Chapter Text
It’s drizzling in Gotham, and Parker wants a chili dog.
This is a rare occurrence. The chili dog, that is. Drizzle constitutes approximately seventy-one percent of the weather in Gotham. The constant film of water on glass and steel makes rappelling on skyscrapers more difficult, but Parker doesn’t really mind. She likes the low light and the sheltering fog, and the mossy gargoyles of the soaring churches are more fun to climb anyways.
But the chili dog. Parker pinpoints the craving and realizes it’s because for the past three days she’s been eating nothing but the triple-chocolate cupcakes Eliot made to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their Gotham brewpub. He’s been trying to thwart her, of course, but Parker’s not a criminal mastermind for nothing.
Now, though, her body wants salt, and meat, and Parker thinks a little guiltily of the breakfast sausages Eliot had been frying that morning when she scampered out the window behind his back, the last cupcake in hand. Oh well. He’ll grouch, but he won’t hold it against her. Eliot knows her, the way Hardison knows her, down to her bones. He never gets mad when Parker is just being Parker .
Hopping down three fire escapes from the rooftop where she was doing surveillance on a satellite office of Chapin Financial Management, Parker vaults off a dumpster onto the sidewalk, winks at the nearby mailman who gives a squawk of surprise at her sudden appearance, and strolls off down the block.
Even in the gloomy drizzle, Crime Alley is vibrant around her, fragrant with spices wafting out of hole-in-the-wall restaurants serving food from all over the world, colorful with bodega awnings and laundry strung between buildings, noisy with voices calling and cursing and laughing, buskers plucking out hopeful tunes on the street corners. Parker absorbs it all, and contentment curls in her chest like a cat. She’s never been fussy about where she calls home; cities are cities, all of them full of scoundrels, crowds, and opportunities. But there’s something about strange, obstinate, bedeviled Gotham, especially Crime Alley, that resonates deeply with her.
It takes her only a few minutes to reach the little food cart that’s always parked in front of a local church’s thrift store. Hardison likes to stop here sometimes, and Eliot does too, even though he pretends he’s too highbrow for it. Happy to be sharing habits with them, Parker saunters up, just in time to see the customer ahead of her spit out a gigantic bite of his chili dog.
“What the hell is this?” the guy demands, glaring daggers at the owner of the stand. “Is this… is there Dijon mustard on this?”
The chili dog vendor stares back at him, perplexed. “...Yes?”
“What the fuck, man? Why would you - Dijon mustard on a chili dog ? Are you nuts ?”
“It's fancy,” the vendor protests.
“It's a crime is what it is,” the guy snarls. “What's wrong with yellow mustard? It’s the way things are supposed to be. It’s part of what makes a New Jersey chili dog a New Jersey chili dog and not some gentrified Connecticut bullshit.”
Parker’s never heard so much passion for mustard. She sidles closer, fascinated, as the vendor’s frown turns from bafflement to annoyance. “Look, man, if you don't like the chili dog, you can have your three dollars back--”
“Unbelievable,” the guy rants on. “Four fuckin’ years I've been gone from Gotham, I come back and the first chili dog I get betrays me.” He shakes his head, looking disgusted. “I don’t know if it’s even worth it any more.”
Parker asks, abruptly, “Do you want a job?”
The man jumps with a yelp, swiveling his head to find her peering up from his shoulder. He reminds her of Eliot. Taller, younger, Latino, Parker thinks - but sturdy like him. And he glares the same way, putting his whole nose and eyebrows into it.
“What?”
“A job,” Parker repeats patiently. “I think you'd really get along with our head chef.”
The man stares at her a moment longer, slack-jawed, then scowls. “No, I don't want a job. I don’t need a job. Especially a random-ass job from a creeper on the street.”
“You paid for that chili dog in dimes,” Parker points out.
The guy and the chili dog vendor both look at the small stack of silver coins still sitting on the counter.
“So what?” the guy growls. “Maybe I just had a lot of change to get rid of.”
Parker holds up his wallet. “You don’t have any cash either.”
“Son of a - give me that.” He snatches the wallet out of her hand, then looks incredulously between her and his tight-fitting jeans. “When did you…?”
“I put a business card in there,” Parker tells him cheerfully. “It’s the Talvey Street Brewpub. My co-owners should be in this afternoon.”
The guy flips her off and storms away. Pleased, Parker turns back to the chili dog vendor, now staring at her in utter bewilderment.
“One chili dog, please,” she tells him brightly. “Without the bad mustard.”
~
It’s the midafternoon lull and Hardison’s manning the bar solo while Eliot works in the kitchen, prepping a few things for the dinner special before the rest of the cooks come in, and Parker is off on one of her own inscrutable errands. He’s playing Tetris on his phone while a codebreaking test script runs in the background, and thinking idly of how he never would have let the team leave him alone out here a year ago. Hardison had been… leery, about moving to Gotham. Whenever he tried to bring up its jaw-dropping crime rates, though, he was drowned out by the constant mantra of “ That’s why we need to be there! ”
But Hardison likes the city, now. Doesn’t trust it, absolutely not, but appreciates its gritted-teeth determination to keep going in the face of the most outrageous bullshit on the planet. And Eliot and Parker picked the perfect spot for the brewpub. It’s right at the edge of Crime Alley, where real estate prices are low but gangs don’t run completely rampant. Most of the neighborhood residents are eternally exhausted grad students living in budget housing while they attend medical or law school. They like using the brewpub as a low-key spot to play trivia with their study groups, and they don’t mind drinking questionable beer as long as it’s cheap. (Eliot’s words, not his. Hardison thinks his brews are improving all the time and that the recent sweet tea-habanero ale was especially smooth, thank you very much.)
The staff, however, are almost all from Crime Alley proper. That was another reason Eliot and Parker wanted a spot within walking distance of the infamous district. Offering legal, low-stress, well-paid employment to ex-cons, single moms, and runaway teens isn’t nearly as dramatic as breaking up international smuggling rings or toppling pharmaceutical empires, but sometimes it feels to Hardison like the best work they do.
So, when the heavy glass door swings open and a young man steps across the threshold, Hardison recognizes the look on his face.
“Hi,” the kid says, shoving his hands in his pockets and coming up to the bar with just a hint of trepidation in his voice. “Someone said I should - uh - I heard this was a good place to look for a job.”
Hardison sizes up the kid. Tall, broad-shouldered, and burly enough that he must be hard-pressed to shake off gang recruiters. That might explain why he’s kinda haggard-looking too. But still under twenty, if Hardison has to guess. With all his foster siblings, he’s good at clocking ages. The kid’s wearing a hoodie, jeans, sneakers, all sporting the faint smell of Goodwill laundry detergent. His hair is buzzed close, but Hardison can still make out a quarter-sized white spot, right at his forehead, stark against the short black stubble around it. Genetic? Hardison wonders. Or it could be a new fashion trend. He dearly hopes not. Gotham’s fads are rough .
Regardless, the guy looks like a typical denizen of Crime Alley: tired and broke, but still carrying himself like he’ll kick anyone's ass at a moment’s notice. No wonder Eliot likes this part of town.
“Yeah, for sure,” Hardison says, reaching under the counter for their stack of applications. “Who recommended us, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He’s ready to bask in glowing reviews from a brewpub employee, but the kid just gets a weird look on his face. “Uh… some blond lady at the chili dog cart on 8th said I reminded her of the chef here.”
Hardison pauses. Steeples his fingers. Inhales. Parker is the light of his life, and truly, every day with her is a new adventure.
“Gotcha,” he says. “Can I ask if anything… prompted her to make that comparison?”
“I was arguing with the chili dog guy about Dijon mustard.”
“Ah.” It all makes sense now.
The kid shoots him a suspicious glance. “Would you ever put Dijon mustard on a chili dog?”
“Um….” This is clearly a test, and Hardison desperately grasps at the right answer. “I would. Not?”
The kid looks unimpressed. “I take it you’re not the chef, then.”
“Haha, no. Founder and CEO. Eliot does the food.”
The kid arcs an eyebrow. “CEO of a local non-franchised restaurant?”
“Look, if you hate enterprise and entrepreneurship, I can just keep this.” Hardison brandishes the application at him.
“No, I love the hustle,” the kid deadpans. “And, uh….” He rubs the back of his neck, suddenly looking uncertain again. “A job would be. Helpful.”
“They can be,” Hardison agrees smugly. He fishes a pen out from under the register and lays the application on the counter. It’s just one page, as basic as they can make it. “Front of house or kitchen?”
“Kitchen,” the kid says immediately.
“Okie doke.” Hardison marks that on the application. “Our head chef’s in the back, he gave very strict orders not to bother him until he’s finished caramelizing the onions for tonight’s special, but that should just be another couple minutes.” After years of Eliot’s cooking, Hardison can track every subtle shift in the mellow aroma wafting out from the back. “I can get you started in the meantime. First name?”
A second’s hesitation. “Eddie.”
“Last?”
“Dantes.”
“Oh, like The Count of Monte Cristo ,” Hardison says absently, scribbling it down.
When he looks back up, Eddie’s eyes are wide, and Hardison belatedly realizes - Alias. Obvious alias. Be cool!
“Yeah, uh, neat,” he stammers. “Hope you didn’t get teased at school. Then again, I only know that ‘cause my nana made us watch the 2002 movie all the time, always felt like it was about seventeen hours long, she had the hots for Guy Pearce, but at least it had sword fights so it was better than My Big Fat Greek Wedding ….”
He shoots Eddie a look out of the corner of his eye. Thank god, this rambling has made the kid relax a little bit. He’s even got a tiny smirk on his face. “As if anyone in the Gotham public school system has read Count of Monte Cristo, c’mon, man.”
Seems like you did , Hardison almost fires back, but with a heroic effort he reminds himself to keep playing dumb. He likes Eddie so far. He really does remind him of Eliot. It would be a shame to scare him off. “No comment,” he says instead, and clicks the pen a few times. “Anyways. Where were we?”
They get through the rest of the basic questions - pronouns, preferred shifts, general availability - and Hardison keeps his foot firmly out of his mouth. “All right, my man, that’s it from me,” he finally declares, handing the application sheet to Eddie. “Any questions before I send you back to Eliot?”
“Yeah.” Eddie’s got a hint of a challenge in his voice. “You don’t sound like you’re from Gotham.”
Hardison grimaces. Parker will sometimes break out a mangled New Jersey accent that she’s extremely proud of, but he and Eliot have never even attempted the local dialect. “Yeah, no. I’m a North Carolina boy myself.”
“Then why set up shop…,” Eddie gestures behind him, to the big windows that show a glimpse of Crime Alley tenements rising a few blocks away, “...here?”
Unsurprisingly, this is a question they get asked a lot. Usually Hardison gives a snide answer along the lines of “The ambiance,” and people will laugh and let it go. But there’s something seeking and intent in Eddie’s face, like even though he’s the interviewee, Hardison’s the one getting evaluated. He purses his lips for a second, trying to come up with an answer that’s both vague and truthful.
“We thought we could do good here,” he says finally. “Make a real impact.”
Eddie studies him a moment longer, then nods, shoulders relaxing a fraction. Hardison has no idea what test he just passed, but he’s glad he did.
“Anything else?” he asks, and Eddie shakes his head. “Super. Smells like the onions are done, so head on back to the kitchen and you’ll find a long-haired dude by the name of Eliot. He might look like a grumpy old man, but he’s harmless.”
Within the walls of the brewpub, at least.
“Thanks,” Eddie says, and Hardison watches him stalk over to the kitchen like a man on a mission.
Interesting guy, Hardison thinks as he pops Tetris back open and resumes his level. He hopes Eliot wants to keep him around.
~
For a man that claims total ignorance about any food that isn’t artificially orange, Hardison has a talent for interrupting Eliot mere seconds after a pan of caramelizing onions has reached perfection. Obviously, it’s a big improvement over interrupting the process itself, but it would be nice to have a chance to stand and savor the golden bounty for more than a single breath before some down-on-his-luck linebacker-looking teenager pokes his head into Eliot’s domain.
“Hey, uh - Alec said to talk to you about working in the kitchen?”
“Yeah,” Eliot half-growls, half-sighs, sliding the pan of onions across the range to cool. “Who’re you?”
“Eddie.”
Eliot grabs a dish towel to wipe his hands and uses the movement to disguise a lightning-quick examination of Eddie. Buzz cut, but not military. Switchblade in his hoodie pouch, otherwise unarmed. Shoes too genuinely shitty to be part of a disguise. There’s something interestingly stilted in his stance, like he has to make a real effort to act casual. Then again, he might just be nervous about applying for a job.
All in all, he’s not a cop, not a rogue’s henchman, and not about to crack open a canister of fear gas in the brewpub, and sometimes that’s as good as it gets in Gotham. “Okay,” Eliot says, throwing the dish towel over his shoulder. “What position you looking for?”
