Chapter Text
Jason Todd is 16 years old. He has spent at least ten of those years angry - first at his father for his cruelty and the choices he made that cost them so much; at his mother, however briefly, for her death, for leaving him; at Bruce for his lack of trust; and then at his birth mother for things that he doesn’t dare to put into words for fear of them consuming him whole. He’s angry at the Joker, for being the one to pull the proverbial trigger. He’s angry at Bruce, again, for not being fast enough. For letting him die.
He’s angry at the universe for bringing him back.
But more than any of that, more than the bitterness and the sadness that’s been weighing him down and directing his every move for the last sixteen years, Jason Todd is angry at himself. For running away, for falling for it all, for dying, for clawing his way out of that coffin, for letting himself get taken. And right now, if he’s being completely honest, he’s angry at himself for letting goddamn Talia al Ghul manipulate that anger into…this.
Into a duffle bag full of heads, into a half-assed plan for revenge, into a fury and violence that isn’t him.
Jason may be the Red Hood, but he isn’t sure he can take full credit for his creation.
There’s a gun in his hand, but he isn’t sure if he’s the one who put it there.
Still, Crime Alley is better for it. Jason’s anger has been put to good use. He’s done a better job of cleaning up the Alley in the last month alone than Batman has in the last three years, even if he got a little blood on his hands along the way.
He should be angry about that too. Bruce would be disappointed in him.
But Bruce doesn’t know he’s back, not yet. Jason has a plan for that. A confrontation, a reveal, one with a clown and a gun and a decision to make.
He has to correct himself a week after he finalizes the details, because he finds himself standing on a dock, having broken down a trafficking ring and ending up ten feet away from Batman and Nightwing in the aftermath. They make eye contact through their respective masks but no one moves, no one attacks or even says a word, and he knows in an instant that something isn’t right.
This isn’t right, he isn’t right.
He had a plan. He doesn’t anymore.
—
A month. An entire month, and Jason has spent half of it in a wild goose chase, following rumors and false sightings through the maze that is Crime Alley, and all it’s done is pissed him off and gotten him shot up. Multiple times. He needs to get better armor. He’s really tired of digging bullets out of himself and sewing things back up.
He shakes his head, resisting the urge to rip his helmet off just so he can pull his own damn hair out. A whole month, and yet again he’s gotten himself turned around into a dead end alleyway while his target is long gone.
His target being some nosy piece of shit arms dealer that’s been passing out new weapons to some of the Alley’s lower level thugs. It’s been making his job a hell of a lot harder lately and Jason is ready to just pop a cap in the bastard, if only to start cleaning things up again as soon as possible.
He won’t. He’s been working too damn hard to keep the killing down a bit. He noticed it quickly - the anger, the green, it takes over when he lets himself take those shots. Every kill, every drop of blood on his hands, is one step farther from ‘Jason Todd’ and one step closer to… To someone he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to be. Someone he can’t be if he ever wants to reconnect to Bruce and the family. Which he does, more than he expected to.
It’s something that’s been building up since he ran into Batman and Nightwing on that dock a month ago. He’s angry. He’s probably going to be angry for a very long time. But he wants to be angry at home. He wants to yell and scream at Bruce and Dick, and then he wants to sit down between the two of them and let the rest of his emotions catch up and apologize - for dying, for coming back, for everything he’s done ever since.
The killing has to stop, if he ever wants that to happen. He has to be in control of himself, and control is hard. It is especially hard when shitty arms dealers keep running him in literal circles, because holy fucking shit-!!
Jason whips around on his heels and sends a fist into the brick wall of the alley. It crumbles under his knuckles, satisfying the rush of anger even as he feels the skin split and blood trickle from the wound. It’s like pulling the plug on a full bathtub. The green drains out of him, his shoulders slumping as the energy redirects itself into a flood of thoughts.
Come on, you idiot, he swears at himself, jaw clenched so tight that he can hear his teeth grinding together. Think like a goddamn Robin and find him!
The green inches back in at the thought, just barely tinting the edges of his vision with sick shades of envy. He forces himself to take several deep breaths - he’s used to this. Used to being angry when he thinks about Robin. Because Batman still has Robin, and it’s not him, and it infuriates him. It…it should infuriate him. It should make him angry.
It doesn’t. It makes his heart ache. Makes his limbs heavy and his head hurt, makes him want to scream, because he is Robin, he’s still here, he’s-
But Robin died, Jason died, and it’s cruel to blame them for moving on. Cruel to think that he’s worth making their world come to a stand still. It was already a borrowed name when Jason had it. It’s only appropriate that it’s been passed along again. That doesn’t make it hurt less.
