Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

Jason’s new apartment in Crime Alley had come to him courtesy of the League of Assassins, and he didn’t think much of their interior decorating skills. There were two cardinal sins to commit in making a safehouse. The first was to decorate it like a murder basement, baren and with cheap furniture and no embellishments. The second was to decorate it like an Ikea catalogue, with colour and light but no personality at all. Somehow, the League had managed to do both at the same time. There was a nice kitchen, with white tea towels with red rose patterns. And yet the couch looked like it had been stolen from a yard sale in 1980. He supposed in a sense the idiosyncrasy was good. People were idiosyncratic, after all. But they usually weren’t this idiosyncratic when it came to a single space. And regardless of whether or not it was technically good as a disguise, it was unpleasant to actually live in. The most unpleasant part was the knowledge that Talia’s eyes were probably on him. Jason avoided it whenever he could.

He spent some more time in bars, listening for rumours about Peregrine and Purple, who he learned was called ‘Spoiler’ by people who actually remembered her name. There were more mentions of Batman too, but almost all of them were old. The exceptions, stories of a mysterious figure in black beating particular villains like the Penguin with ruthless efficiency, matched Bruce’s MO but it didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t just say he was Batman if it was him. It seemed as likely as not to Jason that people who recounted these incidents as ‘Batman stories’ were doing just that: creating stories to cover up something else entirely.

Jason spent more time stalking the little birds, unsure of what he was going to do when they inevitably got in over their heads and got themselves killed or worse. He found himself listening to news of Arkham breakouts, worried about what would happen to these stupid when faced with someone really threatening. No one had seen the Joker since Jason’s death. It was entirely possible that he was out there, somewhere, waiting to catch another baby bird. Maybe that was the real reason Jason just couldn’t stop watching them. It couldn’t happen again.

With his evenings at bars and his nights stalking the birds, Jason didn’t get out in the day much. The sun seemed too bright when he did, and he felt far too exposed, walking around the city without any mask or helmet to cover him up. Bruce or Alfred or Dick could have been anywhere at any time. They could have seen him. It took a week for Jason to decide that he hated the apartment even more, and he was going out.

--

It wasn’t a conscious thing, exactly, the way Jason’s feet carried him to Gotham Central Library. There was a time when he’d known this building like the back of his hand. Public libraries are one of the only places in the world where you can go for free, and they’re warm, and nobody will tell you that you’re loitering. Also, there’s books. Jason owed his life and his mind to the Gotham Public Library System.

It was easy to get a new library card. They were free for Gotham residents – courtesy of a generous donation by the Wayne Foundation when Jason was thirteen – and all he had to do was provide a bill addressed to Pete Johnson at his new address, and he had the turquoise card in hand seconds later. It felt like the most powerful thing he’d been given since coming out of the Pit. More than his guns, or his helmet, or the motorcycle that was waiting for him at a garage in the Bowery. This felt like freedom.

“Do you know how to use our new digital holds system?” The librarian asked, with a friendly smile. She was a young Black woman with glasses and a silver nose ring. Her name tag read: Hello my name is DELANEY. I’m currently reading THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. JEMISIN

“I don’t,” Jason admitted, wanting to know how it worked more than he wanted to end the conversation. Also, it was the longest he’d talked to anyone who wasn’t an assassin, a target, or a source of intel in months, if not years. The change was nice.

Delaney pulled up the library website on her computer and walked him through logging in and placing a hold. “It’s easier if you select your best pickup branch first. That could be here, or any of our other branches across Gotham.” She glanced down at his letter, still on the table. “Based on your address that’ll be the Jason Wayne Memorial Branch. Do you know it?”

He was faintly aware of the thumping of his pulse, the green intruding at the edges of his vision. Beneath the desk he brought his hands together and dug his nails into the back of his left hand as hard as he could. It made the green recede, a little. “No.”

She nodded. “It’s new. Just completed three months ago, about a block and a half from your place. Small branch, but it has a lovely kids section, if you have any younger siblings.”

Did wayward little birds count? Jason wondered, somewhat hysterically. Aloud, he said. “No, just me. But it’s nice to have a branch down there. Would have meant a lot to me as a kid.”

That was the problem. It was a fucking excellent gift. Bruce – or Alfred, more likely – couldn’t have picked anything better. Fucking fuck.

“It’s a great spot for it,” Delaney agreed, tactfully ignoring any signs of Jason’s distress. “I wish there was a better reason for it, though. This city could do with a few less Wayne family tragedies, you know?”

Dead parents, orphaned kid, another orphaned kid, orphaned and dead kid. “Yeah.” Time to end this conversation. “Hey, how can I use one of the library computers?”

--

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Wayne_(billionaire)

1 early life and orphaning
…
…
7 Death of Jason Wayne (Todd).
7.1 Funeral

Following the announcement of Jason’s death, Wayne first stated the funeral would be a ‘private affair’ before capitulating to popular demand and agreeing to hold a public memorial in addition to a private funeral.[42][43] This public memorial was attended by Politicians, including Gotham’s then-mayor Jonas Williams, celebrities such as Tom Hanks, and other members of the ultra-rich, including Lex Luthor and Oliver Queen.[44]

Wayne was expected to give a eulogy at this event, but he declined at the last minute and the speech was instead given by his former ward, Richard Grayson.[45] Grayson’s speech ultimately went viral on YouTube, where it was watched 3.6 million times.[46] In the course of the speech, Grayson also announced the creation of the Jason Wayne Project (JWP), a multi-million dollar charitable organization dedicated to children’s welfare, education and literacy in inner-city Gotham.

8 Present

Following Jason’s funeral, Wayne’s public appearances steadily decreased. Once a fixture of Gotham’s elite social scene, Wayne’s appearances were reduced to charitable functions, including the annual Wayne Foundation Gala.[47] He was last seen in public attending the 23rd Annual Gotham Centre for the Arts Banquet, where columnist Vicki Vale reported that he experienced a breakdown, culminating in a fist fight with Oliver Queen.[48] A statement issued by Wayne after the fact stated that he would not apologize to Queen, and would cease making public appearances.[49]

Speculations of Wayne’s death have been widespread, but Richard Grayson has repeatedly denied their accuracy.[50][51]

--

Jason had almost been stopped dead – ha – at the fact that Lex Luthor had attended his funeral. But he pushed on to the end of the page before closing the tab and putting his head down on his arms.

It was all too much, really. The green wash that he’d experienced all the way from Nanda Parbat until the moment Lane’s headline had caught his eye had been so much easier than this. He wanted to be angry. He was angry. But he didn’t know who to be angry at. The Joker, still out there somewhere? Bruce, for failing him and giving up? Dick, for turning his memorial into a performance? Lex Luthor, for being Lex Luthor? Oliver Queen, for whatever the hell he’d done to make Bruce so pissed off? The Little Birds, for taking his place? He didn’t know and he was really fucking tired.

“Excuse me,” an old woman said, from behind him, “if you’re going to take a nap, can I use the computer?”

Jason could have shot her, but he hadn’t brought a gun to the library. “Fuck off, lady, I’m having a moment.”

“Well fuck you too,” she replied, and toddled off.

Jason sighed and changed position again, tilting his head back to stare at the plaster ceiling of the computer room. The green slowly ebbed out of sight as he focused on the sounds and smell of the library around him. Even after all these years, this building still reminded him of safety. That helped.

Focus on the mission, he reminded himself. There was still revenge to be had, he just needed to find his targets – still Joker and Batman – in a different way. Even if Bruce Wayne and Batman were both MIA, there was still one lead he had that no one else did.

--

That night, Jason let up on stalking the little birds to get some real, if nightmare-filled, sleep before going to pick up his motorcycle. It was a damn nice bike, and Jason didn’t even realize how much he’d been itching to get out of the city until the last of Gotham’s high-rises had faded into the distance and he was well into Bristol. Because it was day time, he’d yet again been forced to leave his helmet behind and had donned a regular motorcycle helmet as well as one of those bags people used to do delivery driving. It was the best excuse he’d been able to come up with on short notice.

He nearly drew up short approaching Wayne manor at the sight of a for-sale sign. For one mad, heart-breaking second, he thought it was for the manor itself. Then he realized it was the neighbours, and relaxed slightly. Bruce wasn’t stupid enough to sell the house that was sitting on top of all the evidence of his criminal activity.

It was the easiest thing in the world, to go down the usual route to the cave and let himself in with his own codes. They hadn’t even thought to disable them, the absolute idiots. For all they knew, he’d given them up to the still-loose Joker when he was in Ethiopia. Fuck, maybe he had and that was why everyone was missing. Jason withdrew a gun he’d holstered just inside his leather jacket, and inched forward the last few feet into the cave.

Whatever he’d been expecting to find – a blood-spattered crime scene, a bomb, the Joker twirling in his chair, Bruce sitting there waiting for him – nothing had prepared Jason for what really waited for him in the place that had once been his home as much as the manor upstairs had been. Maybe more so.

No one was there. That wasn’t the surprising part. He’d intentionally come in the morning to see to it that the cave would be empty. The surprising part, which made Jason draw up in his tracks, was this – it was clear no one had been here in years. There were bat droppings scattered over the floor and there was dust everywhere and something smelled like it was rotting somewhere, and there was a weird mold growing over by the showers. It looked disgusting.

He’d expected that Bruce might be gone, might be dead, but somehow it had never crossed Jason’s mind that Alfred might be as well. If something had happened to Alfred, Jason was going to fucking obliterate everyone who’d ever been part of this masked fiasco. Bruce, Joker, the Justice League, the villains in Arkham, the GCPD, maybe even Talia and Ra’s for enabling Bruce in becoming the Bat. Acting without thinking, he ran through the cave, clattering up the stairs to the manor and found–

Emptiness. The furniture was covered with sheets. The more valuable antiques had been removed, no doubt taken to storage. No one was living in the manor. Pulling his gloves off, Jason trailed through the halls, running his fingers along the rims of paintings and the frames of doors with no care for leaving finger prints or DNA. He was supposed to be here, after all. Anyone who thought Jason was their intruder would probably be taken for psychiatric help.

In the kitchen, there was no food in the fridge, and only a handful of items in both the pantry and the freezer: olive oil, white vinegar, frozen peas, ice tray, vodka. Past the kitchen, Jason took the servant’s stair – he always thought it was stupid, that they’d pretended Alfred was just a servant when he was so much more – up to where Alfred’s private rooms were. Here he hadn’t bothered to cover the furniture, but it was empty anyways. No food in the kitchenette, dust across the countertops, and no clothing in the closet.

Actually, that wasn’t true. There were three suits tucked in the back, none of which Jason had ever seen Alfred wear. Presumably, they were actually uncomfortable or didn’t fit. Or, Jason realized with some displeasure, they had bad memories associated with them. One was obviously the kind of suit you wore at a funeral. None of the three were items you would choose to bring with you when packing, no matter how long the trip.

He went to Bruce’s room next. Here the closet was still mostly full, but these clothes belonged to Brucie more than to Bruce. It wasn’t surprising that Bruce wouldn’t take them along to wherever it was that he’d gone.

The green had mostly faded again, replaced with a buzz of worry and confusion, as Jason steeled himself and made his way to his room.

It was like walking into a photograph, a moment in time captured, unmoving. Where the rest of the manor had become a mausoleum, and Alfred’s rooms had become featureless and empty like a show home, Jason’s room hadn’t changed since the day he’d run away. Like, to a creepy extent. There was still a mug on his desk, the inside stained, probably permanently, by the herbal tea – tisane, Master Jason, it contains no tea leaves – that had last been inside it. His school copy of Macbeth was still sitting on his desk, half-annotated. There were sticky notes on a bunch of the pages, marking off instances of classical allusions. He’d been supposed to write a paper about that. He’d almost brought the book with him, so he could work on the plane to Ethiopia, but he’d forgotten it instead, and here it was, all these years later on his desk.

Jason sat down hard on his bed, and then, after some thought, picked up the pillow, pressed his face into it, and screamed. There were no answers here, just absence and presence and nothing made sense. If they’d been packing up the house, why hadn’t they cleaned Jason’s room? Where the fuck had they gone? Why had they abandoned the cave but left all the evidence in place? Nothing made any fucking sense.

He needed to do something, anything. With a growl, Jason took the copy of Pride and Prejudice from his bookshelf and stalked back down to the cave. It took him five fucking hours to clean the whole place, but at least when he was done, he felt good tired, productive and better than he’d been in years.

-

It was night by the time Jason finally made it back to Crime Alley. After his cleaning spree, he’d taken his motorcycle out on the highway, driving at dizzying speeds that, in combination with the tiredness from cleaning and the dryness of his hands, made him feel human and alive. Jason was about three blocks from the League’s shitty safehouse, and he was dreading going back.

“Bitch!” Someone yelled, and a shot rang out, followed by the familiar sound of a gun clattering to the ground.

Seized by an instinct greater than he could control, Jason pulled his bike to a stop and ran.

There were six men in the alley and two women. One of the women was lying on the ground, bleeding from a graze to her arm. The other was standing over her. Spoiler, in her dark purple costume, fists raised. She’d knocked one of the men down already and broken an arm on another, but she was alone. There was no sign of Peregrine.

“Leave her alone you sacks of shit,” Spoiler said, with no trace of fear. But she was outnumbered and this was not acceptable and Jason didn’t think. His first instinct was to go for his gun but before his fingers could close around the grip, Spoiler had thrown herself into the fight and Jason didn’t want to shoot her. Also, after his week, he could really use someone to hit. So instead, he pulled off the motorcycle helmet and waded into the fight, using it as a bludgeon against these idiots. The green purred with satisfaction. He twisted arms and grabbed a man by his hair and threw him into the wall so hard that he didn’t get up and, a second later, it was just him and Spoiler standing there. Even the victim had run off in the confusion.

“Don’t start shit if you can’t finish it,” Jason told her.

She bristled at the scolding. “I don’t remember asking for your help, emo boy.”

People hadn’t ever been this rude to him for saving them as Robin. “Well you got it anyway, so.”

She sighed, and rolled her neck, reaching up to massage her shoulder. “Well, thanks. Where’d you learn to fight like that anyways? That was more than regular crime alley brawling.”

Jason was standing in front of her wearing no mask and she wanted to know about him and Batman might have a camera somewhere on her costume and he was absolutely fucked.

So he did the only sensible thing he could do; he ran. The miserable apartment would keep him safe, and at least he’d have Jane Austen for company.

--

Stephanie massaged her shoulder for a minute longer before calling the GCPD to come get the assholes, and then she climbed up the nearest fire escape back onto the roof and took off running. Tim was so going to want to hear about this.

Chapter Text

It was easier every time Steph ran to Tim’s apartment, what he insisted on calling the ‘Nest’. She was stronger now than she’d been a year ago, and scaling the buildings took less out of her. She peeled back the hidden panel on the outside of the window frame and scanned her fingerprint. The lock clicked, and she slid the window open and let herself inside.

Tim, who’d been standing in front of the microwave wearing his housecoat and pyjama pants, turned to look at her.

“Did you forget something?” And then, as an afterthought, “are you hurt?”

She shook her head, though the muscle she’d pulled in her shoulder still ached. If Zebra Hair hadn’t showed up when he had, things could have been a lot worse. Tim and Steph had a mutual agreement not to patrol alone, and she hadn’t wanted to break it, but those wannabe robbers had fucking deserved it.

“Ran into some trouble and made… a friend, maybe. Some biker, but he fought like he knew what he was doing, and when I asked him where he’d learned and he ran away. Also, his eyes were weird. They were green and glowy but when the fighting stopped, they turned mostly normal again.”

The microwave beeped and Tim took out a mug of warm milk, to which he added hot chocolate powder. “Do you want one?” Steph nodded, and Tim poured a second mug full of milk – the eggplant emoji mug, because he wasn’t over thinking that gag gift was funny – and stuck it in the microwave. “So, are you thinking he’s a meta?”

“I’m thinking he’s hiding something, but he’s not a bad guy. I could see that he had a gun holstered under his jacket and he didn’t shoot anyone. He certainly could have shot me when I scared him by asking questions and he didn’t.”

Tim nodded. “A little messed up that not shooting you makes someone a good guy, but I see what you mean.”

The microwave beeped, and Tim took a second spoon out of the drawer, stirred in the powder and passed it to Steph. “So, potential-meta, possibly friendly, in Gotham.”

“From Gotham. Crime alley accent.”

“Do you know him?”

Steph came so close to saying ‘I don’t know everyone in the alley, Tim’ but she stopped and considered the question. It had been low light and she’d been distracted by the streak in his hair and the glowing eyes, but there was something familiar about the face. If only she could place it.

“Maybe? He was a big guy, big enough that I would have remembered, but I might have met him as a kid.”

“Why do I feel like this is segueing into asking for a favour?”

She hadn’t been planning to ask, just to let him know about a new player in town, but, “could you track him down? He left on a motorcycle but I didn’t get the plate.”

“What did he look like?”

Steph gave a description, and Tim nodded, taking a sip of his hot chocolate. “I’ll see what I can do.”

--

The view from the Gotham-Metropolis train was surprisingly pleasant, once it cleared the last of the industrial parks and ran through farmland and open country. Jason wasn’t in a mood to enjoy the scenery. He was only here because he’d hit a dead end in Gotham. There wasn’t a single clue to Batman’s – or Bruce Wayne’s – whereabouts in that city. In the days since his trip to the cave, he’d broken into Wayne Enterprises, hacked into the GCPD using the batcave’s computers, and had beaten up Penguin’s henchmen until they revealed his location. Fucker was apparently vacationing in Antarctica to get away from his ‘grim reaper’, so Jason wouldn’t be getting any information out of him. Commitment to a theme, that one. Although Jason supposed it was still less egregious than ‘batarangs’.

There were no leads on the Joker either. He wasn’t in Arkham, the GCPD hadn’t heard anything about his whereabouts since a sighting in Ethiopia just before Jason’s death. The Batcomputer files on him had been either completely deleted or moved somewhere that Jason couldn’t find them.

And so, with Gotham apparently none the wiser as to where her two representatives – three, if you counted Brucie – had gone, Jason had been left with only a few options. He could have run back to Talia, tail between his legs and pleading for help from the league. But that choice sat badly in his stomach. That only left two choices: Oliver Queen or Clark Kent. Queen clearly was involved, at some stage, from his mentions on the Wikipedia article, but Bruce hadn’t been close to him the way he was to Superman. He wouldn’t tell Queen secrets. Superman, for all they butted heads sometimes, was a different story. And more, Superman clearly knew something, because Lois Lane knew something. He was her inside source on the Justice League. If she’d decided to write about the Bat’s disappearance, he’d probably approved it. He was involved in the cover up.

So, all Jason really needed to do was pry it out of him. And that shouldn’t be too hard. Superman was a pushover and, even though Batman didn’t keep kryptonite bullets – no guns. Pussy. – he did keep kryptonite, and Jason was good enough to make it into a more usable form himself.

