Chapter Text
Jason slowly tensed and untensed each of his muscles, head to toe, as he lay on the cold concrete roof with his sniper rifle set up in front of him. He’d been there for a few hours already—completely sacrificing his night as Red Hood—but there were too many masks galavanting about this city for him to chance a shoddy stakeout.
Bludhaven wasn’t supposed to be like Gotham; there shouldn’t be so many capes and villains running around. But he guessed that was what happened when Dickwing decided to claim the city as his own. He brought the crazies with him.
Crazies like Jason. Oops.
Speaking of Dickface, he was off playing renegade with Deathstroke on the other side of the city. Jason had confirmed they were far away tonight—and that the Bat was in Gotham—before setting up. He didn’t have nearly the same resources in Bludhaven as he did in Gotham, and he really didn’t fancy a fight with Bruce or Deathstroke-the-fucking-Terminator right then.
Jason had no idea what was going on with Dick; surely Goldie hadn’t actually gone full darkside, but how had he convinced Slade motherfucking Wilson that he had? Because Deathstroke seemed pretty damned convinced, sending Dick on all sorts of missions with his daughter. Which, point for Evil Dick. But Bruce wouldn’t let his one remaining Robin live all alone in a city that had Deathstroke, Ravager, and an evil Dick Grayson running around, would he?
It was a conundrum. Jason had hacked into the Bats’ comm frequency weeks ago, but they hadn’t discussed Dickhead at all. At least not where Jason could hear. It didn’t matter. His plan didn’t involve his so-called “big brother.” If all went well, Nightwing wouldn't be involved until it was too late.
But Goldie and the Terminator weren’t the only masks running around the city. Oh, no. The new Batgirl was also supposed to be floating around somewhere, but no one had seen her in a few weeks. No sightings in Gotham, either. It could be she was just quiet, but Jason’s money was that she was either recovering from an injury, training abroad, or undercover somewhere. But he wasn’t going to let his guard down just because she probably wasn’t around right now. Rumor said she was good, and she could be back any time.
Then there was Barbie, who was probably playing Oracle to an extent. Not as much as she did in Gotham, but Jason couldn’t imagine a world where the ex-Batgirl wasn’t at least keeping half an eye out for Dick. And the new Robin.
The final fucking vigilante living in Bludhaven.
The reason Jason was here tonight.
His goddamn replacement.
Robin wasn’t here right now, but Jason was pretty sure he would be. The Bats’ comm line was currently playing in his ear, relayed from Gotham, and it confirmed that the Replacement was in Gotham tonight. The line was fairly quiet, mainly brief status reports between B and Agent A, with occasional insight from Oracle and a few short check-ins from the Replacement. It sounded like the kid was flying solo, on the other side of the city from Bats. And wasn’t that just asking for trouble.
Jason was happy to oblige. That was, after all, why he was here: to cause the bats some fucking trouble. Or, not here here. That would come later. He was here here to do some fucking reconnaissance, the boring-as-shit old fashioned way. He knew their schedules and routines in Gotham, had been listening long enough to map them out, was keeping a pretty close watch on the Teen Titans' activity, but he had one major gap in his intel that needed to be rectified: Eddie Drake. Little Robin’s legal guardian.
He was doing a shit job of it. Oh, on paper he looked fine—an upstanding citizen, clean tax history, fine employment and medical records, a long list of past residences all around the world that reflected the nomadic lifestyle he'd given up to take care of the Replacement as soon as the kid's father died—but that was only on paper. As far as Jason could tell from careful stakeouts of the guy’s place, he hadn’t even seen the Replacement in at least two weeks. Tim Drake certainly wasn't living with him. And three days ago, he’d pulled the kid out of school. If Jason didn’t have Robin’s sporadic reports over the comms, he would have thought that Uncle Eddie killed the kid and was trying to cover it up.
Something fishy was going on, so Jason had tailed the Replacement back to this place a few nights ago, a nondescript apartment building in a semi-nice area of Bludhaven. If anything in Bludhaven could be called even semi-nice. Ownership traced back to a shell company. Now it was just a waiting game. See where Robin came to roost.
Fucking Timothy Drake, making him give up perfectly good time when he could be crime-lording so that he could stare at an empty apartment in the freezing fucking cold instead.
Jason breathed through the rage that thoughts of the new Robin always brought. He kept his focus on the view through the scope of his rifle, the world washed in cold green clarity. Whether that was the night vision scope or the Pit didn’t matter; either way, it brought Jason focus. Purpose. A pointed, patient rage, a purifying fire that consumed and comforted him, distilling his being into deadly intent.
Jason had died in an orange blaze of fire. He had died beaten black and blue and broken and bloody. He had died betrayed, and abandoned, and alone. Jason had died, and that should have been the end of it. Robin should have died with Jason.
Robin should have died with Jason.