“Prep cook.”
“Okay.” Eliot grabs a potato and plonks it onto a cutting board. “Prep that.”
The kid shoots him a narrow look. “For what?”
All right, he knows there’s more than one way to cut up a potato. That was already a step above some of the other job seekers who come through.
“French fries. Skin off.”
“Who makes french fries with the skin off?” Eddie mutters to himself, but he steps up to the counter and plucks a paring knife off the rack.
“Wait!” Eliot barks, and the kid freezes in his tracks. “Wash your hands.”
Eddie shoots him a rueful look. “Sorry,” he mutters, moving over to the sink. “My–my granddad always called me on that too. Don’t know why I never internalized that shit–” He winces again. “Ugh. Sorry.”
“Cussing’s fine,” Eliot tells him, amused. “But OSHA violations ain’t.”
“Words to live by.” Eddie dried his hands and picks the paring knife back up. He peels the spud in a few expert strokes, then slaps it back on the cutting board, grabs a chef’s knife, and chops it briskly into strips.
Eliot watches. When Eddie puts the knife down, he hands him a head of broccoli. “Stir fry.”
Eddie obliges, working through the broccoli and a couple bell peppers and a mound of mushrooms. Finally Eliot goes to the fridge and pulls out a whole chicken that he’d thawed out for him and Parker and Hardison. “You know how to break down meat?”
Eddie looks like he wants to laugh, but thinks better of it. “Yeah, I do.”
“Joint that.”
Eddie sets to work on the chicken. Eliot observes. It’s clear the kid’s never been to culinary school, but it’s equally clear that someone - a grandfather, apparently - taught him his way around a kitchen. He handles the knives with particular ease, and always picks the right tool for the job. That’ll save Eliot some training. If there’s one thing he hates, it’s seeing his good knives misused.
“All right,” he says when Eddie finishes washing his hands again. “You’re hired.”
Eddie blinks. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Eliot confirms. It was nice to have prep cooks around. They didn’t really get busy enough to need many, but Leverage Incorporated did not believe in lean staffing. He looks at the kid’s application again. “Flexible shifts, right?”
“Yeah,” Eddie confirms. “Just picking up stuff when I can. I’ve got another job with… weird hours.”
“Sure.” That was pretty typical of their staff. Eliot never asked. “Well, Aidan and Noor are our general managers, they handle the scheduling. There’s a group chat with all the staff where they’ll put out the call for extra preppers to come in, or you can pick up shifts when folks need a sub. If you don't have a phone you can use, we’ll get you one on the company plan.”
“Oh.” The kid looks surprised. “Uh… yeah. That would be great.”
“Talk to Hardison about it. Once he gets that to you he’ll send you a W-2 so we can put you on payroll.”
Eddie shifts. “Actually, I was hoping for something kinda… informal.”
Ah. That was typical too. There were probably more people on their staff getting paid under the table than above it. It’s actually pretty handy when they need to launder a big score. “That’s fine,” Eliot says. “In that case we’ll pay you in cash or gift cards, end of every shift.”
A lot of the brewpub’s part-time employees worked for them so they could go to Costco or the grocery store every week. But Eddie says, “Cash,” and Eliot nods.
“Okay. Sounds good.” He pauses, sizing Eddie up. “You got a place to stay?”
Eddie doesn’t answer right away, and Eliot hastily goes on. “I know the shelters in Gotham get a bad rap, but we know the folks who run the good ones - I can give you a list, give them a call–”
“That’s - that’s nice of you,” Eddie interrupts. “But no. I’m good.”
“Staying with family?”
Eddie blinks, looking suddenly wary. “What makes you say that?”
“Gotham accent,” Eliot says. “Crime Alley accent, actually. But you’ve got a bus ticket from New York sticking out of your pocket.”
Eddie looks. “Guess I do.”
“Figured if you just moved back, you might be crashing with relatives. “
“Nah.” Eddie shakes his head. “I’m… estranged from my family. Been gone from Gotham for a few years too. They wouldn’t even recognize me.” He sounds oddly satisfied. “But I got a place to stay. Thanks though.”
“Okay.” The outfit he’s wearing screams ‘that place is a condemned building,’ but Eliot feels he’s poked enough. However Eddie is managing his life is none of his business. Only the bad guys get their secrets pried out of them by his team.
“Well, welcome to the team, Eddie.” Eliot turns back to his pan of onions. “Get that phone from Hardison and we’ll see you around.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
The kid starts out the door, then pauses. “Quick question. How do you feel about Dijon mustard on chili dogs?”
Eliot stares at him for several long, long heartbeats. “Is that one of Hardison’s ideas?”
“No.”
“Good,” Eliot growls. “Because it’s fucking terrible .”
Eddie grins, and slips out.
Notes:
For those who've read The Count of Monte Cristo, you can probably think of the two main reasons I picked Eddie Dantes as Jason's alias. For those who haven't, all will be revealed! Many, many chapters from now. Just know that Jason definitely earns that literature nerd tag.
Comments are warmly welcomed but I am very bad at replying. Please know they are still appreciated!
EDIT: FORGOT TO MENTION I AM NOT FROM THE EAST COAST AND I HAVE NO EXPERIENCE WITH CHILI DOGS. My apologies if I've misrepresented the culture, values, and mustard preferences of New Jersey and/or Connecticut.
Chapter 2: Chicken on Brioche
Notes:
Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who's jumped in, especially those who have left kudos and comments! You are the rays of sun to the solar panel of my writing motivation.
Content warning for a brief flash of PTSD from our boy "Eddie" towards the end of the chapter - more details in the end notes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Eddie’s a good fit for the brewpub crew. Most of them are down on their luck too, estranged from family, looking for a new start - but, in classic Gotham fashion, shouldering their burdens with nothing more than an eye roll and a complaint about the shit weather. With his thrift-store hoodies and thick Crime Alley accent and steady supply of snark, Eddie slots right in.
He works hard. Eliot knows it’s too much to ask that his staff never complains, but Eddie’s grumbling never has any heat in it, even when the kitchen managers put him on menial tasks like washing the floor or emptying the compost bins. His coworkers appreciate it. But what they appreciate even more is that Eddie’s good conversation at the cutting boards.
That’s what Eliot notices, more than Eddie’s work ethic or skill with a knife: although the kid’s not nosy about anyone’s personal lives, he hunts for gossip on the inner workings of Crime Alley like he’s cramming for a test.
“McBride?” Eliot hears Eddie scoff one morning while he and another one of their on-again off-again prep cooks, Sasha, are deveining shrimp together at a utility sink. “That fuckin’ Walter White wannabe is a player now? When I was here he was still selling weed to college kids at the U.”
“Yeah, well, now he thinks he’s big leagues ‘cause he switched to pharmaceuticals. Not party stuff, either. Shit he can hold over people’s heads.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“You know, antibiotics, anxiety meds, inhalers, stuff you can’t get if you don’t have a prescription. My dipshit brother went to him for insulin for my niece after he got laid off, and when he missed a payment McBride just straight-up took his car. So now he’s got no job, no health insurance, and no car.”
“Fucking sucks, dude,” Eddie mutters.
Eliot moves on to check with the line cooks, making a mental note to himself to add McBride to the to-do list of Leverage Incorporated, and ask Hardison to rig some kind of vehicle giveaway for Sasha’s brother in the meantime.
“Yeah, but how can you not have one window in the whole apartment?” Eliot overhears the next day as Eddie peels apples with an older woman named Diane. “Isn’t that, like, the most basic fire hazard?”
“I guess,” Diane sighs, “but it’s slim pickings as an ex-con, you know? This woman, Bella Landry - Landry Living, that’s the company - she owns almost all the apartments in Crime Alley that’ll rent to people who’ve got records. She can do what she wants.”
“So she divides the units in half,” Eddie muses, “doubles the occupancy of her buildings, probably bribes the inspectors so they never check, only reports half the rent on her income tax, and pockets the rest.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Diane says hastily. “And honestly, I’ve lived in much worse places. Maybe she’s just trying to meet the demand.”
“Of course. Yeah. Sorry.” Eliot glances over to see Eddie give Diane a sheepish grin. “I’m really into, like, conspiracy theories. Have you heard the one about how mattress stores are all fronts for money laundering?”
But Eddie’s probably right, Eliot thinks as the kid and Diane move on to joking about increasingly outlandish schemes. If a shady landlord’s got a monopoly on housing for ex-cons, it figures they’d get greedy.
Well, he doesn’t want to throw Diane out of her place by taking down the landlady, but there’s more than one way to break a stranglehold. Eliot pulls out his personal phone and texts Hardison. can we buy some apartment buildings to rent to ex-cons in the alley?
A second later - Hardison always replies at lightspeed - there’s a buzz.
you need to get better hobbies
but yes
Eliot smiles.
It’s inevitable that with all the questions Eddie asks, his coworkers want to know more about him too. But he’s remarkably good at giving nothing away, even when one day he comes in limping and sporting a black eye.
“You okay to be working?” Eliot asks him, running a critical eye over the way he’s standing. Black eye’s clearly from a right hook, and the limp - looks like someone hit him in the thigh, maybe with a baseball bat. He’s not too concerned about Eddie getting into fights - it’s a part of life in Crime Alley, probably connected to his “other job” - but he ought to send the kid home if he’s sprained something.
“Yeah, boss, looks worse than it is.” Eddie gives him a crooked grin. “Tripped on the stairs.”
Eliot rolls his eyes. “Sit on a stool at least. You can help Britt and Sasha with the salad.”
“You are so full of bullshit,” he hears Britt, a waitress who pops in to prep when the orders are slow, inform Eddie as he pulls up a stool beside her. “Stairs, my ass. Someone’s been punching you.”
“What?” Eddie puts a hand on his heart. “Who would do such a thing?”
“You tell me. Do you even have any friends outside of work?”
“No, and I bet you feel like an asshole now.”
“Are you implying his friends should be the ones punching him?” Sasha chimes in. “‘Cause I could give it a go—”
“Ugh, shut up. You know what I mean. Who gave you a black eye, Ed?”
“If I said I was a streetfighter, would that be hot?” Eddie bats his eyelashes, poorly.
“Ew, no.” Britt wrinkles her nose. “Only teenagers think fighting is hot. Black eyes give me the ick. And once a guy kissed me and he had a split lip from a fight and he bled in my mouth .”
“Some people are into that,” Sasha smirks.
“ Ew !” Britt squeals and flicks a towel at him. “Why are you such a giant perv!”
“Hey, everyone!” Eddie raises his voice. “Sasha’s a giant blood perv! Pass it on!”
The rest of the crew jumps in to rag on Sasha, who just grins wider. Eliot watches Eddie chop lettuce and hurl good-natured insults at his coworkers. It was a casual deflection, but it worked.
Which makes him wonder, of course, why Eddie was deflecting at all. But Eliot stops himself. Eddie’s got a life outside the brewpub, and if he doesn’t want to bring it in here, that’s fine. None of their business.
As the weeks roll on, Eddie shows up with bruises pretty regularly. Some of the staff think he really is a street fighter in his off hours. But he just keeps redirecting, usually to his own questions. And dear god, Eddie has questions. Eddie wants to know who deals clean drugs and who cuts their product, which restaurants are fronts for the mob, how many bodegas have real vegetables and not just junk food, which rogues have shown up in the Alley and why, what areas have the worst police response times, how much funding is coming in from local philanthropists and where it’s going, on and on and on–
Finally one day the kitchen’s bustling, the lunch rush in full swing, and Eddie’s just asked for a poll on Crime Alley’s fire brigade that’s got everyone debating at the top of their lungs. The food’s getting cooked and cooked well, so Eliot can’t scold anyone, but the tumult is irritating. He likes a quiet, focused kitchen. “Jesus, kid,” he growls at Eddie as he passes by him with a tray of potato croquettes. “Are you running for mayor or somethin’? Building your platform?”
“Ooh, you should, Eddie!” Britt gushes as she scoops up baskets of bread rolls. “Mayor Dantes! I’d vote for you!”
Eddie gives a bark of laughter. “Sorry, Britt,” he drawls, scraping potato peelings into a compost bucket. “I’ve got a much higher calling.”
“Besides, you can’t cuss on the campaign trail,” Sasha says. “And that would be a big fucking problem for you, wouldn’t it, Eddie?”
“Please,” Eddie scoffs. “Gotham would love it if I called my opponent a piss-guzzling fuckwad and you know it.”
Eliot grinds his teeth at the wave of laughter and decides to take himself to the front for a while. But that gets him wondering about Eddie again, and what kind of higher calling he’s got in mind. He’s beginning to think there’s more to this kid than he lets on.
