Hello!

Jason gets the noises to stop. Eventually. But when his mom is super sick from her needles, and dad isn’t home to scream at him about the noises, Jason lets the noises come back, vibrating through his chest, while he tries to get his mom back onto a bed instead of choking in her sleep on the couch.  

There are lots of things Jason wishes his dad wouldn’t do. Or would do. Jason’s dad is super weird.

He’s super angry, too; Jason learns early on what infractions will get him a deathly quiet scolding and what will start the screaming matches he gets into with his mom. Sometimes, though, when his dad isn’t drinking and when money isn’t so tight, he’s interesting to be around.

Jason’s dad teaches Jason the important things about living in the shitty side of Gotham. The first lesson is involuntary, at first—how to be invisible when hiding.

Jason is very good at being invisible.

His dad will always find him, eventually, but at least at first, the skill hides him from the worst part of the fights in their run-down, mold-infested apartment. Jason gets picked up by the collar of his shirt, or by the jacket, and then everything starts all over again.

When Jason is six, his dad shows him all the important parts of a human body you can damage. Someone’s neck. Their stomach. Achilles tendon. Their dick, if they have one. Things Jason might be able to reach if he gets snatched, and places Jason will have to protect when he gets into fights with the street kids that wander their neighborhood with hungry eyes and hands.

His face does funny things when he tells Jason to protect his chest. That there are important things in there that will affect him for life if they get damaged.

Jason knows, instinctively, that he means the place where his noises come from.

Jason works extra hard on keeping himself quiet when he’s sad from then on.

When Jason is eight, his dad takes him around town sometimes—not to work, never to his jobs—but to his ‘friends and acquaintances’, who might not raise an eyebrow or call the cops if Jason needs money and his dad stops coming home. Jason knows his dad would rather make money fixing up radios and repairing household appliances, but no reputable place would hire a man with no good documents, and there’s not enough money in the shitty places on the street to pay rent.

Still, sometimes Jason will come home after school and there will be a disassembled VCR or toaster or motor on the kitchen table, and his dad will point out all the bits and bobs that come together to make it work.

They keep the VCR. Sometimes Jason brings home movies from the library to watch on their lumpy couch.

His dad takes him around town, sometimes, and points out the drug dealers and pimps on the streets at night, so Jason never, never, ever takes a favor from them.

Penguin’s warehouses get raided. His dad goes to jail.

His dad comes out of jail. Sober. He teaches Jason punch, again, with all of the bulk he’ll probably grow into behind it. His dad gets a black eye and doesn’t even yell at him about it.

There’s a bust on Joker’s henchmen. His dad goes to jail. Again.

This time there’s no money left. It’s a longer sentence.

Jason meets one of his dad’s ‘friends’ and gets a couple offers; he leaves with a tire iron and a directive.

And Jason. Gets caught. By motherfucking Batman. The invisibility trick only works when Jason is paying attention and he thought he was alone and he’s so stupid and now he’s going to go to jail or get killed or trafficked or even worse—

Jason wakes up. He’s in the biggest fucking house he’s ever seen. There’s stuff everywhere. It even smells…nice. There’s soap he can was his face with at the sink and everything.

Jason would rather his dad be gone than home, but when Batman (Bruce Wayne!! The richest man in the fucking city!) brings back papers that say Jason’s gonna stay here for a little, all with his dad’s permission…

…it does kinda hurt. That Jason is so easy to get rid. That now that mom is gone, his dad doesn’t even want him around. He crawls under his new bed and cries and then remembers his dad isn’t coming so he makes all the noises he wants and cries even harder, because no one is coming.

Except. Batman (Bruce Wayne!!) does come to the door. And ask if Jason wants hot chocolate.

Jason wants hot chocolate.

And. Bruce isn’t his dad but he is like Jason’s dad, and Jason doesn’t even notice between going to a new fancy school and eating big meals and watching movies on lump-free couches that he starts to distinguish between Willis, the dad that Jason’s always known, and Bruce, the dad he shares with Dick.

Speaking of dicks. The first time Jason had to put a dollar in the swear jar he almost had a panic attack. A dollar is so much money!!

Except it’s not. And then Bruce gave him a twenty for lunch literally an hour later.

…Huh.

Jason loves being Robin. He loves punching people and solving problems and he gets to punch the john that tried to out Heather to her landlord and get her arrested her and its great and Jason thinks, high in the sky, that he would be perfectly fine if his feet never touched the ground again.

Bat-Bruce grounds him for two days for punching that guy, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the coolest things Jason’s ever done.

Bruce-dad teaches Jason martial arts like Willis did when he was sober, and gives weird looks to Jason’s forms but they work, so what’s the big deal?

And Dick-Robin was a sneaky little fucker who thrived on scaring people since he was a little kid, but Jason can go motherfucking invisible. Getting the drop on people? Great. Ambushing from above? Fantastic. Making Bruce lose his shit when Jason doesn’t want to cooperate by being found, and making him search the entire alley for his missing sidekick? 10/10, best thing that could happen to him.

When Jason goes to visit his mom, he goes alone. He makes Bruce stand outside the cemetery gates so that when Jason makes I love you, I miss you, please come back noises with his chest, no one hears them.

Jason is a good Robin. When B gives him a hug and the largest smile he’s ever seen on the man on his first day of high school, Jason thinks he might be a good son, too.

And then he fucking blows up in Ethiopia.

(It’s his own fault, the demons in his head whisper.)

(And, trapped six feet under in the world’s smelliest coffin, Jason has a lot of time to listen to them.)

So…so Catherine wasn’t his real mom, then. And she just…dropped everything in her life that wasn’t her addiction, just to take care of him.

Also, how the fuck did Willis have sex with a globe-trotting doctor? She literally had money (before they both blew up). She embezzled. That’s a lot of cash. What on earth did she see in his shit-faced old man? Willis and his mom got hitched and he didn’t even buy her a ring; he stole it out of someone’s house or something. It’s been a while. His memories are fuzzier and fuzzier.

(These are the things one wonders when they have as much time as Jason.)

(Jason kicks the coffin ceiling as hard as he can, and can’t even muster up enough strength to break his toe.)

(Fuck. Well, back to wondering about Willis’s sex life.)

He feels sleepy. His body…he remembering being in chunks and pieces and he remembers pulling himself back together, but now everything feels fuzzy and his body aches in all its soft ligaments and Jason knows somewhere high up and soft and far away that if he falls asleep here he won’t come back again.

 *

Still, everything blurs.

 *

 *

He dims.

 *

 *

 *

 *

 *

 *

Dick has gone back to Blüdhaven. As reclusive as Dick had been after... (the fight the adoption the restlessness the job the training the mission) …everything, his presence on the phone and over text has turned to. Nothing. After the funeral. 

Bruce can’t even remember why he had rushed it. (He can.) He couldn’t bear to…

Close the thought. Put it away. 

Without Robin, without Jason, patrol has been. It’s been rough. He hasn’t seen Gordon in weeks, sensibly. Sending petty robbers to the hospital daily does not put the GCPD in good light. It’s the only respite he has. The mission is all he has. 

Bruce Wayne is gone. Batman is gone. All that’s left is the ghost of the man his parents never wanted him to be. 

There are nights when he stares down his liquor cabinet and wonders how much it would take to kill him. He has a high metabolism. Alcohol poisoning has a pretty high threshold. He could work at the goal for a while before the ethanol stopped this whole circus. 

His hand hovers over a bottle. 

“Yeah, I wouldn’t try that. It doesn’t fix shit.”

Bruce’s head jerks up. 

The manor is always– dark. At night. Without any reason to keep the lights on besides Alfred’s comfort, there’s been an ever-present gloom. No shadows. Only various depths of black. A cherry ember fades in, and out, adding red to an otherwise colorless void. 

In the back of a pitch black corner is Willis Todd. The man sucks on a cigarette– the red, Bruce realizes silently– and exhales, creating smoke and fog in an already obscured room. 

Bruce quietly rises from his crouch. The man doesn’t seem to move. If Bruce couldn’t see the clouds of smoke visibly rising off of his body, Bruce would have thought that the ex-convict wasn’t breathing. 

In careful, cautious movements, Bruce shuts each door of the liquor cabinet and locks it. Alfred will be…pleased. “I wasn’t expecting company.” 

“You should have been.” Another inhale, another exhale; slithering from his mouth and nose, smoke slides through the air. “I had to find out from a newspaper that my kid was dead. Nice going, asshole.” 

Bruce can physically feel the emotional pain he’s numb to. It lodges between his ribs and juts into his lungs like a tumor. “Ah.” Todd is right. He should have expected this. 

