Work Text:
A firm knock at the door.
Tim, sitting on the carpet, waist-deep in print-outs from Black Mask’s latest debacle, looked at the door. Looked at the pile of invoices, photos, blackmail, and stupid little evidence baggies from Mask’s stupid little torture party. Looked at his couch, which was Evidence Island for that thing with Scarecrow last week, and his coffee table, the last refuge of JL prototypes. Maybe whoever was knocking at the door of his top-secret vigilante hideout would just go away. Or maybe they’d have the decency to bring their own chair with them. He picked up his phone and accessed his front door security cameras.
Red Hood, one arm occupied by a pair of Old Joe’s pizzas, knocked again.
On the one hand, Hood might shoot him. On the other hand, Tim hadn’t eaten lunch and it was (he checked his phone again) 8:13 PM.
Tim turned all of his thigh-piles into carpet stacks and made his way to the door, where he removed three physical barricades, three digital barriers, and four traps for the unwary. He activated his If I die in the next ten hours, this is the last person I was seen with failsafe. Then he cracked the door on its chain. “Sorry, I didn’t order any pizza,” he snarked.
Hood huffed a robotic sigh through his voice modulator. “I need a favor.”
“I’m aware,” Tim said. There was no other reason for Hood to show up. And it had to be something complex, otherwise Hood would just do what he’d been doing, which was texting him a casefile and sticking a “One month of no murder attempts” coupon to Tim’s door when Tim solved it for him.
Hood held out the pizzas and waited. He didn’t even twitch his hand towards his gun.
“Fine.” Tim undid the chain and opened the door for him.
Hood left his helmet on one of the hat hooks by the front door, revealing a wryly curved mouth and eyes that weren’t any more Lazarus green than usual. He even gestured to the guns at his side with a cock of his head. Leave those here too? A generous offer from a crime lord who loved shooting people.
Tim shrugged. If it got down to violence, he’d rather Hood not be grumpy about it.
Hood shrugged back, kept his guns, and followed Tim into the solarium, which was an antechamber that Tim mostly used when he wanted to taunt potential snipers. It had a breakfast nook, two barstools, a dead plant from his well-meaning decorator, and ceiling-length bulletproof windows.
Tim tinted the windows with a flick of a wall switch.
“One Canadian bacon with onion and artichoke hearts,” Hood—Jason—said, dropping a pizza box in front of the left stool. “And one basil and roasted garlic with extra pecorino.” He dropped the other pizza in front of the right stool and sat.
Tim sat next to him. “Thanks for getting my order right.” He could be polite.
“I asked Alfred,” Jason said.
Proof someone else knew that Jason intended to visit him. Jason really didn’t want to kill him. At least at the moment.
(Jason’s pizza order had changed from when he was a kid; he’d always ordered the meat-lover’s before, maybe for the extra calories. Food insecurity sucked.)
(Tim’s tastes had changed too, but his pizza order hadn’t. No one ordered “Canadian bacon with onion and artichoke hearts” unless it was for him, specifically, and it was…nice, knowing that whoever had ordered the food had thought of him. Mental insecurity sucked too.)
They did justice to Old Joe’s thin-crust for a while, eating in silence.
When he only had a couple of slices left, Jason took a deep breath and said, “None of this leaves here, aright? Tell anyone I asked about any of this and you’ll wish you were dead.”
Tim waved his hand. “Duh.”
“Right. Okay.” Jason rubbed his forehead. “You know how sometimes start-up companies get successful and then they suddenly realize that they have a million employees instead of ten and that they should probably have things like an HR department and a pension plan?”
“Ah,” Tim said. Jason “Red Hood” Todd didn’t need the help of Red Robin, teen vigilante. He needed the help of Tim Drake, teen CEO. “You got your fiftieth employee?”
“I have to know what FMLA is now,” Jason said, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. “There are so many subparts.”
Tim made a sympathetic noise.
“And I’ve been meaning to set up some kind of…retirement…thing…for the past two years,” Jason continued. “Pretty much since I started, but there always seemed to be bigger things, you know?”
Tim nodded. Effective long-term policy or not, preteens addicted to fentanyl could definitely make someone put a 401k plan on the back burner.
“And I had Gloria handling birthdays!” Jason said, obviously on a roll now. “Like getting cards for everyone on the day and getting them signed and all? But she had to move to Florida cuz her Mami’s getting up there, and no one else wants to get the cards and pass them around, but now I’ve got grown-ass armed adults who are miffed that their birthdays don’t get a card, and some other people think there should be cake too if we’re going to be revamping the birthday system anyway!” He looked at Tim, his eyes wild. “The whole thing is distracting everyone from killing traffickers and setting up community support systems! Grown-ass adults! Birthdays!”
“Birthdays are the devil,” Tim said. The Wayne Enterprises R&D department had had a brief kerfuffle over them too.
“Incarnate,” Jason said. “But also, no. I mean, I get it, some of us ain’t had people who celebrated our birthdays before! I want everyone to feel appreciated. But at this point, all Black Mask has to do is say ‘cake and ice cream’ and his goons will be able to set up shop while my guys shoot each other.”
This level of chaos didn’t just happen; it was likely only the visible part of an iceberg of underlying dysfunction. “Gloria did a lot more than birthday cards, huh?” Tim asked.
Jason winced. “I begged her to come back and she said she was tired of nagging me about the pension plan.”
“Good for her,” Tim said mildly.
Jason glared.
“It got you here, didn’t it?”
Jason glared harder, but he stuffed his mouth full of pizza instead of threatening Tim with bodily harm.
Tim flexed his fingers. Gotham was better with a functional Red Hood gang and this would get him unprecedented access to Jason’s plans, but he also needed to come out of this alive. “If I help you with this, I’m going to need to know a lot about your organization.” He held up a pre-emptive hand. “I don’t care about your exact plans for Gotham’s drug trade, but we’ll be looking at your org charts—your chain of command—and getting nitty-gritty about it. Also, I want to be compensated as a consultant.”
Jason frowned. “You want money?” He glanced at Tim’s ostentatious kill-me windows.
Tim shrugged. “You can choose. I’ll bill you a fair amount, and you can compensate me with your money or with an equally valuable amount of your time—and I’ll know how much you value your time in an exact dollar amount by the time we’re done.”
Jason snorted. “That your usual deal when you’re a consultant, or is that a Jason Todd special?”
Tim smiled his best Janet Drake smile. “It’s the exact same deal I offer anyone in the JL or the vigilante community. The Jason Todd special is when I let people roll up in my DMs for the low, low price of not slitting my throat. Again.”
Jason had the grace to glance away. “Gotcha. Better get started then. Like you fancy CEO types say, time is money.”
“Like we fancy CEO types,” Tim corrected, and had the pleasure of watching Jason wince. Time for Red Hood to get his hands dirty with all the blood and ink that went into being a responsible twenty-first century boss.