And he’s certain of it when later that day, just as they’re closing, a skinny kid creeps in the door and asks if they have any leftovers.
This happens a lot. Word gets around fast among Gotham’s street kids about which restaurants might feed you if you ask. This kid has the sleepless look of a recent runaway and twitchy fingers that remind Eliot of Parker. “Chicken sandwich okay?” he asks them, gently, and they give him a tiny, frightened nod.
Eliot points the kid to a table by the door, brings them a glass of water and sets it on a cardboard coaster printed with the addresses of shelters he trusts, then heads into the back.
Everyone’s gone home except Eddie, who’s washing dishes. “Hey,” Eliot calls out to him as he passes through. “We just had a kid come in - could you make them a sandwich? There’s some leftover roast chicken from the special.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
In their apartment behind the restaurant, Parker’s on the couch with two screens going, one running live camera footage from inside some generic-looking office and one playing Gravity Falls . She pauses both when Eliot comes in, cocking her head at him.
“Kid out front.” Eliot jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “You want to talk to them?”
Parker bobs her head happily and springs to her feet. Eliot has to fight to keep a sappy surge of pride off his face as she follows him back out. Parker’s come a long, long way since Serbia. Here in Gotham she’s found a role as the advisor/cool aunt/near-mystic figure of wisdom to the street kids and runaways, and takes it very seriously.
They’re both shocked to a stop when they get to the kitchen. “Something smells amazing,” Parker says with a deep inhale. “Are you making us dinner?”
Even though they live behind their own restaurant, Eliot cooks something unique most nights for him and Hardison and Parker. The two of them are perfectly content with orange soda and cereal, but he gets tired of eating leftovers from their own menu, and Parker and Hardison need more nourishment than corn syrup, dammit.
But Eliot doesn’t have anything cooking yet. Whatever was just made must have been Eddie.
He and Parker wind through the cooking stations to reach Eddie, who’s just plating a sandwich. Eliot’s eyebrows shoot up.
When he’d asked the guy to make a chicken sandwich, he’d imagined cold leftover meat with a smear of mayonnaise and maybe a slice of cheese between two pieces of bread. Tasty, but basic.
However, it appears that Eddie has, in the sixty seconds Eliot was gone to get Parker, pan-roasted the cold cuts of chicken in a pat of garlic butter, whipped up a quick chipotle aioli to go with it, toasted a brioche bun in more garlic butter, and assembled the whole thing with some ultra-fresh arugula that one of the kitchen managers, Aidan, grows in a window box above the sink. The hot, crisp sandwich looks as good as anything on the menu. Eliot is floored.
“Hey, boss. And Boss Parker.” Eddie nods to both of them. Parker isn’t around the kitchen much, but everyone knows she’s one of the brewpub’s owners, and she smiles at Eddie, clearly pleased with the title. Eddie gestures towards the stunning creation on the plate. “There’s your sandwich.”
He turns to go back to dishwashing. “Wait a sec,” Eliot says. “You should take that out to the kid. Let them know you made it.”
Eddie looks puzzled. “Why?”
“Because it’s beautiful!” Parker chimes in. “You can’t let Eliot steal the credit!”
“It’s true,” Eliot says solemnly. “I’m known to do that.”
“Uh. Well. Okay.”
Eddie picks up the sandwich and they follow him out into the dining area. Eliot grins when the kid’s eyes go huge at the sight and the smell. Eddie puts down the plate and almost leaps back when the kid tears into the sandwich like a ravenous tiger.
“Oh my god,” they say around a stuffed mouth, their voice suddenly loud and bright. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“Oh. Cool,” Eddie says. “You’re welcome.”
He turns and very nearly rushes back to the kitchen. Eliot leaves Parker chatting cheerfully with the kid and heads back too.
Eddie’s already up to his elbows again in soapy water, scrubbing hard. Eliot stands in the doorway for a second, watching him.
“That looked like a really good sandwich.”
Eddie doesn’t turn around or pause in his scrubbing. “That’s just my M.O. with leftover chicken.”
“It’s pretty slick,” Eliot says. “Your grandpa teach you?”
Eddie flinches, minutely. “Yeah.”
“You know,” Eliot says, making sure his voice is light, no pressure, nothing that would send this kid running, “you got talent. If you wanted to be a line cook, we’ve got room for you.”
The scrubbing got a little less frantic. “That’s more scheduled,” Eddie says. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. And full-time.”
Eliot knows that Eddie knows what he’s offering. Whatever Eddie’s involved in now outside of the brewpub, he could walk away. Work an ordinary, predictable job, at a place that provides everything a person needs to live simply but comfortably. Start over. Build a normal life. How many times had Eliot himself gotten that offer? From Amy, from Kaye Lynn, from others whose paths had crossed his for moments as intense as they were brief. Because his answer was always the same.
And as he suspected, the answer is the same for Eddie. Slowly, still not turning around, the kid shakes his head.
“Nah, boss, what I’ve got now works for me. But thanks.”
He sounds genuinely grateful, if a little sad. Eliot’s almost sorry he offered. He wouldn’t change the way his life has turned out now, with Parker and Hardison, Leverage and the brewpub, kicking ass while doing good. But part of him still mourns all the roads he’s left untraveled.
But all he says is a casual, “Sure thing,” and returns to the dining room to sit beside Parker.
~
Then, a few days after the sandwich, Eliot realizes the secrets Eddie Dantes is keeping go far, far deeper than he could have imagined.
Recently, Hardison had decided to try his hand at making a sparkling passionfruit wine (not a champagne, at least Eliot's managed to teach him that much by this point - it doesn't even have grapes in it, for god's sake, let alone the correct Pinot Meunier variety from France) - and of course, he chose one of their commercial-sized brewery vats for his test run. The concoction actually tasted okay, but the aroma was so powerful Eliot was worried he’d lost his sense of smell, so the brewpub had decided to host a brunch with bottomless mimosas to try and get rid of it.
Unsurprisingly, every table filled up almost instantly. Most of the staff had been called in for the morning, and the kitchen was packed. Aidan and Noor broke out their serious-manager voices and the mood in the room was one of furious focus and barely-controlled chaos. Even Eddie, peeling hard-boiled eggs in the corner, wasn’t making his usual wisecracks, instead responding briskly to the crisp call-and-response of behind, knife, flash it, on deck, pickup table 4, yes chef . Eliot, slamming oranges through the juicer at top speed, feels like he’s in the Army again. It’s oddly nostalgic.
Then Sasha drops a ladle.
This would ordinarily be a minor issue. But the ladle goes skittering across the floor, trailing polenta, and Aidan, rounding the edge of a cooking station, accidentally steps on it, and as they slip, their foot skids the metal ladle across the concrete floor with a horrible screech!
With windmilling arms, a muffled “Fuck!”, and a contortion that’s actually pretty impressive, Aidan manages to stay upright. But no one is looking at them. Everyone is looking at Eddie, who, the instant he heard the screech, whipped around and grabbed a knife.
For a long moment, the kitchen is still. Orange juice drips down Eliot’s forearms. The angle of the knife in Eddie’s hand, the clean line of wrist to thumb to blade, tells a story Eliot knows well.
Then Eddie’s eyes flash as he tracks the sound to the ladle on the floor, and just as fast, he flips the knife out of his hand and back onto the counter. His shoulders drop, and he puts a hand over his face and shoves his way out of the kitchen through the back door, ignoring the startled calls after him.
“Shit,” Noor mutters. “Should I go after him, boss?”
“One sec,” Eliot says, and darts to the office.
Hardison has a lot of cameras outside the brewpub, in case their enemies ever track them here. It feels a little Big Brother-ish to look for Eddie on them, but Eliot’s glad for it when he immediately sees that the kid hasn’t gone far. He’s in the alleyway out the back door, by the trash cans, bracing his hands on his knees and breathing deep. After a few seconds, he straightens up and pulls out his phone. An instant later, Eliot’s work cell pings with a text to him and the managers.
im fine but I need to go sorry
Three typing bubbles immediately appear with Noor’s name by them, and Elliot pockets his phone. She and Aidan will do a good job reassuring both Eddie and the rest of the kitchen. A lot of them have bad triggers too, for countless reasons; everyone will understand.
What he’s more concerned about is the way Eddie grabbed the knife.
He’d held it like a trained fighter would, clearly ready to use it. Eliot’s protective instincts didn’t like that. But knowing how to use a knife in combat could be explained by military service or gang involvement, and Eddie had never made a threatening move. It was a knee-jerk reaction, nothing more.
There was something else. Some other movement had triggered something uneasy in Eliot’s mind, some prickling memory. Eliot focuses hard and replays the incident. The ladle, the scrape, the knife, the–
The flip of the knife. The way it had moved into Eddie’s hand and just as quickly out again. Eliot recognized it.
Ah , Eliot thinks, and then, Shit .
Notes:
HOORAY our first cliffhanger!
The metal-scraping-on-the-floor trigger is lifted directly from Wayne Family Adventures #45, here. If you haven't read it and don't plan to, the short version is that a tire iron being accidentally scraped on the ground sends Jason spiraling because it sounds like the Joker dragging the crowbar on the floor of the warehouse. (cue hugs for the boy)
I have a handful more chapters prepped so I should be able to stick to a weekly update schedule for a little while at least <3 see you on Mother's Day!
Chapter 3: Lamp Chops
Notes:
Thank you for even more lovely kudos and comments! I especially got a kick out of folks identifying the knife flip as, shall we say... extremely unique? Highly characteristic? I can't think of any more synonyms so on with the chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“The League of Assassins?” Hardison explodes. “Eliot, man, you cannot be serious!”
By now, Parker thought Hardison would be used to Eliot’s revelations about all the outrageous things that he knew or had done. But apparently, he could still be surprised.
“I wouldn’t joke about this.”
“But from a knife flip? Come on–”
“It’s a very distinctive flip,” Eliot growls.
Hardison flings his hands in the air. “Look. If I hadn’t hacked the databases of just about every military on the planet, I wouldn’t think the League of Assassins existed. I’m still not convinced. I mean, practically everyone says they’re a myth!”
“They’re real.”
Parker’s watching Eliot. He’s gotten terse and tense like he does when he needs to tell them something he doesn’t want to. Eliot has done a lot of terrible things, for a lot of terrible people. Parker is perfectly aware of that. But this particular haunted look in his eyes only appears regarding one of them.
“You know them because of Moreau,” Parker prompts. “Don’t you?”
For an instant, Eliot just looks at her, wild-eyed and guilt-wracked. Parker gazes back at him calmly. Lets him know that this is just a fact, not a judgment, not an accusation. It doesn’t mean anything to her heart. Eliot takes a quick breath and his face is composed again.
“Yeah,” he admits gruffly. “The League needed antiquities moved between the Middle East and Europe. Under the radar, obviously. They came to Moreau.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Hardison nearly screeches. “Your old boss was in bed with the League ?”
“Minor commanders. Low-stakes projects. But yes.” Eliot breathes deeply again. “He worked with them.”
“And so did you,” Parker finishes.
“Not so much working as….” Eliot runs his hands through his hair, fingers trembling minutely. “Look. Moreau… liked how I could fight. Wherever we went, he found new people that I could learn from. Or spar with. Or both.”
“So you fought a League assassin?” Now Hardison sounded like that was actually the coolest thing he’d ever heard.
“Yes,” Eliot says shortly.
The question hovers on Parker’s tongue: Who won? But Eliot’s in front of her, still alive, so maybe that answered it. Hard to imagine the League went in for anything less than death matches.
If she asks him, he will tell her. So Parker doesn’t ask.
“You know their techniques,” she says instead.
Eliot nods. “I saw plenty of League-trained knife fighters. That move Eddie used? It’s theirs.”
Parker absorbs this. She likes Eddie. Everyone at the brewpub likes Eddie, and he calls her Boss Parker. She doesn’t want him to be an assassin. But that won’t change it if he is. “Any chance he was trained by someone who was trained by the League, but not in it anymore?”
“Possible. Unlikely, though. They don’t give up their secrets easily.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet it’s a lifetime membership,” Hardison mutters. “So what does that mean? Is Eddie here for us?”
That question was gnawing at Parker too. “Is it because of Moreau?” she asks, meeting Eliot’s eyes again. “Does the League want revenge on us for taking him out of the game?”
Eliot hesitates, then shakes his head. “I doubt it,” he says, slowly, clearly considering it. “That was years ago. If they’d wanted to, the League would have found us before now. Besides, Moreau was just a contractor for them. They come and go.”
“Not to mention that we take down criminals!” Hardison points out brightly. “Isn’t that what the League does too?”
“Sometimes,” Eliot says. “It depends on if you define a criminal the same way the League does. Plus their methods are a little… different from ours.”