For a moment, he wonders if Todd is here to kill him. If the average, unnamed henchman Todd sells himself to be will be the one to finally do Batman in, and save Joker and Harvey and the mafia and everyone else all the trouble of pinning him down and cutting off his head. 

But no. With black, unseen eyes, Willis Todd stands in the corner of the Wayne ancestral manor, taking long draws from a cigarette. Watching. 

“I’m not going to ask why you think letting young boys go out at night is an appropriate parenting technique,” Willis whispers, more ash than voice. “It makes them think they’re invincible. They’ll throw themselves at dangers too big to fight if there’s no one there to stop them.”

Bruce wonders how he knows. If he’s always known.

“All I want to know now is; are you going to kill him?” 

Bruce holds onto the vague veneer of deniability. Officially, Jason Peter Todd died in a freak accident at sea. There is no real perpetrator. If no one knows of Batman and Robin’s identities, there is no one to kill. “Who?” he asks, lying to himself and to his son’s father. 

He doesn’t blink. But. Between one moment of consciousness and the next, Bruce can feel the splitting of his skull against the hardwood floor, the weight of his bulk thrown into the wood. And then he can see Todd’s acidic green eyes, the man’s bruise-purple eye bags and unkempt hair, his unshaven face. 

Bruce can barely breathe. There is a hand wrapped around his neck– too firm to get a grip under, even when he tries. Unflinching, Todd puts out his burning cig two inches from Bruce’s face with his spare hand. He can feel the heat against his cheek. 

“Do not,” Todd murmurs, black pupils pinpricks in green light, “Bullshit me. I asked you a question. Are you. Going to. Kill. Him.” 

Bruce has the vague, underlying thought that the man might have moved upwards onto new substances from alcoholism. He grits his teeth. Takes a shuddering, obstructive breath. 

Killing the Joker isn’t about what Bruce wants or does not want. Not killing the Joker is about keeping some semblance of control over the killer he had once trained himself to be. It’s not about want. It’s not about want. 

It’s not about want. It’s not

It’s

Bruce wants Jason home. 

“No,” Bruce chokes out. No, and you can’t make me. No, and I’m a failure. No, and. 

The hand lets up. There are two fathers facing each other in the room. 

Previously, Bruce had been given the luxury of assuming that he could be, would be, and was, a better father to Jason than Willis Todd was. Protected Jason more. Gave him better resources. Was around more. Was less threatening. 

Now Bruce is guilty of putting Jason in line to be killed. Driving him away. Pushing him to his limits when Bruce should have been able to trust Jason to know where his limits were. Todd, for all his failings, didn’t assume that kevlar and good aim would be enough of a barrier between a fifteen year old boy and a whole city of evil. 

Only Bruce had done that. 

Todd…sighs. “Get the fuck off the floor,” he commands. His voice is hoarse, as if he’d been strangled in his own home. “Fucking Ancients above and below. You’re a mess.”

You’re one to talk, Bruce thinks, as if either one of didn’t pay rent in a glass house.

Bruce stands. Todd stands– hunched over, in thought, eyes green enough to cut through the darkness. Bruce watches Willis Todd. Willis Todd watches the shadows play out on Bruce’s grandmother’s wallpaper. 

Stiff fingers fumble for a new cig from a carton. “You know,” Todd says, and it sounds more world-weary than filled with fury, “I was hoping you’d be a better father to the kid than me.” 

Bruce had certainly thought so. 

“I guess, in the end, we were both wrong.” Todd shoves the cig between his teeth and flicks his lighter– when the light flares in the room, brighter than anything else, Todd is gone, and only the spark of fire remains. 

When the light dies, Bruce is alone in a black room. 

It takes a few hours for Bruce to fall asleep that night. Rest doesn’t come easy. 

He wonders if the whole thing had been a hallucination. Even with the ring of bruises around his throat as proof, he doesn’t fully believe his memories. Was his guilt manifesting in psychosis? Would Bruce recognize the truth if it stared him in the face?

He is disabused of that notion in the crack of blue dawn. 

The paperboy comes early. 

Bruce is greeted with a grisly headline and black and white photographs in bed– of a head that would normally be topped with a grin, severed separated from its body by thirty bloody feet. The cut did not look neat. The severed ends of the neck and head did not look tidy. It looked like teeth. It looked like fangs.

Bruce has. No idea what. Has. He. No.

Bruce takes a photo of the article with his phone and texts it to Dick. And that’s about where his processing power ends for the day.

For one. Dick, as the only person B knows on a casual level, ends up fielding a lot of calls about how Jason disappears. In suits and out of suits. Jason will apparently vanish and reappear two hours later, smushed somewhere in the manor vents or rooting through drawers in a previously locked room, either cackling like a madman or engrossed in a book, otherwise ignorant to the world.

Dick doesn’t often visit Gotham. He doesn’t want to be reminded of days that aren’t coming back. But if Batman needs assistance from someone who isn’t in middle school and is slightly less breakable, Nightwing will probably show up, assuming he isn’t off-planet.

The image of a hovering, affectionate Batman, toting an unruly Robin by his yellow cape…it’s too close. To what Dick remembers of his childhood. And it’s so far removed from—the affection is so clear and freely offered, here, when Dick and Bruce had kept more…professional, most of the time.

So Dick doesn’t talk to the kid. Often.

The kid seems fine with that.

When they’re in the same room, they only talk together when Alfred gives them the Disappointed Look he gives unruly children who don’t want to play nice, or when Jason has a Robin question and Dick has to tersely think of an answer off the top of his head.

Dick tries not to think of Jason too often. They’re not…siblings. If B had bitten the bullet and actually offered to adopt him after a childhood together, Dick might have made attempts to getting to know the kid.

But if Bruce had adopted Dick, he has a feeling that a lot of other things might have happened differently too.

So. Jason. Weird kid.

On the few days Dick stays over, he spends his time at the gym. Jason, despite working part-time as a vigilante and having access to the best athletic equipment god could buy, spends most of his time on a mission to finish the most beat-up and dusty books in the Wayne family library.

Weird.

He looks forward to school; the kid loves punching people perhaps too much, but as soon as 1am hits he’s whining to go back to bed so he doesn’t miss his literature debate in the morning, because he, quote, ‘has to kick Deanna’s ass about her shitty interpretation of Catherine’s character.’

“Swear jar,” Batman rumbles. Two dollars are begrudgingly handed over. “Which Catherine.”

“Both of them. The mom and the kid. No one in Wuthering Heights is sane. This isn’t a romance novel. I’m gonna set her whole essay on fire. Metaphorically.”

“I will take you at your word.”

Whhaaaaat the fuck. If Dick had been Robin and Batman had tried to talk homework with him on patrol, Dick would have chewed his whole foot off at the ankle to get away.

“I think we’re losing our guy,” Dick points out, willing to do anything to forget the experience of school. “Look, there he goes. With his little crime briefcase and everything.”

“Rob—“ Batman starts, and then sighs. Nightwing has to double-take. Robin is nowhere to be found. “Nightwing, we’ll meet him down there. Try to keep from hitting Robin when he pops back up, please.”

It’s good advice to have. Dick really appreciates if after almost punching Jason in his smug little domino mask when he pops back up out of the ether.

Seriously, how had he hidden that well? Where?

Jason is a really weird kid. His idea of bonding is starting random arguments so that they can fight about them and he has four canine teeth in his upper jaw instead of two, and Dick once dared him to eat a can of cat food with a desert fork, and he did, even before Dick offered him cash to do it, and if he is left alone, anywhere, for any reason, he’ll straight up just elope from the premises for no discernible reason.

Dick went to the bathroom at the ice cream parlor. Once. And found Jason down the street petting some guy’s corgi barely seven minutes later.

The weirdest thing, is, though, to top it all, is the noises.

Dick’s only heard Jason make them once. Jason had barely just moved into the manor at the time, and was maybe two months in at least. (Dick’s memories of Jason are…going, already.)

Really, the only thing Dick was in charge of was making sure Jason was awake for patrol. He’d knocked on the kid’s door. No answer.

He’d called the kid’s name. No answer.

He’d cracked the door open and shouted again—something really inane, he’s sure of now. Something to placate the kid into waking up without thinking there was a threat in the room with him.

Still nothing. But there had been a noise. Dick couldn’t really describe it, then. It wasn’t quite humming. It wasn’t quite rattling. It was like the electricity running through the walls of a separate room: not really there in a way that mattered, really, but distinguishable if you shut up listened hard enough.

Dick went inside. (Really, he wasn’t supposed to threaten Jason’s boundaries yet. But sue him, every Bat was nosy.) Dick followed the sound—walking from wall to wall, trying to pin down where the ever persistent noise was coming from.

The sound was loudest over the bed. Dick leaned in.

