Chapter Text
Jason knew there was something wrong with the place as soon as he walked in, but then any dive in Pennsylvania still selling liquor after three AM was shady by default. Seeing as Red Hood called the infamous Crime Alley his home beat and wouldn't know a healthy work schedule if it hit him upside the head with a crowbar, an establishment that sold spirits outside of legal hours wasn't exactly a deal breaker for him. More of a plus, really.
The fact that it sold to spirits—like, literally served ghosts—probably should have been, though.
Yeah, there was a group of three of them, see-through and everything, laughing over a few pints none of them had touched in a corner booth. Personally, staring at a beer he couldn't drink would just piss Jason off but hey, it wasn't his afterlife. At a pool table, a guy who looked way too pale to have a pulse and a lady with fangs were chalking some pool cues, about to break a rack. And at a swanky looking sofa lounge in the middle of the bar a group of anthropomorphic animal-people looked to be winding down their night of revelry.
Right. Well, no one ever accused Jason of having a good decision making paradigm, so what the hell. He was reasonably certain this was the only bar within a hundred miles still selling whiskey at four in the morning, and damn could he use a drink. Besides, the idea of walking out of a place just because it's clientele were dead or different felt damned hypocritical considering his own relationship with the grave.
Jason walked up to the bar, a charming slab of old-growth wood stained an appealing espresso to match the rest of the gothic décor, and didn't even double-take at the chimpanzee in an old-fashioned deer-stalker hat, nursing something amber-smooth in a glass tumbler. Hell, he'd fought psychic gorillas, sapient cat-people, literal hordes of bat people, a damn crocodile man. A chimpanzee enjoying his liquor barely hit his radar.
Then a disappointingly normal-looking young woman in pig-tails and an outfit that couldn't decide if it was punk or goth, leaned across the varnished bar top and he was instantly on his guard. Jason hadn't come to a bar in the backwoods of Nowhere, Pennsylvania at four in the morning to chit-chat, and the way she looked him up and down with curiosity said he might be in for an interview.
“You're a new one around here,” she said, and it was obvious the bartender was used to strange when she didn't even comment on his outfit. Sure, Jason packed away the most obvious of his weapons into a locked compartment under his bike seat and zipped up his jacket, but he still had on his domino mask.
“I'm not looking for trouble,” he said, which felt a bit backward somehow. And just plain bullshit because Jason was always looking for trouble, in a way. “I just want something stronger than apple juice and you're all that's open around here.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “I know the drapes in this place could use an update, but this isn't an old-timey saloon. Besides, if we threw out everyone who looked like trouble, we wouldn't make a dime.”
Fair point, he decided, considering the other bar patrons, none of whom looked human. And some of whom didn't even look alive. The weirdos of the world needed a place to drink too, he supposed. Did morally ambiguous vigilantes count as weirdos? Probably.
Jason chewed on a question that was likely rude as he scanned the bottles along the back wall. But then he decided he'd rather be an asshole than cursed. “I'm not going to owe someone my first born child if I ask for a whiskey, am I?”
The bartender rolled her eyes. “Only if you skip out on the bill.”
Jason felt his mouth go crooked and pulled a fifty dollar bill from the bribes-and-stakeout-coffee stash he kept in his inner jacket pocket. “Then consider this a down-payment.”
She plucked the fifty from the bar and swiped it with a glowing purple finger, after a moment deciding the bill was legit. She didn't ask for an ID because of course she didn't, this place served the undead. Hard to get an ID with a death certificate—Jason ought to know. “I'll open a tab. What should I put the name under?”
“Red Hood,” he answered. “And whose name am I calling out for a top up?”
“Traci Thirteen,” she said, pouring him a generous glass from a bottle halfway up the back wall.
When a customer called for her at the other end of the bar, Traci left him the bottle. What a peach.
Jason sipped the liquid fire and savored the burn, tasting the alcohol again as he breathed out and looked into his brooding reflection in the dark whiskey.
Here's to you, punk. Happy Deathday. Roy's gone, Star is in space, Bizarro voluntarily trapped himself in Hell, and Artemis went back to Bana-Migdall without you. Your ex is possessed by your other ex, and it's all your fault. Oh and your family still hates you, probably. Who even knows at this point, Bruce flashes hot and cold less predictably than a shitty park avenue condo's plumbing system. They were letting you in Gotham again but it was just a matter of time before that changed.
He sighed and took a long sip of his drink. At least Duella seemed to be doing well, reintegrating back into her family. He'd managed to do something right in the past year or so.
He supposed that was worth a toast.
“You wouldn't be Red Hood of Gotham, now would it? Aren't you supposed to be a villain?”