That ominous statement hangs in the air for a second. Then Parker flips her hand, brushing it away.
“Okay,” she says. “Eddie’s not here to kill us. That’s good. What should we do now?”
Hardison grimaces. “Hate to say it, but… the Bats?”
“League of Assassins is more their wheelhouse than ours,” Eliot agrees.
Parker frowns. Figuring out how to add Levage Incorporated’s brand of justice to a city of vigilantes has been… complicated. There’s plenty of wrongs to go around, but it’s still hard to keep lines from crossing. Once Batman punched out a slumlord Parker had been grifting for months and the guy skipped town immediately, which was really annoying. But keeping an eye on Bat activity has also helped them crack a couple of their own tough cases, especially when the Dark Knight’s antics send big players flocking to bars and strip clubs to complain, making them easy pickings for Parker in a miniskirt.
They’re sort of peers, in a way. Parker, Hardison, and Eliot are all criminals, sure, but vigilantism isn’t exactly legal. Swindling a greedy real estate developer to save a low-income housing project, beating up sadistic psychologists to keep the citizenry safe - six of one, half a dozen of the other, really. Parker would call Batman a giant hypocrite if he ever tried to arrest them .
Mostly, though, the three of them just try to stay off Batman’s radar. That was the one thing Eliot had been adamant about when they moved operations to Gotham. From the way his mouth goes thin every time there’s a blurry clip of Batman battling rogues on TV, Parker knows Eliot doesn’t think he could beat him in a fight. She’s not so sure. It’s the body armor that’s the problem, she thinks, and she’s suggested they get Eliot a suit of his own, but he point-blank refuses. Maybe for his birthday.
“Why should we tattle on Eddie to the Bats?” she says. “He doesn’t deserve to get locked up just for being trained by the League. Maybe he ran away.”
It’s mostly wishful thinking on her part, but Eliot frowns thoughtfully. “He wasn’t dressed to fight when he came here,” he says. “His shoes were falling apart. Even if the League sent him here in disguise, there’s no reason they had to go that far.”
“And, not much reason to get a part-time job as a prep cook,” Hardison points out. “I could see maybe, like, a janitor at the mayor’s office if you were going to assassinate the mayor. But the brewpub?”
“So Eddie’s not even with the League anymore!” Parker is happy. “Great. Let’s talk about the menu for next week.”
“No, come on,” Eliot huffs. “This is still a problem. Do we really want a trained assassin hanging around in our kitchen?”
Parker looks at him, pointedly.
“Shut up.”
“If you’re so worried about it, just talk to him.” Parker flutters a hand. “Try to feel out how much murder he’s planning to do.”
“ Parker ,” Eliot growls.
Parker flops dramatically down on the sofa. They’ve been standing tensely in the middle of the apartment for this whole exchange, but her worries have blown away in the breeze and now she’s ready to move on. “Hardison, tell Eliot to listen to me.”
Eliot shoots Hardison the kind of look that would have sent him running for the hills when they’d first met. But now Hardison just raises an eyebrow at him. “Hey man, I bet when you rolled up on your chef pal to start turning your life around, you had twice the baggage and half the charm of young Mr. Dantes. And he didn’t throw you out on your ass.”
Oo, that was a good one. Parker files a note in her brain to reference Chef Toby in future debates about their employees as Eliot’s shoulders slump in defeat.
“Dammit. Fine.” He shakes his head. “But if I end up having to kill him in front of all our customers, you’re both going to be sorry.”
~
Eddie doesn’t come back to work for nearly a week. Ordinarily Hardison wouldn’t even notice. He pays only scant attention to what’s happening in the kitchen outside of his precious brews. But despite his retort to Eliot, and his genuine endorsement of second chances, Hardison is a little bit leery about having a person trained by a secret cult of killers scrubbing the floor in their restaurant. He got good vibes from Eddie - and of course he’ll back Parker on just about any play she wants to make - but still… nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the kid.
That’s hard when Eliot’s so firm about his no cyberstalking the employees rule. Hardison takes just a teeny peek at the phone they gave Eddie for work, simply to make sure the kid’s still alive - he is, he’s been texting Noor and Aidan, super, a strong support network is so important - but he holds himself back from trying to trail him on security cameras or rifle through his online footprint. Not that Eliot would catch him at it - man can barely send an email without being coached - but if Hardison slips up and mentions something he’s not supposed to know, Eliot’s going to put throwing knives through all his orange soda again.
Eddie finally shows up again on a Monday, their slowest day. Hardison’s in the apartment when he glances at the security camera feed on his monitors and sees the kid shuffle in. He’s got a bruise at the corner of his mouth. Who’s giving bruises to a League-trained knife fighter? Hardison wonders, then decides he doesn’t want to know.
But he does want to know what Eddie’s going to say to Eliot, who materialized out of nowhere when the kid walked through the door, so Hardison watches as Eliot steers Eddie to table 16 in the far corner, then picks up his tablet, taps a green microphone icon on his homescreen, selects 16 , and settles in to eavesdrop.
Eliot hasn’t banned the hidden microphones Hardison installed on the underside of all the brewpub tables, because Eliot doesn’t know about them. On the issue of forgiveness versus permission, Hardison’s firmly chosen his side. Plus, the brewpub is the base of operations for their own top-secret international criminal organization. It would be weirder if he hadn’t bugged the place.
“-not in trouble,” Eliot’s saying. “Noor and Aidan said the three of you talked about what happened, and you didn’t mean to react like that.”
“Sure as shit didn’t, boss.” Eddie sounds weary.
“Then that’s that,” Eliot says. “They trust you, and I trust you, not to put anyone in this space in danger.”
“I – okay.” Now Eddie’s tone is an odd mix - surprise, doubt, relief, and aborted defensiveness, Hardison diagnoses. He was expecting something much harsher from Eliot.
“But,” Eliot continues, “I need to ask - and I’m only gonna ask this once, ‘cause you deserve your privacy - is there anything you wanna tell me about why that happened?”
Silence. And silence, and silence. Hardison risks rotating the dining room camera from pointing to the front door to pointing towards the far corner. Eliot’s sitting calmly, patient. Eddie’s facing away from the camera, so Hardison can’t see his expression, but his shoulders are hunched up like he’s trying to disappear.
“No,” Eddie finally rasps, and it makes Hardison jump. “No, I - no. Sorry, boss.”
“Nothin’ to be sorry about,” Eliot says easily. “Your business. Now, you don’t have to answer this either, but if you wanna share: is there other stuff we should avoid in the kitchen going forward?”
Eddie scrubs a hand across his face and gives a hollow laugh. “Just - take me off the schedule if you’re gonna serve lamb chops.”
Lamp chops? Hardison thinks, bewildered. Eddie’s got a phobia of lamb chops?
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Eliot deadpans. “Lamb chops are a little ritzy for our clientele.”
Eddie laughs again, slightly shaky, but genuine this time. “Aw, c’mon, boss. Have a little faith in the refined Crime Alley palette.”
“Which reminds me,” Eliot says, pushing back his chair and standing up, “you can stop putting ‘chili dogs’ in the menu suggestion box. When we moved in here we got a visit from some sort of… I guess I'd call 'em food cart goons, who made it very clear we could do plated food only.”
“Organized crime in Gotham is truly out of control.” Eddie stands too. “Thanks for - checking in. I’m all good.”
“If you say so.” Eliot glances at Eddie once more. “But just know - if you need anything, we’re happy to help.”
“You already are.” Eddie immediately looks embarrassed at the sentiment, but Hardison smiles, delighted. He knew the vibes were right.
“That is so cute ,” Parker breathes in his ear.
Hardison screams. When he whips around, Parker is inches from his face, giving him a serene Mona Lisa smile, in complete defiance of two facts: first, that she’s hanging upside down from the ventilation system, and second, that he thought she was currently in Philadelphia. “ Woman . Swear to God if I have to get on those heart palpitation pills like the doctor keeps threatening–”
“You won’t,” Parker says. “Eliot’s got us on a secret cholesterol-lowering meal plan.” She frowns. “Wait. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” Her eyes slide to the tablet in his hand. “Just like I’m not supposed to tell Eliot about the microphones under all the brewpub tables.”
Hardison rubs his hand over his face. Every day, he wonders why he’d thought it was a good idea to make his life partners two career criminals. “What’ll it take to remind you to keep that little tidbit under wraps?”
“Japanese Kit-Kats,” Parker says immediately. “Eight pounds. Discontinued flavors. By breakfast.”
Hardison takes a mental lap through the latest Pacific shipping times, his personal dark web smuggling connections, the private pilots who owe him favors, and nods. “You got it, babe.”
Parker grins at him. “Spider-Man kiss?”
Her hair, bright as a pennant, cascades nearly to the floor. He has no idea how long she’s been hanging upside down, but she seems content to stay that way forever.
“Spider-Man kiss,” Hardison agrees, and cups her face in his hands as he leans in.
Oh, right. This is why the career criminals were the best idea he ever had.
Notes:
I actually cut this chapter in half because it was getting long, so it doesn't end with much drama, but please enjoy Thieves in Love <3 And for our next chapter we'll have a new POV... who could it possibly be???
Chapter 4: Minestrone
Notes:
Posting early so I'll stop procrastinating on actual paid work I need to do this weekend! And yes, it's finally time for the big reveal... Eddie has been Jason Todd all along!!!
Oof, this chapter just kept getting longer and longer. In my defense, I'm incapable of editing down Jason's POV. It's just too fun to write, and I'm such a sucker for his love of Gotham City.
Content warning for references to Jason's PTSD from Chapter 2 plus moments of Pit madness.
Literature warning for gratuitous references to the poem "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas throughout the chapter. If you're like me and read Watership Down at a questionably young age, you may have encountered this poem in one of the chapter quotes and had it irrevocably change your brain chemistry. If not, you can read it here.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The problem with normalcy is that it’s so unbearably tempting.
Jason was dead. He came back to life. He got dunked in an evil Jacuzzi and joined a near-mythical cult of assassins. He returned to the city where it all began with an elaborate plan for revenge against both the man who killed him and the man who raised him.
And yet here he is, chopping tomatoes, humming along to Diane’s a capella rendition of “Piano Man,” and wondering if he has time to pick up a shift tomorrow before he breaks into a meth lab to steal all their cash.
Jason had had no intention of getting a job when he came back to Gotham. His plan was simply to rob as many criminals as he could find until he had enough of a nest egg to make his grand debut. It had worked out in Istanbul, which was where he’d been when Talia had finally cut him off from the purses of the League.
“Go back to Gotham, certainly,” she’d told him, impatience flaring sharply in her eyes. “Take power. Change the city. Show your father the error of his ways. All this I support, more than wholeheartedly. But this elaborate scheme you’re concocting?” One eyebrow arched in exquisite disapproval. “Kill the clown yourself and be done. You have too much work to do for childish gimmicks.”
The Pit had not taken kindly to the phrase childish gimmicks , and Talia had not been impressed by Jason’s profanity-laden retort. By the next morning his stores of cash had mysteriously disappeared and his credit cards declined when he tried to buy so much as a kebab.
But Jason was a decent pickpocket, and an even better burglar, and near his safehouse there was a group of obnoxious Russian arms dealers who were always taking potshots at the street cats, so beating the shit out of them and blowing open their safe was especially satisfying. Before long he had enough money to secure a spot for himself and a few essentials - his League blades, an assortment of his favorite guns, some body armor, and Mansfield Park - on a smuggler’s cargo plane bound for New York City.
He should have stayed there for a few weeks. It was a city rife with opportunities to steal from the rich and unsavory. But Jason had always hated New York - the noise, the garbage, the gawking tourists - and before he could really think it through, he was sitting on a bus to Gotham.
And then he was home.
The bus station smelled like seawater and piss. The subway running below it clattered and groaned and sent up gusts of hot oily air. Pixels scrambled across a cracked display screen declaring that the 15L was arriving now, above a stop that was distinctly empty of a bus. He’d arrived right at the start of rush hour and Gothamites were flooding by, every shape and size and age and ethnicity, united only by the muck on their shoes and the glances they flicked over Jason that universally said fuckin’ weirdo .
Which, fair. He was dressed all in black, sitting in a corner of the station on a big old-timey travel trunk covered in padlocks, and he may have been crying. But all the glances moved off him again, and the Gothamites went about their lives, because weird shit happened every day in their city, and Jason was just a part of it.
He was a part of it.
He was home .
At least after that he’d had the sense to stash his trunk in a handy dumpster and swing by a thrift store to exchange his League-issued black duds for a much less conspicuous outfit, which had taken his sole remaining ten-dollar bill. Logically, his next step was to get money, plus he had a whole to-do list that he’d written on the plane, like identify potential safehouses and scope out active gangs and determine current Bat patrol routes . But….