The sound was loudest in Jason. Freaky. The kid was curled up in bed like a cat, sleeping on top of the thick quilts Alfred liked to ply all the beds with in early spring, knees tucked up underneath his chin.

The smirk hadn’t been on purpose. “Dude. Are you purring?”

Jason had blinked bleary eyes. Looked up. Seen Dick.

“…’ck off.” The transition from sleep to wakefulness was a violent one.

“What?” Dick teased, leaning forward with a hand over his ear.

Jason bolted upright. The kid screamed, red-faced and horrified. Dick couldn’t understand the sudden change. “FUCK OFF!”

The ensuing fight had been so hostile that Bruce had to run in from the third floor to break it up—grabbing a sobbing, screaming Jason who seemed to want nothing else but to draw blood as he tried to claw his way out of both their grips, and pulling away from Dick, who was trying to keep a feral wildcat from dealing him real damage in the face. Everyone ended up with angry red scratches up and down their arms.

Bruce finally managed to get both of them to stop hitting and Jason had sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed, screaming about letting him go. Bruce did. Jason ran off into the hall with his hands clutched to his chest, and any and all sounds from the kid vanished, and no one heard from Jason until lunch the next day.

Bruce had tried to explain a little more about finding Jason on the street and how Jason had been living after his bio dad went to jail, after that, but the talk had never tackled Dick’s earlier question of what was that noise?

Jason was always a weird kid.

And now, with his body interred six feet underground, there will be no more answers to find.

Danny fully sober from his stint in prison, finding his kid dead, whop wait holy shit. God, just thinking about the Emotional Struggle™ of reconciliation, of learning more about his Dad and Why He's Like That™. Jason learning about a whole World of his Heritage.

Jason spending post-resurrection with Danny Willis instead of the LOA/Talia. He's still angry, still a little more violent than before, but it's not unhinged, his dad? Willis teaches him actual control over these newer more intense emotions. They argue and fight, Jason cajoles Willis into reading Pride and Prejudice and Willis meets him with some science fiction about people and exploration of deep space. They argue over similarities and how "They're so, so different, old man." but no one bleeds or bruises when their voices get loud. Instead, Jason's wrestled down into a noogie headlock before they get back to dinner before it burns on the stove.

Jason seeing more of that version of his dad he didn't often see as a kid. There's still bad days, day Willis just disappears and God does Jason get it, but it still feels like abandonment all over again until he finds the guy somewhere curled in on himself or sprawled on the floor staring blank at the ceiling/sky.

None of what he learns makes the shit Willis did before okay, and Willis tells him that over and over in so many different ways. That none of it was Jason's fault, "Just because I've loved you since the day she dropped you in my arms don't mean you ain't allowed to be pissed with what I put you through. The good don't erase the bad, and my shit life don't give me a pass for hurting you."

*

Jason wakes up.

 Everything hurts.

He eats…something.

  He goes back to sleep.

*

Jason wakes up.

He can smell…bacon.

Hm. Willis is probably home, then; his mom never makes bacon in the morning.

All his limbs feel…heavy. Grounded. Jason has to haul his whole leg off the bed in order to reorient himself towards the edge.

He can’t really…see. Everything feels dark and blurry.

He’s probably just tired.

Jason gets off the bed, waits for his brain to settle inside his skull, and walks off.

This…isn’t his room. It’s not even his corner of the apartment. The walls are the wrong shade. The floor is some kind of shitty laminate. It smells weird.

It smells—

Jason is hungry. Jason is really, really hungry. He can smell food from outside this weird room.

He cracks the door open and slips away.

Sure enough, in the kitchen of their weird-new apartment is Willis, turning bacon in a too-nice, too-clean pan. Music plays from…somewhere. On a low table sits bowls of scrambled eggs, a carton of orange juice, and glasses made out of actual glass.

…Weird, Jason thinks. He stays where he is in the doorway. This is weird.

“Stop lurking and sit before you keel over,” Willis demands, sharply. Jason automatically stands straighter. “I thought you had more sense.”

It’s not a kind tone, but it’s not explicitly angry, either. His old warning system that had been so quiet with years with Bruce flares back up: low threat, but remain vigilant. Jason can do that.

Jason sits in the wooden chair. The drop does make him a little dizzy; he puts his head in his hands as his father moves around the room. All he can hear is the low, indiscernible music, and the popping of bacon, and a quiet hum underneath it all.

There’s a plate in front of him.

Bacon. Scrambled eggs. Not Alfie quality, but way better than anything Jason can remember Willis getting in a good long while. The eggs are a little runny, and the bacon is a little too crispy. And.

Jason is so hungry. He’s suddenly. Jason is so hungry.

Two slices of bacon go down easy, hot enough to sear his throat. Eggs are just as easy to down. He doesn’t even need a spoon—he folds the paper plate in half and lets the eggs slide down.

“Put the plate back.”

Jason does.

He gets more eggs. More bacon. Good. He reaches for the orange juice carton to pour himself something. He needs something to wash more food down.

It’s not orange juice. It’s liquid, glowing green.

Jason looks at the glass. He looks inside the carton. It’s all green and glowing goo inside.

He looks back at the glass. It’s still green. It’s in his cup. It’s—

“Jason.” Willis’s voice is just as taut. Jason’s gaze snaps over to him. “Drink your juice.”

That’s not juice. It’s radioactive. There’s no way to prove it won’t kill him. Jason’s in a strange place he doesn’t recognize with someone he hasn’t seen in years with a substance Jason has never seen before and he doesn’t remember how he got here. He has every reason to say no. He needs to stand up and leave. He—

The glass is in his face. Willis is holding the green stuff in his face with the most deadly serious voice the man can make. His eyes are green. It feels important. Jason can’t remember why. The music is flat and high pitched.

“Sniff.” The command is clear.

Jason…smells it.

He barely notices when the green starts filling his stomach—his hands desperately pouring what of the green is left on his tongue. Jason feels out of his body. He needs—he’s so hungry. He doesn’t wait for Willis to pour the rest. The carton is in his hand and the nozzle is between his teeth.

“Well,” Willis says, and Jason can hear the music slowly climb back up to what it was before. “I really should have expected that.”

Jason has no idea what that means. All he knows is that the carton is empty, and that he can’t get to the drips. He starts pulling at the tabs to open the thing.

“Jesus Christ. Eat your eggs first, you animal. Fucking Hell.”

The carton is pulled out of Jason’s hands. He whines.

“Look. Bacon.” Dad spoons more onto his crumpled paper plate. “This first. I’ll have to see if…shit. I really don’t want to ask Vlad for more of this. I’ll have to ask Val first…”

Jason doesn’t know who they are. But there’s food in front of him, and Jason is ravenous.

He eats.

 He eats.

 He—

 *

Jason wakes up again in the same bedroom.

He doesn’t…

…What? He gets up—this time, with less effort—and returns to the kitchen.

More of the room he’s in is clearer, now. The haze of exhaustion is gone. The kitchen is half living room, half kitchen. The floor is cold under his bare feet and the walls are slate gray.

Willis is on a red couch, cup of coffee in hand. He looks…relaxed. There’s a notebook in his hand, and he’s writing…math?

He looks up.

Jason flinches.

“Coffee’s on the table,” is all he says. Willis sips his own. And says nothing else.

…Okay. Coffee’s not his favorite, but it might be good to have something bracing. Jason pours himself two fingers of coffee and finds the creamer.

The creamer is green.

What? Jason sniffs it—it smells fine. Maybe a little…spicy…? What? Reminds him of, like, tajín or something. It remains green-tinged and murky, like a Saint Patrick’s day Riddler Shake from Batburger.

Whatever. Jason fills the rest of the mug with creamer and hopes that it has enough sugar blended in it already.

The concoction tastes fine. Maybe even better than usual, he thinks; whatever the blend is, he’ll have to tell Alfie about it. Bruce’s been getting more adventur—

Jason blinks. Something is…wrong.

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how he got here. This isn’t the manor and Willis isn’t Bruce.

The coffee creamer is green.

Jason looks at Willis. The man is largely the same as the last time Jason saw him: clad in a beaten-up tank and gritty jeans, the same white socks Jason used to help shoplift in plastic packages from BuyRite. There’s a flannel thrown over his shirt, though, and he’s got his hair back in a…man bun…?

“You can ogle or you can finish your toast,” Willis says, apropos of nothing. He doesn’t look up from his math. “Pick one.”

Well. Fuck that.

Jason ogles while eating his toast. Willis lost any rights to order him around years ago. Fuck that guy.

