Red Hood x Vigilante!Reader | One Shot
(I am trying my hand at angst- it def turned out more hurt/comfort lol)
The plan had been simple.
In retrospect, that should have been the first warning sign.
Simple plans had a way of detonating in Gotham. The city had a sense of humor about that — a mean, black-comedy kind of humor that mostly landed on the people trying to do good in it.
You had really learned this and yet you had still looked at the blueprint Jason spread across the hood of the car two hours ago and thought: yeah, okay, this could work.
Marcone was a mid-level weapons trafficker who had recently made the mistake of moving product through the East End, which put him squarely in Red Hood's territory and, by extension, yours.
The job was a two-person operation:
Jason would take the east entrance, you would take the west and you'd both box Marcone's men in from your sides, grab the manifest from the office on the second floor, and then be back at the safehouse before midnight.
Clean. Contained. Simple.
What had actually happened was that Jason had called you twenty minutes in — his voice clipped and controlled, which was how you knew it was bad — to tell you that; the east entrance had been a decoy, that there were twice as many men as the intel suggested and that he was pinned down three blocks away dealing with a situation that was developing.
"Go back to the car," he'd said. "Wait for me."
You had said, "Copy that," which was technically not a lie, because you had understood the instruction perfectly.
Then you had gone inside anyway.
The reasoning had seemed sound at the time. Marcone was in the building. The manifest was in the building. If Marcone got spooked and ran before Jason got clear, six months of work evaporated, and more weapons ended up on more streets and into more hands that would use them on people who hadn't signed up for any of this. You were good. You had trained hard and been trained well, in part because Jason had an almost pathological need to make sure the people around him could handle themselves.
You can handle this, you had told yourself.
Three of Marcone's men were already down in the corridor behind you, which was evidence in your favor. The problem was what was in front of you.
Viktor Renn was not what the file had described. The file had called him personal security, which conjured something in a suit with an earpiece. Viktor Renn was six-foot-four of Eastern European muscle with hands that looked like they'd been assembled from spare parts and eyes that registered your presence the way you'd register an inconvenient weather pattern — something to get through, not something to worry about.
He had hit you twice and you had felt both of them in places you didn't know you could feel things.
You were in the second-floor office. The manifest sat on the desk ten feet away. Renn stood between you and every exit, which was a layout problem you were working on solving while simultaneously trying not to get your skull caved in.
Your earpiece crackled. "—still there? Talk to me." Jason's voice, lower than usual, strained at the edges.
You ducked a swing that would have taken your head off your shoulders and came up behind Renn's arm, going for the joint, but he was faster than he looked — they always were, the big ones who had survived long enough to be good at this — and he pivoted and caught you by the vest and threw you into the wall.
"Still here," you managed, pushing off the wall. Your left eye was swelling. You could feel your ribs complaining about the evening's events, "Minor complications."
"What kind of complications."
"The large kind. Don't worry about it." You spit blood. "Where are you?"
"Two minutes out. Maybe less. Stay on the line." A pause, and under his control there was something rawer... something that sounded like worry wearing a thin disguise. "Tell me you went back to the car."
"Tell me you went back to the car."
Renn came at you again. You had been reading his pattern — three exchanges now, enough to see it — and you knew the move he was building toward, the overhand right that was his finisher, the one he'd been setting up with body shots. You also knew you couldn't take another two minutes of this the way you'd been taking it. He was bigger and stronger and fresher, and time was not your friend.
You thought about what Jason had taught you once, months ago, when you'd asked him how he thought about a fight he couldn't win clean.
I don't fight to win, he'd said. I fight to make sure the other guy loses. Those aren't the same thing.
You hadn't understood it then but you understood it now.
Renn threw the overhand right.
The impact was spectacular and white-hot and briefly took the room from you — but you were inside his reach now, too close for the power strikes, and you drove your elbow into his throat with everything you had. You felt him choke and reel, and followed it with a knee to the inside of his thigh that buckled the joint, and when he went down you went with him and you didn't stop, because stopping was losing, because you hadn't come here to win, you had come here to make sure he lost —
"Hey." The voice in your ear was different now. Closer. Real. "Hey, stop. I've got him. I've got him."
Hands. On your shoulders. Pulling you back.
You fought them on instinct — one hard backwards elbow — and heard a sharp exhale and a familiar goddamnit that cut through the static in your head and made you stop.
He was behind you, both hands gripping your arms now, solid and real and here, and Renn was on the floor in front of you, not moving in the way that meant unconscious rather than dead. You registered that slowly. You registered a lot of things slowly.
"I've got him," Jason repeated gently again, quieter. Directly in your ear, not through the comms. "It's done. You can stop."