Gotham. He’d left in a fury without a glance back as a teenager. Technically he’d been here since then, but he remembered only the terror of clawing out of his coffin, the vivid smell of wet dirt, and then nothing but hazy scraps until the Pit. Four years really wasn’t that long to be away, but Jason could say almost literally that it had been a lifetime. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d been missing his city until he was back.
So he wandered, in a daze, memories flashing over him at every sight and sound and smell, flipping off the drivers who honked at him when he jaywalked, like he was fourteen again.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs , Jason’s brain supplied,
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green…
Crime Alley wasn’t exactly Fern Hill, and Jason had never in his life been under an apple bough, but Dylan Thomas had written that poem with all the aching love for a place he’d once called home, and right now, Jason knew exactly how he felt.
He walked past diners with the same paper menus, four years yellower, taped to their doors; past pawn shops with the same shiny junk piled in their windows; past Crime Alley’s lone, brave bookstore, where he’d spent many an afternoon staring longingly at the handsome classics display through the bulletproof glass. Two sex workers, lounging on a stoop to take a break from their impossible heels, glanced over his obviously penniless outfit and returned to their animated debate on organic gardening. He turned the corner past them and his heart leapt at the sight of the Park Row library, closed for Sunday but as worn and welcoming as he remembered, like a kindly neighbor waving over the fence, delighted to see him again. A group of kids swung a jump rope in its parking lot, shouting the same nonsense rhyme Jason had shouted a decade ago.
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long , Dylan Thomas sang to their tune,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways….
It was all impossibly, painfully dear to him; he ached to have been gone for so long, to have missed so much, but at the same time the familiar sights soothed a hurt he hadn’t known he’d been carrying. He even felt a surge of fondness at the trick alley hidden between two oddly angled buildings where, sure enough, some half-high dude jumped out to try to mug him with a switchblade. Jason plucked the knife from his hands almost absentmindedly, and the man looked so crestfallen that he nearly gave it back. But it was kind of a nice blade, and subtler than a watered-steel dagger, so Jason tucked it into his hoodie pouch - his first prize in his quest for Gotham.
Then he’d spotted a chili dog cart, and counted out the remaining coins in his wallet, and. Well.
He still held a grudge about that Dijon mustard, but it had led him to the brewpub.
The tomatoes he’s chopping are for minestrone; a huge stockpot of homemade broth is already sitting on the range, gently beginning to warm, awaiting a rich deluge of vegetables, noodles, and beans. This version of the recipe is Eliot’s own, apparently. The man is a hell of a chef. Jason’s looking forward to bringing a takeout container of soup back to his current safehouse after work and savoring it over some blueprints of Black Mask’s headquarters. He’s not actually sure he’s ever had minestrone before. Catherine usually stuck to chicken noodle in a can when it came to soups, and Alfred had never made it; Bruce had a thing about the texture of cooked beans.
(Although, now that he thinks about it, maybe that’s not right, because Jason distinctly remembers multiple times where, after they’d made a trip to big Central Library in the Diamond District, he’d dragged Bruce to a funky little vegetarian burrito place nearby, and they’d split a plate of burritos con frijoles, and Bruce had always looked so happy, he had always–)
Nope .
Jason slams the door of that memory so hard his brain smacks around the inside of his skull. One breath. Two. Green motes flare like fireflies in the corner of his eyes. He pretends he’s inspecting a yellow spot on the tomato he’s holding in his left hand while his right tightens around the handle of the paring knife, comforting, grounding. Grudgingly, the green fizzles away. One more big breath, down to the bottom of his lungs, and then Jason eases his death grip on the knife and shifts back to a more utilitarian hold.
Okay. All good. Back to chopping.
He can only imagine the choice words Talia would have for him if she saw what he was up to right now. But Jason had excellent justifications for becoming a prep cook - namely, that making honest money was less risky than stealing as he built the foundation for his plans, and mingling with working class Crime Alley folks would be a solid way to gather intel. Both had turned out true. A couple hundred bucks a week had gone a long way towards keeping him fed and clothed while he worked on setting up hideouts and identifying his first targets, and the chitchat in the kitchen had revealed the state of the Alley in detail he never would have gotten from just wandering around reminiscing - or skulking in the shadows like a certain bat-themed asshole.
The real problem is, he likes it. He likes the work, the pleasing, soothing, simple motions of chopping and slicing and cleaning. He likes doing something meaningful, something that makes people happy. He likes having potato starch and strawberry juice on his hands instead of blood.
He likes his coworkers too - a lot, more than he expected, given Sasha’s razzing and Britt’s drama and the thousand small irritations of other human beings. It’s… grounding, actually. Jason suspects he hasn’t been around enough normal people in his life.
He even likes his bosses, the owners of the place. The brewpub is clearly a front of some kind - just look at the tomatoes on his cutting board: local, sun-ripened, ruby-red gems with an aroma so overwhelmingly sweet and rich Jason almost took a bite out of the first one he picked up - and they came with bundles of Crayola-orange carrots and giant bouquets of fresh spinach, delivered by a charming, heavily tattooed hipster in honest-to-God overalls. Jason doesn’t know much about the restaurant industry, but he does know that a place with the brewpub’s menu prices should be sourcing their minestrone ingredients from giant tin cans rather than artisanal vegetable farms, and certainly not serving it in huge bowls alongside fluffy dinner rolls from a nearby bakery, with pats of Irish butter to boot.
It’s money laundering, most likely. Maybe for the mob. Jason’s fairly sure the owners aren’t working with any rogues, if only because he’s never seen any thematically-dressed goons hanging around, even when he camped out overnight on the roof of the building across the street a couple times to check. Right now, that’s good enough for him. True, sometimes Eliot moves like he’s got top-tier combat training, and true, Parker effortlessly picked his pocket when they met, and true, their security system is wildly overpowered for a small business - and true, the Pit snarls at him about all these things, urges him to grab Eliot by the throat and crush the answers out of him. But Jason can counter that impulse by remembering that the brewpub hires Crime Alley folks and treats them well, that it’s a sponsor of the Park Row Youth Shakespeare Company and Gotham Pride, and that the street kids tell each other to go there when they’re hungry, which to Jason is an endorsement worth its weight in gold.
He likes Eliot and Parker and Hardison. He doesn’t know much about them, but his gut says he doesn’t have to. The brewpub is - special. It’s not just wholesome food at crime-subsidized prices. It’s a little nucleus of care, of goodwill, of the freedom that came, paradoxically, from being deeply entwined in community - the freedom of knowing you could be brave, because you were not alone.
This is Gotham too , his heart murmurs to him, almost too softly to hear, when the Pit howls for death and vengeance. It’s not all darkness. You could stay here in the light.
Oh, god, he needs to leave.
But he can’t bring himself to.
Jason had thought, for a few horrible hours after the little incident where he drew a knife on the entire kitchen, that his time at the Talvey Street Brewpub was at an end. With the rage of the Pit mixing sickeningly with plain old-fashioned PTSD to turn his vision to a foggy, swirling green, he’d staggered his way to an especially rough part of the Alley, fought six or eight random gangbangers until his mouth tasted like blood instead of grave dirt, then crawled into a safehouse and reached for his phone. Eliot had no doubt left a voicemail; he wasn’t the kind of man to do this business by text. Jason could hear Bruce’s words in Eliot’s southern drawl. You’re too reckless. You never think. You can’t control yourself. You put other people in danger.
But it was entirely fair to fire someone who pulled weapons on his coworkers, so Jason knew he had to take his medicine. He opened his phone.
No voicemail, nothing from the big boss. Just two texts:
Noor TSB: Eddie, hope you’re okay. Everyone in the kitchen is fine, just worried about you. When you’re feeling up to it you can have a call with me and Aidan about what happened. In the meantime, please take care of yourself! :)
Aidan TSB: weve all been there dude. youre welcome back in the brewpub if you just wanna hang out. peace <3
Jason could only stare. Not fired. Not even in trouble. They wanted to help him. They wanted him back.
There was heat in his chest, electricity in his veins, and for the first time since he died, it wasn’t because of the Pit.
Jason still didn’t go back for six days, partly because he didn’t trust the Pit to simmer down until he’d knocked some more heads, and partly because he didn’t trust himself not to fall even harder for the siren song of real life. He’d already turned down Eliot’s offer to work at the brewpub full-time - but he’d been sorely tempted. That little voice from his heart had risen to a wail, a coyote-cry of longing echoing around the marrow of his bones, calling out to him to imagine what it would be like to just… live.
But all that meant, said another little voice, icy and stern and very Talia-esque, was that Jason needed to stiffen his spine and get out, sooner rather than later, before his will got any weaker. Strategically speaking, pulling the knife was the perfect excuse to quit. He could tell everyone he felt too guilty, or that triggers were too much, and never go back. He was close to launching the first phase of his plan - for Crime Alley, and for revenge. He didn’t have time to keep playing Eddie Dantes.
And yet when Diane texted him asking if he might be able to pick up one of her shifts so she could go to a niece’s birthday party - accompanied by at least half a dozen NO PRESSURE THO caveats - Jason accepted.
And the brewpub rolled with it. Apart from that embarrassingly sappy check-in with Eliot, and Sasha hollering “Welcome back, John Wick!” when Jason walked into the kitchen again, everyone treated his return like a none-issue. The incident with the knife was tucked away into a vast communal vault of bizarre restaurant stories. Later that very day, Britt had burst into tears all over the shrimp alfredo because she was so stressed about her upcoming GED exams, and that became the new crisis of the week.
It’s so easy. Fuck, it’s so easy to live like this. No judgment, no expectations, no vengeance, no destiny. No battles against evil, no agony over morals, no wretched past haunting the present. Just the relentless clamor of the mundane, and the warmth of the people who helped each other through it.
Jason cores the tomato in his hands with a single vicious twist of the paring knife. He has to keep this all at arm’s length. The money will be less important soon, but the intel from his coworkers is still valuable. He can’t count on civilians interacting with him casually once he’s donned his mask, so having connections like Eddie’s could be useful. The brewpub can still be part of his strategy - but that’s it.
He’s here for the Joker. He’s here for Batman. He’s here to give Crime Alley and all of Gotham the justice people have been denied for too long. Pain and hopelessness have been irradiating his city for decades. Against all odds, Jason has the ability to change that on a grand scale. It doesn’t matter what else he feels, what else he wants.
There’s too much work to do.
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace….
“Hey, Ed!” Britt pops up by his shoulder. “You’re like a big book nerd, right?”
Jason shoots her the most withering glare he can manage without his eyes starting to glow. “I’m not answering that.” And definitely not mentioning that he’s been reciting a poem from 1937 on a loop for the past six weeks.
Britt scoffs. “Yeah, yeah, you act all tough, you look like a jock, but Diane says she sees you at the library all the time, and when we were talking about The Notebook you knew that poem off the top of your head, from like Robert Frost or whoever.”
“Walt Whitman,” Jason says automatically, and Britt gives him a triumphant look.
“So, I was thinking–”
“Aren’t you supposed to be peeling garlic?”
“I was thinking, while I was finishing peeling the garlic –” Britt points emphatically at a cutting board covered in cloves and papery skins– “maybe, like, you could help me study for the book part of the GED? Noor’s gonna help me with math and science, and her sister’s gonna help me with social studies ‘cause she has a minor in history, but I need someone for language arts.”
As she speaks, her voice shifts from brash to bashful. Britt’s always the life of the brewpub, laughing and challenging and instigating, and it’s strange to hear her uncertainty. Jason glances at her and thinks about how much he’s always hated asking for help. How long it took to find someone who was willing to give it.
“Sure, okay,” he says with a mock sigh, and pretends not to notice the way her eyes light up. “Are we on a time crunch, though? I’m kinda busy for the next couple weeks.”
“That’s fine,” Britt assures him. “The tests aren’t until December. I’ll get all the sciencey stuff out of the way first and then you can teach me how to do words good.”
Jason shakes his head. “Christ. I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
“Asshole,” Britt says fondly, and flits away.
There are three tomatoes left to chop. Jason picks one up and it’s a perfect fit in his hand, smooth as a river rock. The huge stock pot on the range has begun to simmer; the kitchen is filled with the aroma of garlic and oregano and the cheerful maraca-rattle of Sasha carrying in a big box of noodles and beans. The fact that Britt came to him to help her with language arts is a warm glow in Jason’s chest. It’s a nice moment. He feels, vividly, that he's going to remember it.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
~
Two weeks later, eight headless bodies are dumped on the front steps of the GCPD.
Notes:
Here comes some plot, babes.
Also, the real AU of this piece is not so much the Leverage crew being there, but that Talia thought Jason's plan was stupid. I love a Talia who not-so-secretly cares about both Bruce and Jason but is still a hardass, and I needed a reason for Jason to get a job at the brewpub, so voila! I hope I can sneak her back into this story at some point.