Once he was in Metropolis proper, he changed in a gas station bathroom, one of Batman’s weird lead vests under his jacket, and the helmet over his head. Metropolis wasn’t Gotham, so he got more stares and it was much more difficult to find somewhere secluded enough and elevated enough for the meeting he wanted to have. But he did eventually, on the roof of a five-story building that had shops on the ground level and apartments all above. Arranging the meeting itself was easy enough.

“Superman,” Jason said, voice roboticized slightly by the helmet, “we need to talk.”

Clark didn’t come for every person in Metropolis who said his name. But he’d definitely show up for the one who was dressed to kill and was cocking and un-cocking a gun repeatedly. He didn’t have Batman’s levels of paranoia, but he was, at his heart, an investigative reporter, and he would investigate.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Superman said. He was doing that thing where he floated just above the ground, not leaving footprints and oh-so-conveniently making himself just a little taller than everybody else. Asshole.

There was a faint wash of green, like scum across the surface of water, not dark but omnipresent.

“That’s for me to know.”

His eyes had that alien-blue glow to them, not entirely dissimilar to the green of Jason’s, on the rare occasions when he’d been able to make himself look in the mirror. But in Superman’s face, those inhuman eyes were heroic. In Jason’s, they looked like toxicity and death.

“What did you want to talk about, then?” His tone was soft, inviting, but there was a hint of authority too. He’d brought the carrot, but he had a stick if necessary.

Keeping his gun in his right hand, Jason withdrew the edition of the Daily Planet with Lane’s article on the front page, and tossed it to the ground. “I want to talk about what happened to the Bat.”

Superman was forced to land to bend down and pick up the paper, which he did with careful grace. “Batman left the Justice League several years ago. If you want to contact him, you should speak with the Gotham City Police. You are from Gotham?”

Jason ignored the question, although he couldn’t really hide the fact. Only someone from Gotham would point a gun at Superman on the roof four stories above a 7-Eleven while dressed like a rejected member of Daft Punk. People from other cities didn’t have this kind of stupid crazy.

“You’ve given interviews to Lane in the past. You allowed her to publish this.”

Superman’s expression shifted to one of faint amusement. “If you think anyone tells Lois Lane what to write, you are going to be very disappointed.” Fair. Jason had admired her, when he was younger and less cynical. He thought she had integrity, as if such a thing even existed in people who worked with capes.

“Where is Batman?”

“Not here.”

Batman and Metropolis went together like oil and water. “Obviously fucking not. And he isn’t in Gotham either. So where is he?”

“Resting.” That was either a super ominous euphemism or a lie.

“Batman doesn’t rest.” ‘Justice doesn’t sleep,’ a younger Jason would have tagged on, half for his own belief and half to make fun of Dick.

“He’s only human,” Superman reminded him, in a surprisingly gentle tone. “He’s done more than enough for one lifetime, for all of us.”

“Well he didn’t fucking do enough for me.”

Superman watched him, inhuman eyes full of compassion. “I’m sorry.”

If he wasn’t going to give answers about Bruce, then maybe, “where is the Joker?”

“You don’t need to worry about the Joker.”

Jason had a headstone in Gotham that begged to differ. His anger pulsed. Superman was stonewalling him and he couldn’t take much more of this.

“Why did Batman leave the Justice League?” Jason half-growled, sounding to his own ears entirely too much like the man in question.

“Family tragedy.”

Fucking liar, the green darkened, hardening into emerald. Jason re-aimed his gun towards the centre of Superman’s body..

“I have kryptonite bullets, asshole, and I will shoot you. I know the family tragedy was months before he quit heroing. I can see the picture in the fucking paper. That isn’t Robin.”

It wasn’t implausible that someone who wasn’t Jason would have noticed Robin’s body type had changed, but it was admittedly unlikely from that photograph. It was from a distance and dark and their bodies were blurred in motion as they swung through the city.

For a man who’d been threatened with his imminent death, Superman didn’t seem especially concerned. “I think your timeline is slightly off, Mr…”

“Get the fuck on with it.”

“Mr. Red.” Good enough. “You and Ms. Lane are both mistaken in one key detail.” He really was going to draw it out. Jason aimed at his chest. The green liked the idea of shooting Superman right through the S with the bullets he’d made from Bruce’s supply of kryptonite. “That isn’t a picture of Batman, either.”

Liar, Jason thought immediately, and he’d fired before he’d even fully processed Superman’s words. Fortunately, Superman was even faster, and the bullet just barely grazed his arm before embedding itself in the rooftop shed where the landlord kept a leafblower and paint and window cleaning solution.

Superman, with more sense than courage, vanished, presumably to go get someone else in the JL who wouldn’t be bothered by one angry man with kryptonite bullets. Jason grabbed his newspaper from where Kent had dropped it, and bolted from the scene before he could come back with Flash or God forbid Wonder Woman to deal with him.

--

It wasn’t a picture of Batman. Or, rather, it wasn’t a picture of Bruce. When the green cleared, back on the train with the gun and the helmet and the lead safely stowed in his backpack, he could see it so clearly he wanted to put his head through the cool glass of the train window.

That wasn’t Bruce. Jason knew how Bruce looked in the suit and he should have known him anywhere, no matter how blurry the photo. That wasn’t Bruce any more than the kid beside him was Jason. It wasn’t Dick in the batsuit either. They were too broad-chested, too wide in every dimension. Close enough to Bruce to fool anyone, even the one person who should have known better more than anyone.

But it wasn’t too big to be Superman, Jason realized, with a sudden, eerie calm. And, failing him, Martian Manhunter was a shapeshifter. Although his impression of Bruce probably would have been better. Depending on his workout regime and shaving schedule, it could even have been Green Arrow. Whichever of them it was, whoever was aiding and abetting in this strange disappearing act, it wasn’t Bruce.

Which meant he didn’t have any evidence that Bruce had gone out as Batman since Jason’s death.

Which meant he didn’t have any evidence that the kid in the picture had ever really been Robin as anything other than an act, to hide the fact that Jason Todd and Robin died on the same day.

Which meant he didn’t have any evidence that the Justice League’s story wasn’t true. Batman had quit the League due to a ‘family tragedy’.

Jason didn’t know if he was more or less angry than before. On the one hand, it soothed something in him to know that Bruce had been so stricken by grief that he’d given up. It soothed him to know that Talia was wrong, and there’d never been another Robin.

But it clawed at him to know that Bruce was a coward. That he’d given up the fight that Jason had given everything for. That he hadn’t cared enough to at least track down the fucking Joker and stick his ass back in Arkham, or better yet, in the morgue.

The two circling feelings, like warriors with blades bared, duelled in Jason’s mind all the long train ride back to Gotham.

--

He made two stops, before returning to his league-allotted apartment. The second was to the cave, to replace the kryptonite that remained. Jason knew there were ways to track the radiation from the stuff and he wasn’t interested in getting caught for such a stupid reason. That trip was practical. By contrast, the first trip was driven entirely by emotion. He went to the cemetery, to see the place where he’d been reborn. After the day he’d had, the unsettling realization that Batman really was gone, he’d thought it couldn’t make him feel worse to set foot at his own grave.

He was wrong, it seemed. He could feel worse. He stared up at the angel and felt a sudden nausea rise in his throat as his pulse began to race. Some part of him wanted to scream, to tear it down, but he couldn’t bear to. Instead, he unfolded the centre crease of the newspaper and placed it on the pedestal so it hung over the words ‘JASON TODD’, leaving the identity of the grave’s inhabitant a tasteful mystery. Then he left the cemetery as fast as he could, stopping only for half a second to rest a hand on Catherine Todd’s cold and smooth headstone. The texture grounded him, but only a little. The feeling of the wind as he rode his bike out to the cave did more, but still not enough to calm the uneasy sickness in his chest.

--

Jason let himself into his apartment quietly, the way he’d let himself into the apartment he’d lived in as a child, only a couple of blocks from here. It was an instinct born of fear, and though that threat had long subsided, the instinct remained.

A second, later-grown instinct took over almost immediately. Someone was watching him. Jason grabbed his gun and slammed at the light switch with his other hand. He only barely managed to jerk his aim to the side to miss shooting the person sitting on his shitty, league-acquired couch.

Peregrine’s costume looked different in the incandescent light from Jason’s light fixtures than it did in the streetlights. There it had seemed all grey, but here, up close, he could see that it was actually lightly textured with pale brown lines, an abstract feathering pattern. It made the material look almost soft. The yellow swoosh, on the other hand, was hard against Jason’s eyes.

“Who are you?” Peregrine asked. He was trying to do a Batman voice, but it wasn’t really working for him. He sounded the same way a kid trying on his dad’s suit jacket looked.

Spoiler stepped in from Jason’s kitchen. Her costume was slightly brighter in this light, but otherwise basically the same.

“None of your fucking business, mask,” Jason snapped, trying to reign in the green. He’d had a very long day and he wasn’t going to end it by cleaning blood out of his – the League’s – ratty carpet.

“Our city,” Spoiler said, with entirely too much confidence, “our business.”

Peregrine pressed, “what is your relationship to the League of Assassins?”

Who told the Little Birds about the League? “Get out of my apartment.”

“Why do you look like Jason Todd?” Peregrine demanded, more urgently.

Nobody else had noticed. Who the fuck were these kids? Were they working for Bruce after all? The green edged in on his vision.

“I could shoot both of you right now and nobody would ever know I’d done it.”

“No you couldn’t,” Spoiler said, with too much arrogance.

“You’re the only two vigilantes in the city. Who do you think is coming for you, Nightwing? He’s miles away. I bet there’s more than a few gangs who would give me a pretty penny for your tailfeathers.”

“You couldn’t,” Spoiler repeated, “because you’ve very badly miscounted the number of vigilantes in this room, let alone in this city.”

Jason didn’t even have time to blink before there was a needle embedded in his neck. A soft voice, barely above a whisper, said, “sorry.”

And then Jason passed out, tumbling to the floor on the League’s probably-infested carpet.

Chapter Text

Jason woke slowly, bleary in that way that only came from drug-induced sleep. He peeled his heavy eyelids open to find a scene that took him a moment to understand. He was still in his apartment, tied to one of his chairs with his own rope. The knots, from what he could see at his ankles and feel around his wrists, were good – too good to be the work of the two amature children he’d thought he was facing. That assumption had obviously been wrong.

There were three people in front of him, all in costume. Spoiler and Peregrine sat on the lumpy couch, side by side. Peregrine had a tablet open on his lap and was typing something into it, gloves resting on the arm of the chair beside him. Spoiler was on her phone. She still had her gloves on, so they must have been those ones that let you use touch screens.

Behind them, silhouetted by the light from Jason’s lamp, stood the woman who’d stabbed him in the neck. She was dressed in all black, with a hood like Spoiler’s, a mask under that, and a cape. It could almost have been an impression of Batman, except for the feathering of the cape and the slightly beak-like shape of the mask. This was another Little Bird, he realized, but also, given the black garb and the hood, she was probably the Penguin’s Grim Reaper. Unlike the other two little birds, she could hold her own against villains of his caliber.

Except she clearly wasn’t that good, because this house was definitely under League surveillance. Talia was probably going to end up watching footage of this. He couldn’t see where the cameras were from here, but he was certain that they were around.

“No cameras,” the woman said, softly. Metahuman? He wondered. Mind reading never really got any less freaky, but he tried not to let himself feel fear. She couldn’t have been much older than Jason himself. “Not watching.” And then to the two teen vigilantes, she added, “awake.”

Spoiler set her phone down. Peregrine stopped typing. “You have Jason Wayne’s fingerprints,” he said. He wasn’t putting on a voice now and Jason could hear how young he was. That pushed back the green just as much as his curiosity and confusion had. “You have Jason Wayne’s face. You have Jason Wayne’s blood type, and I haven’t been able to run any tests yet, but I’m guessing you have Jason Wayne’s DNA. You were seen on the neighbor's security cameras in the vicinity of Wayne Manor. Are you Jason Wayne?”

Jason was going to kill Bruce and Dick for putting all the memorials under ‘Jason Wayne’. Jason hadn’t even gotten around to legally changing his name before he’d died, though there’d been a time when he’d been planning on it.

“Are you fucking delusional? Jason Wayne is dead.”

“I know,” Peregrine said. “I went to his funeral.”

The big memorial, presumably, with Lex fucking Luthor. Just the thought of it gave the green something to work with. “Then you know that I’m not Jason fucking Wayne.”

Weirdly, both teenagers turned to look at the woman behind them. “Swan?”

Black Swan. Very funny. She tilted her head slightly, examining him. “Some truth.”

A lie detector as well as a mind reader. Fucking brilliant. “I’m not saying shit with the fucking meta in the room.”

Spoiler finally saw fit to chime in. “She’s not a meta. No mind reading, only body language.”

Creepy, but also, “bullshit.”

“True.” She tilted her head, watched him closely. “Eyes… like Ra’s. The… hole?”

“Pit,” Jason corrected, and wanted to slap himself for falling for the oldest and stupidest trick in the book.

Black Swan tapped both the teens on the shoulders, and offered them a few words of ASL and some gestures that looked less like signing and more like charades. The only bit of it Jason understood was when she handspelled ‘Lasarus’.

“La–za–rus,” Spoiler corrected, signing the proper spelling as she went.

Jason, for his part, stared at Black Swan. “You League?”

She shook her head vigorously. “You?”

Was he? “No.”

Peregrine chimed in, “then why are you in their safe house? Why did they bring you back from the dead? Were they trying to fuck with Batman?”

A rush of cold went through Jason. “I don’t have shit to do with the Bat.”

Spoiler looked to Peregrine. He wrapped his fingers nervously around the edge of the tablet. “I know you’re Robin, Jason. And I know that you know you’re Robin because you went in the secret entrance to the manor, and you saved St– Spoiler, and I’m, uh, really honored to meet you again.”

“What.” There was too much of Batman in Jason’s tone. Peregrine didn’t flinch; he was too wrapped up in his own monologue.

“You probably don’t remember me but you once saved me from falling off a roof and you were my hero when I was a kid and I was so upset when you died, I mean everyone was, all the people from the Justice League and from Gotham Academy who went to your funeral and stuff, but I was really sad and I’m so glad you’re alive.”

“Take a breath,” Spoiler muttered.

Jason, for his part, stared at Peregrine. He was maybe fifteen or sixteen, so when Jason died he would have just been a kid. Contrary to popular belief, Jason hadn’t actually saved that many pre-teens from terrible heights. With the dark hair and the blue eyes…

“Camera kid?”

Peregrine grinned, bright as the swoosh on his chest. “It is you! And you remember me.”

There was no point in denying it. Whatever traces of green lingered in Jason at the fact of his capture by three nobodies faded at the plain joy on Peregrine’s face. It was strange. He’d found Superman’s smile made him want to put his fist through a wall, but this kid… it was just kind of difficult to be angry in the face of someone who saw Jason, saw what he was now, and still smiled like that. Talia had said nobody had missed him. Apparently, that was one more thing she’d gotten wrong.

“Yeah. It’s me. But who the fuck are you? How do you know who I am?’

The smile stayed, but it grew more fond, even a little wry. “The Flying Graysons had a very special trick called a quadruple somersault. It was… a little recognizable. After I figured Dick out, everyone else was easy. And you can call me Peregrine.”

Spoiler cuffed him on the side of the head. “What’s the rule about secret identities?” To Jason, she explained, “he did this exact same gambit when we first met. Knew my whole life story and wouldn’t tell me his name. It’s stalkery, but it’s how he shows affection.”

“Careful, pit,” Black Swan reminded them.

Spoiler looked at him critically. “What do you want, Jason?”

Revenge, a voice that sounded too much like Talia’s hissed. Justice, returned a voice that sounded too much like Batman. Jason pushed both of them aside.

“Answers,” he said, finally. “What happened to Batman and the Joker? Where is everyone?”

Spoiler and Peregrine looked to Black Swan, and she nodded decisively. Spoiler reached up and pushed her hood away. Peregrine reached into his belt and withdrew a wet-wipe to help remove his mask. Black Swan pushed her hood back, but left the mask in place.

“Stephanie,” Spoiler said, brightly, a hand on her chest. She gestured to Black Swan. “Cassandra.”

“And Tim,” Peregrine added.

They were an adorable little vigilante family, but, “can one of you please untie me now?”

--

Steph had to hold in her laughter the whole way back to the nest. Tim was practically vibrating, his hero worship was so strong. Every time he looked at Jason, he seemed a little more faint. She really should have come up with some outrageous favours to ask Tim. He would have agreed to anything if she’d asked while he was looking at Jason.

In some ways, it wasn’t a shock. Tim had been talking up Jason since the very first time they’d met, long before he’d become Peregrine, back when they’d both been stupid kids in homemade costumes. He’d been calling himself Robin then, and he’d told her why, about the ‘real Robin’, who’d died, and who’d been his hero. Steph was the one who’d pointed out that it was morbid to call himself after a dead kid, and had made him change the name. Tim was probably glad of that now. Explaining to Jason why there was a nerdy teenager running around cosplaying as him would have been awkward.

Once they’d shown Jason their faces and told him their names, they’d decided to go in for a pound and just take him back to the Nest. Tim trusted Jason implicitly because of who he was, and Cass seemed to read his body language as trustworthy. As for Steph herself, well…

Tim had said she was a bit like how he’d imagined Jason, under the sheen of Robin and the glamour of the Wayne name. And so Steph looked at this angry, half-mad, clearly fucked up guy only a few years older than them, and she thought: that could have been me. And she thought: I’d want a second chance.

The three of them were already plenty fucked up. Steph’s biggest enemy was her dad, Tim hadn’t even had enough of a relationship with his parents to call them his enemies, and Cass’s dad deserved to be flayed alive just for the things Steph had guessed that he’d done. Tim was living on his own as a teenager in the middle of one of the world’s most dangerous cities and nobody had actually noticed, even after his parents had died. Cass was on her own too, and she didn’t legally exist, and she still found it almost impossible to communicate with anyone other than Tim or Steph. Steph had her Mom, but she hadn’t even noticed that Steph had been sneaking in with bruises nearly every night for years now. So really, what was one more fucked up guy? At least he knew what he was doing.

“Swanky,” Jason said with some amusement, when they’d all climbed into the Nest. Cass had drifted off back to her room, presumably to get changed back into something more comfortable. “Do you actually live here?”

Tim nodded. “It’s my place. If anyone asks, Cass is my Au Pair.”

Jason stared flatly. “You’re a teenager.”

“He’s also an orphan and his guardian doesn’t exist,” Steph informed him. “It seemed like the best lie we could come up with for why they both live here. I don’t, by the way.”

Jason rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I cannot believe Batman is letting you do this.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time,” Tim insisted. He hopped up on one of the two stools at the kitchen counter. “Batman didn’t approve any of this. He wasn’t okay after you died, and he stopped patrolling. Other people went out pretending to be Batman – at least two of them, possibly more – but they barely stopped any crimes and I knew they weren’t him so I confronted him, told him that I knew who he was and said Gotham needed him.”