Normally, Willis’s temperature has a range anywhere between “fuck off, I’m going to sleep off this hangover for three hours” and “if you get anywhere in my line of sight you’re going to really fucking regret it”, and he generally means both. But right now, on this crochet-quilt-covered couch Jason’s never seen before, Willis looks…like, genuinely chill. Actually calm, and not just faking it until someone gets in his way.

Jason has a vague memory of the last time this happened. “Dude,” he asks around a mouthful of toast. He gets crumbs everywhere. “Are you, like. Actually sober?”

Willis shrugs. “Got out of jail a month ago,” he says. Again, not looking up. “Hard to get booze in the clink.”

“Huh.” This is probably the best of Willis Jason is going to get. Now. What the fuck is going on. “Where are we?”

“Friend’s house.”

Jason’s eyes narrow. He takes another dry bite of toast. There isn’t even anything on it, even if it’s whole wheat. Lame. “You don’t have any friends.” None that Willis would rely on, anyway.

Willis snorts. He takes another swig from his coffee and braces himself for it like it’s whisky or something. “Not in Gotham, no. But I do have an ex in my hometown who owes me a favor.”

“Gross.” Willis has a hometown? Jason had always just kind of assumed his father had crawled out of a sewer in Park Row, like everyone else.

“You’ll meet Val soon; she’s back in ten.”

Alright. Jason has never particularly liked meeting any of Willis’s dubious ‘friends’, but it sounds like he doesn’t have a choice.

Besides, the apartment is nice. Homey. Spacious. Television set and DVD player seem to both be in working order, and not scavenged from a dumpster. The quilt is a sunny yellow.

Jason takes the nearby kitchen chair. And waits. Drinks his contaminated coffee. Wonders if fetching the remote is worth the hassle of asking Willis where it is.

The door cracks open. A Black woman with short-shorn hair and grocery bags makes her way into the apartment.

“Hey,” Jason says, around his toast, and in a pile of toast crumbs. His weirdly docile dad only glares from his seat on the couch.

The woman gives him a look Jason isn’t sure he’s earned yet. “Great. He’s awake. Now get the hell out of my apartment.”

Rude. Jason stuffs the rest of his toast into his mouth. And, still, super weird.

Willis’s face makes a complicated expression. “I haven’t told him anything, yet. Give us two hours and we’ll be out of your hair.”

The glare Willis gets could scrape paint off a Bentley. The glare she gets back is just as laser-honed—however this relationship had ended, Jason gets the sense that it hadn’t been pretty. Jason kind of wants the low down on their relationship. Jason kind of wants to never bring it up in front of them, ever.

The woman—Val, Jason remembers—crosses the room specifically to jam her finger into Willis’s cotton-covered sternum. He stands to meet her. “Two hours,” she hisses, “Or I’m calling the Guys in White on you and your spawn myself. Is that clear?”

Willis bares his teeth. They’ve always been sharper than most, something Jason’s had to learn to moderate in his own smile. But when Willis shows off his fangs, they always have a tendency to make the other person back the fuck off.

”Crystal.”

The woman barely moves. “Good.”

And then she and Willis pretend they aren’t in the same room as each other. Perfect. Willis turns to him with a half-filled notebook full of stuff Jason has never seen before and a coffee mug that has some sort of security firm printed on its side.

“Jason,” Willis says. And then he stops. And swallows. “Alright. Firstly, if anyone asks you what your name is when you’re here, your name is Todd, and you do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Do I make myself clear.”

As opposed to what? “Uh,” Jason tries. “Okay…”

Willis doesn’t stop. “Secondly. If you see a vaguely-middle aged looking man with white hair, or hear the name Vladmir Masters, fucking run.”

Val snorts.

“I mean it,” Willis continues as if nothing interrupted him. “He’s a shady sonofabitch and I have little doubt he’d want your fucking soul if he knew you were alive. Got it?”

Jason blinks. Is he? Is Jason alive?

He remembers… he remembers. He—

There’s a snapping sound. Jason flinches. Willis’s fingers are barely two inches from his nose. 

“Focus.” His dad’s voice dips dangerously. “Things are going to be pretty fucked up in your brain for a couple months. You’re not going to be conscious this whole talk. I need this to sink in.” 

Jason’s entire world is narrowed down to the coffee cup in his hand and the weird green electricity in his dad’s eyes. 

“Focus,” his dad commands. 

Jason wets his lips. “I’m focused.” 

“Good. As of right now, we are both off the radar from the GIW. That name ever come up in the bird training your Bat-dad gave you?” 

He didn’t. He didn’t know Willis knew he was Robin. Jason shakes his head. What was this about??

“Great.” The tone is so flat. It makes Jason want to cringe back into the corner of the room. Willis continues, hands going to his pockets for a smoke: “Just. Fucking great. The long and short of this is that we are on the run, that there is an entire government agency dedicated to dissecting you for profit and experimentation, and that if we want to get you back to Gotham intact— which I am sure is your goal, somewhere in that shaken up skull of yours— we’re going to have to play it safe for at least a year while you recover.” 

Recover? “Recover from what?” 

Willis’s look is so dead. Just so…empty. His dad looks haggard and weird and roughed up and even in the cleanest clothes and tidiest apartment he’s ever seen Willis in, the man looks dead where he stands. 

“...Forget it. Either you’ll remember it or you won’t.” 

Willis looks—

Jason wants to know. “What happened?” 

Jason has seen a lot of Willis’s emotions, had been forced to learn to distinguish booze-fueled rage from empty dissociation to biting, scathing fury. The alternative of not knowing had never been the safe option. Knowing his dad’s hundreds of varying mood was the key to knowing when to be quiet and out of the way and when it was time to hit the town for three hours.

Or ten. 

This is the weakest, most vulnerable Willis has ever been. The softest. The most sober. For almost no reason at all, it makes Jason so fucking angry. 

“What happened,” Jason demands, something hot in his veins, in his core. Willis wipes his face with his hand. “It happened to me, right? Shouldn’t I get to know what’s going on?” 

“You’ll either remember, or you won’t.” Willis says, and for fuck’s sake, he sounds like he means it too, for all that it doesn’t make Jason give any more of a shit than he did before. “It’s not something—”

“I don’t care,” Jason snaps. His hands ball up into fists and his stance adjusts for a fight automatically, and Willis doesn’t even react. “It’s my life. What. Happened.”

Val’s voice cuts in between them. (Jason might have forgotten she was there.) 

“No to be the bearer of bad news or anything like that—”

“—Val—”

“—But I imagine it’s pretty traumatizing when your kid up and croaks,” Val continues, perfectly at ease as she puts her bananas onto their little hook. “Might not be fodder for casual conversation.” 

Willis fully puts his face in his hands. 

Jason’s brain just. Stops.

It tries to start back up again—to show him horrible things like the scarlet gleam of metal and the sensation of air racing through his lungs and the feeling of being weighed down by your own body—and then it jams up, like the end of a tape in the player. And it tries to rewind, and show Jason more. And his brain. Stops. And it starts.

And it stops.

And it starts.

And it stops. And—

More clicking. Something gets shoved up Jason’s nose. Jason coughs. It’s minty and the stench scours the inside of his mouth and throat.

“Jesus, Val—send him into a panic attack, why don’t you?”

“How was I supposed to know? You don’t talk about—”

“Why would I talk about that?!”

Jason’s dad’s hands are steadying him, giving him something to grip as he tries to pull himself out of the downward spiral his brain is in. Jason is dead. He’s not dead, because he’s here, in the middle of two adults arguing around him. He’s dead. He died. His body broke down into tiny pieces and Jason remembers being obliterated but it can’t be true, because the broken hands with broken fingers he crawled through the warehouse on are here, fully intact and rip-free, as Jason grips Dad’s hands and Jason wants to die. He is dead. He’s not. He is dead. He is alive and well and Jason has no idea why. Jason died. Jason—

He’s not crying—Jason has never cried when he was sad, he’s only ever shed angry tears—but he’s not so far gone that he can’t hear the inevitable noises his chest makes when he’s upset, and it feels just as pathetic and wanting and desperate as if he’d actually screwed up his face and started bawling. It’s babyish. It’s pathetic. His dad hates it.

His Dad hauls him over to him by the shirt and for a second Jason knows he’s in real danger, and he is. But Jason only knows that because seconds later a burnt hole appears in the drywall behind them.

Jason’s mind goes blank.

“You told me he was liminal!!” Val snarls. There’s a metallic schnick-schnick and then, shit, she’s got red armor?? Sneaking up her body?? And there’s a gun in her hand that doesn’t not look like a high-tech rogue weapon, and, shit, Jason has more of an idea now how his dad had managed to wiggle his way into Sheila Haywood’s bed if this is the kind of women he had been dating.