Chapter 5: Uncrustables
Notes:
Oh, is this chapter literally now almost 1/3 of the word count of the whole fic? WHOOPS.
I had the first scene written ages ago but time has been very short this month, and even when I had a break I simply Could Not crack the rest of the chapter until today, when I rewatched The Rundown Job and it gave me strength. I'm so unwell about the three of them. Speaking of which - I'm glad I'm at least posting this in time to say Happy Pride!
THANK YOU for all the lovely comments that have been collecting while I was chipping away at this! I don't know if I'll be able to respond to them, but each and every one is cherished.
Content warning for themes of child abuse and neglect throughout (street kids of Gotham) and a brief discussion of teen pregnancy, which you can skip if desired between the lines "I was the biggest idiot of them all" and "Eddie gives a snort of laughter."
Thank you for reading!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“He calls himself Red Hood,” Hardison says, and the monitors light up with photos. Blurred shots from civilian phones, grainy stills from security footage: they all show armor, combat boots, knives, guns, and a helmet that gleams a rich and arterial red.
It’s more than a look. It’s a brand . There’s a new rogue in town.
Three days have passed since the Decapitation Extravaganza, as Parker is privately calling it - something tells her Eliot wouldn’t approve. Gotham has been in a frenzy trying to figure out who this new player is, and so has Leverage Incorporated. In the time since opening the brewpub, they’ve never experienced a true upswelling of violence in the city, no open gang wars or bouts of assassinations, and all the rogue attacks have been, relatively speaking, minor. Gotham’s underworld is a seething mass of snakes, constantly sinking their fangs into each other, but at least there’s been a fragile equilibrium.
Now, though, Red Hood’s swung a steel-toed boot into the whole nest.
“Red Hood,” Eliot rumbles, frown deepening between his eyebrows. “That’s a former Joker alias.”
Sitting on the couch beside him, Parker presses her shoulder a little harder into his. As soon as news of the bodies got out, Eliot put the brewpub into a Level 3 lockdown: business closed, employees home or at safehouses, no leaving the building if they could help it, especially after dark. It makes Parker anxious and fidgety, but she gets it. Before they moved to Gotham, Eliot made them swear they’d take the rogues seriously, with such desperation in his eyes that Parker’s heart broke a little bit. And at least it’s not Level 4, which is a steel-walled panic room tucked behind the kitchen, filled with army-surplus MREs, an oxygen recycler, and ninety days’ worth of filtered water.
Parker put herself in charge of adding improved snacks and a wide assortment of board games to the panic room at the start of Level 3. She was dying to go out and talk to her contacts in Gotham, but she knew it would make Eliot nervous, so she’s just been moseying around the brewpub. Hardison’s been glued to his computers, tracking police chatter and sightings posted to social media, and Eliot’s been taking apart the ovens and deep-cleaning them with his cell phone jammed between his ear and his shoulder, talking to everyone he knows from… well, from Back Then, as Parker thinks of it. Pre-Leverage. The bad old days.
He hasn’t found much, and that’s contributing to the crease in his forehead. But Hardison’s pulled enough information to justify a proper briefing, which Parker’s leapt on like a Labrador with a tennis ball, eager for the chance to finally work .
“Any connection to the Joker?” she asks Hardison, scanning the photos of Red Hood. None are very clear, but the heavily armored look, all blacks and grays apart from the helmet, doesn’t exactly scream clown .
“Lotta speculation, but doesn’t really seem like it,” Hardison says. “This guy’s got a totally different style. I mean, more than looks. The whole guns-blazing solo act is pretty… unusual.”
Before they moved here, Parker, Eliot, and Hardison all studied up on the existing villains of Gotham. Each one of them is terrifying, but they’ve been around so long they’re fairly predictable. Black Mask rages and schemes, Penguin slyly plots, Two-Face sets up elaborate games of fate, Poison Ivy gets ticked off by billionaires and goes on landscaping benders. Only the Joker is a true force of chaos, and he’s been locked up in Arkham since long before Leverage moved in.
A totally unknown element like Red Hood is - alarming. Parker feels, again, that the tides are shifting, the snakes’ nest writhing, but she can’t see how it’ll play out, and it makes her uneasy.
“Anyways, the police finally ID’d the bodies,” Hardison continues. “Each of the vics was already in the system - really in the system.” Eight scowling mugshots pop up on screen. “All career criminals. And not like us, I mean, nasty . I’m talking multiple felonies each. Murder, rape, arson, assault, kidnapping, you name it. And? All of ‘em have confirmed connections to existing gangs in Gotham.”
“What about their heads?” Parker asks.
Hardison makes a face. “The police haven’t found them. But word on the street is that Hood was seen going into a warehouse with a duffel bag that was. Um. Wet.”
“My contacts say the Gotham underworld is spooked. It’s a powderkeg,” Eliot growls. “But why’s Red Hood trying to start a gang war if he doesn’t have a damn gang?”
“Uh. Well. It’s too early to tell for sure, but it sort of seems like he incited a gang war and then won it. By himself. Like. Immediately.”
Parker frowns. “Explain.”
“I mean, as far as I can tell, he just intimidated the shit out of everyone, and… it worked. There’s chatter on the dark web, about paying a cut of drug sales to Red Hood instead of Black Mask, and if now’s the time to raise prices and if that’ll affect gross sales and - whatever. There’s capitalism in hard drugs too, surprise surprise. Point is, it sounds like Hood’s the new protection racket in town. And that’s not all.”
Hardison pulls up a new page covered in various social media feeds. “He’s - reformed the drug trade in Crime Alley, basically overnight. Dealers are refusing to sell to kids - hell, there are a couple reports that they’ve started carding people. Some are giving out fentanyl tests too. Users are saying that everything’s cleaner than it’s ever been.”
“Better drugs, better high, better ROI,” Eliot huffs. “Like you said, hard drugs have economics too. Hood must be smarter than the competition.”
“And yet,” Hardison says, clicking to a new series of screenshotted posts, “there’s even more. A couple big trafficking rings have left town. Several known child abusers have been found dead. And sex workers are reporting that Hood beat up a pimp who’s known to be hard on his girls.”
“So Red Hood is changing things… for the better?” Parker queries.
“The Alley seems to think so.” Hardison zooms in on a Reddit thread. One of the blurry civilian photos of the new rogue has been photoshopped with a flower crown on his head and My Hero written in curly script across the bottom.
“Hold on,” Eliot snaps. “He’s killed a dozen people in the last three days. Probably more.”
“Yeah, obviously I know that, and the Alley knows it too. But the feeling seems to be….” Hardison rubs his neck. “Some people need killing.”
Eliot’s hands clench into fists so hard the tendons stand out like steel cables. There’s a storm of emotions flashing through his eyes, and Parker wants to drape herself over him like a weighted blanket until they pass. But Eliot’s tense against her shoulder, and she eases back from him, gently. Now’s not the time.
“So the heads were a threat to the gangs,” she muses, thoughts circling. “Clearly one that’s working. But why dump the bodies at the police station?”
“Sendin’ a message,” Eliot growls. “Telling the cops that if they don’t take people like that off the street, Red Hood will.”
“What are the police saying?” Parker asks Hardison.
“Just the usual. Shocking, unacceptable, they’re putting all their resources into catching this guy, et cetera, et cetera. They’re getting dunked on on socials. People are saying Hood’s doing what they won’t.”
“Anything from the Bats?”
Hardison makes a face. The fact that he’s never been able to hack any of the Dark Knight’s systems is a sore spot. “Batman and Robin were on the other side of Gotham when the bodies showed up, stopping a bank robbery. Since then, Batman’s been seen in Crime Alley, but so far Hood’s avoided him.”
Parker leans back and lets everything sink in. Hood’s no amateur. He hasn’t been caught by the Bat, and he’s survived any immediate retaliation from the Extravaganza. He’s demanding drug money, which means he’s not an altruist, and he’s continued killing past his initial eight targets, which means he’s unlikely to stop. He’s clearly tremendously dangerous.
And yet he’s made hard drugs safer, he’s driven out people who hurt kids and sex workers, and the Alley is… embracing him.
Parker stands up.
“I need to go out,” she announces.
Eliot snatches her arm. Parker glowers at him, but allows it. She knows what he’s going to say, and why he needs to say it. But it’s also been three days, and she knows how she needs to respond.
“I don’t like this, Parker,” Eliot says. “Red Hood’s a killer, and he’s ruthless, and he’s making a lot of people mad and desperate. And yeah, maybe right now it’s just bad guys who are dying, but sooner or later there’s gonna be collateral damage.”
“I know, Eliot,” Parker says, as gently as she can. She puts a hand over his where he’s grasping her arm, and squeezes. She looks at Hardison too. “But I can’t stay here forever. We need more intel.”
“Take Eliot with you, then,” Hardison says, expression torn between pain and understanding. Eliot nods, already getting up, but Parker slides his hand off her arm.
“I can’t. I’m going to Kid City. They’ll know what’s really going on.”
Eliot hesitates, looking like he wants to protest, so Parker lets a little mastermind-authority put steel in her voice. “Let me do my job, Eliot.”
That works. They all agreed: she calls the plays. This isn’t a con - not yet, anyways - but intelligence gathering, threat assessment, and contingency planning are familiar steps. Eliot’s expertise keeps them safe, but Parker decides when it’s time to push forward anyways. She sees in Eliot’s eyes when he acknowledges that.
Eliot sinks back into the couch. He looks like he’s regretting not going for Level 4. But all he says is, “Got your taser?”
Parker grins at him. “Always.”
~
The street the brewpub is on is quiet. The faint sound of the radio drifts from someone’s kitchen window, but nobody’s out on the sidewalk. The antique store, the laundromat, and the other neighboring businesses are all closed. With the terrifying Red Hood prowling nearby, Parker’s not surprised. She hunches her shoulders and tries not to feel like a mouse in an open field as she walks towards Crime Alley. If she’s going to look this conspicuous on the sidewalk, maybe she’ll have to take to the roofs - but she could very well run into Hood there, or worse, the Bat, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon and he really shouldn’t -
Parker turns a corner at the unofficial boundary of their neighborhood and stops dead.
Because, it turns out, Crime Alley’s not worried about Red Hood.
Crime Alley is excited .
She’s never seen the streets so crowded. It’s like an odd cross between a festival and a spring cleaning. Everyone with a front stoop seems to be barbequing, swapping plates with their neighbors, calling out jokes and compliments, and food trucks are parked all over the place too, wafting up dizzyingly delicious aromas. Shopkeepers are out furiously working on their storefronts, tearing off boards and putting up new windows, pulling down torn awnings, repainting signs in bright colors. A little bakery that’s been closed for as long as Parker’s lived in Gotham has its doors flung wide open, a bright-eyed woman exclaiming in delighted Spanish as a couple men who look like her sons haul in bags of flour. Sex workers are leaning out the windows of brothels, flirting shamelessly with grinning people in the food truck lines. Packs of kids are racing through it all, whooping and hollering, pausing to slap their hands in the wet mortar where a pawn shop owner patched a spray of bullet holes in his brick facade, then racing away laughing. The owner, who Parker thought had his scowl etched into his face like granite , looks after them with a soft smile, and leaves the little handprints as they are.
Parker is almost dazed as she wanders through the carnival atmosphere. It’s a sunny day, too, vanishingly rare for Gotham, which adds to the feeling of unreality. The smog-tinged blue sky is the color and texture of an old photograph. Everyone has a tentative, giddy air about them, like they’re all in someone else’s dream and trying not to spoil it.
And most importantly: it’s very clear that no one is afraid.
Well, maybe not no one . When Parker stops at a bodega to buy a family-sized box of Uncrustables, there’s a man lurking in the beer aisle, a local guy that she recognizes: the street kids call him Creepy Jeff, and although they didn’t tell her why, Parker has some good guesses. But today, she can see that he’s got two black eyes, and when a trio of giggling teenage girls come in after Parker and start browsing the candy, Creepy Jeff takes one look at them and bolts out the door.
Parker cocks an eyebrow. Interesting.
She pays for the Uncrustables and carries on to a rundown block far from the busy streets, where a fire raged through a mall and no one seemed to know what to do next. The mall is a crumbling shell like the Coliseum, but the parking garage beside it is mostly intact. There’s a metal roller door at the entrance, badly rusted. Parker politely knocks on it.
“Second star to the right,” she calls.
There’s a faint rattling from the far side, and at the base of the door, a cracked panel slides upwards with a creak to reveal a pair of bright eyes in a small, round face. She doesn’t recognize the kid. He freezes for a second, clearly thrown by an adult knowing their pass phrase, but then Parker brandishes her offering and his face brightens.