Steph still couldn’t believe that he’d gotten away with that. Jason whistled. “What did the Bat have to say to that?”

“Said he wasn’t Batman anymore. Said he’d done more harm than good, and he’d failed. He might have said more but Mr. Pennyworth came and took him away. I thought the JL was going to come mindwipe me, but they never did.”

“So then you decided to go out dressed as a bird, with no training, and bring a friend?”

Tim flushed, plainly embarrassed to be so directly called out by his hero. Steph knew that he’d come to terms with humiliating himself in front of Batman, being rejected by Nightwing and ignored by Oracle. But Jason-Robin was the one person Tim had always tried to hold himself up to, more than anything else. This meeting was like the intersection between a dream and a nightmare.

“No,” Tim told him. “Then I went to Blüdhaven, to talk to Nightwing, to tell him that he needed to come back to Gotham, and be Batman, and he told me that city was the crypt where he’d buried three families members already, and that if I was smart I would get out while I still could.”

Jason shook his head. “Yikes, Dickie. Evidently you didn’t take his advice.”

“No,” Cass chimed in, and Steph jumped. She’d threatened to put a bell on Cass before, and she meant it more every single time. Her friend moved more like a cat than a swan. Unfortunately, Catwoman was already taken. “Tim is not smart.”

“Hey!” Tim objected, but Cass was smiling. It had taken months for her to be comfortable with teasing as a concept, and Steph still took it as a personal point of pride every time she did it.

“So then he went out as discount Robin,” Steph said, because she knew that Tim would never have the nerve to do it himself. He flushed bright red at her words and Jason’s eyes went a dangerous green for a second before clearing as Steph continued to speak. “The Bats didn’t approve it. I started going out around the same time to mess with my asshole dad, Cluemaster. We ran into each other on the job and after a few mis-steps and a brick and some stalking, we realized that it was safer in pairs. Tim’s parents had money and he was an expert on the Bats so he figured out how to get us better costumes, safer materials. We got hit a lot, but we didn’t die. Tim taught me martial arts and detective work and he does all the computer stuff. I got insider info from the underworld and taught him about real Gotham and the Alley and how to fight dirty. Also I was the brains behind the design for Peregrine, with the swoosh that’s really a lower-case ‘R’ on its side. And then we met Cass.”

[You tell him] Cass signed. The three of them had been learning sign language together. Cass didn’t like using it all the time, but sometimes in front of new people, or when she felt overstimulated, it was easier.

Tim took over talking again. He’d mostly recovered his composure from Steph telling his hero about his shitty costume choices. “Cass’s father was an abusive asshole assassin. He wanted her to kill people for him and, because Cass is the bravest person on the whole planet, she got away from him and came to Gotham.” It was her turn to duck her head in embarrassment. “She saved Steph and me from some mob enforcers the first time we met. The reason you haven’t heard of Black Swan is because Cass doesn’t go out in mask unless it’s an emergency.”

Seeming to realize exactly how long he’d been talking for, Tim flushed. Jason tapped his nails on the edge of the counter and looked at Cass closer. “Cain?”

She flinched, and Steph found herself instinctively moving to stand between Cass and Jason. She didn’t care if he was Robin. If he hurt Cass, he was going to get his ass handed to him.

But instead of saying anything cruel, or even acknowledging whatever shit he’d heard about her from the League, he held out a hand. “Respect, Cass.”

After a long moment, where Steph and Tim both held their breath, she reached out and took it. Instead of a handshake, they just clasped each other’s arms. “Respect, Jason.”

Straightening up and leaning up against the wall beside the window, Jason said, “I’d return the introduction, but I guess you all know who I am already.”

To Steph’s surprise, Tim shook his head. “I think we could all use some more context on who you’ve been in the last few years.”

There was a brightening of the green eyes again, and, with intermittent cussing and knuckles going white from how hard he was clasping at the window sill, Jason told them about the Joker, and waking up dead, and a coma, and the Lazarus Pit, and the League.

When he was done, Tim slipped off his stool, and, slow enough that Jason could have pulled away at any time, he moved across the room and pulled his childhood hero into a fierce hug.

--

He hadn’t thought it would be possible, to lay it all out for anyone, least of all for these three Little Birds, all watching him expectantly in their own unique ways. But he’d looked at Cain – Cass, he hated the look on her face when he’d said her father’s name. Jason needed to look into whether David Cain was dead or alive, and make sure it was the former – and had seen the understanding written all over her face. Whatever else was true about her, Cassandra No Last Name knew pain and blood and death, and she’d had the courage to share it with these two, and they’d listened, and she’d shared it with Jason and he owed her something in turn. He’d opened his mouth to give a terse, cursory, summary, and everything had come pouring out, a torrent of his miserable, shitty life.

When he was done, Tim, who Jason – the green – had contemplated grabbing a knife from the knife block and stabbing just because his friend had said he’d tried to be Robin in Jason’s place, had come over, and hugged him. He was too short and too skinny to really envelop Jason in a hug but he stretched up on his tip-toes and tried his hardest. Jason didn’t think he’d ever appreciated anyone more.

“Thank you,” he murmured, mostly for Tim’s ears, and the kid offered him that brilliant, star-struck grin again.

“I’m just really glad you’re here.”

There was the sound of a yawn, and Jason turned slightly to see Stephanie, hand covering her mouth. “Sorry. Just… can we go to bed and figure out what our next step is in the morning? I can sleep on the spare mattress on Cass’s floor and Jason can take the pull-out couch?”

Jason opened his mouth to say he was going to go back to his apartment, considered the League’s awful decorating and their surveillance – if Cass had disabled the cameras, they probably come set them back up – and decided that a pull out couch in an apartment shared by two and a half teenagers – how old was Cass anyways? – was actually a better option. It couldn’t be worse than the time he’d slept in the Titans’ rec room while visiting Dick.

“Sure,” Jason said, “I might scream in the night though.”

Tim shrugged evenly, still standing in Jason’s personal space. “You wouldn’t be the first in this apartment.”

--

Tim woke up to the smell of… scrambled eggs? And toast? What? He pushed aside his sheets, rubbing at his eyes. For a second he thought he was back at the Drake Estate, and Mrs. Mac was there making breakfast, but when he blinked, the walls of his room in the Nest, with their posters of the Justice League – oh God, Jason was here, he might see them and then Tim would die – stayed steadily in their place.

Wondering if the smell of scrambled eggs could be a hallucination, Tim got up, pulled on his housecoat, and opened the door.

Jason Peter Todd Wayne was standing in Tim’s kitchen, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and Tim’s slippers. He turned at the sound of the door opening. “I was going to make pancakes, but you don’t have any flour.”

Jason would have made him pancakes. But Tim didn’t have any flour. “At least the milk’s good?”

“You’re living here, little bird, you need a few more groceries than the milk being good. My apartment has flour and my kitchen was stocked by a ninja.”

Tim’s life had turned into a surreal dream. Robin had called him ‘little bird’. “You can put it on the grocery list. It’s on the fridge.”

“Already done. Go get dressed.”

Tim obeyed orders, and when he came back out, Steph, Jason, and Cass were sitting around the dinner table, eating. They only owned three plates, so Jason was eating out of a bowl. “I put more dishes on the grocery list,” he said. “You guys really need an adult.”

“Adult,” Cass said, putting her hand on her own chest. She looked well rested. She always slept better when everyone stayed in the Nest. Tim didn’t know if it was because she felt safer or if it was because she felt they were safer with her. The latter was usually more true than the former, except for last night. Unlike Tim and Steph, Jason might actually have been of some help if someone from Cass’s past came for her.

Jason shook his head and, seeing that Steph had made a serious dent in her eggs, put more on her plate. Oh my God, Tim thought, Jason Wayne is a mom friend.

“Of course you’re an adult, Cass. I mean an adultier adult.”

“You’re about Cass’s age,” Steph pointed out, “where’s your adult?”

“That,” Jason said, “is an excellent question. Leaving aside the fact that I actually have life skills, unlike the three of you, my adult is missing. What do you guys know about B? Where is he now?”

Tim spooned some of the eggs onto his toast and took a bite. They were obscenely good.

“Tim’s our resident bat expert. Cass and I haven’t even met him.”

Tim took a breath. He hadn’t ever imagined telling his theories to someone who actually cared. “I told you last night that he quit but I think it was worse than that. After you died… he didn’t do well. I tried to keep an eye on him at the society events and stuff. He didn’t go out much and drank a lot when he did. Nightwing stayed in Blüdhaven. Batgirl disappeared. I think she just moved somewhere else, but she isn’t in Gotham anymore either. She left before Bruce vanished. After the incident with Green Arrow, they packed up Wayne Manor. I watched and I never saw Mr. Wayne and Mr. Pennyworth leave, so either they went out their secret way, or someone from the League came and got them.”

Jason had his eyes on the table, so Tim couldn’t see whether or not they were glowing until he finally looked up. To Tim’s surprise, there wasn’t anger there this morning. Just sadness. “Do you think there’s any chance he’s dead?”

“No,” Cass cut in. She’d completely cleaned her plate, which was unusual. She had a habit of always leaving a little, as if something bad would happen if she actually ate as much as she wanted. “Tim shows me TV sometimes to learn. Grayson says he is alive. He is honest.”

“And the Joker?” Jason asked, tone apprehensive. “I couldn’t find anything and someone fucked with the Bats’ file on him.”

It was Tim’s turn to look to someone else for guidance. If Tim was the resident Bat expert, Steph had taken it upon herself to be the resident villain expert. She was the one who had all the alerts on her phone for if any of their names were mentioned in the news, and she was the one who knew their connections and where they hung out.

“Neither hide nor hair since you died, alive or dead,” Steph reported. “Everybody thought he was just planning something, at first, but the other shoe never dropped. Three years ago, Harley Quinn broke out of Arkham and accused Batman of killing him on a radio broadcast. She tried to blow up GCPD headquarters until Nightwing, Kid Flash and Catwoman stopped her.” That had been a very strange day.

“He would never,” Jason replied, automatically.

Steph’s expression was quietly pained. Tim thought that she knew what it was to think about what your father ‘would never’ do and be disappointed.

“It’s the general consensus,” she said, instead of telling him that she thought he was wrong. “I haven’t ever met anyone with evidence for or against it. It’s just… after all these years, do you really think the Joker could have stayed away?”

Jason shook his head, the worry evident on his face. “No, but… Bruce wouldn’t kill him, and he’s missing, so maybe that’s why. If the Joker didn’t make him go missing, maybe he went somewhere to deal with it. He wouldn’t just give up the cowl for nothing. But to stop the Joker from being a problem again… maybe.”

Tim and Steph exchanged a look. Neither of them were willing to say the clear, obvious truth. Jason had died, Batman had killed the Joker, and he’d never been the same, after. Every rogue in Gotham probably knew it.

“We will look,” Cass decreed, saving everyone from the tension of the moment. “Investigate. Tim is smart.” For Tim and Steph’s benefit, she signed, [he needs answers.]

Tim would have wanted to find Batman, and the truth about the Joker, although he thought he already knew it, even without the request. That Jason needed his help – that they would work together – was just the icing on the cake.

Steph cleared her throat. “I know I’m the non-detective of the group, but… why not just ask Nightwing or Superman or somebody where to find him?”

Jason shook his head. “I want answers, not to see any of them. Not one of them made sure Joker never saw the light of day again. Not one of them saved me or noticed I was still alive. They abandoned everything I cared about. I don’t want to see them.”

“So, we’ll investigate then?”

“And in payment, I’ll be Cass’s co-adult, for a little while. How’s that?”

“Good,” Cass proclaimed emphatically. Steph grinned.

Tim extended a hand across the table, and they shook on it.

Chapter Text

When they stepped back into the Cave, all Jason could see was the traces of the ways he hadn’t cleaned it right. The floor was still slightly tacky, there was a sharp smell of cleaning solution in the air, and the supplies in the medbay were all still out of date. Nothing felt right. Alfred, Jason was sure, had some kind of meta gene that made him better than any human at this sort of thing.

“This is amazing!” Tim exclaimed, nearly falling in his hurried attempt to leap off of Jason’s motorcycle.

He was like a fan, humming with excitement at the chance to see the place where his heroes had made the magic happen. It wasn’t dissimilar to what Jason imagined Dick’s reaction to the cave had been, that first time. Dick was always so earnest. Tim, by contrast, wasn’t especially excitable, but this was enough to practically turn him into a Grayson-style ball of energy. Holy Hero-Worship, Batman!

You were never as suited to this as he is, a voice in his head that sounded like Talia said, Grayson and my Beloved would have taken to him far more than they ever did to you.

Jason closed his eyes, trying to blink away the green. When he opened them, he saw Tim, looking at his own reflection in the giant penny. Jason had done that, a few times. When freshly-polished, as it had been by Jason himself, it was extremely shiny. Barbara had taught him to bounce a laser-pointer off of it and try to hit Bruce. They’d made a game of it and Jason had gotten very good at calculating angles and trajectory as a result. Bruce had been a good sport about it as long as they’d promised not to bother Alfred.

Jason clamped down on that train of memory with an iron grip. He couldn’t spend his time reminiscing about the ‘good times’. He had to remember that they’d all left, abandoned the mission, abandoned Jason’s legacy. He had to remember that. The green swirled at the edges of his vision in tacit agreement.

“Hey kid!” Tim glanced back. “Let’s get over to the computer, yeah? We don’t have all day.”

He let Tim sit in the big chair, dwarfed by it, and by the bank of monitors in front of him. Jason was abruptly reminded that he himself, who had been underfed and years younger than Tim was now when he’d first sat in this seat, would have been even smaller.

“This is amazing,” Tim repeated more quietly, when Jason leaned over his shoulder and logged in, first to the computer itself and then to his JLID. “These computers haven’t even been updated in years and they’re still ahead of lots of stuff coming into the market.”

Jason had never been much of a computer guy. “How do you know that?”

Tim laughed and moved the mouse over to an icon on the desktop, and pressed a few buttons, bringing up a screen of letters and numbers that might as well have been in Kryptonian for all Jason understood them. “If these specs are in any way accurate, this is some guy in Silicon Valley’s wet dream.”

“Gross.”

“I’m serious. I’ve tried to get good stuff out of Drake R and D and it’s nothing like this. How did Mr. Wayne do it?”

Jason hadn’t ever thought about the logistics of their work enough to ask. Yet another way that Tim would have been better at it than he’d ever been. But before the green could rise up and have its way, he looked down at the kid again, watched as Tim began to navigate the computer. Reflected in the still-dark leftmost monitor, Jason could see his look of wide-eyed enthusiasm, thrill at the work he was doing.

Child, Jason reminded himself. This was a lonely child with no adults who was going to get himself killed. He was going to protect Tim, not hurt him, and Tim was going to help him find Bruce.

“You can ask him, when we find him. For now, get started with the files on the Bats’ database before moving on to the League. They’re less likely to be helpful and more likely to have limited my access, so you shouldn’t try to access their files unless you can’t find anything here. Don’t get caught.”

Tim offered Jason a mock salute. “Aye-aye, captain.”

--

Jason ended up leaving Tim at the cave. It was probably the safest place in Gotham, but Jason still worried. Tim, on the other hand, was insistent. Jason had brought him coffee, as a reward for the work he was putting in, and Tim sipped it, typing with the other hand, while he gave Jason orders. He was such a mini-Batman, it wasn’t even funny.

“You need to go back because Steph will try and patrol on her own when I’m not there. Or worse, she’ll try and bully Cass into going with her.”

“Why is that worse?”

Tim took another sip of coffee. “We told you, didn’t we? We don’t send Cass out to fight. She’s been through enough.”

The same could have been said about Jason himself. But Bruce, for good or ill, hadn’t tried to stop Jason from fighting the way he’d wanted to. Not until later, when he’d started to see Jason as corrupt and violent and everything he hated.

“How does Cass feel about that?”

Tim gave a half-shrug. “Hard to say. But I see the look on her face, the times we do ask her to go out. It’s not worth that.”

And so Jason, resigned to his fate, rode back to Gotham alone. Tim would be fine. The cave was safe, Tim had spent years sneaking into downtown Gotham from this very street without incident, and in a pinch, he was still, for now, the owner of the house next door. He could always go over there and skip the ride into town entirely.

He still enjoyed the feeling of flying, of riding too fast and feeling the wind rush around him, but somehow without the sound of Tim’s excited whooping and the feeling of arms wrapped tight around his chest, it felt far less satisfying.

--

Spoiler was getting suited up, when Jason returned to the ‘Nest’. They kept their suits and weapons in the apartment next door. Tim had bought it under a different name and a nest of shell companies, and they’d put a hole in the wall covered by a bookshelf that swung out if you pulled ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’. Because Tim was a huge dork.

“Not alone,” Cass complained, positioning herself between Steph and the door on the off-chance that her charge decided to make a run for it. Tim’s read on the situation, it seemed, had been at least a little wrong.

“I’ll be fine,” Steph insisted, flipping her hood over her head and securing her mask in place.

“You will,” Jason agreed. Steph jumped. Cass, who was better trained to be aware of her surroundings, didn’t react. “Because I’m coming with you.”

Steph gave a theatrical groan. “I don’t need a minder.”

Jason would have said the same. Had said the same, many times. He responded the way Dick would have, if he’d been here instead. “Do you want someone to teach you how to do a backflip or not?”

She put her hands on her hips. “You’re going to teach me how to do a backflip?”

“I still have Robin skills, you know, even if I don’t look like I got dressed in the dark at a jazzercise convention.”

--

It turned out that Jason could not, in fact, still do a back flip. He groaned, and lay flat on his back on the rooftop. Steph, finally managing to reign in her laughter, squatted down next to him and patted Jason on the shoulder.

“Good thing you decided to wear a helmet, Red.”

Dick would have been so disappointed in him. “I haven’t done a backflip since I was Tim’s height, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break.”

She stood, and offered Jason a hand to leverage his way up. “I still want cool Robin skills, for the record. But maybe we should actually do the patrol before you try cracking your head open on the concrete.”

And so they went on patrol. It was a slow night, with no rogues out. They stopped three muggings and would have broken up a drug deal if Steph hadn’t put her hand on Jason’s arm and whispered, “wait, I know them.”

He tensed. One of the central tenets of vigilantism was that nobody got a pass. With her father, Steph should have known that. The green burned. “What?”

“He’s my neighbour. Uses pot for chronic pain. I know because he asked Mom and me if the smell was bothering us. Didn’t want to be inconsiderate.”

Jason knew well the risks of self-medicating, and told her as much. Steph rolled her eyes. “You’re from the Alley, dude. You know there’s like seventy things shittier than this happening in this city tonight. Beating this guy up isn’t going to fix jack shit.”

She was right, God damn it. “Batman wouldn’t have asked questions.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not Batman,” Steph snapped, “and neither are you.”

She’d spoken with the tone of somebody who’d had this argument before, so it must have been more about Tim than about Jason, but he still felt a stab of pain, a flash of green that was sorrow as much as anger. Jason wasn’t Batman, but he’d once been the next best thing. He wasn’t anymore.

But he’d also come to Gotham thinking that Batman had replaced him and planning to replace Batman in turn. He’d thought a lot about the ways in which Batman was wrong, and he’d wanted to fix it by killing. There was no recidivism from the dead, except for Jason himself. But here was Stephanie, grown from the same dirt as Jason, and she had problems with Batman, just like he did. And yet she’d arrived at a totally different conclusion.

“I can’t just stop stopping drug dealers because one person has a legitimate reason. There’s always going to be assholes who cut their supply or abuse their clients or sell to kids. I’m not fucking having it.”

“And is this guy doing literally any of those things?” Jason’s silence was telling. Below them, the drug deal concluded and both parties went on their ways. “If I were in charge of the government, this wouldn’t even be illegal. Spoiler isn’t about these guys. It’s about stopping people that really deserve it, people nobody else can stop. Like my dad. After that, it’s about stopping people from getting hurt. I don’t want to be Batman, a nightmare used to scare bad kids in the Alley.”

The green did want to be a nightmare. It wanted to rip and tear and hurt. It wanted to be feared. Jason looked again at Steph, perched on the edge of the roof in her Spoiler costume.

“Were you scared of him, as a kid?” Jason had been, but those memories seemed so far distant now, eclipsed by years of knowing the real Bruce, in all his good and all his bad.

She shrugged, which he took as a ‘yes’. “But I was never scared of you.”

Nobody had been scared of Robin. Not even kids in the Alley. Dick had started it, with his bright smiles and laughter and boneless grace. Even when he’d been at his worst with Bruce, he’d never let it get in the way of offering kindness to the people who needed it. Jason had carried it, in a different way than Dick. He hadn’t ever been as able to be free with affection, especially not with strangers, but he thought he’d been good at being gentle to the people who deserved it. That gentle child was dead. He’d been beaten to death in a warehouse.

“Never? That seems a stretch since you broke into my apartment and drugged me and tied me to a chair instead of just talking to me like a normal person.”

Another shrug. “That was mostly Perry and Swan. He said he was sure that you’d died and he thought it was Clayface. Swan wasn’t sure what was going on but she’s… protective of us.”

“And you?”

“If you’d wanted to hurt me, all you had to do was stand there and watch. Maybe it was a ploy to earn my trust, but I didn’t think so. If it had been, you wouldn’t have run off.”

She’d basically been right on the money, but her lack of caution still frightened him. It was a good thing she had Cass and Tim around. “So you want to be… Robin?”

“I want to be Spoiler, whatever that means. Who are you going to be?”

He’d been planning on ‘Red Hood’, part of his thirty-six step double revenge plan. It seemed stupid, now that he thought about it. The Joker didn’t fucking deserve to have a hero – because Jason was going to be a fucking hero, if a more effective one than Bruce – named after him.

“I’m not going to be Robin.”

“Well then, I guess we can break out my favourite Wikipedia page.” Jason waited for the punchline. “List of birds by common name.”

“Is that how he ended up with ‘Peregrine’?”

“Weirdly, he didn’t like my first choice of ‘bushtit’.”

--

They ended their patrol with Jason walking Steph home, across the rooftops. She found herself torn between being angry at him for being overbearing, and reassured by Robin’s presence at her side.

“Why do you have grappling hooks if you never use them?” Jason asked. He must have noticed them when Steph was putting on her costume.

“Peregrine got us everything he’d ever seen Batman use. But none of us know what to do with a grappling hook, so…”

It hadn’t even been part of Cass’s extensive education. Either that, or she’d thought these two were menaces enough without being able to swing around.

Steph thought she sensed a mischievous look on Jason’s face, although with the helmet she could see no such thing. Then suddenly, moving nearly as fast as Cass, he’d leaned over and snatched the grappling hook from her.

“Lesson one,” he said, “always carry two of these, not one. You’ll need the backup at the worst moment. Perry the Platypus can get you extras. Lesson two, check them regularly. Because you’ve never tested this rope, I’m not letting you jump from any real heights on it. Lesson three, aim.”

He took Steph’s hands and wrapped them around the grappling gun, her finger on the trigger. Leaning his head down so it was beside hers, they raised the weapon together. “You’re firing a grappling gun, not a regular gun, so you need to always shoot slightly over where you actually want it to hook onto. Gravity and the winch will pull it down and back into place. Eventually, you’ll be able to do it by instinct, but until you can, for the love of fuck, please do not leap before you’re locked in. Lesson three–”

“You already said three.”

“Lesson four, releasing. You can use your grappling hook in two ways. In one, you’re going to land on the ground, so you just release once you’re running. In the other, you’re going to release in the air. That means you need to switch your finger from the trigger to the release mechanism before you leap. Got all that?”

Steph nodded, slightly dazed, and Jason adjusted their shared grip on the weapon. “Does this shot look good to you?”

She almost nodded again, instinctively, before actually looking. He’d pointed the grappling gun directly at a gargoyle. Asshole, he’d been trying to make her look like an idiot. Steph pointedly adjusted their aim up, and Jason made an amused huffing noise, muffled by his helmet. “Shoot, little bird.”

Ignoring his shitty, patronizing nickname, Steph pulled the trigger and watched in satisfaction as the grappling hook sailed just clear of the gargoyle before falling down and catching, the rope drawing tight. Jason gave a few hard yanks, testing its strength.

“Say,” he said, “this roof isn’t very high.”

It was three stories. “Red, I fucking swear.”

He raised his hands. “I’m not going to push you. But think of the look on Peregrine’s face when he finds out the only non-birdie in the group was the first to fly.”

Tim might actually die of jealousy. “He’s going to hate you.”

“Good. Knock the hero worship out of his head.” Jason stepped to the edge of the roof, clearly preparing for a dramatic bat-style descent. “Remember to be running as you land. I don’t want to set a broken leg.”

And so, steeling her courage, Steph made her way to the edge of the roof and flew.

It was so, so much better than a backflip lesson.

--

Barbara stared at the alert on her monitor for a long moment. She had a lot of emergency alerts set up, for the home bases or hideouts or safe houses of almost a dozen Justice League members. She had alerts for reports of objects from space, alerts for news stories mentioning her name or Dick’s, and alerts to remind her to make sure Green Lantern had done his shift cleaning the bathrooms at the Watchtower. This wasn’t any of those alerts. This was an alert to inform her that somebody was trying to access Batman’s file on the League database.

Someone was trying to access Batman’s very classified file that everyone in the league knew that they had to get permission from Superman to access. Barbara clicked on the alert, to bring up the details of the report, and stared. This wasn’t a hacker, or, if it was, it wasn’t the kind Barbara had been expecting. This wasn’t somebody who’d found a way to spoof a JLID and had gained access that way. This was somebody using a valid ID that hadn’t been used by anybody in years. Barbara checked the file. No, nobody had used this ID since before Oracle had become the head of the Justice League’s remote support team.

Username: BatRob02
Password: 3%Tires%And%Counting

Jason Todd.

As Barbara watched, the intruder, realizing that their access to the Justice League did not include access to the Batman files, stopped for a moment. And then they started trying to hack their way in to the Batman files. They were pretty good. If Barbara hadn’t upped all the security when she first came to work here, they would have slipped under the radar for long enough to get away scot-free. But Barbara was better, and she’d been working in the JL systems for years. She took one last long sip of her coffee, and got to work.

It was the work of only a couple of minutes to create a box to put this intruder in. He wanted past Barbara’s shields, into the Batman files? Fine. He’d get through her walls, but by the time he did, there’d be nothing there but a bunch of nonsense files that Barbara kept around exactly for circumstances like this, and a quiet little virus. She thought about using something flashy, but rejected the impulse. Even if she flattened the intruder’s computer, they’d still be out there with Jason’s passcodes and Barbara was not letting them get away with that. She’d been having a good day. She hadn’t wanted to end it thinking about laughter and a gunshot, and the sound, entirely constructed by her own imagination but no less painful for it, of a crowbar striking flesh, the crunch of bone, and a boy's pained scream.

She hit ‘enter’ with a decisive slap of her pinkie and watched her plan fall into place. They’d been smart, routing their traffic through other servers, rather than simply accessing from their own IP. But they weren’t smart enough, once Barbara’s little bug got to work. She picked her mug back up, fighting a smile. She liked being good at her job. Some days, it almost made up for the role she’d lost.

Navigating with her other hand, she checked her low-priority messages. It had been a busy week, with the Flash dealing with a temporal incursion, the Titans accidentally starting an intergalactic diplomatic incident, and having to dodge her dad’s requests for her to come down to Gotham for her stepmother’s birthday. It wasn’t happening.

The ‘low-priority’ tier was below ‘emergency’, which was for things that were going to need attention from the entire league or were going to result in imminent death, and also below ‘urgent’, which was for things that needed to be addressed in the next few days. This tier was for things that had the potential to become urgent, but hadn’t yet, or could probably be managed by whoever had reported them. In general, everyone in the league had gotten good at sticking to Barbara’s rules, although Flash had a tendency to say everything was ‘urgent’. His sense of time, Barbara thought, was a little messy.

There were three low-priority messages from Martian Manhunter, who provided regular updates about potential threats to be added to the League’s database, and two more each from Wonder Woman and Green Lantern on the same subject. J’onn and Diana had even remembered to flag their messages as database entries, which was nice of them. Barbara checked on her virus. It hadn’t been noticed yet.

There was one low-priority message not from any of the usual suspects. Superman very rarely used the emergency update system. Barbara wasn’t sure why, exactly. He just didn’t often want her help. If he had database entries, he did them himself.

--

Subject: Possible Gotham-Based Rogue in Metropolis?

Oracle,

Are you aware of a Gothamite rogue who wears a solid red helmet (similar to a motorcycle helmet) and carries a gun? Young (18-22), male, Gotham accent. He had access to a small amount of kryptonite, but seemed more interested in any potential answers I had about L’s article on Gotham’s cape situation than in anything to do with me personally.

I doubt he’ll bother me again, given that he seems to have left Metropolis (I heard his heartbeat on the train back to Gotham) but any further information you have would be appreciated.

Best,

Kal-el

--

There was a beep as Barbara’s virus finally returned to her the answer she’d wanted. She checked the result three times before tapping out a six-digit code on the number pad to her left and speaking directly into her comm.

“Oracle to Nightwing.”

“O? What’s up?”

She’d never wanted to deliver news to anyone less than she wanted to deliver this news to Dick. “I need you in Gotham as soon as possible. Someone’s broken into the Bat Cave, and they didn’t trip any of the sensors while doing it.”

Chapter Text

That morning, Jason got up early to make a baffled Tim breakfast before school – the last of the eggs, they were going to have to get groceries today – and then turned off all the lights in the living room and slept for another three hours. Much as he hated to admit it, the couch in the ‘Nest’ was the most comfortable place he’d slept in years. There was something about the space that felt warm, even if it was decorated like someone’s college dorm.

If Jason was honest with himself, the thing that probably helped the most was Cassandra’s presence. She moved quietly, but not in the same way that Talia and the rest of the League did. In spite of the fact that the two of them had never met, she moved like Bruce. Not like Batman either. Like Bruce Wayne. Quiet, yes, but not in a way that felt sharp and deadly. Some instinctive part of Jason’s brain could sense Cass moving around between her room and the kitchen, and that part of his brain said ‘protector’. It was dumb, and Jason hated himself for the weakness, but he was sleeping and honestly, that counted for more than words could say.

When he woke up the second time, it was nearly noon, and Cass was sitting in her room with the door open, watching a YouTube video of a ballet. When she paused it to talk to Jason, he saw that it was apparently from “Romeo and Juliet”. He hadn’t even known that was a ballet, but looking at it now he thought he could pick out Montagues and Capulets.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go out for lunch with me. We don’t have a lot of food in the fridge.”

She watched him for a moment, considering. “I do not go out.”

“Because you don’t want to, or because you’d normally have to go alone?”

She raised two fingers, presumably meaning the second option. “Well, it’s a special opportunity then. We should get something that we won’t ever make ourselves. Do you like sushi?”

Jason had actually saved money the last few days not going to bars for information and eating together with the rest of the Little Birds. So, when Cass nodded, he didn’t bother taking money from Tim’s cash drawer. He just offered her his hand, and escorted her, like a Victorian maiden to the ball, out of the apartment.

--

Dick showed up at the Batcave dressed as Nightwing, via zeta tube. They’d decided this was the best method to get the drop on whoever was inside, in case they were watching all the entrances. Up at the Watchtower, Babs had shown him Clark’s note and the batcomputer data. The evidence was clear. Someone was looking for Bruce.

No matter how far they’d drifted apart, these last few years, Dick wasn’t going to let any harm come to his father.

He emerged, escrima drawn, to discover… an empty cave. No, actually. He’d discovered something much stranger.

“All clear, O.”

“Copy.” He could hear her typing, no doubt working on the case from some other angle.

“And I mean all clear in two senses. Whoever was here cleaned up.”

“Like wiped their fingerprints?”

“Like polished the penny. I can see my reflection.”

There was a long silence on Barbara’s side of the comm. “And you’re sure it’s not just… I don’t know, no one’s been in there getting it dirty?”

“Actual bats live in here. I’ve seen what it looks like when Agent A takes a week off. Nobody’s been here in months; it should be disgusting.”

Dick moved through the space as carefully as he would have any other crime scene, treating it with as much detachment as he could. There were footprints, and someone had parked a motorcycle in here recently. None of the bat vehicles seemed to be missing, so they’d brought their own.

“I’m sending you a picture of some tire tracks. There might be footprints, but it hasn’t rained much recently so they aren’t muddy or anything. I’ll get you what I can of those too.”

“Copy,” she said again, and Dick thought that he’d probably lost her full attention.

He moved over to the computer, and dusted it for prints, which he entered into the Batcomputer and sent on to Barbara. The cameras in the cave and around the rest of the manor had, irritatingly, been wiped. Then he went upstairs. The manor hadn’t been cleaned the way the cave had. There were still dropcloths over everything, and Dick might have been able to imagine that nobody had set foot in here, except – there was a mug in the dish rack. Clean, so no fingerprints or DNA. But it was clear that someone had come upstairs, made a cup of coffee, and then returned everything to its place.

“There’s two sets of fingerprints,” Barbara said, in his ear. “One is Timothy Drake.”

Dick remembered Tim Drake. “The neighbour. The one who figured out B’s secret identity.”

“Bingo.”

“And the other?”

Her tone changed, grew more serious. “It’s the strangest thing. They’re Jason’s. I would have thought you or Bruce or even Alfred would have used the computer since.”

“Maybe Agent A swapped out the keyboard with an old one before he left?”

“Maybe,” Babs agreed, sounding skeptical. “Weird, though.”

Weirder still, when Dick went to test the cleaning supplies, the only other place he knew his culprit had touched, Drake’s fingerprints weren’t anywhere. This time there were two distinct sets: Alfred Pennyworth and, again, Jason Todd.

Even after all these years, there was no getting away from Wayne Manor’s resident restless spirit.

--

Jason and Cass went to a small, somewhat upscale sushi restaurant and grill, where Jason had never been. Because they were early for the lunch rush, they got a booth all to themselves, and sat on the same side so they could both have their backs to the wall.

They got on surprisingly well, all things considered. Cass gave Jason her order by pointing at the menu, and he relayed everything for the both of them to the waitress.

“And can I get you anything to drink besides water?” She asked Cass, after she’d written everything down on her tablet.

Cass glanced down at the menu, and then shot a glance at Jason. She didn’t know the etiquette or the expectations, of course. He could practically hear a voice that sounded like Bruce berating him for not explaining every minute detail as clearly as he possibly could.

“My friend and I will share a pot of green tea,” he told her, with a look he hoped said ‘leave, now’. He could always leave a good tip later to make up for his necessary rudeness now.

Fortunately, she caught the hint, and nodded. “That’ll be right over.”

Cass tilted her head, examining Jason critically. “‘Friend.’ You mean that.”

Jason didn’t really have any friends. Even back when he’d been a kid, he hadn’t had a lot of friends. He wasn’t a social butterfly like Dick, who had school friends and Titans friends and fucking circus friends, probably. His most meaningful relationships had been with Bruce, Alfred, Dick, and Barbara, usually in that order unless Bruce or Dick were being assholes. Nowadays he had Talia, and that only dubiously.

“Not yet, but I’d like to be,” Jason admitted. He saw no point in lying to Cass, since she’d know if he did.

She nodded. “You did not want this at first. What changed?”

The waitress came back with the pot of tea and two cups. She poured the first cup for them, and then left the pot.

“It’ll be too hot,” Jason warned her, half out of concern and half to dodge the question.

What had changed? He hadn’t come to Gotham wanting any friends, let alone three teenage vigilante friends. He was turning into Dick, with his own miniature team of masks. He didn’t want this responsibility, he wanted his revenge on Bruce for replacing him.

But Bruce hadn’t replaced him. Bruce was gone. He wanted to hurt Bruce for abandoning Gotham, abandoning Batman. But he still didn’t know where Bruce had gone or why. So why was he so angry?

The Green was angry. The Green needed to be angry. It didn’t need friends. Jason didn’t need friends. The pit had stripped that from him, the humanity required to need friends.

“Not broken,” Cass corrected, reading whatever she could see in his body language.

“I am, though. I don’t know why I want to be friends, okay? I’m not capable of it.”

“Bullshit.” He stared at her swearing, and she ducked her head. “Steph.” A bad influence. Jason couldn’t exactly judge.

“I’m not right. The Pit doesn’t bring you back right. But when I’m with you guys I guess I feel it less, okay?”

She reached out and pressed his cup of tea into his hand. Then she squeezed his shoulder. “Me too. They help.”

Jason took a little sip of the tea. It warmed him as much emotionally as physically. “You too, blackbird. You help.”

She smiled, a small but clearly delighted smile. “You help too, Jay.”

--

After lunch, they walked around the city. Jason hadn’t started with a particular goal in mind, although they’d have to get groceries eventually, but his feet carried him almost instinctively to the place where he needed to be.

Bruce and Alfred were missing. Dick and Barbara were gone. But there was one last person in Gotham who knew that Jason Todd was Robin, one person who certainly wouldn’t report him to the Justice League.

He lingered in front of the Gotham Humane Society. Cass stopped beside him.

“Inside?”

Jason shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Catwoman, maybe. She knows who I am. She might know where Bruce is. But I don’t want to drag you into anything.”

She grabbed him by the elbow. “I’ll drag.”

-

The person at the front desk of the GHS had close-shaven blue hair and a name tag that read: JONI they/them I love PARROTS

“Hi!” They said brightly. “How can I help you?”

Jason turned on his best charming smile, trying to seem somewhere between Brucie Wayne and ‘Call-me-Dick’ Grayson. “Hi Joni. Do you know if Selina’s in today?” They seemed a little nervous, so he toned it down a little. “Nothing weird, just, she offered to show Robyn and me the lay of the land and we weren’t sure if it was a good day for it or not?”

It was as good a way as any to get the word ‘Robin’ into the conversation, although as Joni said, “one minute,” and went into the back, Cass shot him a very deliberate raised eyebrow.

‘Sorry’, he mouthed, and she gave a slight shake of her head, more bemused than angry.

Selina had made an effort to show Jason around, once upon a time, and so it wasn’t a surprise that a mention of ‘Robin’ asking to see her had summoned her as effectively as, well, catnip.

“Ro-” the word died, half formed on her lips, as she took in the scene before her. She looked from Cass to Jason and back, clearly trying to determine which one of them was the culprit. Joni, for their part, emerged behind her, clearly curious but trying not to show it.

Jason didn’t know Catwoman – Selina – as well as Bruce did, but he’d met her plenty of times, in and out of mask. He knew her well enough to know that she looked older, in her thirties rather than her twenties, and it struck him only now how young she must have been when first getting into the vigilante game. Perhaps it was the change in setting, but her posture seemed different too. It was not seductive or coiled violence, the way she was at fancy parties or on crime sprees. Rather, she wore a simple green t-shirt, lightly coated in cat hair, and dark blue jeans, and stood with the lazy confidence of a skilled bartender. None of that, though, undercut the murderous expression on her face as she stared at Jason.

He needed to cut through whatever story was forming in her mind and quickly before Cass, who’d gone abruptly tense beside him, felt the need to intervene.

“I know it’s been a long time,” Jason said, rushing the words out, “but I never did take you up on that offer, and I thought–”

She cut him off. “Where the hell have you been?”

There were a lot of answers to that question, but the salient one was probably, “Talia.”

The murderous look didn’t drop, but Cass seemed to relax slightly, which was probably a good sign. Selina stalked around the desk, vowed, “oh, I am going to kill her,” and, to Jason’s immense surprise, pulled him into a fierce hug.

“I’ll, uh–” Joni wisely fled the scene.

“No follow up questions?” Jason said, rather disbelieving. He knew he’d been raised by the most suspicious man either side of the Mississippi, but this seemed unusually far in the other direction. Even Tim had needed more than that and he looked at Jason like he could weave straw into gold.

She laughed. “I’m not your father, Jason, but I am an expert in thieves. Nobody in their right mind would think to get anything from me by pretending to be Jason Todd.” She was the first person since his resurrection who’d gotten his name right. Thank fuck. “And, if there were anyone in this world who would think to harm your father by keeping you from him for this long, that person is Talia.” Selina spat the name with a sincere loathing that went far beyond that of a romantic rival.

Had Talia been trying to harm Bruce? She’d given Jason his life when Bruce had abandoned him, had failed him. Had it all been a show? Surely not. Bruce hadn’t even been affected by it.

But if Bruce had been here in Gotham, he would have been. Jason would have hurt him. The Green wouldn’t have stuttered in the first place if Bruce hadn’t been missing. If the Little Birds hadn’t taken to the streets in his absence, Jason never would have met them, never would have let them push it away.

Fucking Talia and fucking Ra’s and the fucking League and their fucking mind games.

“I do want something from you, though.”

Selina ignored him, pulling back with her hands on his shoulders as she looked at Cass. “And who’s this?”

Jason considered the odds of eavesdropping and decided they were decently high. “She’s a friend. She knows everything.” And what the hell, “and I’m not sure she’s ever actually petted a cat.”

Cass shook her head, and Selina got a look on her face like she’d just found a new life mission.

--

They ended up back at Selina’s apartment, with Selina’s cats. There were three, at the moment: Yarrow, Baby, and Ra.

“I only named Ra,” Selina explained, and then to Cass, she said, “Yarrow’s the easiest with strangers. Kneel here beside me and he’ll probably come to you.” She handed Cass a couple of treats, as extra motivation.

The whole process took about five minutes and ended with a fat grey cat asleep in Cass’s lap and a wondrous expression on her face as she very carefully stroked his head.

“Do you mind if Jason and I take a minute in private?” When Cass shook her head, Selina practically dragged him by his elbow into what seemed to be a spare bedroom. There wasn’t much on the walls and the bed was made, but somebody had left a volume of the “Journal of Psychiatric Research” on the bedside table.

Jason had been waiting, anticipating questioning, for the entirety of their walk over here. He wasn’t expecting the first question to be, “where did you find that girl?”

“She found me here in Gotham. Her dad is an assassin called David Cain and he’s getting a bullet to the head if I ever meet him.”

She nodded. “Do you want me to put his name out there? There are other people in Gotham who would… take care of someone who would do something like that.”

There had always been occasional Gotham villains with lines they wouldn’t cross, their own twisted senses of justice. “You’d have to ask Cass what she wants for herself.”

Another nod, and then, finally, the conversation turned where Jason had been waiting for it to. “And you? What do you want for yourself?”

“Answers.” Selina sat down on the edge of her guest bed. “What the hell happened after I died, Selina? Where’s Batman? Where’s the Joker? What the hell happened to everybody else? Why is the manor empty?”

She ran a hand through her hair and then, like a dejected teenager, flopped back on the bed to stare at the ceiling. “Fuck, kitten. I never thought I’d have to tell you this. And none of us were imagining you coming back to an empty house. I’m sorry.”

“Selina?” Jason tried to keep fear out of his voice but it was difficult. He hated that she was keeping him in suspense.

She sat up again, expression corralled into a seriousness that didn’t suit her. “Bruce killed him. Just after you died.”

Steph had said as much. Jason hadn’t believed it. Some fundamental part of him hadn’t been able to believe it. To accept it would be to accept two fundamental truths of Jason’s life – that Batman did not kill, and that Bruce had not loved him enough – were fundamentally false.

“How?” He asked, feeling utterly detached from his own body.

“Strangulation. Joker crawled out of the rubble and Bruce… it wasn’t a fight, really.” Selina, as if driven by something other than herself, moved into a storytelling mode. “He wanted to turn himself in, after. They would have killed him in prison and we knew that. I think he knew that too. He would have gone through with it, but Alfred and Barbara threatened to turn themselves in too, if he did that. They called in the Justice League and one of them got rid of the body and got Bruce out of the suit before the cops showed up. I don’t know who. I didn’t find out what was happening until they’d gotten him back to Gotham. They needed someone who knew who he was, who wouldn’t let him hurt himself.”

He didn’t want to hear this, and he couldn’t stop listening. “It was…”

“It was bad. Dick got back planetside a few weeks later. Missed the real funeral, had to come to the public memorial like the rest of the league. Gave that stupid speech Superman ghostwrote for Bruce.” That explained a lot about how Dick would give a speech good enough to go viral.

“He went out with Superman as Robin for a while, to keep the rumours down, and I think they had the Martian Manhunter meddle a bit too, convincing people that Robin was alive. And then Dick and Bruce had their blowout fight. Bruce wanted him to quit being a vigilante. Dick told him he could fuck right off. It wasn’t… they were both doing terribly and neither of them was really to blame. Dick went back to Blüd, said Gotham was-”

“A crypt?”

She started. “Graveyard, he said to me, but same thing. Him and Barbara split Bruce’s duties in the Justice League, with him on the missions and her as the brains. We all tried to hold everything together and it was such a fucking mess and I wish I could tell you where Bruce is but I don’t know. He pushed me away pretty hard in the year or so before he vanished. Didn’t want anything to do with me. I think – I hope – the League took him away from here. Somewhere with a few less ghosts. Somewhere he could get help.”

There was a part of Jason, even in spite of everything, that had always seen Bruce as infallible. He’d died because Batman had failed him, and yet Jason had always seen his father in that way so many people see their parents: stronger than the problems that plague the rest of us. It seemed inconceivable that anything would be able to break Bruce, to crack the shield he wrapped around his emotions, let alone to shatter it. But something had. Jason had. The Joker had. The two of them entangled had ruined everything, had shattered the family Jason had for a brief wondrous moment been a part of.

The green surged, wanting to find someone to be angry at. The Joker didn’t satisfy it; he was dead. He was definitely dead because if Bruce set out to kill someone he’d do it right. It tried to latch on to Bruce, but Jason batted it away. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen one of his parents utterly unable to cope. He’d loved Catherine, after all, truly loved her, and some instinctive part of him, older than memory, refused to hate Bruce any more than he hated her. The green scrambled. It tried to turn on Selina, but she’d done nothing. So in the end it turned inwards, towards Jason himself.

Jason had come back and he’d listened instinctively to Talia, who he knew – knew – had a fucked up past with Bruce and a doubly fucked up moral compass. She’d lied to him, with intent. That much was clear from the newspapers. She had to have known something else was happening. He hadn’t ever questioned her narrative, not until Lois Lane had shouted the truth from the rooftops. If Talia had been right, if there’d been someone else in the Robin costume – Tim, say, or Steph – Jason would have killed them. Just for doing the same thing he himself had done to Dick. Fuck.

A hand came down on his shoulder and Jason startled. Somehow, he’d come to be sitting on the floor. Selina and Cass were kneeling in front of him, sharing looks of concern.

“Here,” Cass said, and passed him Yarrow. The cat, warm and heavy, stretched himself but didn’t move from where he was placed on Jason’s lap. Instinctively, he stroked his fingers across silky grey fur. Cass herself raised her hand and stroked her fingers, just as gently, across Jason’s head. “Not your fault.”

“I should have known better, Cass. I trusted all the wrong people. I thought he let me down and I let him down too. I should have been here years ago. He gave up everything he stands for to avenge me and I what? I spit in his face and become a murderous asshole who takes orders from Talia al-fucking-Ghul. If he knew what I’d become he’d never’ve done it. And he would have been right. I’m not worth the end of Batman.”

Selina picked up one of the other cats who’d come to investigate. “You’re an idiot if you think any of this – whatever you think you’ve become – would make an ounce of difference to him.” Jason gave her an extremely sceptical look. “He’s always been able to forgive some of us our tresspasses. You know that. And even if he wasn’t, Bruce has always believed in our ability to change, to ‘better ourselves’.” She gave air quotes. “He loves you, little thief.”

Selina had always liked Jason because of the batmobile tires story. She’d offered to teach him the tricks of the trade more than a few times. Selina’s two love languages were sharing her cats and committing crimes. In those ways, she’d shown how she loved Jason. He’d forgotten. How had he forgotten an entire person who’d loved him?

Cass’s fingers caught Jason’s chin, turning his head so she could look directly into his eyes, the eyes that portrayed exactly the monster he’d been frozen on the edge of becoming. “What am I?” She asked, softly.

Jason stared at her, utterly uncomprehending, and Cass said, “Father. He made me kill. Be a weapon. What am I? What am I worth?”

Selina’s breath caught, a noise of soft fury. Jason thought that there was probably going to be a message going around the Gotham rogue grapevine shortly that David Cain was blacklisted and anyone who so much as pissed on him while he was on fire would face a very angry Catwoman.

“You didn’t have a choice, Cass,” Jason reassured her. “You’re a good person and you deserve to be happy, doing whatever you want to be doing. Whether that’s being Black Swan or Cassandra or just plain Cass. You never had a choice.”

“Did you?”

She couldn’t have struck a killing blow any more easily with a knife or a gun than she had with just those two words.

Because he hadn’t had a choice, had he? He hadn’t asked to come back. He hadn’t asked to be thrown in the pit. He hadn’t asked for Talia to lie to him at every turn, and everything he had done had been done under the influence of the pit and with the fundamental misconception that Bruce had replaced him. When was the last time he’d made an informed decision, with access to all the information on the table, just for himself?

Well, he’d taken Cass out for sushi. He’d gone out on patrol with Steph. He’d shown Tim the Cave. He’d followed the three of them back to the Nest. Talia never would have approved of that.

“Breathe,” Selina instructed, “you’re here now, and Talia can choke.”

“She was kind to me, sometimes.”

“She kept you away from your family, kitten. There’s nothing kind about that.”

He hadn’t even seen Dick yet. Bruce and Alfred at least were missing but Dick was only an hour away in Blüdhaven. Jason could have gone to see him at any time, and he hadn’t. What had he even had to be angry at Dick for? Dick had been offworld. He couldn’t have done anything. Or Barbara? Why hadn’t he gone looking for Barbara? She might have been gone but her family was still here. She’d been in just the same position Jason had, at the Joker’s mercy. Nobody had killed the Joker for her.

“What do I do now?”

“Whatever you want to do.”

When Jason decided that what he wanted to do was to sit on the ground holding Selina’s fat cat and breathe raggedly, neither of them said anything to scold him for his choice.

Chapter Text

Contrary to popular – Steph’s – belief, Tim didn’t hate school. Really, he didn’t. He just found it boring. Half of it he didn’t need to learn – Shakespeare, seriously? – and the other half he felt held back by the pace and approach his teachers took. There were people in this world who enjoyed learning for its own sake, even when it wasn’t practical, or who enjoyed school for the socializing. Tim was not one of those people. He went to school for one reason and one reason only: to keep up appearances. The thing about being legally in the care of a fake person was that the whole gambit went out the window if anyone asked too many questions, and missing school was a quick way to get people to ask questions.

In spite of the fact he was bored out of his mind, sitting through a chemistry lecture on the basics of calculating pressure in a closed system, Tim had not wanted to be called to the principal’s office. He really, really hadn’t wanted that. But the call had come, and Ms. Powell had sent him down.

Tim trudged through the hallways as slowly as he could justify. He got a sip of water from the water fountain. He held the door for one of the English teachers. He stopped to look at the awards case in the school hallways. If he looked back far enough, he could see his father’s name printed there. Jack Drake had always excelled in all the conventional ways. Convention and propriety had mattered to him. Tim was sure he wouldn’t have approved of Cass, Steph, or Jason. Tim didn’t think he gave a single fuck what Jack Drake would have thought of any of them.

Loitering couldn’t save him forever, no matter how badly he wanted it to, so Tim opened the doorway to the main office and let himself in. There were two secretaries, Mrs. Zhao and Ms. Scott. It was Ms. Scott who looked up when Tim opened the door. “Timothy Drake?”

He didn’t get in trouble often enough, or excel often enough, for them to remember his face. “That’s me.”

“Principal Williams would like to see you in his office.” She gestured to the appropriate door.

Principal Williams was a balding middle aged man who always wore button-down shirts and usually wore a broad smile at school assemblies. Tim had never seen him look as serious as he did when he opened his office door.

“Timothy,” he greeted, “there’s a police officer here to see you.”

Tim’s breath caught in his throat. He hoped the expression on his face was suitably confused. “Uh-”

“Detective, actually,” said the man sitting in the Principal’s office, turning slightly in his chair, and Tim recognized him well before he pulled out his badge. “Detective Richard Grayson.”

He didn’t have any legal authority to be here. He was with the Blüdhaven police. But Principal Williams, for all his kind spirit, was not a particularly observant man. Years of senior pranks showed that. And besides, Dick Grayson didn’t need any kind of legal authority to threaten Tim. He knew that Tim knew that he was Nightwing. This was a threat.

They were absolutely fucked.

Tim had contingency plans for if the police ever came for him, but they were all based around it being the actual police, not Nightwing. He supposed that he could have spilled the beans now, sent Nightwing after Jason, but Jason was alone with Cass today and Tim couldn’t set off that explosion with Cass in proximity. Also, Jason had been kind to him, kinder in a more personal way than Robin, as played by either Jason or Dick, had ever been. Tim owed him the right to set his own boundaries, for as long as he could.

“Principal Williams,” Tim said, in the polite society voice he’d learned from his parents, “would you mind staying in the room? I’m still a minor, but I don’t want to have to bother my Uncle. He’s away on a business trip.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Grayson said lightly, “this is just a routine step in an investigation.”

Principal Williams, sensing a threat to one of his charges, puffed up with a mixture of defensiveness and self-importance, “then I’m sure, Detective, it won’t be a problem to fulfil Timothy’s request. He’s had a very difficult year, you know. His parents recently passed.”

It didn’t feel recent, really. Except sometimes, when Tim went to get on the wrong bus after school and remembered that he didn’t live at the Drake Estate anymore. He was selling it, and good riddance. But in those moments, it felt like he was getting the call all over again.

This was apparently news to Nightwing. He shot Tim a sincere look of sympathy. “I’m sorry, Mr. Drake. That’s a very painful loss.”

The difference was, the Graysons had loved their son. Even Tim had known that and he’d only met them the once. It wasn’t the same, not really.

“So you don’t mind if Principal Williams stays?”

He never thought he’d feel a tinge of satisfaction as the original Robin barely managed to avoid gritting his teeth.

“Of course not.”

Tim and Principal Williams both settled into their chairs. It still wasn’t an ideal situation, but, well, now Dick couldn’t ask any specific questions, or make any specific threats.

“I’m here to speak to you about a break in at Wayne Manor.” Tim forced himself to keep breathing.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what that has to do with me?”

“You’re the Waynes’ neighbor, aren’t you?” He was one of the Waynes, no matter his last name. It was only lucky for him that Principal Williams hadn’t been teaching at Gotham Academy when Dick had been a student.

“Not since my parents died,” Tim said, going for maximum sympathy points. “My uncle has custody, remember? My parents’ house is being sold.”

“So you haven’t been there recently?”

He’d been wearing a helmet when riding with Jason, and he’d wiped the footage at the Cave, so the only evidence of yesterday’s excursion was that he’d taken the bus home. Still, it would be best not to be caught in an obvious lie.

“I was there yesterday for a little bit. I just… wanted to see my old room.”

“I see,” he said, bluntly, “and while you were there, did you happen to notice anyone going into Wayne Manor?”

Tim shook his head. “No, Sir. It’s about twenty minutes away on foot, and I wasn’t really paying attention to other stuff. I just… I felt homesick, y’know?”

“I do.” Of course he did. Because his parents had been murdered. Tim would have felt bad if he hadn’t been petrified with fear. “But are you sure you didn’t see two people on a motorcycle?”

“Pretty sure.” So they had pulled a security camera somewhere. Shit. It must have been from the road, not the Cave. Tim was pretty sure that if Jason’s face had been visible, they’d be having a very different conversation.

“So how did you get to Bristol?”

“By bus. Took it home too. I think I have the ticket in my bag if you need to see it.”

He shook his head. “No need.”

“Is there anything else, or can I go back to class now? We’re learning about Boyle’s Law and pressure and stuff and I don’t really get it.”

“Just one more question. Where did you say your uncle was?”

Shit. “Business trip. I didn’t say where, but he’s just in Toronto. Something about Drake Industries Canada?”

He could tell by the curt nod that Dick didn’t believe him. Tim cursed himself for asking Principal Williams to stay. It was possible that Nightwing might not be bothered by a teenager living alone – and he wasn’t really alone anyways, he had Cass, who kept him safer than any legal guardian could have – but if Principal Williams caught on, he was basically guaranteed to call someone.

Tim pulled out his trump card. He furrowed his eyebrows as if in concentration. “What did you say your first name was again, Detective Grayson?”

“Richard.”

“Bruce Wayne’s son?” Tim asked, as mildly as he could. Principal Williams gasped out loud. “Isn’t it kind of a conflict of interest for you to be working on a break-in at your own house?”

“I don’t live there.”

“Right! The papers said you moved to Blüdhaven.” Tim frowned, almost enjoying it. “But how are you investigating this case if you’re with the Blüdhaven police?”

“I-”

Principal Williams stood up. “Can I see that badge of yours again, young man?”

‘Young man’. Nightwing was totally fucked. He must have known it too. Instead of showing his badge, he stood and offered Tim his hand. “I think that’s all I need from Mr. Drake, actually. He clearly didn’t see anything unusual going on in Wayne Manor last night.”

Tim took his hand and shook. “Thank you, Sir.”

He’d never been so glad to go to chemistry class in his life.

--

After Tim and Steph were done at school, they came back to the nest, and Jason told them what he’d learned from Selina. It was a fraught experience, to say the least. Tim spent the entire time looking like he had something on the tip of his tongue. A comfort perhaps, or some platitude, but every time he opened his mouth to speak, one of them would shut it, Jason with a sharp look or Steph with a “shh!” or Cass with a hand on top of his. She knew, more than anyone, that if Jason stopped talking, he’d never manage to finish the story. And it needed to be told.

“So,” Jason said, voice rough to his own ears, “Batman’s not coming back. And I… I’m sorry. I know you needed someone to come and fix this, but I don’t think he can.”

Steph looked angry. At Bruce or Joker or Jason or Selina or the universe. Maybe some combination of all of them. Tim’s eyes were wet, but he still had that look on his face, like he was desperate to say something.

Cass noticed it too. “Tim. Speak.”

“I think we’re busted,” he mumbled a mile a minute, “I was at school today, and Nightwing came to see me about a break in at Wayne Manor, and he said it was because I’m the neighbor, but that was clearly a lie.”

“Fuck,” Steph cursed, with feeling, and there was a moment of silence, a calm before the room exploded into motion.

The cause of the explosion was a sound, a quiet creaking. Nobody would have noticed it if they hadn’t all been paranoid vigilantes. But they all were, and they knew that sound. Someone had landed on the ledge outside the living room window. Everyone reacted at the same time. Cass moved first and fastest, dashing into the kitchen and, by the time the explosion had subsided, she was standing in the doorway holding a rolling pin outstretched the way some people would have held a fencing sword. Steph moved away from the window as well, drifting towards the door not as if she intended to fight but as if she was preparing herself to run. Tim leapt off the couch, diving towards where his tablet was charging in the corner.

Jason, with entwined feelings of determination and dread, stood, drifted over to the living room window like a man possessed, and opened it. An alarm went off on Tim’s phone automatically as someone unauthorized – a lithe man in a black and blue costume – stepped through the open window and inside.

Jason learned years after the fact that in that moment Tim, reacting by pure instinct, had raised his tablet and taken a picture. The picture was from ground level, gazing up at its two subjects. Immortalized in that shot, Dick’s mouth hung open in pure shock as he took in Jason’s face, while Jason, captured in profile, shrunk back in fear and guilt. Outside the scope of the camera’s gaze, Cassandra lowered her improvised bat, holding it at hip level in her back hand while the other came up in front of her. Stephanie slid towards the doorway, moving to Cass’s side either to disarm her or to help her in a potential fight.

Cass thought her home was being threatened, Jason realized, the thought filtering slowly through the haze in his brain. There was a little green, latent fury at Dick for not being there, either for him or for Bruce, but more than any green there was simple fear, the terrible possibility of being judged by someone who he loved and found wanting. Jason slid away from Dick, towards Cass, not knowing what he would do if either of them decided to attack.

The look on Dick’s face morphed into one of pure fury and he took a single threatening step towards Jason.

What would have happened in that moment might have been terrible if not for Tim. He leapt to his feet, still clutching his tablet. “Stop!” There was a collective turn to look at him. “I have information proving that Dick Grayson is Nightwing. If you lay a finger on him, the entire country will know who you are by tomorrow morning.”

“How dare you?” Dick hissed at Jason. The threat was effective though, and he pulled back. Turning his gaze on Tim, he demanded. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, kid? Working with Clayface?”

“He’s not fucking Clayface,” Steph snapped, all bravado. “Where do you get off, attacking your own fucking brother?”

“Spoiler,” Tim soothed. He was the only one of them managing any semblance of calm. To Dick, he added, “we thought the same, but I’ve run every test in the book. Fingerprints, DNA, memory. It’s him.”

The Camera Kid thing was probably as good a memory test as anything Bruce would have come up with.

Jason found his tongue heavy in his mouth. “The grave’s empty, Dickface. Check for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

He didn’t look at Jason. His eyes were fixed entirely on Tim. “Show me.”

He held out the tablet instantly, evidently never having pulled up his blackmail information – if it even existed.

“You ran DNA tests on me?”

Tim shrugged. “Your DNA was on file in the cave and the equipment down there is crazy. Also, I kinda thought this might come up.”

Dick looked away from the screen, to Steph and Cass. They were standing together now, and Steph had taken the rolling pin. Cass’s stance was still combat ready and Jason had no doubt that she would be on Dick in an instant if he made a move to hurt Jason.

“Who are you two?”

They both glanced to Tim for leadership. The secret identity thing was probably partially shot by their faces being clear, but Dick had no reason to recognize either of them.

Jason answered for them. “They’re the people who’ve been doing the job you and B left behind. Black Swan, Spoiler, Peregrine.” He pointed at each of them in turn. “Whatever problems you have with me, you stay the fuck away from them.”

“God,” Dick said, voice growing faint as he spoke, “you’re real.”

And then he sat there on the floor, his shoulders shaking in hard sobs. The mood of the room shifted from tense to awkward. Tim turned his tablet off and plugged it back in. Steph switched the rolling pin to her right hand and put her left on Cass’s shoulder. Dick buried his face in his hands and Jason, drawn by the same impulse that had pulled him to the window, knelt beside him.

Dimly, he could hear the sounds of the Little Birds filing out of the room.

--

“Nightwing!” Dick could hear Barbara in his ear, voice growing increasingly desperate. “Nightwing, come in?”

He found he couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe. He hadn’t meant to cry and now the tears were coming so hard and they couldn’t stop.

That was Jason. It was Jason and he was here and he was different. If he’d looked the same, Dick never could have believed it. He looked older, bigger – almost as big as Bruce, he’d always said Dick’s days as the ‘big brother’ were numbered – stronger and worn, his eyes an unusual green that had faded the longer Dick had looked at them.

“Nightwing, I am alerting Superman in three minutes if you do not respond.”

Since Jason died, they’d all been paranoid about Dick, especially when he was back in Gotham. Dick understood why, even if he hated it. If Bruce lost Dick to Gotham or to the mission – the way he’d lost his parents, and Jason, and very nearly Barbara – it would destroy him.

But Jason was here. Oh God. Jason was here, had been here for long enough to grow up and they’d missed it. Because Barbara had moved on and Bruce had fallen apart and Dick had run away. Jason had been right here in Gotham for who knew how long, and he’d had to break into the Batcave to look for answers, and he’d used his own codes to try and hack the Justice League and Dick couldn’t breathe and–

And there were hands on his shoulders. Broad hands, strong but aware enough of their strength not to hurt.

“Dick.” It wasn’t exactly Jason’s voice. The last time he’d spoken to Jason, he’d been in the middle of puberty, voice still cracking at inopportune moments. This was a man’s voice, belonging to an adult. The way he said Dick’s name, though, hadn’t changed a bit. “Are you having a panic attack?”

Good question. “Don’t think so, haven’t… before.”

“Nightwing?” Barbara demanded again, and Dick grimaced. She sounded genuinely afraid for him.

“Stand down, O. I’m talking to someone.” He raised his hand to his ear and took the comm out.

“Babs?” Jason asked, gently.

Dick nodded. Now that it was done, he doubled back over and let a fresh wave of tears flow.

Jason’s hands left his arms and Dick could hear himself keen. They returned, gripping tighter. The touch grounded him.

“There’s no fucking kleenex in this house,” he grumbled. Then, more loudly, “Tim! Add kleenex to the shopping list.”

“Handkerchief. Utility belt.”

Jason laughed, and, with the instinctive knowledge of someone who’d once worn a uniform designed by just the same person, retrieved it. “Agent A still makes you carry one?”

“Habit.” Alfred hadn’t been around while Dick was gearing up as Nightwing since Jason died.

But Jason was here, and Jason was alive, and Dick’s heart was full to bursting. He wiped tears away and blew snot into the handkerchief. Dick was an ugly crier. Most people were, in his experience, although there were always exceptions. He’d seen Wally cry and come out the other side with a smile on his face that more than made up for any blotchiness.

“Long day?” Jason asked. His hand had come up from Dick’s arm to his shoulder.

“Long day?” Dick repeated, incredulous, “Jason, you were dead.”

His hands drifted away, and his expression grew abruptly hard. “I know.”

Most days, Dick wished Bruce hadn’t killed the Joker. Everything that came after it had been far too difficult. But today, Dick was suddenly, fiercely glad of the fact. He forced a smile onto his face.

“You’re here now,” he said, and pulled his little brother into as tight a hug as he could manage. “Nothing else matters.”

They held the position until Dick could breathe again, until Jason’s shoulders had stopped shaking, and then Jason picked Dick’s comm up from the floor.

“You can tell her,” he said, pressing it into Dick’s hand, “she won’t believe me.”

--

With the contents of a folder from Tim Drake entitled “JPTW Evidence” open on one monitor and a shaky selfie from Dick’s phone up on another, Barbara found herself perfectly entitled to tap a message out to Flash reading, “taking tonight OFF. Personal.” Before pushing her keyboard out of the way so she could cross her arms on the desk and have a real, hard cry.

Chapter Text

None of them slept much that night. Nobody went on patrol either and, when Jason and Dick both finally managed to stop crying, they called the little birds back in, did proper introductions, and ordered a lot of pizza. Cass, Steph, and Tim all sat on the couch together. Cass leaned forward at first, ready to protect her siblings and with tension in every line of her body. But whatever she saw in Dick and Jason’s posture, she slowly relaxed and even openly cracked a smile at one of Dick’s jokes.

Not long after dinner was done, someone buzzed their apartment. Tim, who was the only one of them legally supposed to live here, took the call, and soon they were joined by Barbara Gordon and the cycle of crying – mostly Jason – and introductions began all over again.

“So you’re Batgirl?” Steph demanded, eyes shining with a hero worship that matched Tim’s. It was adorable.

Barbara nodded. There wasn’t any sadness in her at the question, the way there would have been when Jason last knew her. “I go by Oracle, these days.”

“And you work for the League?” Jason asked. He’d been a little shocked when Dick had said as much. Part of him had hoped that if Barbara had left Gotham, she’d finally gotten out of the game. Like Jason himself, she’d paid enough already.

“Four years and counting.” Now there was a sadness to her. “It was a big change, but… I like it, now. It’s different than working for Bruce. He always had to be the smartest person in the room, the leader. When I work with Wonder Woman or Aquaman or the Titans, and I’m better at something than they are, they just… trust me to be in charge. Diana will let me run an investigation for her and will follow the leads I hand over, Barry uses my fake financials and doesn’t end up making his own later. They believe in me.”

Barbara had always been the best of them, in some respects. Smarter than Dick, a better leader than Jason, kinder than Bruce. She deserved peers who would treat her with the respect she deserved. If only it had been in better circumstances.

--

Because it was a school night, Steph had to go home to sleep. Cass and Tim both escorted her there. It was kind of them, to give the older generation some time to themselves. It felt strange for Jason to count himself and Dick in the same age group but it was true that, provided you ignored Cass’s age and went by her arrival in Gotham, Jason was now in the older half. He wasn’t sure he liked being the Bones of their personal Star Trek: TOS.

When it was just the three of them, Barbara had Dick help her out of her chair and onto the couch, where she could lie with her head pillowed on Dick’s lap.

“Get up here,” she ordered Jason, with no room for argument, and he found himself seated under her legs.

They hadn’t cuddled like this when he was Robin. Dick hadn’t been there most of the time and him and Barbara had had their weird thing which Jason had been no part of. He hadn’t expected them to have missed him so much, somehow. Barbara’s hand found his and squeezed.

“Let me know if you’re uncomfortable.” Jason nodded. He wasn’t. Whatever this feeling was, it wasn’t discomfort. It was just… strange.

“Are you two still…”

Barbara snorted, and Dick outright laughed. She swatted him gently with the hand that wasn’t still holding Jason’s. “No. We’re not. We don’t get to see each other much either with my work for the league. But Dick is still my best friend.”

“When Black Canary isn’t busy.”

“And when Wally isn’t busy.”

They shared a fond glance again. It was sickening and normally Jason would have given them such shit for it, but right now the normalcy of it all just made all his organs feel twisted up.

“Catwoman said you went to the League to do Bruce’s job.”

“You talked to Catwoman?”

Had he not said? “Well she was here and I knew where to find her, so…”

Jason knew it was the wrong thing to have said the instant it came out of his mouth, and even if he hadn’t the way Barbara’s hand twitched in his would have convinced him.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Barbie. Shit, I might not’ve even been able to come to you if you had been here. I just… I’m not saying that I didn’t want you, but maybe that’s not what I needed. Or what I could deal with.”

“Why not?” Dick asked. Jason searched for judgement in his voice and face, and couldn’t find any.

He didn’t want to tell them. He didn’t want Barbara to pull her hand away in horror, for Dick to look at him in disgust. But he needed to tell them. He’d told Selina, and she hadn’t been appalled with him. He’d told Cass, and she hadn’t hated him. Cass was a good judge of people. Surely she would know.

“When I came back,” Jason told them, in a storytelling tone that invited no interruptions even when he paused, “I woke up in my own coffin.” One of them gasped. “I don’t know why. I wasn’t… I don’t remember most of it, after waking up and digging out. I had brain damage, or I got brain damage somewhere. Talia… Talia says she found me wandering the streets of Gotham. She says I was in the hospital for a while and asking for Bruce and nobody ever came. With my rational-brain, I guess nobody told him. Maybe that never even happened; Talia says a lot of things. Anyways, uh, I had brain damage, and Talia… she threw me into a Lazarus pit?”

“Fuck,” Barbara said, with feeling.

Dick, softly, asked, “and why did you think you couldn’t come home, Little Wing?”

It had been so long since Jason had heard that nickname. He hadn’t considered until now how close it was to his own nickname for the little birds. Did this technically make him a little bird too? He didn’t have a bird-themed name at the moment, but neither did Steph. And did this make Dick ‘Big Bird’?

Jason was aware that he was deflecting, even inside his own head, trying to avoid having to say the words that they needed to hear. But he was Jason fucking Todd, and he wasn’t a coward.

“The Pit… you know about the pit madness, right?”

Dick had been fighting Ra’s for years, including in Bruce’s absence. He had to know. And indeed, he nodded. But Barbara shook her head.

“It… it makes you angry. Or, feeds on the anger that’s already in you, maybe. And it’s… I was so angry, and I couldn’t feel anything else, and I hurt so many people. I killed people. I’m dangerous and I’m wrong and if you’d been here when it was worse I might have hurt you. I would have hurt you, I had this whole plan, I was going to…”

He’d been planning on making Batman kill the Joker. Now that he knew what had really happened, he was caught between nausea and hysteria at the idea. He couldn’t voice the truth. Not yet.

“I was going to hurt B. I thought… I thought he’d replaced me, that there was a new Robin and I’d died and he hadn’t cared and I was going to hurt him.”

“Little Wing,” Dick repeated, soft and soothing. It took some maneuvering, with Barbara on top of them and the three of them adults – Jason a large one, at that – on one couch, but eventually Dick managed to get close enough that he could run a hand across Jason’s hair.

“What changed your mind?” Barbara asked, giving his hand a firm, grounding squeeze.

“It broke.” They gave him time to elaborate on this nonsensical answer. “The Pit… it only likes anger; it shuts down everything else. And when I got here and everything I knew was wrong I started to feel other things. Curiosity and concern and wonder and amusement. And they helped. Having other people there… they helped.” He gestured vaguely towards the rest of the apartment, meaning the Little Birds.

“Well thank God for them, then,” said Barbara.

With more maneuvering, her and Dick managed to change their seating arrangement so Jason was in the middle, pulled against Dick’s chest with Barbara curled into his side. Dick resumed running a hand through Jason’s hair. Barbara closed her eyes and buried her face in his chest. Jason would have cried, but he didn’t think he had any tears left.

“You were never replaceable,” Dick told him. “Even if there had been a new Robin, you never could have been replaced. I know it hurts, but you’re still irreplaceable. As Jason Todd, just as much as Robin. More than. The Lazarus Pit doesn’t change that. Talia doesn’t change that. You came home the second you could and that’s all that matters. Your worst thoughts don’t define you.”

“You sound like Dinah,” Barbara murmured.

“I sound like my therapist,” Dick corrected, “who Dinah recommended.”

“You went to therapy?”

Dick hummed in agreement. “The Titans made me. Said they weren’t going to make the same mistakes the League did with Bruce.”

Jason didn’t think he’d ever appreciated the Titans as much as he had in that moment. “I’m glad.”

“That’s a little hard on the League though,” Barbara said, without raising her face from Jason’s chest. “They did their best with Bruce, he just didn’t want any part of them. Clark basically got himself transferred to the Gotham beat and Ollie went to about a million fancy parties just to try and look out for him. He nearly lost an eye for his troubles.”

That hadn’t been in the reports of the Queen-Wayne match that Jason had read. “Fucking hell, B.”

“Mm. They didn’t give up on him, though. Clark clearly knows where he is. He almost never comes to me with questions about his investigations. He’s a good investigative reporter in his own right, but nobody is good enough to never need a second opinion, and I know he’s not the type to just be an arrogant asshole when he needs help.”

“And neither of you know where he went?” You didn’t ask? Jason wanted to demand.

Dick sighed. “B’s good at pushing people away. You know that. And I can’t… I’m his son, not his parent. I can’t be responsible for him, for keeping the relationship going when he doesn’t want me, and as long as I’m Nightwing, he doesn’t want me. He made that abundantly clear.”

Barbara made a noise of agreement with this assessment. “And he’ll never forgive me for what I did, after you died.”

“What did you do?”

She pulled her head up to look Jason in the eye. “I tied myself to him. Alfred started it, saying he’d confess if Bruce did, but I think… Bruce still would have turned himself in if it were just Alfred. He’s never stopped because Alfred might get hurt before. But I said it, and he didn’t believe me at first. He didn’t believe that I’d throw my life away for him, and he asked me why I’d do that, and I said… I said it was because I was glad the Joker was dead, and he believed me, and he let us cover it up, because he couldn’t accept me dying for him, but… he never forgave me for it.’”

“Was it true?”

It took her a moment to answer, and when she did it was with shame in her voice. “I didn’t know it then, but… yes. It made the nightmares stop for the first time in months. I’m not sorry he’s dead. I am sorry that you paid the price, and that Bruce was the one to do it. I wish he’d had a heart attack and dropped years ago. I wish he’d been the random civilian killed first in an alien invasion. I wish I’d done it when he had me. I wish Harley had finally realized what a piece of shit he was and broken his fucking skull with that bat of hers. But I don’t wish he was alive.”

She rested her head back against Jason. Dick murmured, “it wasn’t any one person’s fault that we fell apart, Little Wing. I suspect all of us wish we hadn’t. But we couldn’t be what any of us needed then, and afterwards I think we were all too scared to be the one to give it a second shot. But maybe we can now. It isn’t too late. We’re all here, aren’t we?”

“Not yet,” Jason corrected, but ideas were already swirling in his head.

--

The next morning dawned to Jason, asleep on the floor with all the blankets, Barbara, asleep on the couch with no blankets except for Dick’s sweater, and Dick, sitting on the windowsill, too wired to sleep. Between the three of them, they’d gotten perhaps three hours of sleep.

Dick nearly jumped as Cassandra, the girl Jason had introduced as ‘Black Swan’, materialized beside him.

“Safe here,” she whispered, with a look between Barbara and Jason and the window. “We protect.”

There were still a lot of specifics he hadn’t gotten about what, exactly, the arrangements here were. But he knew that Cassandra, Stephanie and Tim had been protecting Gotham, and each other, for longer than they should have been left, without any meaningful adult help. Jason had said Cass was the adult, the one who looked after the others, but she was so young, no older than Jason himself, and neither of them should have been alone with the responsibility for two high schoolers.

“You protect them?”

She nodded, and then waved her hand in an approximating gesture. “We protect each other. Jason too. And you.” Based on her glance towards Barbara, Dick thought that was a plural you.

“That’s all we can ever do. Protect each other.”

“Better than being alone.”

“Yeah, it is.” Cassandra settled in beside him, and they sat on watch as the sun rose and their three charges began to stir.

--

They knew what call they had to make, and they knew they had to do it together. Dick had come to Gotham with a car not a bike, fortunately, and so the three of them rode to the cave together. Tim, begrudgingly, was sent to school, while Cass slipped away. Selina, she told them, had promised to get her signed up as a volunteer at the shelter.

“You did a good job cleaning this place up,” Barbara said, turning her chair in place to get a full view of the cave.

Jason shrugged and dipped his head. “Not as good as Alfred.”

“You’re still human,” Dick agreed. “Are you ready?”

Jason was so not ready. He nodded anyways, and Barbara tapped a few quick numbers into her phone, raising it to her ear.

“Superman, this is Oracle, requesting your presence at the Batcave ASAP. I have your answer about the man in the red helmet. It’s good news.” She hung up the call and checked something else. “He’s in Algeria, so there’s probably another emergency. Give him fifteen minutes.”

And so they waited. Barbara signed in to the batcomputer and started making security updates, adding in profiles on the Little Birds and other changes of the last five years. Dick went to go check that his gymnastics equipment was still safe and operational. Jason, for his part, found himself staring at his reflection in the penny, trying to figure out what he should do with the white streak in his hair. A part of him just wanted to cut it off so Bruce wouldn’t see, but his eyes were just as damning a piece of evidence as any chunk of hair was.

“You can just dye it,” Dick called, from where he’d lifted himself up on the parallel bars.

At that precise moment, there was a gust of wind, their proximity alarms went off, and Jason turned to see Superman, standing in the middle of the cave.

He looked at Jason, Jason avoided his eyes, and there was a moment of electric tension before Superman relaxed his posture and the man standing before them was, as clear as day, Clark Kent.

“I knew it,” he said, tone charged with victory. “I hoped it was you so badly, you have no idea.”

“I shot you.”

“Hang on,” Dick said, dismounting artlessly in his hurry to scurry back over to them, “how did you know it was him?”

“I listened to you,” he said. “You might have had lead lining and kryptonite bullets, but none of that stops my hearing. I tracked your heartbeat back to your own grave. After you left, I went there myself and saw that the coffin was empty. But Bruce was so sure that you were dead and I didn’t want to get his hopes up. If Oracle is calling me here, then it is you.”

Jason forced himself to nod, throat feeling incredibly dry. He braced himself for Superman’s reaction to the fact that Jason had tried to kill him, with Batman’s own supply of kryptonite, and instead he found himself lifted off the ground in a super-strength hug.

“Hey!”

Barbara was trying and failing to hide her laughter. Dick, mercifully, said, “put him down, Uncle Clark.”

But it had all been a ruse because no sooner than Jason had his toes on the ground, Dick was hugging both of them. “No superpowered hugs without me.”

“Of course not,” Clark said agreeably, and held onto both of them for a moment longer before freeing Jason from brotherly torment.

He floated back to the ground, standing close enough to Jason that a gust of air from the cave’s AC blew his cape against Jason’s leg.

“How are you so calm about this?”

He offered Jason his most charming smile, the one that wasn’t dazzlingly Superman or sheepish Clark Kent but something in the middle that had more truth than either did on their own. “I’ve seen stranger things than one miracle, Jay. Worse ones, too.”

That, Jason could believe. “I tried to kill you.”

“Your father does say I should be more careful. He’ll be smug.”

“But-”

“Jason,” Clark interrupted, “I’m just glad you’re home. You could have done more than grazed me and I’d still be glad you’re home. Your father will be too.”

“That’s why we called you,” Barbara cut in, trying to get them back on track. “You know where Bruce is. We’d appreciate a lift.”

Finally, Clark dropped the grin from his face, and grew serious. “Jason, I know you’ve been asking questions, investigating, but how much do you know about what’s happened since you died?”

“He knows enough,” Dick said, in his defence. “Catwoman and us filled him in.”

“Jason,” Clark asked, ignoring Dick, “who do you want to see?”

It took Jason a minute to understand the question, and when he did, he felt stupid. Because there’d never really been one person there. Brucie Wayne was more of a lie than Batman was, and Batman was gone. Who was left, then?

Jason only had one answer, and he hoped to God it was the right one. “I want to see my dad.”

“Okay,” he said, and, with a fraction of his incredible strength, he wrapped an arm around Jason. The other, he extended to Dick, who comfortably folded himself against Clark’s chest. To Barbara, he said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She waved her hand at him. “He’s not my dad. I already texted Kon for a lift. There’s three baby vigilantes and one resurrected dumbass I need to add to the Watchtower’s database.”

“Does Kon know how to get in here?”

“Probably not, but he could use the training. I lowered most of the security features. At worst, he’ll get a sharp zap and I’ll tell him how to get in.”

Clark huffed a laugh. “Call me if you need anything.”

“When do I not?”

“When Diana’s available.”

Barbara laughed, and Clark’s grip around Jason and Dick tightened. “See you soon, Oracle.”

She raised her hand. “Good luck.”

And then the world around them blurred. Jason had been carried at superspeed before, and he’d been flown before, but the feeling never got any less strange. Clark wasn’t going at top speed, and so Jason kept his eyes open and got to experience a few seconds of blue sky and sunlight over the tops of the clouds before they commenced a stomach-droppingly quick descent that culminated with them standing…

In a field? What?

Clark let them go, taking a single step back, and Jason spun around to get his bearings. It was early spring, so nothing was growing, but there was a barn and a grain silo as well, of course, as the house. It only took a few seconds of wracking his brain to realize where they were.

Dick must have caught on even quicker, because he spoke before Jason could. “Seriously, Uncle Clark?”

“You brought him here to live with your parents?”

Dick winced. Clark didn’t. “It’s just Ma now, actually. And Kon.” He checked the time on his phone. “I hope he figures out Barbara’s puzzle before he’s late for school.”

“Time difference,” Dick pointed out, “he’ll be fine.”

“Who the hell is Kon?”

“Superboy,” Dick and Clark said, at the same time, which didn’t answer anything at all.

“Clark?” All three of them turned to Martha Kent, who came from inside the house, still drying her hands on a teatowel. “Where on Earth or elsewhere has Connor gone haring off to this morning? He wasn’t half-finished his breakfast yet.”

Superman looked sheepish. “Just doing a quick favour for Oracle, Ma. He’ll be back in time for school. But as you can see, it’s been a bit of an odd week.”

Ma seemed to look at Dick and Jason properly for the first time, and gasped, raising her tea towel to her mouth in shock. Clark was standing beside her in between one breath and the next, steadying her as she took a single step back.

“Jason?” She breathed.

He’d only met Martha Kent a handful of times. He’d thought she was a sweet lady. But this was a bit much.

“Yeah. It’s me.”

She nodded, as if not entirely processing or believing what was before her. “I have to–”

Clark let her go, and she hurried to the door. “Bruce!” There was no tremor in her voice now, and her shout was loud enough to wake the dead.

“Be there in a minute!”

Dick placed a steadying hand on Jason’s shoulder at the sound of that voice.

“Now!”

“Coming, Ma,” Bruce hollered, voice drawing closer as he spoke. A moment later, he emerged from the door, and Clark took him by the shoulder, just as he had his mother.

With an authoritative tone that suited Superman better than it did Clark Kent, he said, “it’s real, Bruce. He’s real. Barbara and Dick confirmed it themselves.” That was pushing it. They’d both taken Tim’s data at face value. Although knowing Barbara, she’d probably performed her own tests while left in the cave. Fortunately, since Jason was real, it didn’t matter except that Bruce would hate that they’d been sloppy.

With Clark guiding him, Bruce came down the three steps from the porch, onto the solid ground of the back lawn. Dimly, Jason recognized that Martha had slid away, back into the house, but he could barely look anywhere other than at Bruce.

He was so much smaller, now that he wasn’t carrying the weight of Batman. Though he was still a clearly muscular man, it seemed now the fitness of someone who worked hard in a day job – the sort Jason had grown up seeing from people who worked in construction – rather than the fitness of someone who worked out almost obsessively. He was built for lifting heavy objects, not knocking people’s lights out. In some places, he seemed softer, less chiseled, although it was possible that was being accentuated by the golf shirt and loose-fitting slacks he wore. He looked, Jason thought, more like a dad than he even had as Jason’s dad. His hair had gotten longer, revealing a slight curlyness as it brushed just past the bottoms of his ears.

“Jaylad?”

Jason opened his mouth, but all words seemed to have left him. Dick, who’d been full of quick responses since Jason had been in diapers, appeared to be similarly afflicted.

“Yes,” Clark said, for all of them. “I promise.” Over Bruce’s shoulder, he shot Dick a meaningful look.

Dick’s hand shifted from Jason’s shoulder to his spine and he gave a firm shove in Bruce’s direction. Clark, in a mirror image, did the same, and they met in the middle, Jason reaching out instinctively to catch Bruce as he stumbled. His hands wrapped around his dad’s forearms and he was surprised, as they stood so close, to discover that they were about the same height, and that Jason, who had been training obsessively with the league for years, was decisively bigger.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce croaked.

“Why?” Jason asked, wondering what answer he even wanted to hear.

“I wasn’t there.”

That was what it all came back to, wasn’t it. Bruce hadn’t been there, when Jason needed him the most.

And Jason hadn’t been there, when Bruce had needed him the most. “I’m sorry for not coming home sooner. I was scared. The Lazarus Pit, it–”

Bruce’s hand came up to cup at the side of his face, and he stared deep into Jason’s eyes. Please, Jason begged, don’t hate me.

The hand slipped from his face, and Bruce’s other arm came up around Jason, and they were hugging, so tight that it almost felt like choking. And then he was choking around sobs that rose unbidden from his chest.

“Jay,” Bruce whispered, “you’re here. You’re safe.”

Keenly aware he was babbling but utterly unable to stop, Jason mumbled, “she told me you replaced me and I was so angry all the time and I went back to Gotham and you were gone and I was so scared and I didn’t know what to do and I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

Jason found himself struggling to breathe as snot clogged his nose. From behind him, he heard a tiny sniffle of sympathy, and he felt one of Bruce’s hands come away from his back.

“Get over here, chum.” And then Dick was pressed to their sides, like a long-limbed (and tragically half-dismembered) land octopus.

“He did good, B,” Dick said, “you’d be so proud of him. He investigated and solved the case and adopted three random teenagers. Your very own mini-me, only not so mini.”

Snorting to try and clear some of the snot without blowing it on Bruce’s shoulder, Jason gasped out, “not random teenagers. Teen vigilantes. Someone needs to adopt them. You should adopt them. Cass’s father is David fucking Cain and I’m going to kill him if Selina doesn’t get to him first, and Tim’s guardian is an uncle who doesn’t exist. It’s forgery.”

With vindication, Dick hissed, “I knew that was a lie! He even pulled the ‘you can’t meet him ‘cause he’s in Canada’ trick!”

Jason loved that weird disaster child but someone had to stop him before he got himself killed.

Bruce inhaled and Jason could just tell he was going to ask follow-up questions, but they were interrupted by an uncharacteristically emotional voice. “Oh my lord.”

There was a rush of air and Clark, for the third time that day, stood in the doorway, carefully steadying someone. This time it was Alfred, who’d gone as pale as a sheet as he stared at Jason. Like unravelling a ball of thread, the three of them came apart.

Pulling away from Clark, Alfred hurried down the stairs from the porch, until he was standing right in front of Jason. “My dear boy.”

“Yeah, Alfie. It’s me.”

And Alfred, because he was Alfred, was pulling out a monogrammed handkerchief (AP), and pressing it into Jason’s hand. With his other hand, he reached up to brush Jason’s hair out of his face.

“You came home.”

They were a thousand miles from Gotham, the city where Jason had been born and raised. And yet, in spite of that, Jason was home. For the first time since he’d boarded a plane bound for Ethiopia, he was home.

Chapter Text

It took some convincing to bring Bruce back to Gotham. Even if he no longer had Jason’s death hanging over him in a cloud of misery and shame, this was still the city that had taken his parents, where he’d worked himself nearly to death and nothing ever seemed to change. Wayne Manor was still the house where he’d walked around seeing ghosts in every room, where he’d been so utterly consumed by self-loathing and depression that it had, quite literally, taken Superman to pull him out.

On the other hand, though, it was his home, just as much as it was Jason’s. Gotham was the city where he’d found his sons. Wayne Manor was the home where he’d raised them, the place where he still had memories of his parents. Gotham was the whetstone on which he’d honed his mind, the place that had made him into the version of Bruce who had been a hero and a leader, a founder of the Justice League, more than any training under Ra’s al Ghul ever had.

He confided all of this in Clark. Since kidnapping Bruce, Clark had made himself an available ear many times. In some ways, he’d never admired Clark more than he did now. All those years ago, when they’d first met, he might have anticipated coming to admire Superman’s power, perhaps even Clark Kent’s subdued intelligence. He never could have imagined how much he had come to rely on Clark’s heart.

“They’ll understand if you can’t go back,” Clark said, perched at the very apex of his parents’ roof, dressed in a baggy hoodie and blue jeans. “Dick’s been there, and Jason’s always been very empathetic.”

“I know that.”

“Can I tell you what I think?”

Bruce grunted. He knew by now that Clark was always going to say what he thought was right eventually. His strong conscience prevented him from doing anything else.

“I think you do want to go back, but you’re scared.”

Too perceptive for his own damn good. Bruce had been telling Clark for years to pay more attention, to hone his mental acuity, but now that he was reaping the fruits of that labour, he found it rather displeasurable.

“Of course I’m scared. That city eats people alive. It’s full of monsters.”

Clark wrapped his arms around his knees and knitted his fingers together. “I used to think that too, you know. That Gotham was the worst city in the world.”

“And your time as a Gotham-based reporter changed your mind?” Bruce demanded, incredulously.

“You changed my mind,” he corrected, “and Barbara, to a lesser extent.”

Barbara had seen the very worst of Gotham. She should have known better than anybody what that city did to people. “How?”

“You two… you’re not like the rest of us.”

“You don’t say.”

“Shut up,” he scolded, fondly, “I’m talking.”

“Remarkable.”

“What I’m trying to say, if someone would stop interrupting me, is that you and Barbara – and Dick too, though he’s less Gotham than either of you – have shown me the very best of Gotham. You’re two of the people in this world who I admire the most, and you’re both impressive in the same way. Not your intellect, but your determination. Grit. I may be a hick from Kansas but one of us took the elbow grease approach to superheroing and it wasn’t me.”

“Kal.”

“So that’s the good in Gotham. As for the bad, well, I suppose I learned something from being a Gotham City reporter about that. See, I report crime in Metropolis too, and what I hate about it is that nothing is ever what it seems. Luthor always has a million shell companies and everyone is secretly working on some experiment to, oh hell, blow up the moon or turn bees evil or something. Metropolis is beautiful, but so much of it is a lie that it kills me. Even I’m a lie. The other leaguers, their hero identities are the real part. Diana is Wonder Woman; the Amazonian warrior is who she grew up as and it’s a part of her that she hides in her other identities. But I’m just Clark, under it all, some kid from Kansas who happened to be adopted from space. Superman is an ideal, something I’m trying to be. But you… Batman was more real than Brucie Wayne ever was.

“What I came to love about Gotham, as Clark and when I was playing Batman, is that so many people in Gotham are what they seem. You know a cat burglar who dresses like an actual cat. So if Gotham seems awful… maybe Gotham is just more honest about what it is than other cities. I’ve seen awful things in just about every country and more than a few territories and I can promise you that Gotham isn’t unique in that regard. Gotham isn’t terrible. Some people are, and some of those people live in Gotham. But some good people do too, and your son is one of them.”

He flew slightly over, until he was settled beside Bruce, their shoulders just barely brushing. Bruce finally voiced his real fear.

“He’s going to want me to be Batman, if I go back. I can’t do that.”

“He doesn’t want Batman. He wants his dad. He told me as much. You can be that without the cape and cowl.”

“Can I?”

Clark bumped his shoulder deliberately. “Of course you can. I’ve seen flashes of it, you know, with you and Kon. I know how hard you were pushing him away, trying not to get hurt again, but I still saw flashes of Jason’s dad in you. You saw a lonely boy and couldn’t help but look out for him. It was sweet.”

“What happens if I do go back?” Bruce asked, aware that Clark wouldn’t have any answers for him. The gift of prophecy was not one of Superman’s many skills.

He answered with a grin. “We work out a joint custody arrangement so you can see Connor on weekends and the high holidays and Ma can have you, Al, and the boys for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and to help with the harvest.”

--

So Bruce steeled his nerves, and moved back to Gotham.

--

Everyone came to help air out the manor. They could have hired a service to do it, but Alfred had insisted this was better and Clark had compared it to a barn-raising and that had settled the matter. Flash threw open windows in every room, while Black Canary followed in his wake with a bottle of glass cleaner. Wonder Woman pulled sheets off the furniture and handed them to Dick to fold. She seemed calm now, focused on the work, but Jason could have sworn that she’d cried earlier, holding Jason even more tightly than Clark and Bruce had. Superboy and Tim were sweeping and talking while they did so. Some people seemed not to be working at all, like Selina, who’d gotten caught up in talking about the curatorial ethics of some new museum exhibit with Lois Lane.

It was sort of a party, Jason knew, to celebrate both his return and Bruce’s, albeit from very different kinds of absence. But in spite of the fact that he was the man of the hour, so to speak, Jason found himself unable to stand the crowd of boisterous superheroes and their associates. He was still struggling with nightmares, with flashes of green at inopportune moments. He was still coming to terms with finding Bruce so different from the man he’d left behind. None of it felt exactly like the moment for a party.

It wasn’t a surprise that, with this crowd, he didn’t find himself alone on the roof. It was a surprise to discover that the other person up there was, in fact, Bruce.

“Alfred’s going to be pissed at us for being terrible hosts,” Jason said, and took a seat beside Bruce, dangling his feet over the edge. If either of them slipped there were at least three dozen people in the house who could catch them before they hit the ground.

“We’ll go back eventually,” Bruce decreed, which was probably fair enough, given that all their friends were actually doing work and they weren’t.

Jason had been planning to smoke while he was up here, but it felt weird pulling out a pack of cigarettes in front of his dad. He knew Bruce wouldn’t approve and didn’t want to fight about it today. In lieu of that, he took out his phone and was midway through an Am I The Asshole post on Reddit (she was the asshole) when Bruce decided to break the silence.

“Tim and Connor seem to be getting along well.”

“Steph and Wonder Girl too.” When Jason had seen them last, Steph had been sitting on her shoulders to dust the top shelves of a bookcase. “Cass is in the kitchen with Ma, so I don’t think she’s met anyone yet. I told her she could, or she can hide in my room if it’s too overwhelming. Nobody will bother her in there.”

“It’s good they’re getting along.”

Jason had some vague plans to suggest the creation of a Titans group for Tim and Steph’s generation of heroes, but he wasn’t going to mention that in front of Bruce.

“They’re good kids,” he said instead. “Better than I was at that age.”

“At Steph’s age, you were already dead,” Bruce pointed out, immediately looking like he regretted it.

Jason let himself huff a laugh. He didn’t mind mentions of his own death as much as Bruce did. “Point stands.”

Bruce gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, half to acknowledge Jason’s words and, likely, half to reassure himself that Jason was still there.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Bruce took a moment to find his words. “You said, when you came to Smallville, that you felt someone needed to adopt them. Cassandra and Tim, at least. You suggested that person should be me. I wanted to ask if you were serious about that.”

He hadn’t been, at the time. He’d said the words on a whim as much as anything. Jason had discovered, that day, an ability to blubber that was previously unknown to him, and he’d mumbled quite a few things through his tears. Now, though, he considered the possibility seriously. He thought of how much Cass benefited from being somewhere she felt safe. He thought about the fact that, according to Steph, Tim’s parents had been deeply shit long before they’d died. He thought about how much it would hurt both of them if their lies were ever discovered and they were separated.

“Yeah, B. I am. I’d say all three, but Steph actually loves her mom.”

There was a moment of silence, save for the sounds coming from the gathering of heroes below them. Jason could make out the sound of Impulse, somewhere below them, yelling, “Ew! Get that off my shoe!” Jason decided he didn’t want to know what was going on down there.

“I’m not sure I can,” Bruce confessed, voice low and serious. “They’re not going to give up being vigilantes, are they?”

That had been the line for Bruce’s still-fragile relationship with Dick, and he was an adult. Jason was still scared of what Bruce’s newfound phobia of loving vigilantes was going to mean for him.

“Probably not,” admitted Jason. “Cass might eventually, but she won’t as long as Steph and Tim are in danger. They’re used to being the only ones they can rely on. They won’t give it up while Gotham still needs them. There was a time when they, or at least Tim, would have stopped if Batman was still around, but I’m not sure that would make a difference now.”

There was guilt written all over Bruce, and Jason wished he’d never uttered the word ‘Batman’.

“I-”

“I’m not saying you need to come back as Batman. But I don’t think you should leave them hanging just because they’re all too fucked up to stop dressing up in costumes and fighting people. They need someone in their corner, looking out for them. And maybe that’s helping them train, or running ops, or stitching them up, or just giving them somewhere safe to rest their heads and a shoulder to cry on. I don’t have any fucking idea what this is going to look like. But they need someone and it can’t just be each other any more.”

Jason’s mouth felt dry in a way that was reflective more of anxiety than dehydration, and he was contemplating pulling out a cigarette after all when Bruce said, “I’m proud of you, Jaylad.”

He ducked his head, keenly aware of the fact that he was blushing. “Is that a yes?”

“They can stay at the manor. Anything else remains to be seen.”

Bruce was not going to be able to resist caring for two sad orphans – or one sad orphan and one person who was going to be an orphan if Jason had anything to say about it – once they were under his roof.

“Thanks, B.”

From below, Jason could hear that someone had decided to put on music. Judging from the fact that it was Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA, he was going to lay the blame squarely at Dick’s feet. He cast his eyes up. It was late afternoon, but the sun was still up, occasionally peeking out from in between the clouds.

“There’s one more thing. I have thought about it, and I think you should too.”

That didn’t bode well. “Yeah?”

“Are you going to bring yourself back to life as Jason Todd, or as someone else? Legally, I mean.”

It was an excellent question, but raised another one Jason had been wondering about since his return to Gotham. “So you do know my last name. I was starting to wonder, since you put Jason Wayne on fucking everything.”

“It was a mistake at first,” Bruce admitted, without any remorse. “The associate who drafted the paperwork for the foundation got it wrong. But then I sat back and thought about it and I didn’t think you’d want Willis’s name on everything. And, perhaps selfishly, I wanted you to have mine.”

Jason was torn between being mad – the green was weaker by the day but still sometimes showed itself – and a twisting feeling of affection that was too complicated to fully parse. Sometimes he would forget that Talia had been lying, and that Bruce had missed him profoundly. It both hurt and helped to have the occasional reminder that he had been loved all along.

“I am, you know. Your son, I mean. Whether or not we can think of a way for me to still be Jason.”

Bruce’s arm wrapped around him, firm and comforting. “I love you.”

“Where the fuck did you learn how to actually say your feelings out loud?”

“Ma Kent.”

“You know, that’s fair.”

--

Three weeks after Bruce Wayne’s official, public, return to Gotham, he adopted his first daughter, a former trafficking victim named Cassandra. This latter bit of the story was allegedly a secret, but any thorough digging through GCPD records could have uncovered the sad ‘truth’ about how her parents had died and she’d been trafficked to the US. It explained why she had no legal documentation, as such, and no record of how and when she’d entered the country. Unlike Wayne’s other two children, she was adopted almost immediately after coming into his life, and changed her surname to Wayne with no hesitation.

Cassandra Wayne mostly stayed out of the press, but there was a tasteful interview between Wayne and Lois Lane that featured a picture of Cassandra and her new brother, Dick Grayson, doing ballet warm-up exercises together, along with another of Cassandra sitting by a fireplace in Wayne manor, curled up with her rescue cat, Giselle.

Tim was happy for her. Really, he was. Cass deserved the world and Tim couldn’t have ever given her a public, legal identity in this way. He could only ever have given her lies. But none of that changed the fact that the Nest felt inescapably emptier without her there. She’d nearly always been silent, moving around the apartment, but she had provided a sense of companionship without ever saying a word. He missed her.

“What are you moping all the way up here for?” Jason asked, from the other side of the gargoyle.

Tim shrieked, and was saved from falling to his death only by Jason’s hand on the back of his collar.

“Jesus, Perry.”

Tim was wearing his Peregrine suit. To his surprise, Mr. Wayne had looked it over and decreed it perfectly acceptable to fight crime in, for now. He’d always assumed that he was missing something. Now he wondered if maybe Batman had been just a little less well-prepared than he’d thought.

Jason, on the other hand, was wearing a t-shirt, a leather jacket, and his helmet. Even after all these weeks, he still hadn’t settled on an official name or uniform. Steph was threatening to break out the Wikipedia page again to find him one. Mr. Wayne was probably going to help her, if it would mean that Jason would get a uniform with actual safety precautions.

“Sorry.”

Jason let him go, and sat on the other side of the gargoyle so Tim couldn’t actually see him. There was a click as he took the helmet off and his voice returned to normal.

“Sorry for startling you. Penny for your thoughts?”

“Can I get the big penny?”

He snorted. “Only if it’s a really big thought.”

Tim didn’t say anything, just leaned slightly over the edge of the cathedral roof and gazed down at the pedestrians below. This time of night, there were only a handful, a man in a ratty brown coat walking his husky and two tipsy college students leaning on each other.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here, Little Bird, and guess that it’s about Black Swan moving into the Manor.”

Tim didn’t bother lying. “Congratulations, you won a toaster.”

“And I’m guessing B hasn’t managed to talk to you yet?”

That caught Tim off guard. “Talk to me about what?”

“About moving in.” He couldn’t be serious. He just… couldn’t. “You and Swan can’t come too close together or people will think it’s weird, but… B did promise to take you both, and Spoiler too, as much as she wants that.”

Tim’s body felt very far away. “What?”

“Your fake uncle gambit is clever, Agent P, but it’s not that clever. We’d all feel better off having you home with us. Swan especially. She sleeps better when she knows that everyone is safe.”

“You’re serious.”

“I swear it on my own grave. You did good on your own, kid. Better than I did at your age, that’s for fucking sure. But you belong with us, now. After everything you did for us, it’s the least we can do.”

“All I did was fail to break into the Justice League for you.”

There was a creak of the roof and Jason’s masked face popped up over the gargoyle. “You’re a real piece of work, Perry, you know that? You proved my fucking identity and brought me home and believed in me when I thought I was a fucking monster and you’re like ‘oh well all I did was some hacking’. Fuck off with that shit and come home.”

Tim found himself completely robbed of speech, but fortunately, since Jason was looking at him, all he had to do was nod and strong arms pulled him to his feet, and he was practically frog-marched back to the Batcave.

--

Dear J,

I wanted to do something nice for you, in payment for everything you’ve done for Tim and Cass lately. But then I remembered that I’m not very nice, and also that you are being completely ridiculous by not just picking a fucking name and getting on with it already. So in lieu of an actual gift, I’ve gotten you this.

Spoiler’s Bird Names Suggestions:

Buff-crested Bustard
Tit
Bowerbird
Warbler
Nightjar
Sunbird
Cinereous Tyrant
Starling
Dull-coloured Grassquit
Great Xenops
Snipe

Please Please Please pick ‘Buff-crested Bustard’. Or at least tell B you’re picking it,

S

--

“Bustard?”

“Well it was that or ‘tit’. Those are my top two choices.”

“And here I’d been working on costume options for ‘Cinereous Tyrant’.”

Jason couldn’t help it. He broke first. Bruce joined him in a moment of shared, unapologetic laughter. The sitting room seemed warmer when filled with the sound. “Maybe you could make Steph the ‘Cinereous Tyrant’. She’s still lacking in bird names.”

“There’s nothing ‘cinereous’ about her costume.”

Jason had googled the word, which apparently meant ash-gray, and had to agree.

“Still no serious options, then?” Bruce asked, setting his knitting – half a sock – down on the tea table. Apparently, Ma Kent had been teaching him and he didn’t want to let her down now. Jason was torn between finding it endearing and hilarious.

“Honestly, Nightjar is my favourite on the list. Dick is still pushing for ‘Flamebird’. But none of them really feel right. Maybe I’ll just go back to my original idea and be Red Hood. Then I won’t have to change my costume.”

There was a silence that felt unusually tense before Bruce said, “I would prefer it if you didn’t.”

Because the name was a constant reminder of the Joker, who Bruce had murdered. Right. Jason was a fucking moron.

“You’re right. Not really my style. And it should still be a bird. Just because Steph can get away with pretending that ‘spoiler’ is a bird doesn’t mean the rest of us can.”

“And what will you do, when you have your uniform?”

Unlike the name, Jason actually had made some progress on that front. “I’m going out. I’m not going to take the guns. They’re… if the pit ever comes back, I don’t want to have them on me. I want to keep the Little Bird’s rules, about always patrolling in pairs. Me and one or both of them. I’ll try to lighten how much they take on, keep them out of danger. I don’t think I’ll run with the JL. Dickie and Barbie have that covered.”

“So you’ll be their leader.”

“I guess?” Jason hadn’t set out with that plan in mind, but he wanted to look after them, see that they were safe. This seemed like the best way. Tim and Steph might fight him on it, some, but they’d both come around eventually. They wanted to learn how to do this, and Jason was the best person in Gotham to teach them how.

Bruce shifted slightly, and Jason tracked his eyeline, up to the portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne that hung on the wall above the fire. When Jason was a kid, he’d thought they looked old, sophisticated. Now that he was an adult, all he could see was how young they were. Was Bruce older now than his parents had been when they died? If he wasn’t, he would be within the next few years, probably. Jason had known Bruce for almost as long as Bruce had known his parents.

“I have a name suggestion,” said Bruce.

“Please don’t say ‘blue-footed boobie’.”

“It isn’t a bird.” There was a low and serious note in his voice.

What? Oh. He meant– Oh fucking hell.

“I can’t be Batman!”

“Why not?”

Jason bit his tongue before he could say ‘because you’re Batman.’ That was obviously a non-issue, and it would hurt Bruce to say.

“Because I’ve killed people!”

Bruce raised an eyebrow at him, which, well, fair. If Bruce had picked the cowl back up, Jason wouldn’t have batted an eye.

“I’m dangerous.”

“Batman is always dangerous.” The most dangerous member of the Justice League, Wonder Woman had said once. Jason remembered that.

“I tried to murder Uncle Clark,” he sputtered.

“Part of Batman’s job is to keep Superman on his toes. And Clark has already forgiven you.”

Aware that his objections were growing weaker, Jason said, “I can’t.”

“Do you want it?”

The thought had never even crossed Jason’s mind that it was something he could want. But now that it had, he considered the implications. There was an advantage to making a role all for yourself. That was what Dick had done with Nightwing, and he’d done brilliantly, better than Jason thought Dick could have as Batman. But there was something to be said for stepping into a premade role and wearing it in, molding parts of yourself to fit it just as you molded it to fit you. That was what Jason had done with Robin, and he’d loved being Robin. This, the chance to be Batman, was something far greater still. In some ways it terrified him, that he might mess it up and ruin Bruce’s legacy and destroy everything. But on the other hand, the potential of it, what it could be if Jason did it right, was more than he ever could have imagined.

“Yes.”

“Then it’s yours, Jaylad.”

--

Batman returned to the streets of Gotham after nearly six years away, although Gotham herself didn’t know it. They would know soon, if not the duration of the absence, then at least the fact of the return. Word would spread, just the way it had spread the first time, just the way that word of Spoiler and Peregrine had spread, from person to person, as whispers that grew into shouts. They would recognize him as Batman, although the costume was different. The ears were shorter, the cowl more reinforced than ever, padded like a helmet. The eyes were covered with dark glass, giving the impression that the bat had no eyes at all. The armour was perhaps slightly more intense, five years of scientific advancements having taken place. The cape, though, was just the same, giving the vague impression of a bat’s wings as Jason landed cleanly on the roof.

“Cinereous Tyrant, Agent P, Stick together,” he ordered Peregrine and Spoiler, who were poised to jump off the roof in front of him. They both flipped him off in unison. “And tell Agent B if you need backup.” Into his own comm, he said, “how’s the view from down there?”

“Not as pretty,” B said, with a hint of laughter in his voice that made Jason feel viciously glad that Steph and Tim had bullied him into this.

“Maybe you should come up sometime, just to see it. You know Peregrine did that for years. He’d probably love to have a nighttime photography buddy.”

Tim would probably faint from joy if Bruce offered to take him out wandering the city at night.

“Maybe,” agreed Bruce.

“Batman,” Talia said, from the shadows, and Jason squeaked like a chihuahua with someone standing on its tail and went for his knockout gas.

“Batman?” Bruce demanded, over the comm. That was going to be fucking weird.

“Talia,” Jason greeted her, for both of their benefits. He pressed the switch on his glove to give the person on comms ambient audio.

He hoped that Bruce would have the good sense not to send in Tim and Steph. Cass at least might have a shot at defending herself, but the littlest birds would have no hope against the league.

She raised her hands in surrender. “No need to call for reinforcements. I’ve only come to talk, Little Bat.”

“To talk about how your plan failed? It didn’t work, Talia. You couldn’t turn me against him.”

He hated that smug, self-satisfied look on her face as she stepped closer, into the light from the nearest billboard (‘From the Creators of Batburger: SuperNaan’. Had they no loyalty? Well, Jason would have them singing a different tune.)

“Did my plan fail?” Her lips turned in an arrogant smirk. “What exactly was my plan?”

“You lied to me. You set me up. You tried to use me to murder Bruce.”

“Why on Earth would I want to murder my Beloved?”

In Jason’s ear, Bruce murmured darkly, “black widow complex.”

“What do you want, Talia?”

She stalked forward another couple steps, only stopping as Jason raised his knock-out gas and pointed it directly in her face. “Well, I wanted you to come up with a plan to lure Batman back to Gotham. I confess that this was… not entirely what I had envisioned. When it became clear you were tied to the pit, I could only hope that your escalating violence and knowledge of his identity would force his hand. I had not imagined that you would be able to break free of it.”

Jason gritted his teeth so hard he could practically hear it. “Well maybe if you hadn’t fucking lied to me, I wouldn’t have been so pissed off.”

“And if I had not delayed you long after my father would have seen you take the field, you might still have been too close to the pit to manage what you did.”

“Fuck you. I didn’t do any of the shit you wanted.”

She only kept her dickish smile. “I am not displeased with this outcome. Indeed, it was well done. In some respects, this makes it easier. Your repeated death would have created… awkwardness, and my Beloved’s presence without it is preferable. As is the assembly of a strong defensive alliance in Gotham.”

Jason did not want to find out what kind of machinations Talia had in the works that required Bruce’s presence and a strong defensive alliance in Gotham. “B-”

She extended a hand towards the shadows and beckoned. “Come, Damian, and meet your elder brother.”

Jason’s jaw dropped at the sight of the mini-Bruce who stepped from the shadows. Talia, he thought, was a liar, but she wasn’t lying about this.