“He is.” Willis’s voice is firm. Dangerous. From where Jason’s clutched against his chest, Jason can’t see his face. Jason can’t move. He has to move. He cannot move—

“If it was just contamination, he wouldn’t have a core!” Val snaps. Jason feels like this is all flying over his head. He hates this. He can’t stop himself from making noises. His dad is defending him. Willis is probably going to be mad at him next. “He’s a full-blown ecto-entity, and there’s no way you wouldn’t have known that by the time he was born.”

Willis says nothing. The hands pinning Jason to his dad’s chest are shaking.

“Get the Hell out of here, Fenton. I’ll put a line into the Guys in White myself if I catch either of you around here again.”

Willis…obliges. It’s weird to see him even slightly cowed, and not furious; he put the notebook he had been writing in into Jason’s hands, grabs a duffle that had been abandoned on the floor, and marches up to the room that Jason had woken up in.

Val is in sleek, red armor. The whole thing is riddled with wires of black connections—electric, Jason guesses tiredly. The armor is likely semi-autonomous, or at least programmable. Her helmet covers the entirety of her face. He can’t see anything of her expression.

(Her finger is on the trigger, his hindbrain notices.)

Willis comes back. Gives the armored Val a dark look.

“Come on.” He drags Jason out of the apartment by his wrist.

Outside of the apartment is just a…it’s just a normal apartment complex. But everything is so spaced out. So empty. It takes almost ten minutes to cross the grass and get over to the bus stop. The road goes to nowhere on either end Jason looks. There’s trees. Trees are fucking everywhere. Jason can’t even see any buildings over the tops of their canopies. It’s fucking weird. Jason feels too exposed here. It’s too quiet.

Willis parks his ass on the bus stop bench. Jason cautiously does the same. “Where… Where are we?” he asks.

“Illinois.” Willis’s grunt isn’t illuminating.

“…Why?”

Willis seems to have an entirely unrelated realization, and digs through the black duffel on his lap. He hands a thermos with a scraped-off label to Jason’s shaky hands. “Drink this.”

It’s been a long morning. Jason obeys. Pops off the cap.

Inside is that same green goo that had been in the juice container the first time Jason had woken up. He doesn’t even have time to feel surprised before it’s gone—all down the hatch as soon as the smell had his the back of Jason’s throat.

Willis watches. When Jason caps the thermos back up, shameful of how quickly he guzzled the stuff down, and offers it back, Willis doesn’t take it.

“That’s why we’re here,” Willis says, mercurial, something dark in the back of his eye. “There’s only two reliable places to get that stuff in the United States, and there was no way I could get you up and conscious without it. It’s really the only thing to make your… to replenish all the energy you used up.”

Jason’s heart beats up. There’s something here. Jason can hear a spot in the narrative that is still empty. “My… You said something.”

Willis doesn’t answer.

“My what?”

For a second, it’s nothing but birdsong. The distant hum of the AC units in the building behind them. Jason’s heartbeat, and his weird noises, and the silence Willis wants to protect more than anything.

Willis sighs sharply. “I’m mentioning this here because Amity Park is the only town in the US with enough ectoplasm to trick or block GIW scanners. If you mention this anywhere else, any town, bus stop, road stop, high way—you’re getting carted off for vivisection.”

Jason’s face scrunches up.

Willis’s upset turns into a glare. “I am so fucking serious,” he snaps. “And trust me, you do not want to experience what they do with young kids too bold for their britches who possess their own fucking corpses. I am answering your questions here and I never will again.”

The Robin bites his lip. Looks away. “Sure.”

“Got it?”

“I got it.”

“Good.” Jason and Willis both wait for their tempers to cool. Willis takes a deep breath. Another. “Good. A… Val mentioned it earlier. A core is an organ that functionally serves as the brain to a liquid-based nervous system. It does everything for you processing-wise—makes your thoughts, moves your body, reorganizes your molecules when needed, adjusts your. Powers.”

Jason’s eyes narrow. He hunches over on the bench, arms flopped over on his lap. “…Powers?”

“Your attempts to make yourself invisible while stealing the marshmallows were valiant,” Willis begins, and oops, that’s a fucking embarrassing memory of his six year old self, “But when you’re dropping the pans all over the floor at the same time, it is obvious when someone’s rooting through the cabinet, you know.”

“Wasn’t me,” Jason lies, immediately. Willis rolls his eyes so hard Jason wonders if he’s gonna break his optic nerve. “Wait, so if I’ve got a core— How the fuck do I have one? Because I definitely passed freshman bio, and that was nowhere on the fucking body chart.”

Jason got a B+ on that chart. He would know.

Willis turns his eyes to the inner ceiling of the bus shelter. The corners are covered in filthy webs, decorated by the occasional brown leaf.

“…All ecto-entities have one,” is how Willis chooses to start the conversation. “Their central nervous systems are based around it, because it sends out mild electrical impulses throughout their body. Since their bodies are largely ectoplasm, they need something to organize their molecular structure around, and something to control it. Otherwise, ectoplasm is just goo, floating through a void, the same way a human without a head is just meat.”

That is. Gross. Jason has distinct memories of Being Meat And Not Much Else, and he does not want to revisit them, thank-you-very-much. His impending breakdown is shoved so far down into Jason’s core that he thinks he can feel it digging into his kidney.

“Ectoplasm,” Jason adds, trying to add like four new vocabulary words to his mental dictionary. “Like…like the gauze the Fox sisters used to spit out during séances?”

The corner of his dad’s mouth pulls away, and he makes some sort of half-cocked shrug. “It’s more like. It’s like goo.”

“Goo.” Ugh. “And you’re saying that I have some of this…goo…in me.”

Willis smirks wryly. “Well, you just chugged a whole pint and a half of it, so I know you have at least that much of it in you.”

Jason freezes. What the fuck.

“And it’s toxic to humans,” Willis continues, as if that fucking helps, “So I know that you qualify as either liminal—as in, ecto-contaminated to the point of no return—or as a full-blown ecto-entity. Congratulations, both populations are currently either in containment or on the hot list by a shady government agency you can’t even google without getting hunted down and nabbed.”

“What the fuck,” Jason says blankly.

“Watch your fucking language,” Willis jabs back, neither pleased nor displeased. Jason hates when he says shit just to say shit. “There are only three places highly ecto-contaminated enough to sustain little baby ghosts, by the way; we’re about ten miles out from Amity Park, putting us in the ballpark area for low-grade ectoplasm harvesting.”

“I just drank toxic ghost goo,” Jason repeats, a little dead inside. Perhaps more than. Since he. You know. Died. What the fuck.

Willis jostles him. Jason sways in his seat.

“We for sure weren’t going to Wisconsin to grab anything from the haunted mansion up there, and Gotham is…” Willis grimaces. “Don’t drink the ecto in Gotham. Just living there makes you shitty to everyone all the time. I wasn’t exactly. Hm.” Willis’s expression does a few complicated thing. Jason can’t even follow them. “I wasn’t…a good parent to you. For a lot of reasons.”

Jason blinks blearily. Steadies his chin on two hands.

“Part of that was the ecto-atmo being so fucking rancid, sure, but one of those reasons is that you were born when I was seventeen,” Willis says, and shit, Jason didn’t know that, the fuck? “I’ve got a fake name and a fake date on my license, but…yeah. Between that and the entirely fucked up goop I’m always hyped up on there, the only thing that really worked on me was booze. I tried Cathy’s choices, but you know. Heroin didn’t exactly work on me for the same reason Neosporin and band-aids wouldn’t have fixed you…after.”

Willis sniffs and scrubs at his nose.

They settle into silence. Jason isn’t really sure what to think. His head is fuzzy. He’s dead. He’s sitting with a Dad he hasn’t seen in years on a bus stop bench in Illinois. The air is actually, like, nice and breathable here. Jason thinks he might throw up all the goo he just ingested.

“You died?” Jason finally asks, not sure why he’s asking.

His dad leans all the way back, his flannel smearing the mildew and pollen all over the acrylic wall of the bus shelter. “When I was fourteen. Wish you fucking hadn’t had to deal with that.”

Yeah.

Jason gets that.

It fucking sucks.

He kicks his feet rhythmically. Whenever this bus is supposed to get here, it’s not here yet. They’re stuck. Jason might as well ask the big questions as long as they’re trapped in a bus shelter. “Why’d you sign me off to Bruce?”

The look Willis gives him is, genuinely, perturbed. “Wh—Jason, you were digging books out of the trash and squirreling them away in the apartment bathroom. You were memorizing the dictionary for sport since you were five. Bruce Wayne has more money than God—What was I going to do, stop you from getting fancy rich people resources? Holy shit, the first thing he told me was that he’d send you to the fuckin’ rich prep school because he knew that I knew that you’d flip your fucking lid at a chance for a school with a real library in it.”