Jason yanks his fist down from the brick, ignoring the sting of cold air against freshly cut skin, and lets out a thin breath through grit teeth.
Seriously, no wonder he can’t track this creep down. He keeps getting lost in his own head. If only he hadn’t seen them on the dock - if only they hadn’t been so close that he could imagine reaching out and touching them, telling them.
This whole mess would already be dealt with if he weren’t so fucking distracted.
—
It takes another week before he stops getting tricked into dead ends and loops through the city that can’t possibly be natural. Magic, Jason decides, because there’s no way in hell he could ever get this turned around on his own turf unless it was involved, and it would explain how this bastard has been playing keep away so easily for the last five weeks of his life.
Yet tonight, finally, Jason has the man cornered on the roof of a particularly tall building, both guns raised towards his opponent’s head while the Pit screams in his own. Green lies over his vision, mingling with the shadows with a sick sense of humor until the man before him looks almost comically inhuman. He has a gun of his own aimed at Jason, something slick and silver that looks like it belongs in the newest Star Trek movie rather than on the streets of Gotham, and if it weren’t for the fact that Jason has already been shot by this guy, he’d be questioning if it were a real weapon at all.
“You-” Jason huffs out a humorless laugh through his helmet. The voice modulator almost makes it sound like a growl. “-are one tricky piece of shit.”
The man doesn’t move, and certainly doesn’t respond. The strange gun stays leveled at Jason’s chest - they aren’t far enough apart, and Jason isn’t sure if he’ll be able to dodge if the man pulls the trigger. Luckily that means he can’t dodge Jason’s either.
For now, Jason decides that he just needs to keep him talking until he can disarm him.
“So what’s the play here, huh? You’ve been outfitting my neighborhood with your fancy new weapons, what’s the endgame?” He tilts one of his guns towards him, gesturing at the weapon still clutched so casually in front of him. “You after a turf war? Because you should have just said so. I’m happy to throw a few punches. Knock you down a peg or two, remind you who’s Alley this is.”
Jason’s eyes narrow beneath the mask as the man still refuses to answer. It doesn’t matter. He sees his shot. “Spoiler alert,” he says conversationally as he pulls back on the safety of his gun, the audible click echoing across the rooftop. “It’s not yours.”
That finally gets a reaction from the guy. His hands tighten around the futuristic gun and it raises another inch, pointing at the center of Jason’s chest. “You sure about that?”
The voice isn’t what Jason expects. It’s gruffer, for starters, and it doesn’t match the sweat-drenched and pinch-nosed face of the man standing in front of him. It’s too deep, like maybe he’s been smoking ten-too-many cigarettes every day for the past six years. Or maybe he’s trying to take a page out of the Bat’s book and thinks it’s intimidating. It’s not, but it’s weird enough to catch Jason off guard.
He straightens up, and even though his gun stays trained on the man, he can feel his grip loosen ever so slightly. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jason asks, thoroughly unamused.
The man’s hands adjust again, steadying the weapon as his attention zeroes in. “Hard for it to be your Alley if you ain’t around to claim it.”
Two things happen at once.
The man, whose words hit Jason without hesitation or hidden meaning, pulls the trigger at the same time that Jason takes a hurried but precise step to the side.
It isn’t enough. In fact, something tells Jason that no step would have been enough, because there’s something strange with the bullet that’s suddenly barreling his way. There’s a weight to it, pulling Jason towards it as if it has a gravity of its own and Jason is already in its orbit. The world moves in slow motion, his own limbs swimming through half-dried cement until he can force his fingers to pull the triggers of his own guns.
The weighty bullet slams into Jason’s shoulder at the same moment that his own bullets find their mark in the man across from him - one lodging into his collarbone and the other between his brows. He falls to the rooftop with wide, blank eyes, and Jason swears to himself as he stumbles back, clutching his own wound. Blood gushes between his fingers, dripping down his arm and soaking into his armor.
He doesn’t get to mourn his broken streak - over a month without death on his hands, down the drain because of a poorly placed shot and too-fast reflexes that he just can’t seem to turn off. The strange pressure of the bullet in his shoulder feels like suffocation. It sends him careening backwards, dragging him off the roof and dropping him into open air, only to be met with the sound of shattering glass as his back slams into one of the windows of the neighboring buildings.