Jason glanced sideways at the chimp two stools away, the ape's hat hanging low over his eyes as he polished off his glass and poured himself another few fingers from a flask in his suit jacket. That the chimp could talk didn't even surprise him. That he knew who Jason was did, a bit. The circles where his vigilante persona was well-known weren't the kind an upstanding citizen of any species ought to be involved in.
“Did Batman tell you that?” Jason asked, taking a not-so-wild guess. For a guy who claimed to work alone, Bruce sure seemed to work with fucking everyone.
The chimp responded with a quirk in his simian expression as if the idea of Batman giving out any information on anything was beyond his imagining. Actually that was fair.
“Man-Bat, actually,” the chimp corrected.
Jason frowned to himself. Man-Bat? That was a name he hadn't heard in a while. Like, not since he'd worn the green tights. “Well if that isn't a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don't know what is.”
The chimp narrowed his eyes managing to look disparaging. “To my knowledge, the doc never dropped a duffel bag of severed heads at anyone's feet.”
Jason rolled his eyes. That was honestly one of his proudest moments—Black Mask's whole enterprise gutted in one fell swoop of masterful strategy, all his captains taken off the board—and yet people always brought it up as if he should be ashamed. It was baffling.
He took a sip of his drink, obnoxiously smacking his lips. “And I've never turned a whole city into bat-hybrids that tried to eat people's faces, but no one can do it all,” Jason returned blithely.
The chimp itched his chin, looking sheepish. “Touché.”
Jason downed the rest of his glass and decided he'd already had enough of this place. He hadn't signed up for a lecture, he could get that at home. Conveniently, the bartender had left him with something for the road.
Jason grabbed the bottle of whiskey and stood up from his stool, saying, “Tell Traci she can keep the change and close the tab. Guess I wasn't as thirsty as I thought.”
The chimp frowned. “Now hold on a sec there, kid,” he said, and Jason was sure as hell not in the mood to be called 'kid'. People only called Jason 'kid' when they wanted to belittle him, to put him in a place where he was wrong and had to listen to the adult who was right by default. Well, guess what—he'd had to be the adult in the room since he was seven years old or starve while his mom shot up on the couch with smack she'd bought with their rent money. He was so over being called 'kid' it wasn't even funny.
Jason felt his lip lift in a snarl and something ugly came out of him as he spat, “Look, I didn't come here for your 'Big Thinks', Ape-Man. I just came to drink and now I'm done, so save the sermons for your next AA meeting.”
The chimp's face screwed up into something that was more incredulous than insulted. “Did you seriously just reference The Island of Dr. Moreau? Isn't that a bit before your time?”
Jason glared. “Fuck you, H.G. Wells is timeless.”
The ape sighed and took off his hat, rubbing at the fur on his scalp with anxiety. “Look, this chimp doesn't like small talk when he's drowning his sorrows, either. But people like you don't just wander into places like this on accident and...I mean, I’ve got a Justice League ID and everything. If I didn't at least ask about what you're doing here they'd toss me out of the club!”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. “It's nothing to put your panties in a twist. I'm just passing through.” Wandering aimlessly, more like.
No direction, no destination. He checked on safe houses he hadn't been to in years as he came to them, and tossed a criminal the police's way as he saw fit. So far Jason hadn't killed anyone but it wasn't off the table, he was just saving his best work for someone who deserved his special touch. Believe it or not, he knew the meaning of restraint. He'd restrained himself from punching Bruce in the teeth for damn near a year until he became persona non grata in his own town.
“Well...okay then,” the chimp answered like he was pretty sure there was something else he should say but had no idea what it was. If he needed a guide for kicking out Red Hood he should hit up Batman.
Jason shoved a hand into his pocket and saluted the other with the whiskey bottle. “See ya around, Curious George.”
The chimp put his hat back on with a frown and a narrow gaze too tired to be an outright glare. “Okay, seriously. The name's Bobo. Bobo, or Detective Chimp.”
Yeah, like those names were better. “Inspector Bananas. Got it,” he shot back.
“You're a real asshole, you know that?” Bobo informed Jason, as if he might previously have been unaware of this fact.
“It's what they tell me,” Jason admitted, and figured it wasn't his worst parting retort.
He was all set to cut and run and enjoy his whiskey on his lonesome, watching the sun rise from the window of some shitty motel halfway between Nowhere and Somewhere Else. It was starting to sound good, even. But when Jason made it to the door and pulled on the handle, it stuck fast refusing to move.
