For the Hell of It - Rescue
Characters: Jason Todd x fem!oc
Rating and warnings: T, brief description of violence.
Word count: 990
Summary: Red Hood comes to her rescue.
Masterlist
She woke slowly, sedately, to the touch of Jason’s fingers trailing down her cheek.
Eyes shut, she leaned into it.
The hand cupped her jaw, tilting her face up. There was no light scrape of rock hard calluses against her chin. The skin was smooth.
Andy’s eyes snapped open.
Black Mask looked down at her.
She recoiled. Or tried to. Her body responded slowly, groggy and jerky, against hard metal restraints. She was bound to a chair.
“Red Hood’s squeeze, hmm? Lucky find,” he said. He wasn’t talking to her. He tilted her chin back the other way to look her over. “I knew he was just a man under that helmet.”
A large man covered in tattoos stood behind him to his right. He looked down at her in disdain.
“Anything you want to tell me, Miss Wright?” Black Mask drawled.
She kept her mouth shut.
The second man hit her on the face. Her head rocked back. Her ears rang.
“He asked you a question.”
She bit her tongue to stop her pained whine.
“He doesn’t know you’re missing,” Black Mask said. “And he won’t, not for days. No masked maniac coming to rescue you. Your chances of getting out of here start and end with not pissing me off.”
She looked at the nasty grins on the face of the two hulking enforcers standing by the door. The uncaring menace in the man who hit her. The mocking glint in Black Mask’s eyes.
“You’re not letting me out alive anyway,” she said, with mounting terror. It churned in her gut.
Black Mask barked a hoarse laugh. “Don’t worry, I’ll wring every last secret out of you before I do you the favour of letting you die.”
One of the enforcers turned his head, his brow furrowed.
Something rattled onto the floor, then blinding white exploded everywhere. Her vision blanked out entirely, one final image burned into her eyes: Red Hood standing behind Black Mask, with his gun pointed at his head.
She was thrown sideways in her chair and landed hard on the ground. Guns fired with deafening reports, too loud for her to tell where or from who. Blind and still reeling from the impact, she felt the tattooed man grab her hair. He was ripped violently off of her a second later, and she went skidding sideways across the ground.
Everything got lost in the chaos and noise, before a blow to the head knocked her out.
-----
Andy woke to Jason’s hand in her hair.
Her heartbeat picked up, foreign alarm she couldn’t name or understand in her throat, until she registered the familiar calluses against the small of her neck. Strong hands, scarred and rough, massaged her skin with all the gentleness in the world. She breathed out in relief, and her eyes fluttered open.
Her head lay in Jason’s lap. He was reading a book, his wrist propped up against her shoulder. A gun sat on the bedside table. They were in a safehouse. She didn’t recognise it.
She felt perfectly safe. It took her a moment to process why that mattered, and why her mind even presented it as meaningful.
Her brows pinched and the side of her face stung at the movement. She brought up a hand, and felt butterfly strips across her brow.
Patchy memory filtered in.
Jason turned a page with his thumb, calm and measured. He radiated fury. It wasn’t at odds with the gentleness of his hold on her. His calm methodical rage was so dangerous it could burn Gotham to the ground if he loved it any less.
“What happened?” she asked. Her voice was raspy and her throat sore. She had the vague idea she might have been screaming during the scuffle.
“Black Mask’s second in command launched a coup and murdered his Boss,” Red Hood said, still looking at his book. “He’s trying to pin it on me to keep the support of Sionis’ loyalists. Nobody believes him.”
She remembered, sudden and clear as day, burned into her mind against the pure white of a flashbang grenade: Red Hood pointing a gun at Black Mask. A fan of blood and viscera, in a frozen still, exploding out behind the black skull.
She sat up. She stared at him.
Jason hadn’t killed anyone in years. He wasn’t allowed to, or Batman would run him out of town.
The enforcers, any witnesses, they’d know what happened, they would have to be– he couldn’t have just walked out with her, she was dead weight, had he really–? Had he– For her?
A quiet, hard thought cut through her muddling.
There had been a good reason Jason didn’t kill Black Mask during his initial rampage, and it wasn’t lack of opportunity. He had plans, counter plans, acceptable losses, and goals he wouldn’t bend on. Necessities balanced on delicate scales sometimes called justice but more accurately called reality. The power vacuum hadn’t been worth it.
And he’d done it anyway. He’d killed Black Mask, in the middle of Batman’s city, for her.
He looked back at her, unflinching.
She lay back down, putting her head in his lap.
He ran his hand over her again, carding it through her hair and burying it deep beneath her curls.
Those men, however many it was, died for her sake.
Did their blood stain her too? Did it stream down from his hands onto her head, dripping through her hair to streak across her face?
They would have tortured his secrets out of her, that hard voice said in the back of her mind. She was alive because Jason killed them first.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
He curled over her and looked into her eyes. The hard fury cracked and she saw the desperate storm in his gaze.
“You don’t have to thank me for that.”
I love you.
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