His vision floods black, green swirling at the edges until not even that remains.
He had hoped that dying again would be more pleasant the second time around, because he already knew what to expect, but it isn’t. It’s worse, he thinks, because this time, even from within the depth of the void in his eyes, he can feel the explosion tearing him apart cell by cell, ripping him down to his very soul.
It stops with the sound of shattered glass, and then Jason is left wondering if he’s even really died at all.
———
New York is quiet tonight, and if he were anyone else, Peter would be thrilled. He has a chemistry test coming up on Monday. Ned has been running through the flashcards with him over an open comm-line throughout patrol, and as soon as he’s done making sure the streets are cleaned up for the night, he’s heading over to Ned’s house to keep studying in person.
The thing is, New York being quiet isn’t normal. Even if he’s grateful for the break, particularly the lack of bruises and or broken bones that come with it, he knows that something is wrong. New York doesn’t do quiet, especially not on a Friday night and especially not when they’re still cleaning up from the Vulture’s attack last fall. Low level criminals have been crawling out of the woodwork since then, even though it’s been almost three months, and Peter can’t remember the last time he had a night this…boring.
“The modern atomic mass unit is based on…?”
Ned’s voice has Peter blinking back to reality. “Uh.”
He can practically hear Ned rolling his eyes from behind the laptop in his room. “Come on, Peter, this one is so easy!!”
Peter groans and adjusts his swing, arching himself upwards before letting go of the web. He lands on a rooftop and sighs, shaking the tiredness out of his arms. “I’m sorry, dude, I honestly don’t even know what the question was.”
Ned is quiet for a moment. Peter can hear him moving something in the background, probably the flashcards. It rustles, like paper scraping against the desk. It makes Peter wince. He knows he’s said the wrong thing now, because if Ned is putting away the flashcards it means that he’s worried. And that, that’s another issue entirely.
“I’m fine,” Peter jumps in before Ned can even ask. “I think I’m just getting tired. It’s a slow night.”
Ned snorts. “Right, stopping a car thief and a purse snatcher in the same hour is a slow night.”
“It’s slow for New York,” Peter points out, and Ned clearly can’t argue. “Especially lately.”
There’s another pause before Ned sighs in defeat. “Yeah, alright, it’s a slow night.” There’s an uptick of sudden excitement as he adds, “Does that mean you can head over here early?”
Peter’s gaze lingers on the skyline. He can hear the cars below, and the usual murmur of New York’s residents just beneath that. Even this late at night the city is so alive, but for once Peter can’t hear sirens. There’s no police chatter, at least nothing they can’t handle without him. No fires or break ins or super villains. It’s almost surreal, even if it should be a good thing.
It feels like the calm before the storm and it settles like a weight in his gut, but it’s not one he’ll be able to remove by staying out here to do absolutely nothing, so Peter shakes it off and readies himself to swing again.
“Yeah,” he finally says. “I’m on my way.”
Even if he still can’t see him, Peter knows Ned is smiling now. His best friend is supportive of everything he does as Spider-Man, but even Peter knows that there are some days Ned would rather just have his friend around, without the superpowers.
“Sweet!” He can practically see Ned pumping his fist into the air. “I’ll get the snacks ready!”
Peter can’t help but laugh. “I thought I was coming over to study?”
“You can study with pizza rolls, Peter. You’re a master multitasker.”
Peter grins beneath his mask, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “That’s me. Master multitasker. Let’s start with talking and swinging all at the same time.”
It’s half mumbled to himself as he shoots a web at the nearest skyscraper, and then he’s letting himself soar alongside the windows in a perfect arc. The wind whips past his face, chilling his cheeks through the breathable fabric and muffling out some of the sounds of the surrounding city. It’s just enough to turn the cacophony of cars and tourists into a comfortable white noise, and to let Ned’s voice become the forefront as he chatters on about snacks and some new TV show he’s going to make him watch as soon as he gets there.
Peter’s just about to say something, some comeback about how they’re still supposed to be studying, but he loses his chance in the next moment.
The sound that floods his eardrums is nothing short of hell for his enhanced senses. Ripping, squealing, screaming metal, screeching back against itself like a car crash mere inches away-
Except it isn’t a car crash. It isn’t any kind of crash.
Peter aborts his swing, flinging himself at the nearest wall and clinging to the first surface he can get a grip on. As soon as he’s clumsily secured himself to the glass, he can only stare as just a few dozen meters away the sky itself seems to be ripping open at the seams.
Inky black sinks in on itself while starlight warps into something out of a Star Wars movie, twisting and bending in ways that Peter is fairly certain should be impossible for him to perceive. It’s like the sky itself has come to life - there’s something pulsing in its depths, swelling and receding like a breath or a heartbeat-
And then Peter blinks and the anomaly is gone and the sky is back to normal. The world moves around him as if absolutely nothing has changed. But Peter’s ear is filled with static, his comm cut off in whatever fantastical surge of power he just witnessed, and he can’t even think about the fact that he can’t hear Ned anymore, because…
Because there’s a body. There’s a person, falling from where the hole was, and Peter is acting on instinct alone when he shoves himself off of his perch and dives for the figure. He slams into them harder than he means to, wrapping his arms around them as protectively as possible as he twists his body and rams into the neighboring building’s window in one fluid, reckless motion.
Glass shatters around them and, not for the first time, Peter is incredibly grateful for just how durable his new suit is. He’ll have to thank Mr. Stark the next time he sees him. Which, considering what he’s looking at, might be a bit sooner than their usual Wednesday lab session.
‘What he’s looking at’ being an actual literal human being in a leather jacket with a bright red mask covering their entire face, who apparently dropped out of the freaking sky.
Yeah. Yeah, he has a feeling Mr. Stark is going to want to hear about this one.
—
Jason’s eardrums are ringing when he finally opens his eyes, the echoes of shattering glass filling out every corner of his body as if it’s a freshly rung bell. He practically feels like he’s vibrating, for God’s sake.
Opening his eyes doesn’t actually help, although it does at least confirm that he is on solid ground. Which is nice. He wasn’t sure he was going to be, considering the last thing he remembers is falling off the roof. In retrospect, that’s kind of stupid. Of course he’d wake up on solid ground. Where else would he go? Up? It’s more so the fact that he’s waking up at all that surprises him.
He turns his head with an audible groan, taking note of the glass scattered around him. He’s lying on some generic looking blue carpet, probably some office or another. Sucks for them. This is going to be a fucking bitch to clean in the morning, and no he will not be sticking around to help. It’s not his fault the bastard with the freaking Star Trek phaser decided it was a good night to shoot up his Alley. If anyone should have to clean this shit up, it’s-
Oh. Right.
The memory hits all at once. The guy’s gun going off, the bullet in his shoulder - which he can still feel, now that he’s thinking about it. And then there were his own guns firing, his own bullets finding their target…
He tilts his head towards the window, as if hoping - or maybe dreading - that he might be able to see the body he left behind.
Instead he meets vibrant white lenses, wide as saucers, against an unfamiliar swatch of bright red fabric with a perfect spider’s web stretched across it.
Jason swears and scrambles back in an instant, blind to the pain in his shoulder. And his back and his head and really his entire body - it’s screaming at him, begging him to stop moving, but he can’t afford to care right now. He’s on his feet before he can think better of it, and his gun is trained on the limber figure before him in the next millisecond. Only one, because the second gun is gone, probably lost between buildings when he fell, and damn that’s going to suck to replace.
The kid in the spider outfit - and he’s definitely a kid, no self-respecting adult would be running around in a damn onesie - throws his hands up and jumps back a solid two feet, and somehow the big white lenses get even wider, like they’re reacting to his eyes underneath the mask.
“Whoooa, whoa, whoa! Ok, let’s not go pulling out the big guns!”
Even the voice gives him away for God’s sake! It cracks when he gets to the part about the guns, and Jason has to resist snorting with amusement. He still doesn’t lower the weapon.
“Too late.” Jason’s voice comes out hoarse and the sound grates against his ears. He nearly winces, holding back the physical response by the skin of his teeth. He covers up the momentary lapse of control by clicking the safety off. The boy steps back again, something defensive in the way he holds himself, like he thinks he might be able to dodge a shot if Jason were to actually take one.
“Move.” Jason grits his teeth as soon as he’s said it. There’s something broken, a rib probably, thanks to his dive through the window. He can feel it scraping against itself in his chest with every breath.
The boy doesn’t seem especially deterred, although his attention is definitely on the gun now. “Hey, we’re all good here, man. I am totally not the enemy. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, right? I just caught you? You were falling?”
Jason can see him gulp. Nervous, but throwing on a brave face, trying to keep his cool. He can respect that.
Wait.