“Oh, you’re the Uncrustables lady!” the kid exclaims. “They told me about you.”
“First time on sentry duty?” Parker asks.
The kid puffs out his chest. “Second.”
“Nice.” Parker crouches down and hands him the box, which he takes with wide-eyed reverence. “I’d like to talk to you guys about some stuff happening in the Alley. Could you ask Gemma if I can come in?”
“I’ll see if she’s here,” the kid says primly, and vanishes. Parker waits, and listens. There are faint cheers. A few moments later, the kid reappears.
“She says yes.”
The cracked panel at the bottom of the door offers less than a foot of space to shimmy through. Even with all Parker’s experience, it’s a challenge. That always comforts her. She can’t imagine a cop or trafficker managing the squeeze. But luckily, it hasn’t been an issue so far. As far as Parker knows, she’s the only adult who’s discovered the mythical Kid City.
She stands up and glances around.
The entryway stretches cavelike away from her, twisting in the distance to rise up to the higher parking levels. The kids keep their tents up there, but this entryway is the plaza where they gather. There’s no electricity here, but a faint light drifts in from further away in the structure, and there are several enormous flashlights hanging from the walls for nighttime. Lawn chairs circle beat-up folding tables, each with a different focus: one has puzzles and decks of cards, one has stacks of yellowed textbooks, one has a motley collection of paper plates and plastic utensils. The ticket booth serves as a pantry: through the dusty windows, Parker sees neat stacks of saltine crackers, jars of peanut butter, bottled water, and now the box of Uncrustables, being carefully placed on top of the heap by a thin, solemn-faced girl while a pack of other children watch covetously. Parker is used to being second best to the Uncrustables; she waits, trying not to smile, until the girl turns from the pantry and approaches her, holding out her hand.
Gemma is far, far too serious for a twelve-year-old, but Parker knows how she got that way, and she can hardly blame her. Kid City is where the children of Gotham go when they need to disappear, a place to escape not only an unbearable foster home or a guardian bent on hurting them, but also the cops who would drag them back there. It’s where they go, Parker has realized, when they’ve given up all hope of an adult helping them; when the only thing they have left to rely on is themselves.
Parker shakes the girl’s hand, gravely. “Can I sit?” she asks, and Gemma beckons her to the dining table.
Most of the other kids follow, greeting Parker like puppies - some bouncing excitedly at her, some yelling at the top of their lungs, some bashfully trailing behind. They range in age from six to thirteen, if she had to guess. In addition to the sentry, there are a few faces that are new since her last visit; she spots the kid who visited the brewpub and got a sandwich from Eddie, and shoots them a grin. They give her a shy wave.
“Did you already eat lunch?” Parker asks, neutrally, glancing down the table. “I saw you putting the Uncrustables in the pantry.”
“Everyone’s been giving away free food today,” Gemma says, settling down at the head of the table. “We made the rounds earlier.”
“I had a whole panini,” one of the boys, Bennett, pipes up. “ Fresh . It was so good.”
“That’s awesome.”
Parker would feed these kids leftovers from the brewpub every night if she could; hell, she’d set up Eliot as their private chef and bring them whatever delicious things they wanted any hour of the day. But Kid City has rules, built by generations of careful street kids, and Gemma had been very clear: they don’t eat any food they haven’t seen cooked in front of them unless it’s still in packaging. So Parker brings Uncrustables, and thinks, very cautiously, about a future where she could do more.
“So,” Gemma starts, in a tone that says enough small talk . “Ravi said you need intel on the Alley.”
“I do,” Parker says. “I want to ask all of you about Red Hood.”
The table of kids ripples excitedly, but Gemma gives them a warning look. “What about him?”
“Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”
“Good,” Bennett says immediately. “He beat up Creepy Jeff and told him if he ever even looks at a kid again, Hood’s gonna squoosh his eyes out with an ice cream scoop.”
Parker blinks. That certainly explained the bodega.
“Yeah, he’s good,” a girl named Kaitlyn agrees. “I went to see my aunt at the nail salon and a bunch of the working girls were talking about him. They said Red Hood told them they can ask him for help whenever they need and he’s not going to let anybody go missing anymore.”
“Well, I think he’s bad,” the new kid, the door sentry, huffs. “Heroes aren’t supposed to kill people. Batman’s never killed anyone .”
“What’s Batman ever done for you, dipshit?” Kaitlyn snaps. “Or the Alley? And you’re supposed to be watching the door.”
“Kaitlyn, don’t be a jerk,” Gemma orders. “But Ravi, you are supposed to be at the door.”
Ravi sighs, loudly, but stumps back down to his post. Parker glances around the rest of the kids.
“Has Red Hood talked to any of you?”
“Me!” a tiny boy named Marco chirps brightly. “I got caught lifting a bag of Sour Patch Kids from Walgreens and the manager was yelling at me but then Red Hood came in and was like, ‘Hey, this is my cousin, you can’t talk to him like that,’ even though I’m not even his cousin, and the guy, like, almost pooped his pants, and then Red Hood walked out with me and he gave me two bags of Sour Patch Kids that he lifted, and said he’d see me around, and shot his hook rope thingy and flew onto the roof!” Marco’s eyes are shining. “It was the best day of my whole life .”
“And me,” the kid from the brewpub says quietly. They hadn’t wanted to give Parker their name. Maybe they’ll feel like telling her soon, now that they made it to Kid City. Or maybe they’re still picking out a new one, for a new life. “I was sitting outside the library yesterday, and it was late, and I saw Red Hood. He was walking up the street. He stopped in front me, and he….” Their face twists with some unfathomable feeling. “He asked if I was okay, and then he asked if I wanted him to kill anybody for me.”
The kid hadn’t shared their name but they had shared a little of their story; it was a familiar enough tale that Parker probably could have guessed it. A stepdad who hit them, a foster who neglected them, a trafficker who had almost caught them. She wondered what her own answer to Red Hood would have been, when she was a kid like that.
“Did you?” Kaitlyn asks, her eyes huge. “Did you get him to kill somebody?”
The kid plays with their hoodie strings. “I said… not right now. But maybe sometime.”
“You dummy,” Bennett says. “You should have asked him to kill Black Mask!”
The table erupts into argument at that, some kids agreeing with Bennett, others countering that Red Hood’s gonna kill Black Mask regardless, several shouting out their own personal hit lists. Parker decides to take that as a cue to make a graceful exit. Gemma gets antsy whenever there’s a ruckus.
She stands up. “Thank you,” she says to the table at large; some of the kids wave goodbye to her, but most just keep yelling. It’s kind of an interesting debate. She wishes she could weigh in.
To her surprise, Gemma stands too, and slips away from the table with her. She’s never done that before. They walk silently together as far as the pantry, then Parker stops, and glances at her.
“There’s something else about Red Hood,” Gemma says quietly. “I don’t know if anyone else has found out yet. But I was out, really, really late, and I saw him. I followed him, and he went into a bar where a bunch of traffickers hang out, and….”
Parker aches to hug her. But she just nods. “What happened?”
“I didn’t go close,” Gemma says. “That would have been stupid. It was just a shitty wood building, so there were bullets coming through the walls. But he killed everyone inside. I saw blood hitting the windows.” Her delivery is matter-of-fact. “Then when it was over, Hood came out again. Someone must have shot his helmet, ‘cause it was all busted on one side. He took it off, and his eyes…. They were glowing. Green. It wasn’t some weird lighting or anything,” she adds, defensive, even though Parker hasn’t said anything. “It was dark out. They were glowing .”
Parker absorbs this. “Do you think he’s a meta?”
“He must be,” Gemma says. “That’s how he can fight like he does. But maybe it makes him crazy. Like Poison Ivy. People say she was a normal lady before the plant experiments.”
Parker frowns. “You think he’s crazy?”
Gemma shrugs. “He kills people and then he hands out Sour Patch Kids. That seems crazy to me.”
Parker, though, thinks of Eliot, and it doesn’t seem crazy to her at all.
~
Her mind is whirling after leaving Kid City. Parker wants a little more time to process before heading back to the brewpub, and she wouldn’t mind trying to get a little more intel either. So she heads to one of her favorite spots in all of Gotham: the ceiling vents of Nacho Mama’s TexMex Grill.
In terms of spaciousness and cleanliness, they’re almost as good as the vents at the brewpub, because the proprietor of the restaurant has a terrible dust allergy and keeps his air filters in tip-top shape. Plus, the acoustics are amazing in the long, low-slung dining area, it has a pleasant funk of nacho cheese, and it’s always busy with gossipy people who have interesting dirt to dish.
And, unsurprisingly, Red Hood is the only thing anyone wants to talk about right now. As Parker eases past the juncture of the exhaust duct to the roof and begins crawling along down the length of the vent, she catches juicy snatches of conversation.
“–looked up those gangbangers Red Hood iced. One of them used to deal outside my apartment building. God, he scared me so bad. He must have gotten half the teens in there hooked on meth–”
“–walked home without getting catcalled for the first time since I turned thirteen. This Hood guy’s really put the fear of God into the local creeps–”
“–seriously, I saw him! I saw Red Hood! On top of Nelson’s Deli! He had a grappling hook just like the Bats! So fuckin’ cool, dude–”
“–my sister said Nightwing’s back in town, someone got a photo over by Robinson Park. Must be ‘cause of Hood, huh? I mean, Nightwing hasn’t been in Gotham since the thing with the Man-Bats–”
Parker feels a thrill at that. It’s always a treat to see Nightwing in Gotham. If she can, she'll make a special trip out into the city to watch him flipping between buildings with an incredible acrobatic grace Batman lacks. It’s fun to hear about his fights too, his electric style and the quips he throws out at villains. She wishes Gotham had a livelier vigilante to enjoy.
Parker shimmies a few feet further, and stops with another jolt of delight when she hears a familiar voice.
“Oh my god, it’s autumnal imagery, I know you know what fall is, just try to think a little outside the box–”
Parker peers down between the slats in the vent. There in a booth below her are Eddie and Britt, with a half-demolished platter of nachos between them and an assortment of textbooks and worksheets scattered about. Eddie is jabbing at one with a highlighter. He’s got two fingers splinted, and Parker notices that he’s started to let his hair grow out. The spot at his forehead is now a little twist of white. He looks like early-season-two Zuko, she thinks fondly. She and Hardison are on another Avatar rewatch.
“This is so hard. This is so stupid.” Britt drops her head down on the table. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to be illiterate forever.”
“You’re not even illiterate now,” Eddie points out, with a long-suffering tone that makes Parker think they’ve had this disagreement several times already. “Although you might as well be if you haven’t ever read Anne of Green Gables .”
“You act so tough but you read books for little kids,” Britt grumbles. “Who needs Reasoning for Language Arts on the street? I can't believe that I have to do all this dumb bullshit just for a GED.”
“Well, at least you didn't have to do it in a high school,” Eddie points out philosophically. “The topics may be dumb, but the people there are even dumber.”
“Dude, you don’t have to tell me. I was the biggest idiot of them all.”
“That why you flunked out?”
“Asshole.” Britt smacks his arm. “I didn’t flunk out, thank you very much. I got knocked up.”
Eddie chokes on an olive and Britt cackles. “Serves you right.”
“Jesus.” Eddie takes a slug of water. “Did you… uh… I mean… never mind. None of my business.”
Britt rolls her eyes. “Did I get an abortion? No, because I was sixteen, and again, the world’s biggest dumbass. Did I give the baby away? No, not until I dropped out and royally fucked my life trying to be a teen mom, because - Biggest. Dumbass.”
Even from the awkward vantage point above, Parker can see that Eddie is trying very, very hard to figure out what to say. “That’s. I’m. Sorry?”
“It is what it is.” Britt shrugs. “I knew it was stupid. I knew it wasn’t gonna end well. But sometimes, when you’re a teenager, it’s just like… you kind of want your whole life to implode. You know?”
“Yeah,” Eddie mutters. “I know.”
“Anyways,” Britt continues. “Sorry to TMI. My cousin finally adopted my kid, which was cool, so now he has a sister and a normal mom and dad and stuff. He was still really little when it happened so he doesn’t know they’re not his bio parents. He calls me auntie.” She smiles.
“I'm glad your cousin could do that,” Eddie says quietly.
“Yeah. Me too. Although she got a pretty good deal out of it. She wanted to have another kid, but both of us agreed that being pregnant fucking sucked .”
Eddie gives a snort of laughter. After a few beats of silence, he says, “I was adopted.”
Britt glances up at him. “Oh yeah?”
Eddie nods. Parker can see tension in his shoulders. “Not until I was twelve, though. So not exactly the same thing.”
“Still, it's nice of you to tell me,” Britt says sincerely.