Your hands were shaking. You hadn't noticed until now.
Jason turned you around and even through the helmet you could feel him looking at you; taking inventory, doing the rapid damage assessment he always did when things went wrong, cataloguing everything he'd have to account for later.
"You didn't go back to the car," he stated shakily.
"I don't care about the manifest right now."
Jason cared about every mission component. He drilled contingencies for contingencies. Hearing him say I don't care in that flat, quietly angry voice was more alarming than shouting would have been.
"I'm okay," you rasped out.
"You're bleeding from your ear."
"It is not probably fine."
He had one hand on the side of your face — gauntlet off, bare hand — tilting your head toward him. His thumb brushed your jaw just below the worst of the swelling and you didn't mean to, but you leaned into it slightly, because the room was still tilting and his hands were steady and you were tired in a way that went deeper than muscle.
"What did you say to him?" Jason asked. His voice had shifted again — something underneath it that you couldn't read yet, but that felt important. "Before I got here. I heard part of it on the comms."
You winced as you thought back. The last thirty seconds before he'd arrived, when you'd stepped into the punch and Renn had grabbed you by the jacket and you'd looked him in the face and said —
"I said I didn't need to win," you said. "I just needed to make sure he lost."
"Those," Jason replied carefully, "are not the same thing."
"I know. You taught me that."
Another silence, different from the first. His jaw worked behind the helmet. He looked at Renn on the floor, then back at you, and when he spoke again his voice was very quiet and not entirely steady.
"I taught you that so you'd know how to survive, not so you'd know how to—" He stopped. "You were willing to take that hit."
"It was the only angle I had."
"You were willing to take that hit," he retorted again, like you hadn't spoken, like he was still processing the shape of it. "You stepped into it. I saw the replay from your camera. You stepped into it."
"It worked," he repeated, and there was something in his voice that you had only heard a few times before... not anger, exactly, and not fear exactly, but the space where they overlapped, the particular frequency of someone who had looked at a moment and understood how differently it could have ended.
"You have a concussion and two cracked ribs and you're bleeding from your ear and you want to tell me it worked?"
He made a sound that was not a laugh. "You—" He stopped again. His hand was still on your face. He hadn't moved it. "Yeah. Okay. You got the manifest."
"I knew you were coming."
"I heard you on the comms," you reasoned. "Two minutes. Maybe less. I just had to make sure he wasn't operational when you got here. I wasn't trying to—" You paused, picked the words carefully. "I knew you were coming. I just had to hold the line."
The room was quiet except for Renn's unconscious breathing and the distant sound of sirens starting somewhere below, which meant you needed to move soon.
Jason's thumb moved again, a small careful motion along your jaw, like he was checking for damage or like he needed to confirm you were real and present and still here.
"Next time," he started, and his voice had come down from that dangerous quiet to something rougher and more honest, "you wait for me."
"Next time don't get held up."
"That is not the takeaway I—" He exhaled hard. "You're impossible."
"Yeah," he agreed with a sigh. "I did."
He looked at you for a moment longer — really looked, in the way he rarely let himself, in the way that made you feel accounted for in every particular — and then he pulled his hand back and reached past you for the manifest on the desk, tucking it into his jacket.
"I'm going to ask you that again in thirty seconds and I want an honest answer."
He made the not-laugh sound again, and this time there was something almost warm underneath it. He got his arm around you as you moved toward the door — supporting without making a production of it, the way he'd learned you preferred — and you leaned into the solidity of him and didn't comment on it, and he didn't comment on you leaning, and that was its own kind of conversation.
"Two cracked ribs," he said, in the stairwell.
He said nothing to that, but his arm tightened slightly, and that said enough.
The car was where you'd left it. The city hummed its indifferent nighttime hum around you. Somewhere in the east end, three blocks over, someone was probably dealing with the situation Jason had left in his wake, and you found you didn't have the bandwidth to care about that right now.
You sat in the passenger seat while he drove and let yourself feel the full inventory of the evening — the ribs, the eye, the ear, the shaking that hadn't fully stopped — and decided that all things considered, you'd take it.
"You scared me," Jason admitted. Just that. Flat and honest and not dressed up.
"I know," you answered smally. "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry you were scared."
"Yeah," he said. "Okay. That one I'll take."
The city moved past the windows. You didn't fill the silence, and neither did he, and it was the kind of quiet that didn't need filling — the kind that meant something had been established between you, some new notation in the ongoing document of what you were to each other.
I knew you were coming. I just had to hold the line.
He had heard that. You had meant it. And now it was in the air between you, settled, real, permanent.
You'd deal with what it meant later.
For now, you let your head tip back against the headrest, and you breathed, and the car carried you home.
vaporwave
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