But Jason was back, and so was fucking Robin. Timothy fucking Drake. Jason’s death hadn’t mattered, to him. Hadn’t mattered to Bruce or Dickface or any of them. Jason hadn’t mattered. And now there was a new Robin, flying around town like he wasn’t wrapped in a dead boy’s stolen shroud. Dancing on the edge of rooftops like he didn’t know he could fall.
That had to be why Jason had returned. Someone needed to introduce the new kid to gravity. Clip his wings, give him a little push. Robin should have died with Jason. So it was Jason’s job to set that right, and he burned with a righteous green fervor at the task, a hotter flame than even the explosion that had ripped his body to shreds.
Robin would die. Jason would kill him. Jason would destroy Robin so thoroughly, raze his ashes to the ground, salt the fields with his tears and his bones so that nothing could grow again. No more Robins. No more pale imitations creeping out of mansions and concrete. No more colorful corpses crawling out of graves like undead daisies.
It wouldn’t be enough. Jason wasn’t stupid, no matter what Talia or Ra’s or Bruce or Dick or anyone might think. He’d read Hamlet. He’d read The Count of Monte Cristo and Wuthering Heights. More than that, he’d seen too many kids die in the street, gasping for air with punctured lungs, caught up in so much revenge for their sisters and brothers who’d died just the same way, caught up in the gangs and the endless escalation of a head for an eye and never getting any satisfaction from the blood that ran into the gutters and washed out into the river with the rest of Gotham’s toxic shit.
Jason knew the price of revenge. The toll paid in blood and ripped off pieces of your soul for an ultimately hollow prize. But he was not Edmond Dantès. He was not Hamlet, or Miss Havisham, or Heathcliff. He was not a kid caught up in dreams of power and justice.
Jason knew he would destroy himself, destroying Robin. He would break everything good about what he once was—at least the bits not already shattered by the Bat and the Joker and the Pit and cesspool that was Gotham. Robin gives me magic.
He would tear that magic away. Not just from Robin, but from Jason. He didn’t care. He deserved it. He’d long since suffocated his innocence, long enough since that he hadn’t even felt a fleeting flutter of it as he hacked off seven gang lieutenants’ heads and stuffed them in a duffel bag for show and parade.
It didn’t matter. Robin would die with Jason. And then Jason could die with Robin, for real this time.
And so, Jason waited, and lost himself in the clarity of the navy-blue night, soft city noises, the view of the cracked-open window and empty bed, framed in black and all washed green through the lens of his rifle scope.
Jason loved his scope. It was top of the line: second focal place reticle design with a powerful telescopic lens; ED glass; a .250 MOA click value; an integrated power throw lever; night sights; the works. The scope alone had probably cost around three grand, and that was on top of the rifle itself, a beautiful SAKO TRG 42—not the fanciest gun out there, but a marvel of Finnish engineering and light enough to make up for the weight of the scope. All told, Jason was probably aiming about ten grand worth of gun towards the Drake's window. Plus the directional mic—he was too paranoid about being caught this early in the game to bug the birdie’s room—and the veritable armory he was decked out in. No iconic red helmet tonight; it was too flashy for this stakeout. So he was wearing a replacement helmet instead, black, and one that left his eyes free for the scope but still had just as much tech and all the filters built in. So maybe fifty, sixty grand of equipment, all told. Thank you, Al Ghul money.
Talia had been happy to outfit him with whatever gear his heart desired, on two conditions: one, he got rid of the Drake boy; and two, he didn’t kill Bruce. Well, neither of them were explicit conditions, but Jason could read between the lines. She hated Timothy Drake—an easy hatred to share—and she was obsessed with reuniting with her dear “Beloved”—a less understandable goal. Jason had no desire to crawl back to the man.
Punish him, yes. Reconcile? Never.
Ugh. Jason rolled his eyes and gagged beneath his mask. He wasn’t ever going to understand Talia’s obsession with Bruce. Like, sure, he was currently building up an entire criminal empire and stalking the man’s new pet project solely for the sake of a long and convoluted revenge plot against him, but it wasn’t the same at all. Jason didn’t expect Bruce to love him at the end of this. Talia was an idiot for thinking that this could end in anything other than hatred and pain all around.
Everything ended that way, with Bats.
No, Jason was smarter than that. He just wanted Bruce to hurt. He wanted him to hurt bad enough that the agony of Jason’s own torture and death would be preferable to the hell he was stuck in.
And he would start with Timothy Drake.
Speaking of, here came the little birdie, pulling up to the curb in his civilian motorcycle and parking.
His replacement.
And damn if that didn’t hurt, the knowledge he’d been swapped out for a new and improved model, like an action figure or an upgraded character in a video game. Jason swallowed against the surge of green rage that screamed at him to tear the imposter limb from limb. He couldn’t do that. Not yet. He had a plan. He had a metaphor.
Bruce was about to learn what happened when you didn’t take care of your toys.