“Yeah. Well.” Eddie rubs the back of his neck. “It didn't exactly work out. My adoptive dad… he let me down.” He sighs. “I didn't finish high school either.”
“I'm sorry, man.” Britt cocks her head. “Is that why you're back in Gotham? To get even with your so-called dad?”
Eddie startles a little at that. “Um. Yeah, actually. Something like that.”
“Good,” Britt says. “Because otherwise, I'd have to kick his ass myself.”
A smile creases Eddie's cheeks. “Maybe I'll ask you to do that anyway. It would be pretty cool.”
Britt snickers, then reaches out and snags a chip. “Ugh, these are getting soggy.” She makes a disappointed sound as she munches on it. “Man, I wish the brewpub was open. All I can think about are the boss’s truffle fries. I don’t know what he puts in them. Crack?”
“Truffle,” Eddie deadpans.
“You’re so funny, Eddie, you should be on SNL.” Britt grabs another chip and looks at it balefully. “Seriously, though, it’s so fucking lame that they’re closed.” Parker frowns. “Usually they’re cool and I forget that they’re out-of-towners, but then they go and get all freaked out by one off-brand rogue.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Red Hood’s gunning for independent breweries.” Eddie smirks. “There’s plenty of shit to do in Crime Alley.”
“Damn straight.” Britt shoves another chip in her mouth, then claps her hands. “Speaking of which! Eddie, you have got to quit procrastinating on this.” She continues speaking over his protests. “I need to understand all this dumb bullshit about metaphors or whatever, and I need you to teach me before I have to go and bartend tonight. So can we get on with it, please?”
Eddie rolls his eyes so hard Parker thinks he’s going to see her above him in the vent, and then they get back to it.
~
Parker returns to the brewpub around suppertime - before dark, as per the requirements of Level 3. There’s all kinds of deliciousness waiting on the kitchen counter. Fancy scalloped potatoes, salmon baked with lemons, those chocolate croissant thingies with the flaky pastry that Eliot insists on making by hand even though it always drives him into fits of cussing. She knows he cooked such nice and complicated things to distract himself from his worry over her, and that he picked dishes she really likes, and it warms her to her bones. But Parker also thinks of the children of Kid City, eating Uncrustables in a parking garage, and her heart gives a pang.
Hardison’s sitting at the counter, laptop open, and Parker has no doubt he’d been there all afternoon, pestering Eliot, both of them pretending it wasn’t a blatant ploy to keep their anxiety at bay. When she comes in, he springs to his feet and rushes over to her like they’ve been apart for six months.
“Babe! How was it out there?”
Parker thinks about the revelry, the rejuvenation, in Crime Alley. “Surprisingly good.” She looks at Eliot. “Our employees think that we’re, quote, ‘so fucking lame’ for being closed.”
He doesn’t ask her how she knows that, just grunts, unimpressed. “What’d you learn about Red Hood?”
“Crime Alley likes him. And he likes Crime Alley.” Parker crosses the kitchen, watches Eliot adorning a salad with radish slices, plucks one right out of his hand, and smiles when he glares at her. “Plus, he might be a meta.” She describes the story Gemma told her. Hardison looks intrigued, but Eliot just frowns deeper. Parker sighs, a little put out.
“No matter what else, he’s protecting kids, Eliot. They said so themselves.” She thinks about what Britt and Eddie said too. “You know… we’re not from Gotham. Maybe Red Hood sticks around, maybe he doesn’t, but that’s for this city to decide. Not us.”
“Still gotta live in it in the meantime,” Eliot growls.
“So let’s take our cues from the people here,” Parker presses. “The people we came here for .” Eddie’s voice rises in her mind: ‘There’s plenty of shit to do in Crime Alley.’ “Besides, there’s no sign that Red Hood’s interested in anything beyond the Alley.” She points to the ground below her feet. “We’re outside the Alley. The brewpub will be fine.” She touches Eliot’s arm. “ We’ll be fine.”
Hardison comes to join them, putting his arms around their shoulders and smushing them together, ignoring Eliot’s groaned protest. “Look. Y’all know I was nervous to move here in the first place. But you said we’d be ready for anything Gotham could throw at us. And you know what? I don’t mind it.” He grins at them. “Keeps life interesting.”
“You’re a damn liar,” Eliot sighs, but he’s melting, Parker can tell. “Get off me, man, let me finish grating the parmesan. And then we’ll eat. And then….” He shoots Parker a look. “We’ll get ready to be open for lunch tomorrow.”
Parker gives a squeal of joy and smacks a kiss on his cheek. Eliot shakes his head, but he’s blushing a little, which gives her infinite delight.
His voice, however, is still serious. “We gotta keep an eye on this cat, though. Hood’s drama could spill over here. Gotta make sure any gangs he displaces don’t try to move on new territory. And, if Hood turns on the Alley - we gotta be ready for that too.”
Parker thinks of blood-spattered windows, glowing green eyes. She’s happy, because Crime Alley is happy, but Eliot’s right. It’s still early days.
They’ll have to see what comes next.
Notes:
:)
Chapter 6: Chocolat Chaud
Notes:
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for the lovely comments on prior chapters! I am utterly swamped this summer so I'm sorry I haven't responded, but I read them all with great delight!
This chapter was a slog but it gets the ball rolling on some subplots that I'm really looking forward to. Plus, much OT3 tenderness <3
Content warning for discussion of a child abuser.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Hardison’s having a little bit of a fanboy moment.
Sue him, okay? A badass gunslinger in a scary mask moves in next door and starts cleaning up the streets? It’s the sort of thing baby Hardison could only dream of. And yes, he’s seen enough of the world to know that this could go bad; Red Hood could turn out to be an evil robot, or a serial killer, or a CGI Yoda fan. He knows Eliot’s still leery of the guy. But Parker seems to be supportive, and Crime Alley, of course, loves him. Hardison’s not gonna buy a t-shirt or anything - even though the street vendors of Gotham are putting out some truly unhinged designs - but he’ll let himself enjoy geeking out over their new hometown hero.
It helps that Eliot asked him to keep an eye on Hood’s activities, so Hardison has an excuse to do the deep diving he so dearly loves. He’s putting together a map of Red Hood’s activities, color-coded by timing and purpose. Even though Hood’s only been active for a week, the map is jam-packed - the guy’s keeping busy. But there aren’t any real patterns emerging in his movements. Unlike the Bats, whose patrols are complicated yet predictable - at least, if you’ve got a homemade algorithm and ADHD - Red Hood ranges all over the Alley, his routes erratic but his strikes precise. Clearly, he knows the territory.
In addition, Hardison’s keeping a running tally of the people Hood helps, as best as he can piece together from security footage and social media commentary - everyone from little kids to elderly folks, drug addicts to sex workers, anybody who needs defending. It’s heartwarming, but tempered by the fact that Hardison’s also tracking the people Hood hurts - which is somewhat easier, since they end up in hospitals and morgues. The pace of killing has dropped off pretty sharply since the first couple days, presumably because Hood has knocked out most of his top targets, but he’s still filling body bags. And he’s certainly not pulling any punches in his non-lethal attacks either - shattering bones, gouging eyes, probably leaving more than one goon wishing he’d just killed them.
Here, though, there is a pattern emerging: Hardison is pretty sure Hood’s targeting Black Mask.
He managed to track down the gang affiliations for the eight men that Red Hood beheaded when he made his debut, and although each of their gangs has different specialties, different focuses, and different territories within Crime Alley, each one paid tribute to Black Mask - and now they pay tribute to Hood. In between his good deeds around Crime Alley, Hood has been attacking Black Mask’s shipments, his couriers, his muscle - anyone with a whiff of a connection to the man. A few of Penguin’s goons stuck their noses into the Alley and got chased right back out, but it’s nothing like the way Hood’s going after Black Mask.
Unsurprisingly, there are rumblings throughout the criminal underworld that Black Mask is an absolute fury. Elliot's not happy about this, and Hadison really can't blame him on that one. Black Mask is sadistic, he's impulsive, and his men carry high-caliber weaponry that result in a lot of secondary casualties whenever anything goes down. So far, though, it seems that Red Hood's protection is holding up.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty to do for the ol’ day job too, which is why, after the brewpub closes for the day, Hardison sits Eliot and Parker down for an evening briefing.
“All right, folks, the devil works hard but Leverage Incorporated is gonna work harder.” Right on cue, his screens spring to sparkling life. Hardison brandishes his clicker like a conductor’s baton. “Up first: we got a request today from Leverage Kenya. They’re trying to take down an internationally financed rhino poaching ring, and they just found out one of their main customers is right here in Gotham.” He clicks to a photo of an older white man in khakis and a puka shell necklace, smiling benevolently at the camera. “Dr. Howard Metcalf, self-proclaimed East Coast guru of alternative medicine. He’s squeaky clean on the outside, but according to our team, he’ll give his patients just about anything they want, including endangered animal parts.”
“So I go in as a patient wearing a button cam, get him to give me a big chunk of rhino horn to chew on, and bam!” Parker smacks her fist into her hand. “Send that to the feds and he’s done.”
“Babe, I love the energy,” Hardison tells her. “Two tiny issues, though. First, uh, you don’t get to chew on the horn. It gets ground into powder and you drink it.”
“Gross.” Parker wrinkles her nose.
“ That’s gross?” Eliot echoes in disbelief. “Not chewing on a hunk of keratin? Rhino horn is just like a huge fingernail, Parker.”
“Second,” Hardison continues loudly before the briefing completely derails - Parker looks intrigued at the idea of giant horn-fingernails - “Metcalf’s careful. He won’t prescribe anything off-the-books to his patients until they’ve been seeing him for at least six months. Plus, he’s got a small, trusted staff, his referrals are all word-of-mouth and thoroughly vetted, and we have no idea how the rhino horn is getting from the smugglers to his clinic, or where he stores it.”
“Tough nut to crack.” Eliot narrows his eyes.
“We need intel,” Hardison says. “Parker, I’ve got you set up as Metcalf’s new tennis coach. He has lessons at his villa outside Gotham three days a week. You start on Tuesday.”
“Ugh, fine,” Parker sighs. “Just once, though, I wish one of these old rich guys would be into parkour or free climbing or something cool .”
“We live in hope,” Hardison agrees. “Alright, next up is Gina Scalzi.” The screen flicks from Dr. Metcalf to a collage of images of an impeccably dressed woman standing at podiums or waving at reporters. “Career politician, served on Gotham City Council for twelve years before being elected to the New Jersey state legislature, lives in a swanky loft in Uptown. Lots of skeletons in her closet - accepting bribes, buying votes, the usual Gotham politician chicanery - but she’s on our radar because of her son.” He clicks to a school photo of a grinning little boy with a missing front tooth. “Marco Scalzi, current resident of Kid City.”
Parker straightens up at that, fire sparking in her eyes. She’d given him a few names of children from Kid City, asked him to see if there was anything Leverage could do for them. Hardison had done his research, but by and large, it had been depressingly fruitless. Many of the kids have no family to speak of, and for those that do, their relatives are usually the reason they ran away from home. And all the kids have all been so burned by the system that they won’t consider even the most trustworthy fosters. Kid City is the only place they want to be.
But Marco - he’s a little different. And Hardison thinks they have a real shot at fixing things for him.
“Marco ran away from his mom’s house six months ago,” Hardison continues. “We don’t know exactly why, but we trust he had his reasons.” Eliot and Parker nod, their faces thunderous. “Before that, he’d been splitting his time between Gina and his dad, Andy. They divorced eight months ago. Each of them got half-time custody of Marco, which is pretty common, even though Marco himself said he wanted to live full-time with his dad - custody battles tend to favor either the mother or the higher-earning parent, and Gina checks both boxes.”
“Plus, she could’ve just bribed the judge,” Parker points out bitterly.
“That too,” Hardison agrees. “Anyways, we know from communications with his lawyer that Andy had been planning to sue for full custody of Marco, arguing that Gina was an unfit parent.”
“So why didn’t he?” Eliot growls.
The screen changes to a mugshot of Andy, staring into the camera with haunted eyes. “‘Cause Gina framed him for heroin possession right after the divorce was finalized. He just started a five-year sentence.”
Eliot winces. “Yeah, that’d do it.”
“We need to prove Gina framed Andy,” Hardison says. “Get him out of jail and put her in. Eliot and I’ll head to the state pen tomorrow to talk to him, see if he can give us any leads to link Gina to the heroin. And, uh….” He hesitates. Parker’s not gonna take this next part well, and neither will Eliot, and neither did he, frankly, but they need to know. “Gina’s looking for Marco. She’s got a couple private investigators on it. But she hasn’t reported him missing - she’s been telling people he was too upset to stay in Gotham after the divorce and she sent him to a boarding school. