Chapter Text
Talia, Jason thought, as he stared down at the newspaper in front of him, was either a liar or very badly misinformed. He’d been back in Gotham for all of forty-five minutes, and things were not going according to plan. There had been a whole scheme that he’d had in mind, to figure out where they were hiding the Joker and to track down the new Robin and to do about a hundred other things, but the copy of yesterday’s Daily Planet that somebody had left in this subway station was throwing a wrench in all of his plans.
’Heroless City’ the stark words read, jumping out at Jason straight away. It was a Lois Lane byline too, which meant the information was probably good. Above them was a picture of the batsignal being dismantled. The green cracked, and for the first time in months, perhaps years, Jason felt something totally untinged by anger: curiosity.
Jason checked the time, realized he had five minutes to wait for the subway, and unfolded the paper.
Gotham has been a city of capes for almost a decade. Batman, a founding member of the Justice League, was her first, and foremost. Many saw Gotham herself reflected in him, dark, inscrutable, and fearless. For Gothamites, he was a symbol of the best and the worst of the city.
No one has seen Batman in more than a year.
Fuck me, Jason thought, and read on. By the time he got on the subway – two minutes late, of course – he’d learned that Batman was gone. He hadn’t been seen out with the Justice League since Jason died, and in Gotham, reports of him had been dwindling for a long time.
Also conspicuous in his absence is the terrorist, described by some as a ‘supervillain’, known as the Joker. Some Gothamites viewed the Joker as Batman’s equal and opposite. This view seems rather prescient now. The Joker vanished many years before the final appearance of Batman, though the Bat’s denouement began soon after.
It didn’t make any damn sense. The Joker had killed Jason, and no one had caught him, and now Batman was gone. It would have made sense if Joker had killed Bruce too and he’d vanished all at once, but this slow disappearance made no sense at all.
And then there was the picture, the one Talia had shown him just after coming out of the pit. Except she’d shown it to him and said “see, he has replaced you already,” and Jason had been expecting to come back to a city where Batman and a new Robin – his replacement, with years of heroing under his belt – patrolled. Lane’s caption for the same image told a very different story.
The last known picture of the teen hero known as ‘Robin’. Shortly after this photo was taken, the Justice League issued a statement announcing Robin’s death and Batman’s formal retirement from the group.
Except Jason had already been dead for months by that point, so who the hell was this other apparently-dead kid. Where was Bruce, where was the Joker, and what the fuck was happening in this fucking city?
--
If everything had been going according to plan, Jason would have been killing people right about now, finally getting a chance to break in all his new toys. But everything was very much not going according to plan, and so Jason was sitting in a shitty bar, eavesdropping on their shitty clientele. Willis used to drink here, back in the day, so Jason knew that they were shitty.
Equally, he knew that in Gotham, if you wait long enough, someone was always going to start talking vigilantes and villains. It was by far the most interesting thing that happened in this city, and everyone had opinions on it.
“I’ll have a rum and coke,” he told the bartender. The ID in his pocket said he was twenty-one, but nobody asked for it. If he really wanted to blend in, he should have ordered beer, but the truth was he hadn’t had time to actually get used to the taste and didn’t want anyone to notice that he was just a kid by his reaction to it.
“Name for the tab?”
What ID was in his pocket again? “Pete.”
Jason had come up with a character to play while he waited. He knew that people drinking alone always stood out more than they thought they did, and his streak of white hair made the problem worse. So he’d come up with a character. He checked his phone frequently, glanced at every person who came in the door, and then, when he’d finished his drink, he went to the washroom and told the bartender to tell ‘Mandy’ he was here if she showed up. When she didn’t, he ordered a second drink and slumped morosely, scrolling through Twitter on his phone. In the minds of everyone else in the bar, he’d been rendered a caricature. They noticed him, but didn’t see him for himself.
“Did you hear what happened to Derek?” Asked one of the guys at the bar. “Blackgate, six years.”
“GCPD finally wise up to the fact that a security guard might be the one doing the robberies?”
The first guy, who Jason mentally named Redshirt, shook his head. “Nah. Capes got his dumb ass.”
About time. Jason had been waiting for over an hour. The other guy, Ugly Mug, shook his head. “Poor fuck. Big bat or little birds?”
Birds. Plural. Bruce had fucking replaced him more than once.
“The purple one. Is she a bird? I don’t think her name is a bird.”
Ugly Mug laughed. “You know what they say about birds, Mike. If it walks like a Robin, and it quacks like a Robin, it’s a fucking bird.”
“Nobody says that,” Redshirt muttered, but Jason’s vision had already gone green around the edges. ‘A robin’. He knew, logically, that he’d always been one of a set, but the criminals hadn’t usually known that. They hadn’t usually been blunt about it the way these two were being, except for some special cases who clearly knew the difference. Catwoman, Ivy, Joker.