 Jason’s heart and core stop.

  And then he’s throwing the first punch. “You ass!” Jason howls, and just responds with more and more hits when Willis has to frantically parry and block his blows. “I thought you didn’t fucking want me!! What the fuck!!”

“I didn’t!” Willis splutters, and leans back wide enough that Jason ends up lunging forward, and his Dad manages to grab Jason from behind and pin both his arms to his side. “Holy fucking Ancients above and below and the all the shit in between—I didn’t want a kid for the same reason I didn’t want you to use your core to talk as a kid! You could have been snatched off the street at any moment and how the fuck would I have known?? I knew I was a mess and my plan was to get you a nice foster family in Kansas or some shit far the fuck away from Gotham, but, fuck—Cathy—She wanted you so fucking bad—“

Jason’s sobbing and he can’t stop himself from leaking hurt/hurt/hurt from the fucking stupid new organ he didn’t know he had. “You’re an asshole. I hate you and you fucking suck and I wish you were never born and your mom’s an adder and your dad’s a crackhead and you’re a bastard born in the goddamned sewer and I hate you so fucking much—“

“Jesus Fuck, kid. Love you too, brat.”

Jason cries harder.

The bus comes. (Eventually).

Willis hauls Jason around a weirdly small city with tiny buildings, and they get ice pops that have frozen all wrong at a corner store that looks at Willis funny, and eat them on the curb while the city moseys around them.

It’s weird. Everything is too slow. Jason kind of wants to go hide in a dark corner and never come out.

Eventually, they’re done, and Willis dumps the wrappers in the cleanest city trash bin Jason has ever seen. They walk in some direction his dad doesn’t announce the direction of.

Just. Walking in silence.

Like Willis is on his way home from work at the docks, and doesn’t feel like it’s safe to talk in the streets.

They make it to a shuttered house with a spaceship stacked on top. Willis unlocks it? With a key?

They go in?

The building inside is. Homey. It’s the largest living space Jason’s ever seen outside of the manor’s picturesque grandeur. This is just, like, a house. Why is there a space ship parked on top of it?

Jason doesn’t ask anything.

They go. Downstairs.

The natural light through the windows vanishes. They’re surrounded entirely in darkness—still, Jason can feel his eyes start to adapt? To the darkness? And then suddenly the world is cast in green light like he’s wearing a night vision headset or something.

(He touches his face. He feels nothing. Green light is cast back onto his hands when he pulls them away, though.)

Downstairs is obliterated. There’s a hole in the wall too fancy to be natural. The rest of the room is half-caved in, half rubble. It’s like walking through the abandoned wings in Arkham after a break-out.

Willis digs through the rubble like he knows what’s there, looking through dust-coated binders for. Something. Flipping plastic-sheathed papers. Shoving a couple into the duffle bag.

“The important thing to note,” Willis finally admits, breaking the silence, “Is that you can’t go back to Gotham for a while. There isn’t enough concentrated ectoplasm to keep you awake and aware there, and if there was, it would fuck you up in the head. We can’t hang out here in Amity, since the Guys in White have Amity on a spectral lockdown. If they see either of us hanging out here, that’s it. And if I see Vlad anytime between now and my eventual dissipation into the Ether, I’m going to die trying to kill him. So there’s that.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Good.” Willis’s voice offers to answer no questions. “Not the point, though. I imagine you’ll want to go back eventually, but for now, it’s safer to keep moving. I’m getting what I can for notes on how to track natural portals when they appear and harvest their ectoplasm, so you’re not stuck in limbo all the time trying to keep yourself together.”

Jason watches Willis watch him. He rubs his hands against the texture of his borrowed sweatpants. “…How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Jason finally asks. Willis’d implied he knew Jason was Robin. He knew for sure Willis knew he was Bruce Wayne’s, official rich icon of Gotham’s, only minor kid. This could be an elaborate…something else. Kidnapping. Ransom. Something.

Willis gives him a Look. “You don’t, I guess. But literally all I’d have to do is wait until you run dry of ectoplasm and come get you when you went catatonic. Not to mention, when the intangibility kicks in…”

Jason frowns. “The what now?”

“Forget it.”

Jason fucking hates his dad so much.

But they get out of the creepy, fucked up basement and head back up to the surface world, and for a second, Jason’s entirely incapacitated by the sun. Willis’s hand is the only thing tethering him to reality as they walk through half-empty streets without a map, without a guide, and all Jason really has the energy to do is hope that his Dad isn’t mad at him, so he actually stays this time around.

They catch a bus south.

Jason quietly accepts that he won’t be going home for a while.

(At least until… At least until he figures this out. At least…)

He conks out on his dad’s shoulder.

And there, thirty feet east of his body, lay the Joker’s head. In death, frozen, the grin looked more like a grimace than his usual demented pleasure. The rending through the neck wasn’t pretty—if Gordon didn’t have live confirmation that Quinn was sitting pretty in her cell, trying to convince Isely to play Poker with her, Jim might have thought that the woman had finally just set her hyenas on her ex.

The attack was so brazen, and so practical. So raw and smeared red. This would take forever for the clean-up crew to get out of the rough edges of the concrete floor.

Jim left the investigation to the investigators. It was what they got paid for and what they were good at. All he wanted to do was supervise—see if there was anything they missed they could use later, see if the crowds could be controlled outside the party splattered all around them in the coldest warehouse in the docks district.

This would, somehow, become something he would have to prevent the Bats from investigating. This was officially a high-profile case. No one liked the Joker, but the chokehold he had on Gotham had been thought to be immutable, and Jack Napier’s corpse on the warehouse floor would inevitably change the face of Gotham.

And then Jim saw.

He would think he imagined it later—he wouldn’t have any reason to think anyone wouldn’t have noticed the man in the corner—face smeared in viscera, methodically licking blood from his fingers and from underneath his fingernails. One. At a time. Slowly. Carefully.

Jim blinked and he was gone.

But he looked like—

The corner was dark. Shadowed, sure, but not enough to hide a whole man bathed in gore. Still. Jim carefully went for his walkie talkie with shaky hands. “Can one of you look up Willis Todd for me?”

Static inquired.

“I have a suspicion. Can you get the current status on Todd for me?” Jim thought the man was still in jail. But he could be wrong.

Recently released, the answer came back.

“…Thank you.”

Jim Gordon never pushed to pursue the line of investigation on Jason Todd’s biological father. He wasn’t quite sure what he would find on the other end.

Besides. Jim had always had a soft spot for the Robins.

*

Things have been going missing in the pantry.

Little things. Small things; little things that might be hard to access, but do not possess much value.

Maple candies from imported Canada disappeared last week on Friday. Chocolate from Switzerland, with a toffee crunch inside that isn’t easy to find replicated in the United States.

Sausages from Spain. Seasoning Alfred buys specifically from a Greek restaurant in downtown Gotham, which grows their own herbs in the back and custom blends them for old friends with deep wallets.

Alfred only notices that they leave the pantry during inventory. There’s no reason to notice them, otherwise; although several items have a quiet place in his old heart, the only person who used to enjoy them is no longer with them at this time.

So. Alfred makes a note of their absence and does not restock. Perhaps Master Bruce or Master Dick has been feeling nostalgic. The feeling will not last forever; the foods missing will not return to their once-usual rotation on the grocery list.

Still. The thought of not having the foods available for a boy who isn’t coming back brings a painful tinge to old memories. Alfred tries not to think of himself as sentimental—or, heaven forbid, act on his sentimental urges—but at the grocery store checkout is young Master Jason’s favorite brand of cinnamon gum.

And.

Well.

Alfred isn’t expected back at the manor until two, and he isn’t shopping for as many people as he used to. There is plenty of time to divert over to a graveyard just outside Park Row with a small gift.

There is a thank-you note on the fridge in Master Jason’s handwriting when Alfred brings home the groceries.

It is still there when he blinks.

*

Tim is not supposed to patrol alone at night.

So. He’s not alone per se—Babs is always on the line if he really, really needs someone, and B is held up in medbay with Alfred’s tender care. So. Tim doesn’t really see why he should wait around for B when Tim’s already used to skulking around Gotham at night.

He’s not going to get into any fights. Tim’s smarter than that—and what is the GCPD for, if not tugging them around at all hours of the evening to actually do their job? Tim keeps to the shadows of the rooftops of Gotham, sliding along slick patrol routes he’s had memorized since he was ten. Nothing and no one knows Gotham like a Robin.

Tim might not be the right Robin, but he is the Robin. At the moment, at least, Tim is Robin. That has to count for something. Right?