So Jason banked the Pit to mere fury, and watched the Replacement as he limped to fire escape and hauled himself up to the window. Incompetent little shit had been injured. And where was Bruce? He really did take such bad care of his Robins.
Jason would be doing him a favor, showing him just how bad.
The Replacement shimmied through his window—stupid to do that in civvies—and huffed as he collapsed on the bed, the sound crackling in Jason’s ear as the mic did its job.
The Replacement groaned, then flopped half his body over the edge of the bed, grabbed something from underneath it.
Jason watched as the kid pulled out a large orange bag, pretty easily recognizable as the type that EMTs carried around—lots of pockets, crazy organized, stuffed with, like, premium first aid shit.
Now that was interesting: why was the kid patching himself up? Did Alfred not exist anymore? That was a stupid thought, even if Jason hadn’t heard Agent A checking in over the comms scarcely an hour ago. Alfred couldn’t stop existing. He was immortal and unchanging and would never die or leave or be anything less than Alfred.
But the evidence spoke otherwise: Timothy Drake was here, after he’d reported back to the cave, all alone and spreading an absorbent pad across his comforter to soak up the blood before it stained the sheets. Alfred wouldn’t have allowed that to stand. So what exactly was going on here?
Jason winced in sympathy as the kid stripped out of his sweats until he was dressed in nothing but a thin pair of boxer briefs against the cold November chill that was seeping in from the still-open window. The kid was torn up to all hell: layers upon layers of bruises up his ribs and a serious case of road rash across both forearms and the outside of his left thigh. He’d somehow managed to avoid any injury to his face, but the rest of him was not pretty.
A lot of those were new injuries, but Jason hadn’t heard anything about Robin getting hurt over the comms.
The kid had an obvious routine going. Squeeze bottles of sterilized water to clean out his wounds, antiseptic cream, gauze and butterfly bandages for the more shallow cuts that looked recent, stitches for what looked like older injuries, to replace the ones he’d obviously popped on patrol.
He hissed as he brushed the gravel out of his injuries, and bit his knuckles to keep from screaming as he contorted his bruised torso to stitch closed a cut on his side.
Finally he finished, but he didn’t go to sleep or even clean up the bloody first aid materials. Instead, he pulled out a computer and stared intently at the screen, working on something.
As he worked, Replacement toyed with his discarded needle, seemingly unaware of what he was doing as it poked in and out of his thigh, in and out. Thin pinpricks of blood bubbling up to the surface and wiped away.
He didn’t stop until dawn. Then he squinted at the sun out the window and drew the blackout curtains closed.
Jason stayed on his rooftop, listening intently as Replacement fell back on his bed. There was no further noise, no clacking of keys or sound of clean-up efforts, and Jason was about to call it a night and go when soft hitches of breath caught his attention.
The Replacement was crying.
He sobbed almost silently, only the irregular shaking of his breath giving him away. Or maybe he was just shivering against the cold. Even when he’d closed the curtains, the stupid kid still hadn’t closed the window or even put on fucking PJs.
Either way, it took another half an hour before his Replacement finally stuttered off into what sounded like actual sleep breathing.
Jason packed up slowly, methodically, flexing his numb limbs to bring some sort of life back into them. He used the time to think. His original plan wouldn’t work, not with this new information.
He’d thought that Bruce and Dickface and the rest of them would be all over the baby bird, especially after the last one—the girl—had bit the dust. Drake's father hadn’t died that long ago, either. But they didn’t even care enough to know the kid was injured, living alone in Bludhaven, had dropped out of school, and was crying himself to sleep at 7:00am.
The kid was going to die at this rate, whether or not Jason had anything to do with it. Apparently dead Robins were just a thing, now, and Bruce didn’t give a shit whether they lived or died.
There was something almost comforting about that, that Jason’s wasn’t the only life that didn’t matter.
There was something fucking infuriating about that, that Jason’s wasn’t the only life that didn’t matter.
Do better, Bruce.
His plan had depended on people caring about Timothy Drake, parents rich and powerful enough to cause problems for Brucie Wayne, parents who would would at the very least hire someone to dig into the details. But then Jack Drake had died, the stepmom had been committed, and this new uncle obviously wasn’t doing any kind of parenting. His plan depended on a Bruce so wracked with guilt at the death of yet another Robin that he would slip up enough for Jason to take advantage of the cracks.
But it was pretty fucking obvious that no one was looking out for the kid. Not if he was stitching himself up in his room, crying alone in the cold, and so used to it that he had it down to a routine.
Well, okay, then. Jason would just have to adapt. Improvisation, that was his speciality. Hmm…yeah. That might work. He wouldn’t even have to modify the plan too much.
If those fucks didn’t care about their baby bird now, Jason would just have to make them care. And he had a few ideas on just how to do that.
Timothy might get a little broken in the process, but what was a little kidnapping and torture between friends?