“You have history with the masks?” The bartender asked, and it took Jason a second to realize that he was talking to him. There must have been a look on his face.
“The Bat sent my fucking brother to Blackgate,” Jason muttered.
“Asshole,” Redshirt said, with some sympathy. “Bet you’re glad he’s gone then.”
Ugly Mug made a derisive noise. “He just wants us to think he’s gone. You think the little birds were the one who beat up Penguin last month? No. He told the cops that the ‘grim reaper’ did it. That sounds like the Bat if I’ve ever heard of him.”
Maybe Jason would have to pay a little visit to Gotham’s resident flightless bird. “That’s him alright. Or maybe Nightwing, over from Blüd?”
The bartender laughed. “What year are you from, kid? Nightwing only comes to Gotham when there’s an Arkham breakout. Blüdhaven’s more than enough to keep a mask busy.”
That was a slip up, fuck. And where the fuck was Dick? “True. Blüd’s a shithole. Gotham is too, but at least it’s home.”
Redshirt clicked his glass against Jason’s. Ugly Mug laughed. “So, you seen any of the local wildlife lately?”
“Nah,” Jason told him. “I know better than to get tangled up with the fucking masks.”
The bartender said, “that’s the problem with masks, though. They always get tangled up with you.”
And wasn’t that the fucking truth. “I’ll stay away from purple birds. That shouldn’t be hard to spot from a distance.”
“Only one of them is purple,” Redshirt corrected. “That’s the girl one. Can’t remember her fucking name. The guy wears grey and yellow. He’s a bird name for sure. Parrot or something.”
“Peregrine,” Ugly Mug added. “Like my great aunt.”
Like from Lord of the Rings, Jason thought. He actually kinda liked it. “That’s dumb.”
“Well it’s better than Robin.”
Jason forced himself to laugh along with the others. “True that.”
--
It took Jason a couple days after his visit to the bar to track down the ‘little birds’. When he did, he could only stare in confusion. They were following Batman’s patrol schedule. He followed them for six whole blocks to be sure. This was a Wednesday schedule, and today was Wednesday, and they were going exactly the route Jason knew by heart.
It didn’t make any sense. Because this meant that they had been approved by Batman. Must have been approved by Batman. But Jason wouldn’t approve these kids to punch their way through a wet paper bag. They were children. Children wearing body armor, admittedly, but definitely children. Neither of them were using grappling hooks, so they were basically just doing parkour and punching people. Jason watched them stop a mugging and a B+E, and then knock on a window to break up some sort of domestic.
They couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, either of them. The girl, Purple, had blonde hair peaking out from beneath her hood, while the boy, who wore a domino mask, had black hair. Bruce really knew how to pick em. It was a relief to see that neither of them were dressed at all like Robin. There were no green panties. In fact, both of them were wearing pants and long sleeves. The only yellow on anyone’s costume was a swoosh like a diving bird across Peregrine’s chest. Purple had a sort of cloak thing, but neither of them had a little half-cape. Jason couldn’t see either of their shoes from here, but he didn’t think anyone was wearing booties.
There was a sense of unreality to the whole thing, a feeling of abstraction. Jason knew, logically, that he’d once been that boy, like Peregrine, except even less appropriately dressed. He should have been fine with their presence, except for the fact that they were replacing him. But it seemed so wrong when he was actually looking at it. Those kids were out there, clearly no training, and they were going to get themselves killed.
If Bruce thought this mediocre training was enough to send kids out to fight crime, he had another thing coming. It didn’t matter if they were ‘Robin’ or not. No more dead kids.
Fuck, Jason had gotten lost in thought and had let them get too close. He pulled quickly behind a gargoyle as the pair leapt over to his roof and he heard the telltale sound of a high five.
“Excellent work, S.”
“And you, Perry,” she said, in a Dr. Doofenshmirtz voice.
Sounding put-upon, Peregrine said, “do not.”
“What are you going to do? Tell my dad I’m bullying you about your superhero name?”
There was a long silence, maybe while the two of them were listening to something else. Purple, S, asked tentatively, “another half hour?”
“It’s a school night.”
“Like you give a shit about school,” she muttered.
“I give a shit about nobody calling CPS on either of us. If you don’t want someone to actually tell your dad about our superhero names, you should too.”
She sighed theatrically. “Fine. Nest tomorrow at nine?”
They’d really gone in on this whole bird thing, huh?
“See you then.”
They split up, going their separate ways across rooftops towards home, and Jason clutched to his gargoyle and tried not to think too hard. The green danced across his vision. Bruce was missing in action. Bruce had replaced him. Twice. The Joker was missing. Dick hadn’t been home in years.
Jason was going to find answers, and when he did, he was going to beat the shit out of someone. Who it was going to be depended on what the fuck, exactly, was going on.