So, Tim radios in a mugging and radios in a burglary and throws Batarangs at an attempted assaulter until he gets the freaking message and leaves that woman alone, thank you very much, and the woman even gives him a mostly-squished cookie from the local diner about it.

He tries to be nice to the local sex workers. They know he’s not the right Robin who helped them off the pavement and beat up their creeps, but they also know the right Robin can’t come back and help them either. Tim knows that. They know that. He hates it as much as they do.

Tim’s two-am recall alarm beeps just when he feels like he’s about to flag for real. It’s time to head back to the cave. There’s a couple of established routes back—but if he takes his grapple back the way he came, it might actually be three by the time Tim shucks off his colors and crawls home to the Drake estate. He could drop and take to the ground and allyways, but the result would be slower and riskier, even if it was less labor intensive.

…He could cut through Park Row.

Crime Alley isn’t…so bad…? People live there. There are grandmothers and babies and young boys and girls and kids of every shade who will never leave the cruel mercies of Park Row. Tim knows that it’s dangerous there, but people have to survive everywhere. He could probably get from point A to point B by rooftop as long as he’s quick and careful.

The toe of a green shoe hinges over the lip of a rooftop.

..Yeah.

Tim’s got this.

Swinging through Park Row is instinctual in a way that Tim used to think that clinging to dark gutters and fire escapes was—the way finding the light and the perfect shot used to be all he dreamed about, asleep in class with his eyes open as his thoughts chased Bats and Birds about the city with a camera lens.

Tim is a bird now. Not as confident as Jason. Not as vibrant as Dick. Not the Robin that people need. But he can fly; a selfish, needy part of him thinks that that’s enough for him.

A bullet skitters past Tim’s ear.

Robin to the ground. Tim ducks down onto the next roof and flattens himself against it, scurrying on all fours until he’s carefully ensconced in dark shadow. For a second, he can’t see anything—and then from a higher vantage point, a body topples from the building above him. It drops from an upper ledge.

Tim can’t see the gore where it hits the ground from his hiding place, but the squelching sound and cracking skull when it hits the street from six stories above sea level is pretty—it’s pretty evocative—

Gunshots continue. There’s a figure on the balcony of a building in the middle of park row, clad in splattered white as it holds another body by the neck.

The second body drops.

A fourth person jabs a pistol in the figure’s kidney and shoots. Tim hears the pistol go off and sees where the bullet embeds itself in the building across the street but the figure doesn’t even blink—what should be a debilitating bullet wound to the gut is shrugged off as the figure elbows the assailant in the ribs, knees him in the stomach, and flips him neatly over the side of the balcony.

The third thud and splatter is just as loud as the first. Tim can’t breathe. He has to radio this in. His hand is shaking. He doesn’t know if it’s safe to move.

The figure above him pauses. Looks down. He’s wearing some sort of tinted goggles and a white facemask.

The goggles make full eye contact with Tim. And the figure jumps two stories down into a roll onto Tim’s roof.

The figure rises from its fall. 

The scary thing is, apart from his dark-glass goggles, the man is in all white— from his staticky white hair bleached all the way to his roots to a white turtleneck, armored jacket and slacks to his chunky, steel-toed boots. 

Sprayed— 

—Splattered— 

—He’s stained in red, from the tips of knit white gloves to his elbows, to across arms and chest—

He looks at Tim. 

Tim hurls three batarangs with shaking fingers, and then he bolts. 

He doesn’t hear anyone coming after him, but that doesn’t mean anything. Tim darts up the side of a building above and grapples up against what gravity would deny him. He lands on an angled roof and looks down. 

The man in white leaps against the side of the building in order to climb it with his bare gloves. What the fuck. What the actual fuck. 

Tim throws two more batarangs, realizing with their loss that:

He’s out

They don’t     even matter, since they go right through the man like he’s light,     or fog, or. Something. He keeps climbing. Tim wants to scream. 

He runs instead. (Smarter impulse.) 

Tim hates this (he’s scared) and he doesn’t want to give away his location by comming Babs so he just clicks on his emergency beacon and keeps climbing, climbing, darting—

And then it’s all low buildings and no escape route. Nowhere to run without risking a broken neck in a fall. Four to five story drops— the same drops that had ended those. Those bodies with. How they’d. Died. 

The man is so close. Too close. Tim shudders into a shadow, shaking with adrenaline (not fear, never fear, only readiness), and reaches for the bo staff in his pocket.

There’s a high, cheerful whistle. “Heeeeere, birdie birdie birdie. Heeere, baby bird!”

Tim’s blood goes cold.

“Come here, birdie.” It’s a coo. Soft. Cloying. The kind of tone Tim would expect from, like, Dick, who is convinced that Tim is five and always has been, and not someone who just sent three people careening into the pavement. It makes him want to lean in. It makes him want to run away and never look back.

The voice is moving around, but Tim can’t hear any footsteps. There’s no quick way to tell where the man is. “I’m not gonna hurt you. C’mere! C’mere, birdie.”

The voice goes quiet. There’s no sign that he’s gone; Tim has to assume that he’s simply lost track of the assailant. He snaps his collapsed bo into his hand, rounds off into a fighting stance. And. Waits.

 And waits.

   And waits.

 A set of black eye goggles break into Tim’s field of vision. “There you are,” the voice whispers, deadened by the man’s mask. A white-and-red glove reaches out.

Tim holds the bo out away from his body, clicks the release button and lets it jut out into the man’s chest. The force of it snapping open is enough to break ribs.

The staff goes right through his torso.

Tim actually gets to watch as it passes through his thick padded jacket, splatters and all. The man ignores it with a laugh as he reaches out for Tim’s arm.

Tim lashes out with a flurry of punches. Nothing lands. It’s like trying to hit a shadow—Tim swallows panicked breaths and pushes himself up the wall with the help of his staff. If the guy is borderline transparent, Tim can probably. Go through him. Probably only as long as he thinks Tim is a legitimate threat?

He leaps off of the wall with an outstretched kick, and—yep, through the man. And then he trips.

It doesn’t feel like an accident. It feels like Tim was tripped. A hand wraps against his upper arm, and then he’s hauled midair, floating in the filthy air of a Gotham sky.

“Let me go,” Tim snaps, ripping at the arm holding him captive with gloved hands. They don’t make contact. Tim’s just flailing. He tries to kick the white mass of a torso again—and he still can’t touch him. What the fuck. Tim’s breathing is too fast. He’s on the verge of a panic attack. “Let me go!”

“Nah.” The man changes his position—wrapping around Tim’s diaphragm and pinning his arms with one taut grip. Tim writhes. “Little birds shouldn’t be flying alone late at night. Who knows—you might just end up like the last one.”

Tim goes very, very still without meaning to.

That is a…very knowledgeable threat. Very, very few people had known when one Robin had replaced the other. People noticed the absence, sure—but its meaning?

“…Like what?” Tim rasps. His heart is a hundred beats a second in his chest.

The goggles tilt down to him. A gloved finger—still red, still wet—tilts Tim’s chin up.

“Aw, birdie.” The slick concern in the man’s tone makes Tim physically ill in his stomach. “Your big, bad Bat didn’t tell you about how the last one died screaming?”

Tim swallowed dry.

“There isn’t any comparison to be made to feeling all your flesh and bones become bits, birdie boy. Trust me” The finger drops. Tim’s wide-eyed gaze doesn’t.

This man who tilted three bodies off the—he—he knows about Jason. He knows about how Jason—

Tim can’t escape. Whatever this man wants from him, he’s going to get it. He can’t reach his comm to click in with Babs and he can’t twist out of the grip and he can’t pry himself out of the hold. The needle-bright sensation of tears prick at the corners of his eyes.

He’s not going to cry. Tim’s not going to cry.

Robin can’t die crying.

Tim has to do what Robin deserves.

“Don’t cry, baby bird. C’mon. Let’s have this conversation elsewhere.”

Tim’s stomach lurches. People rarely come back from secondary locations. The man strides over to the edge of the roof and looks down.

The ground is so. It’s so far from— The ground is so far from them and it’s exactly how those three men died and Tim can see the wet splatter of blood where they fell out the corner of his eye. He can’t reach his grapple in this hold.

If Tim falls. He falls.

If he—

Tim struggles to get down to the safety of the rooftop and but they do is drop. The man tips over the side of the roof with no fear. They fall. The ground rushes up so close and so fast and Tim’s breath is so fast and the pavement—

Mercy. Tim passes out before they hit the ground.

       Tim wakes up on someone’s couch.

  It’s a…crummy couch. The realization comes before Tim is fully awake: it’s lumpy and his back hurts and the cushions are not nice to his neck.

His eyes crack open.

There’s no domino filter over his eyes. Tim’s not Robin.