For half a second Jason thought he was just a moron and tried pushing instead, but that didn't work either. He pulled again, pushed, tried to find a lock or dead bolt or latch, or damn barricade—anything really that could explain why the door refused to open. Nothing.
Finally he turned back towards the bar, glaring down the chimp he was seventy-percent certain had something to do with the situation. “Okay, real funny. Now tell the bar or whatever to let me out before I put a few holes in it.”
The chimp just watched Jason with disinterest, using his long simian arm to reach over the bar and grab a bottle of cheap beer from just under the counter. He didn't know her well, but Jason doubted Traci would approve, which might have been why the chimp waited until the young woman was nowhere to be seen to do it. Clearly the other patrons were used to ignoring all kinds of weirdness, from accusations of asshole magic doors right down to the chimp helping himself to the bar, because they ignored the goings on entirely. The Ghosts in the corner were becoming increasingly rowdy in their discussions and the vampire couple, or whatever they were, had switched to darts. The animal-people had left before the Bar decided to lock Jason in, lucky them.
“Considering how many times this place has burnt down lately,” Bobo drawled as he used his bare hands to pop the bottle cap off the beer, “that's not even a threa—woah! Put away the home-brewed bomb, buddy!”
Jason had returned to the door, kneeling to use his knife like a trowel to wipe explosive puddy on the space between the handle and frame. Just one of his tiny charges stuck to C4-putty with a sticky bandage and he figured he could make this problem go away. He'd never been into painting but he was an artist in his own way. Just like Bob Ross—cut a slice off the block of C4 in his utility pouch and make a happy little explosion. In his world, Jason gets to decide where the flames live.
Bobo swung off his bar stool in a panic, a hand on his hat to keep it from flying off in his hurry. “Stop! Jim gave me The Oblivion Bar, but I hardly know everything about it! There's a back door you can try, but don't expect to walk out in the same timezone you walked in from.”
Jason scoffed. So this place belonged to the chimp detective? Yeah, then he'd lay this issue squarely at the guy's feet. Don't have a magic bar if you aren't going to train it to let people out the door. That applied to all pets, really.
Jason was taking the backing off a bandage, ready to adhere the micro-explosive to the puddy, when he heard a surprised female voice from behind him. A voice he knew, one he definitely wasn't expecting.
“...Red Hood? Jason?”
He froze mid-motion, turning his head slowly to look behind him.
And there she was, one third of the Justice League's Trinity in gleaming gold, blue and red armor, dented and scuffed from hard use but still just as beautiful and strong as the woman wearing it.
You might say Jason was used to Amazons. In his brief days with the Titans, Jason had stuck to Donna like glue, called her his commander, and to her credit she hadn't seemed to mind. And then there was Artemis, his friend and teammate, one of the only people who seemed to share and understand Jason's particular mixture of prickly sass and well-guarded kindness. He could have loved her if she let him, but that wasn't for Jason to decide.
And there was Diana, Wonder Woman, the first hero he'd actually thought worth looking up to. Every Amazon Jason ever met was silk-wrapped steel with a warm heart but the Princess of Themyscira was all that and more, she was a Goddess.
“Aunt D?” he blurted before wincing. Jason hadn't spoken to her since...well, it might have been before he'd died. Considering how well his relationship with Bruce was going right now, Jason doubted he was allowed to call her that anymore. “I mean, Wonder Woman?”
Diana's face broke into a smile, as if hearing his old moniker for her actually made the Amazon happy. “You can still call me Aunt D, if you like. I have certainly missed it after these many years.”
Jason stood up as she approached him, feeling his throat tighten and his eyes burn with brimming tears, but if he cried in front of one of his actual heroes he was going to no-shit commit ritual suicide out of shame.
Diana placed her hands on his shoulders, looking him over as if she really was his aunt who hadn't seen him in years, marveling proudly at his growth into adulthood. The injury checklist Jason could see her going over as she analyzed him probably wasn't something a normal aunt did, but then what did Jason know about normal?
Finally she pulled him into a tight hug. “It's been so long. It's wonderful to see you looking well.”
“Nice to...see you too,” Jason managed to say as the tense, aching parts of him eased, soaking up the warmth of her easy affection.
“You know this guy, Princess?” Bobo asked as he sidled up to Wonder Woman, very obviously confused by the situation.
Diana pulled out of the hug, stepping aside and gesturing as if showing Jason off to the chimp. “Yes I do. This is Red Hood. He's an ally of the Amazons, the son of a dear friend, and a hero.”
Jason felt himself blush, both guilt and embarrassment swimming up to make him feel sick though he wasn't quite sure where any of it came from. He felt his fingers twitch, arms trying to cross defensively, and forced them to stay at his sides. “There's people who would dispute some of that,” he mumbled awkwardly.
