuck them out of housing -”

Tim tries to speak and Steph shakes him like a naughty puppy. See, the money thing was wild, which is why she snuck into Jason’s emails. He hadn’t come to Leslie straight away, instead he’d found Talia Al Ghul and clearly they’d chatted. And she was the one backing them, all her money put into Jason’s vengeful hands. 

It’s going to bite them in the ass, Steph can just tell. But Jason Todd-Wayne is dead and doesn’t have permanent access to the Wayne funds other than what he stole to help him run and Steph well, her mum is a nurse doing her best but they were always just surviving. The money has been a lifesaver. 

So she’d let it go, still lets it go, but knows it’s something they’re gonna have to figure out after everything’s over. She doesn’t trust the Al Ghul’s, and Talia may have wanted to help Jason because she’s got a thing for Batman, just like every other adult vigilante and criminal does (she doesn’t get it, guy’s always got a sour face even if praise from him makes you feel like nothing can bring you down.)

She’s not as good as Oracle but she and Jason have a bunch of real cash and secret accounts and Jason doesn’t know but Steph is putting some aside under Leslie’s name - just in case they need to make haste and get out of town.

“He’s still got his nightclub and he’s secluding himself up in there, yelling and drilling holes into anyone that pisses him off -”

She remembers a drill, gone right into the back of her calf, not aimed at the bone but just to hurt. The scar over her sliced lid oils up and she rubs at it. She loses whatever Jason’s saying for a bit there, trying to breathe, Tim’s breath wet on her hand. She suddenly can’t stand the feeling and draws back, needing to get away.

“Stephie, Steph,” is Jason’s concerned voice but her ribs are pressing in on her and she needs to get away, she needs air so she can breathe, the air not making it to her lungs. She bangs into the corner of the table and fists at her sternum like it will help her breathe. She can’t see, her head is pounding and all her senses are saying everything around her is a danger. 

She makes it to the door, opens it with her touch and the password setup even though a hand touches her shoulder and voices are trying to cajole her. She doesn’t want to be touched. 

“Give me, give me space,” she chokes out, her mouth salivating and then she feels like it’s too much and she hates it and wants to spit. 

She escapes up the stairs, clambering two legged, sometimes on all fours until she’s up through the first floor of their building, scrambling at the chain until she’s out in the cold of the streets and she can breathe. 

She falls to her knees, neck bent, hair falling over and covering her and she cries. She hasn’t cried in months and months and wow, it’s been a year since she almost died. Since everyone thought she died. Her mum held a funeral. Cass left. Tim went back to being Robin and her dad is in jail and probably didn’t even care. 

A gentle figure is in front of her, ever so carefully scratching her scalp with sharp fingernails, light enough that it sends tingles down her spine. A smaller thing presses against her side, rubbing up along her and Steph hears a purr. She turns her face sideways, sniffling, feeling the tears drop off her nose and in the dim light of the night there’s a scruffy looking tabby cat next to her. It blinks once, licks its paw and then scurries off. 

Steph hiccups a confused laugh, letting her emotions settle from the tsunami that just hit her. The scalp brushing is not too much, at odds with the violent memories of Black Mask. Her arms are crossed over her chest, knees aching from the press into the hard ground and she’ss lucky it's night though this is a mostly deserted area. 

Steph looks up to thank Tim, because Jason definitely doesn’t have long nails like that and he’s still a bit wooden with comforting actions like this. 

The hand doesn’t retreat, merely helps move her hair back so it frames her face rather than covers. 

“Oh,” Steph sniffles, her eye hurting even though the tears have slipped the oil away.

Gloved claws lead to a full black body suit, which leads to a hood with cat ears and a pair of red goggles. Catwoman crouches in front of Steph, soothing her with claws that have sliced people’s bodies and stolen unfathomable riches.

“Hey there kitty,” Catwoman smiles. “Let’s get you back inside for some warm milk.”

“Selina . . .” Steph tries to say, throat like a knot and tears forming in her eyes again. 

Catwoman looks past her and Steph doesn’t want to turn and see the two boys who surely followed her out. 

“Had my eye on this place, the cats kept bringing me around.” Then says, “Pick her up.” Which is quickly followed by the familiar body of Jason scooping her up and bringing her inside. 

Tim hovering at the threshold of the doorway, in his loose shirt and pyjama pants withdraws and then closes the door as they all traipse back in. The door auto locks behind them and Jason brings her back down into their safe house. 