“I’m sorry, who?” For the second time tonight, Jason loosens his grip on his gun. He doesn’t mean to, considering how well it worked out the first time, but he’s just…
He’s a little confused, alright? First he’s chasing down idiots with space guns and then he’s getting shot off buildings and crashing through windows and then he’s face to face with some wannabe Justice League sidekick? What the hell even is his life anymore??
And the kid seems just as taken aback as he does, considering he’s suddenly lowering his hands and straightening up. His head tilts to the side and his lenses narrow in obvious confusion, and the whole thing is almost comical at this point.
“What…” Eventually Spider Kid’s arms drop to his sides in defeat. “What do you mean who?? I’m Spider-Man!”
Jason scoffs and tucks his gun back into it’s holster. He’s not a threat, not when he talks like that, and the only thing it makes Jason sure of is that he needs to get the hell out of here. “Sure, Spider Kid, and I’m Little Red Riding Hood. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with the Big Bad Wolf to get to.”
Before the boy can even finish trying to make sense of that, Jason has bolted past him and is leaping through the frame of the shattered window without hesitation. A quick hoist gets him back onto the rooftop, at the cost of his already aching shoulder, and then he’s off. He vaguely registers the squeaky yell of the kid behind him, confirmation that he’s following, but Jason is confident that he can outrun him even with a broken rib.
No one knows Crime Alley like he does.
Except…
Except this isn’t Crime Alley. There’s no bloodied body on the first rooftop, and the next one over is higher than he remembers. He has to scramble to make it all the way up. He shouldn’t have to do that, they should be lower-
He whips his head around when he finds himself vaulting onto the third building - up, again, and that just doesn’t make sense, he shouldn’t be going up - and that’s when it finally hits him.
The skyline is all wrong. This isn’t Crime Alley, he’s not even sure it’s Gotham.
He turns a full circle, unsteady on his feet and nearly toppling over from lightheadedness. It isn’t right. This isn’t-but he-where-
And then the kid in the fucking red spandex is literally swinging through the air towards him and Jason nearly falls over again as he turns to keep running. It doesn’t matter if he’s in Gotham. He knows the roofs, even if they aren’t his roofs, and there’s no way in hell he’s letting this little dollar store protegee catch him.
“You!” The kid swings right up alongside him, yelling out at the top of each arc as he gets closer and closer to actually catching up. “Are really!! Fast!!!”
Jason snarls at him and picks up the pace. There’s a drop up ahead, a wider space between buildings that should give him a nice clean path of escape if he can land it. Which he can, of course. He’s Red Hood, Jason Fucking Todd, and this kid is not going to outrun him.
The kid must notice what’s about to happen too, because suddenly he’s looking absolutely frantic as he speeds up. “Hey hey hey, wait a second!! You can’t jump that, you’re going to hurt yourself even worse!!”
Even as the words fade in and out with each swing, Jason can hear him easily enough. It doesn’t matter. The rooftop is ending, and hesitation will kill him all the way up here, so he simply doesn’t hesitate. He kicks off the ledge and sends himself vaulting through the air, onto the roof, into the tighter clump of buildings that should make it that much harder for this stubborn brat to follow him through-
His foot clips the edge. He stretches forward with both arms to balance himself and keep moving, but the moment his hand hits the concrete, pain shoots through his arm and up into his shoulder like lightning. He feels his muscles seize up with every spasm and blood gushes out around a bullet he’d almost forgotten about, and then he’s sliding, falling, dropping right off of the building all over again. His escape route is just out of reach, and for the second time tonight, Jason is fairly sure he’s going to die. He just hopes it hurts less this time.
Except now there are bright red spandex covered fingers wrapped around his wrist, the owner of which is literally sticking to the side of the building. The white lenses are wide again, and Jason can practically feel the panic bleeding off of the kid as he somehow manages to hold onto all 220 pounds of him, hundreds of stories high in the air without breaking a sweat.
“Y-you know,” the kid stammers. “I really don’t recommend doing parkour while bleeding out. Reeeally not the safest hobby. Zero out of ten, really-” He lets out a breathless laugh, sounding downright terrified as he squeezes Jason’s wrist just a little tighter. “-really bad idea.”
Jason stares up at him, grateful for the mask that’s currently hiding his own horrified expression. He wants to tell the kid to fuck off, to let him go and to get lost, but it’s like his mouth is suddenly full of cotton. His vision is flooding with black dots and green mist and he wants to be angry that this literal child managed to catch him, but all he can think is thank God he did.
And then the black takes over and he doesn’t think much of anything at all.
—