Diana sad nothing, just squeezed his shoulder comfortingly and hardened her eyes as if to say anyone who claimed otherwise could say it to her sword. Jason didn't know how to respond to that kind of faith from someone who wasn't an Outlaw, so he said nothing.
“What is going on out here?!” interrupted a short man in tweed and glasses with...a brown bat head?
Well that explained why Detective Chimp was so familiar with Man-Bat.
Dr. Langstrom, the (former?) villain Man-Bat, adjusted his spectacles, squinting into the dim light of the bar with tiny black eyes as he came out of the back room in a huff.
“So much shouting,” he complained with a fussiness to his intonation. “My research is very—Oh my God!” The man squeak-shrieked like an actual bat on seeing Jason, nearly falling on his ass as he staggered backwards, trying to escape through the door he came in from.
“Zatanna! Constantine! He's come for me, help!” Langstrom tripped through the door and slammed it shut behind him. The jamb rattled as he apparently stumbled into every piece of kitchen equipment in the room, judging by the crashes going off in cadence like a choreographed fireworks show.
Jason just raised a brow as Diana frowned in concern and Bobo took off his hat, tiredly rubbing the fur on his head again.
The chimp sighed. “I'll deal with the Doctor while you handle...whatever this guy's deal is,” he told Diana and trundled off after Man-Bat, passing a blond man in a khaki trench and a brunette in a corset-top at the door. Jason recognized them immediately as the infamous John Constantine and Zatanna Zatara.
Great.
Jason scowled. “What the hell is with this bar? Magic-people got nowhere else to drink?”
“I'm pretty sure John is banned everywhere else,” Zatanna said, and though Jason had heard the two were close, it was hard to read anything but scorn in her voice.
“Not true, luv,” the Brit countered as he pulled a cigarette from a rumpled pack and lit it with a snap of his fingers. “Leastwise nobody ever told me to m'face I was banned.”
Zatanna rolled her eyes and plucked the cigarette from his hand, tossing it into the bar sink before it even reach his mouth for a puff. “No, they only kicked you out on your ass and threatened you if you ever came back.”
Constantine glared at the sink and then at the woman next to him. “Now that was just uncalled for,” he deadpanned.
“I disagree,” the magician replied icily before turning to Diana. “Man-Bat came in raving something about...something. It was hard to parse, but he seemed to think he was in danger?”
It was Jason's turn to roll his eyes. “The only thing in danger here is this door if it doesn't let me the hell out.”
Constantine and Zatanna blinked simultaneously then shared a serious look. “Be with you in a tick, mate,” Constantine said before leaning toward Zatanna, the two launching into a whisper-arguement that wasn't quite audible.
Meanwhile, Diana had turned to examine the door behind them, noting Jason's jury-rigged breaching charge with an expression that struggled between amusement and disapproval. “You say the door isn't opening?” she clarified.
Jason very clearly demonstrated his issue by squeezing the latch and both yanking and shoving the door, to cover all his bases. “If you've got any other ideas before I blow the thing, I'm all ears.”
Diana reached forward and squeezed the door latch, pushing it open easily to the view of a dark, shady-looking street and Red Hood's bike parked on the sidewalk.
“Well...that works, I guess,” Jason said, feeling stupid even though Diana merely performed the same action as he did, moments earlier.
Behind them, Zatanna and Constantine's discussion had risen loud enough to hear. The famous stage magician was biting her lip, unsure. “John, how is Batman's delinquent son going to help us with this problem? I must have made a mistake with the spell.”
Constantine shook his head appearing pleased. “Nah, it worked a treat, luv. In fact, you might'uv managed to call the one fellow on the planet specializing in our problem right to our door.”
Jason should have walked out. Should have said bye to Diana, got on his bike and went on his way. Maybe detonated his charge on his walk out just to be cheeky and show that damn door what-for.
But he didn't, of course. Jason never left a bar without bruising his knuckles on some asshole's face and he wasn't about to start now. “'Called'? What the hell are you talking about?” he growled, pretty sure the answer was something he wouldn't like.
Zatanna threw up her hands as Constantine walked right up to Jason wearing a very punchable smirk. “You don't think you wound up in a place like The Oblivion Bar by accident, do you? Not exactly your normal haunt, innit? We've got a problem and Zee and I conjured up a spell to call the solution our way. And here you are.”
Jason snorted. “Really. And who is 'we', exactly?”
Diana put a hand on his shoulder and he met her sapphire eyes, regarding him hopefully. “Jason, we're the Justice League Dark. And if what Constantine says is true, then we need your help.”