Selina looks around slowly, taking in every nook and cranny, the soaking dishes and the leftover tupperware from Jason’s cooking. She sees the tea bags and thrown pillows and the game station save screen on the TV. She sees the door ajar to the bedroom and the computer in the corner with a mixture of plans and all other things strewn about it that Tim has surely gone through.

Steph sniffs as Jason sets her down at the dining table, her nose clogged and is distantly mortified but mostly exhausted. He goes and gets her a cup of water, the sound of the tap going the only noise. Tim stands closer to her and Jason stares at him for a moment before nodding and grabbing a second cup. 

Catwoman - who was there during the War Games before Steph nearly got tortured to death, who taught her some moves when Batman and Robin refused to accept her as Spoiler, stalks around the table and then two fingered points at Tim to sit beside her and Jason to sit beside him.

Jason ends up getting four cups of water, placing it in front of himself and the empty chair Catwoman has not sat in. Tim holds his drink and Steph swallows hers down to try and go past the aching rawness in her throat. 

She gets halfway through before her stomach roils and she wants to puke, pushing the drink away in sudden revulsion. 

Catwoman - Selina, stops by Jason and rubs her cheek over the top of his hair. Jason stares ahead past Steph, a muscle in his jaw clenching. Her gloves come off as she moves on from Jason, setting them beside the glass as she perches with a leg crossed over the other on the empty chair. She looks at them one by one, gaze sharp and mind shrewd. 

“So it seems you are more Cat than Bat. Better that way, we have nine lives.”

Tim frowns, the glass beading in his hand. “Technically only Jason died, Steph and I haven’t.”

Selina pulls her gloves off, then drops her cat-cowl off her head, revealing short tousled black hair. 

“And we want to keep it that way, so tell me. What on earth are you planning with Roman Sionis and how can I help?”

Chapter Text

There is a child. 

A fight happens in the temple-like palace that is one of the many homes to the Al Ghul family. They had been checking out all the known Talia locations so whether it is by purpose or happenstance that they get involved is a problem for later.

They interfere because that is what they do, then they flee and now they are in the Batplane. They, as in Dick, Bruce, Talia Al Ghul and her child.

Their child.

Bruce has a child.

A child they were not looking for because they are looking for Jason and Tim.

Dick has lived through some pretty crazy things, some wild weekends including strange counterparts, time travel and evil aliens. But Bruce having a biological child? Bruce - who Dick knows for certain got the snip years ago to make sure no unplanned outcomes could happen from his trysts?

Talia Al Ghul has done something to make Bruce’s birth control obsolete - perhaps a side effect of the Pit? There is no way that he believes it to be an accident and so the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul has made the impossible, possible.

She is a beauty that intimdates, a beauty that sees the world before her and makes it bow before her. But Dick has seen beauty before, he has seen it be evil and ugly and kind and soft and all the in-betweens. But Dick doesn’t think he has ever been so intimidated as when she held her two-year old in one arm and stabbed a ninja clean through the throat with another, turning so no blood hit the child.

It’s all over her now, as she checks the child for wounds, responding to Batman’s - no Bruce’s increasingly frantic interrogation as Dick comes back from placing the plane on autopilot back to Gotham. Dick can tell it’s frantic by the gravel in his voice, the speed with which one question ends and another begins. By how his words assume the worst - “Have you done this to torment me?”, “Does your father know - of course your father knows.” And to be fair, Dick thinks assuming the worst is probably still far off how actually bad it is.

Jason is not here, that Talia confirmed before Dick would even let her on the plane. He has been paranoid ever since he stumbled upon her and Jason, the Demon’s Daughte immediately pouring Lazarus waters into his brother’s mouth before Dick could chase her away. He can’t ever bring himself to thank her because she and her father have killed thousands of innocents, but he doesn’t understand why she let him take Jason. He doesn’t know why she even did what she did, if her intention was to help - because it was helping; Dick thinks without the waters that maybe Jason never would’ve left that zombie-like state he started in.

He can see now, in the absence of taking care of his traumatised and physically broken brother, that Talia let Jason go. 

It doesn’t change the fact that Dick hates her.

“Yes, he is of your blood,” Talia says with no remorse for the emotional bomb she has just dropped. Then she walks to Dick, lifting the child from where he is wrapped around her front. 

“Take Damien,” she says and Dick can do nothing but willingly receive the child. The baby. For his cheeks are so squishy and his brows are so furrowed and he has not made a sound or spoken a word since they found Talia defending him. 

The insurgents had tried to take him, or kill him - that they have to figure out. Bruce will surely ask, he will need to know all dangers. But Dick only cares about finding Tim, about making sure the Pit hasn’t twisted Jason’s mind to hurt the youngest Robin.

The weight is heavier than expected though Dick has held many children before. But he cannot help the surge of emotion. How can he hold something so innocent when he is so tainted? He isn’t wiped clean of blood like the child - like Damien, and even if he was it’s in his soul. He’s been touched and scarred and her hands are on him and Jason is killing her and -

Bruce stumbles over to them, past Talia who appears unbothered by all the drama, though there had been an unflattering curl of the lips when she’d killed that enemy, when she’d protected her child. And she watches with too much intensity for him to think she is not prepared to act at any moment for Damien. 

He’s never really liked her, doesn’t respect her except when she stands between her father and the rest of the world. But there had been something honest and savage when saving her child. It must be the side of her that Bruce has seen that Dick has never, for he has always been mystified by their romantic entanglement. 

Not that Dick hasn’t done worse.

The child reaches up and touches Dick, lips pouting. 

“You can speak now, Damien,” Talia says. “Richard Grayson is your brother and he protects his siblings.” 

It is almost a threat when she says it but Damien nods with all the fierce understanding of a two year old. 

“أفهم, mo’der,” the child says, his arabic crisp and his english slightly butchered like that of an actual young child. 

Dick’s jaw could drop in shock, his legs could fall out from underneath him.

He has seen demons and fought aliens and this, this is what breaks past all expectations and into surreality. Talia Al Ghul handing her son over and saying they are brothers. 

He is whelmed beyond all belief.

Bruce is there, the mask still on though it is not Batman that looks at Dick and Damien.

“Sons, I have - ”

“Yes,” Talia says. 

“This cannot be.”

“And yet it is,” her words are firm. 

Damien looks at his father, his father looking back. Damien has splashes of Bruce in the shape of his face but his eyes are green like Ra’s. 

Bruce’s breath catches, loud in that any such a sound from his father figure is obscene for Dick to hear. And he hears it.

“Bruce . . .” Dick starts, all fights and arguments and awfulness between them forgotten as it always so quickly is when the wall drops and Bruce lets Dick in.

Because Dick will never forget the night when his world fell out from underneath him and Bruce was there to hold him up, to hold out a rope for him to grab, taking a young orphan into his arms and carrying him all the way home to the manor. To a different life, yes, but at least to one in which he could make change, in which he could do good and make sure no other child has to suffer because of crime.

He doesn’t think he’s done as much good as he’d first thought he would at 9 years old, but holding Damien now, he thinks - Jason, Steph. I can’t let what happened to them happen to Damien.

I can’t. 

Damien wiggles, then, trying to straighten his little back in a way that makes Dick have to recalibrate his hold, says, “Hello, fahder.”

Bruce turns sharply, scarred hand going to his face.

Damien whimpers and tries again. 

“Hello, fahdher,” his tongue still sticking heavy in the middle.

Dick’s heart tears. “Bruce - your father, is happy to meet you. But I think he got hurt in the mouth, so Talia . . . your mother, is going to fix him okay and then he will say hello.”

Damien tries again, fists clenching. “Hello, fathder,” and it is a bit closer to sounding right.

Talia intercedes for everyone’s sake. 

“You are getting much better Damien, go practice with your brother.”

Damien hesitates and Talia says, with a tone that he has heard from Alfred when one of them is being particularly stubborn, “Dami.”

And Dick’s lips tremble and he wants to whimper just like the kid but he puts on a big smile and somehow finds himself in the cockpit, talking to the kid and saying things, all the while trying not to hyperventilate.

He’s a smart kid for a two-year old and though he can speak better in his native language, he clearly understands English well. Lucky for Damien, Dick has learnt quite a few languages, which includes most of their known enemies.

Not that this kid is an enemy.

But Jason is Red Hood and Red Hood is your enemy, comes an awful thought and Dick loses himself to that but comes back when the comms ping on and there’s Oracle’s logo on screen and Bab’s voice in the cockpit.

“Nightwing! I’ve been trying to get in contact with you for over a week. Something is happening with Black Mask and - is that a child?” Her voice turns sharp, surprise and judgement and Dick catches Damien from where he is spinning on the seat.

“Is he -”

“Bruce’s.”

There is relief. “Oh.” And then confused. “What?”

Dick’s brain stalls and then revisits the tone in Babs voice; he knows her so well that even without video proof he can tell what she means.

“You thought he was mine?” Dick asks, and Babs is quiet, her logo a cold statement. Batgirl may have once been Dick’s girlfriend but Oracle isn’t. 

“I know you all think I sleep around,” he knows he sounds defensive, knows he’s used his body and sex as a way to keep people close, as a way to get what he wants so it’s not like there’s any high horse for him to be on. “But I’m careful. I wouldn’t - I wouldn’t.”

“I wasn’t judging, I was just surprised to see a child.”

“And you immediately thought the kid was mine.”

“He looks like you a little bit,” she admits.

“He’s arabic,” Dick defends. “I’m not.”

“No yelling,” Damien says, sounding annoyed. “Yelling weak, bad.”

Wow, getting told off by a baby, and called weak at the same time. 

Dick shakes off his frustration, sighing and Damien tries to get off the chair, accurately smacking Dick in tender spots when he doesn’t immediately let him.

“Oof kid, you know where to hit.”

Damien, with hair dark like Bruce’s (and Dicks’) and a body that is more agile than any two-year old has a right to be, explores the room while Dick swivels back to the screen. 

The logo is gone and Babs is there, red hair drawing his eyes and as always, reminding him of Wally, just as Wally reminds him of Babs.

Her glasses are perched low and she pushes them up.

“This needs to be talked about but I rang for a different reason.”

“Something about Black Mask?”

Serious and able to compartmentalise as good as Batman, she’s always reflected a cop even though she’d never followed her father’s footsteps. Dick, well, he has a harder time, he swears his heart is an open wound that has never stopped weeping since his family died. 

“Batman told me Robin was taken by Red Hood and you two were leaving the country to chase them down. What I didn’t expect was radio silence for a whole week.”

“We were doing reconnaissance and Nanda Parbat is best surveilled with a comm silence.”

“So Ra’s . . . so Talia,” she is quick to join the dots. She then lets out all the air in her chest, wheeling her chair back from the desk enough that he can see she’s wearing that cute green jumper that’s a favourite of his. Not that he gets to have a favourite anymore.

“Yeah,” Dick says, hearing Damien try to tug open a closed compartment and then punch at it with frustration. Dick is concerned that he makes a decent fist.

“This is . . . I’ve been researching this Little Red Riding Hood gang and I’ve found records of a man in a Red Hood appearing in Kisumu, Kenya. Why would you be chasing Ra’s Al Ghul when Red Hood has Robin unless they are connected. And now you have Talia Al Ghul’s child, who is also Bruce’s.”

“Oh yeah, you’ve got a hole-in-one, they’re connected all right.”

“Speak to me boy wonder, what’s going on and why are you keeping me out of the loop for it.”

He hadn’t intended to keep her out of it, so focused on jumping from one issue to the next. So he catches her up as much as he can, but each time he tries to say that Jason is alive he just can’t. 

“They are making waves, in particular riling Black Mask up so much that he’s killing his own people left right and centre - not that that’s out of character for him. His ships have been sabotaged and bombed and most of Black Mask’s real estate has been bought out, destroyed, or raided due to anonymous tips by the police. No one has seen a vigilante in Gotham for over a week and criminals are getting rowdy. Figure out why Red Hood would even want Robin, save him and then get back here before I have to call for backup. I’ve already spoken to Huntress but she’s as likely to kill a criminal as put them in jail and Catwoman, well, she asked what was in it for her. If you take any longer I will have to call Batgirl back and I’m not sure if she’s ready for that.” 

Damien successfully pulls open a compartment that should stay shut and packs of bandages come flying out. 

“Med’sin,” he says, nodding with his bulging cheeks like a doctor before surgery.

Dick looks at him, wants to cry and says to Babs, “It’s Jason.”

“We’ll find Tim, it’ll be okay,” she tries to comfort him, not understanding.

“No, no, it’s Red Hood. Red Hood is Jason.”

Babs goes so still on the screen that he thinks for a second it might have glitched.

“Jason is dead, Dick,” she says slowly, like she knows it will hurt but she has to say it.

“No, I found him. Talia . . . Talia gave him Lazarus waters and then I hid him in Bludhaven. But Bruce found out and he ran away and now he’s Red Hood and he took Tim.”

Babs mouth opens in shock and she holds a hand up. “Wait, you mean to tell me Jason was revived in the Lazarus Pit, you hid him and now he’s insane and has hurt and kidnapped Robin?”

Damien unrolls the bandage and it goes across the floor, the little boy giggling to himself and then forcing a serious face upon himself when he looks up at Dick. 

“Cwean up,” he says and then starts the long and messy journey of fixing it. 

Dick focuses on that instead of Babara’s ever growing anger, feeling almost un-synced from the world and the conversation. She is right to be mad, everyone is right to be mad at him. Maybe if he’d just done what Bruce said and told him from the beginning none of this would’ve been a problem.

The door to the cockpit opens, and Bruce walks in, cowl down and face grey and haggard. Barbara is mid-yell and she turns it straight onto Bruce who answers succinctly and with a game plan to return to Gotham immediately. He growls out that Talia said Jason is holed up in Gotham and that Tim is undoubtedly with him. 

Barbara gives an incredulous laugh, rubs her forehead and then gives a list of locations that she believes the Red gang are operating from but that Red Hood and Red Wolf only appear to visit and then leave.

“And if Jason is Red Hood then who’s this other one - she’s been called Little Red but I’ve heard Red Wolf recently.”

“Is it a she for certain?”

“By all accounts, it’s not an assassin of Talia’s is it?”

“I haven’t asked,” Bruce growls out, with the clear intention to go ask that. They finish up their conversation, Oracle logging off and then Bruce turns and regards Damien, who has been watching his father silently but with rapt attention. Curious about the man he has not known for the first two years of his life. 

“Come Damien, I will put you to bed . . . “ and then Bruce looks at the child with a pained face that sends Dick back to his more volatile years when Bruce would tentatively approach to find a common ground. They would always end up fighting again.

He doesn’t like to remember how Bruce looked after Jason . . . 

Dick bites his cheek and rocks on his chair though the chair is hard and does not move with him. 

Damien stands up, the bandage messily rolled up and puts it back into its compartment.

“Very good job” Bruce says kindly and Dick is not jealous of a child. That is ridiculous and pathetic. The last time he was jealous it left Jason without the support he needed, the support that would’ve stopped him from going off to Ethiopia on his own to die. 

Bruce used to talk to him like that, once upon a time, long ago.

God! Get it the fuck together Grayson! He thinks, sick of his own circling thoughts. There’s bigger things to worry about than his ego.

Damien stands up ready to follow and Bruce holds out his hand for Damien to take it. The child looks at it, purses his lips and looks at Dick for some unfathomable reason. Dick smiles, bright and fake, but needing to be there for this kid. It’s not like anyone’s ever been able to tell. Maybe Babs once upon a time, definitely Kori and Wally. 

Donna.

“Night Damien, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

“I bite bugs,” he returns with a somber honesty and then takes his father’s hand, the two leaving the cockpit and going into the plane to one of the tiny bunk beds. 

Dick shakes when left alone and smacks his head sideways into the wall, knees drawn up in the uncomfortable chair.

It doesn’t stop Tarantula from crooning in his ear and he sees Jason standing in front of the medicine compartment, in his torn and bloody Robin clothes, the Jason that Dick had vivid hallucinations of, for years and years until he found an older, zombie-like one on the streets. 

He hasn’t seen him in a while.

This tiny memory of Jason smirks with his domino mask split, his skin burnt and smoking, blood in his gums and bruises everywhere. He’s so short, so little. He can’t be much bigger than Damien.

Robin Jason scuffs his foot on the wall and leans back against it with his holed and ragged cape a cushion. 

‘Better not fuck up this time dickhead’, he says flatly. ‘At least Timmy’s got some skills to protect himself.’ 

‘That one,’ he gestures out to the rest of the ship where Damien is, his face turning to sneer. ‘Well, he wouldn’t last two seconds with the Joker. Although, you’ve really got to hurry up, cause maybe Timmy’s not doing so well with me.

“I’m sorry Jason, I’m so sorry,” Dick says to the air, all his failures piling up on him.

But there’s no one in the cockpit to hear his apologies, no one that’s real, no one that can say it’s alright. 

Because it’s not alright and there is no forgiveness for Dick. 

He doesn’t deserve it.