He checks his suit too—no, Tim’s not in his suit, even though his cotton wicking layer is still on him, now hidden underneath a t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. Tim’s never worn basketball shorts before. He’s not even sure he’s ever touched them.

Tim’s never seen this apartment either. Dick’s apartment and his myriad of safehouses are run down and grungy just like this one, but the faded wallpaper here is covered in wall-high shelves everywhere possible and loaded thick with paperbacks in any available space. The television in front of Tim’s sleeping couch has a crack running through it. The ceiling is…painted? Splattered? Moldy?

Tim squints.

…Maybe that’s mold…? Should he remove himself from the premises?

The sound of the shower cuts out. Tim hadn’t even known it was running until the sound ended.

He sits up. He really wants to be upright whenever he finds out what happened to him and where he is—and, uh, look at that. It’s not a blanket on him. It’s a slightly stained fitted sheet.

Tim’s eyebrows draw together. He’s alone-ish. He’s not Robin. He doesn’t know where he is—but he’s not tied down? He’s being taken care of?

Tim looks at the fitted sheet.

Okay, he’s being taken care of kind of badly. But whatever kidnapping attempt this is…? Tim has no idea what prompted this behavior. Maybe they found out Robin is actually a kid, and not, like, short. Or something. Harley Quinn is kind of like that, sometimes, when she and the Joker have broken up again and she has more control of herself.

Tim has to think. Everything after one in the morning is kind of fuzzy, but he knows he’s not where he was the night before. He doesn’t know there he is. There’s someone getting out of the bathroom, and he’s pretty tall and broad and intimidating and—

…kinda young, actually. Tim sniffs, and pulls the fitted sheet up closer to his neck. Kind of familiar too, like seeing someone’s baby picture in a family album. All the features are there. Just different. If only Tim could remember why he feels this way.

“Shower’s free,” Jason announces from a now-open doorway, running a towel through black hair. The realization strikes through Tim like lightning. It’s a duskier, husky voice. But that’s—Tim would recognize that voice and face anywhere. In the pitch black. In the dead of night. On a rooftop overlooking the city in Gotham’s uniquely opaque night, not to be hyperspecific as to Tim’s old exploits before Robin.

Jason Peter Todd is clean and alive in a black hoodie and sweats in a shitty apartment. Is Tim dead? Is this what death is? Is he dreaming?

(Tim takes his own pulse. Just in case. The results are inconclusive. Probably because he’s panicking.)

“Want a shower?” Jason continues to ask, oddly blue eyes on Tim as he throws the towel back behind him. “Or are you more in a breakfast kind of mood?”

Tim has no idea what’s going on. But he’s already in something passing for day clothes so he. Nods.

What is going on??

“Cool. I don’t have any of Alfred’s fixings, but I can still whip up a pretty okay crepe. We can put cream cheese on them, or something.” Jason’s older form ducks into the kitchen area. “Or. Ham?” I think there’s some ham in here.”

Tim nods. He feels more than a little separate from his body. There’s a gentle hand on his arm, and then he’s standing, and then there’s a hand in his, and Tim comes to somewhere between adding the wets to the drys and whisking the batter together in little increments.

It’s. Nice. Domestic. More so than Tim feels comfortable with at home; more so than Alfred would allow in the manor kitchen. More so than Tim would be comfortable asking for from anyone.

And he’s here. Doing it with Jason, who he adores. Who’s dead, too, but who’s counting?

They flip crepes in quiet contemplation and the morning outside becomes hot and bright. Summer must be on its way, somehow. The air isn’t clean, per se, but it is…well-lit. Airy. Light.

Jason plates two crepes per plate, spoons brick cream cheese into a bowl and blasts it in the microwave a little, until it’s soft. The ham is left in its plastic wrap on the tiny table shoved into the corner of the room.

They roll and eat their crepes.

The crepes are good. Tim can’t tell if they’re good because he’s dreaming, or because he’s dead and nice crepes would be nice, but they are good.

Eventually the crepes are gone, and Tim is sleepy with a full stomach. It’s nice.

Jason (Jason’s ghost?) tries to rouse Tim up, from his chair, but…it’s a nice dream. Tim doesn’t want to leave. Jason laughs, and it’s not his Robin laugh, but it’s warm and it’s his and it’s so comforting that Tim might be a little more certain that the fall he took last night really did kill him.

Tim’s eyes open sleepily.

Oh. There was a fall last night. And a…guy. Tim doesn’t remember getting away from him. Hm. Maybe Tim died in the secondary location? And this is… Tim was never all that religious. Heaven? An agnostic afterlife?

“You’re such a weird kid,” Tim hears, which is something that has been said to him before, but never with such fondness. “What are you muttering about?”

Tim yawns, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Am I…dead?” he asks, deep breath interrupting halfway.

Jason scrubs Tim’s hair with a hand. “Nah,” he reassures. “I just kidnapped you a little. I think. Everything’s a little fuzzy after I went after the Red River gang last night, so I’m just going to assume I made the right decision in bringing you home.”

Wait. What?

The sickening sound of cracks against the pavement replays in Tim’s mind.

“Oh?” Tim asks faintly. His face is still in his hands.

Jason—or, someone who hasn’t introduced himself—hums. The curl in his voice is familiar. “No little birds should be wandering around alone at night. That’s a real good way to—“

His eyes flash green. And then. Swallowing rage. The expression reluctantly disappears. “It’s a really good way to get yourself hurt, Birdie.”

Tim doesn’t. Tim doesn’t feel the same warmth he did a moment ago.

Jason bites back the green glow. Smiles with all his sharp teeth. “Either way. I imagine you’ve got school today. You should work on that before you start losing more of your time to…other. Things.”

Tim nods.

And.

In the most surreal move of his life, Tim is obligingly driven to Gotham Academy by his maybe-sort-of-ex-stalking-victim-in-that-he-died-? It’s actually great? Tim is carefully on guard the whole time, but the person-who-might-not-actually-be-Jason-but-also-totally-is, like, packs him a lunch and everything. Tim actually has a lunch at school. And it’s, like, a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat. With strawberry jelly. There’s a cosmic brownie too.

Tim actually forgot? How tired he gets in the middle of the day without a lunch? He can actually concentrate in AP Physics now. Tim takes notes and everything. It’s surreal.

The whole thing is surreal. Tim has to duck into the boy’s bathroom to change into his one spare school uniform so he doesn’t get dress coded. He’s just got…a free tee shirt and basketball shorts in his locker now? He guesses? It’s doubly weird when Tim realizes that essentially all his gear has been confiscated and he has no phone, and he has to call Alfred from the secretary’s office for a ride back to the Manor at the end of the day and to report that he isn’t dead.

Whoops.

If this isn’t a dream, Tim is going to be in big trouble for losing his suit.

(Well. He probably knows where it is?)

The drive to the school from Bristol is about an hour and a half by bus. It’s about forty by car. Alfred, by every miracle, gets there in half an hour. Tim is sated, well fed, recovered from being a little bit kidnapped, and deeply, deeply confused.

It’s clear that Tim’s disappearance weighed on the butler. Alfred actually gets out of the car and strides up to Tim’s place on the school steps, already evaluating his status to see if he’s injured or hiding injuries, or, who knows, drugged or hypnotized or whatever happens to vigilantes who go missing for fourteen hours.

Alfred doesn’t even start off with the And you are in big trouble for going AWOL, young man lecture that Tim was expecting, and instead gets a Thank you for reaching out to me, I’m glad to know you’re safe talk instead? What?

He even brought a second jacket? It’s…nice? Tim puts the jacket on automatically, not quite cold but grateful to have the gesture anyway, and then remembers pertinent information that Alfred probably ought to know.

“Jason murdered three people and then kidnapped me a little,” Tim says. The report isn’t Robin-perfect, but his brain is still kind of…not made up about the whole thing. “I’m fine? I mean, I don’t know if it was Jason for real, but he made me a sandwich for lunch and drove me to school on a motorbike.”

Alfred just looks at Tim. Reasserts that Tim isn’t any more injured than he was a minute ago, probably. Comes to some conclusion.

“Well,” Alfred says, and dusts his hands off to offer a hand to Tim. Tim takes it and stands. “As long as you were returned intact. Now, I can admit that I have no interest in the finer points of Master Bruce’s varied interests, so please hold off on revealing any larger details until he is available to obsess over them.”

Tim’s smile is reflexive. “I can do that.”

“Excellent. It is reassuring to know that there is still a semblance of restraint in at least one of you. Now, then, to the car; and don’t think that you can skip out on dinner in the Manor tonight, Master Tim. I imagine that the meal tonight is going to the setting of an unusually long conversation.”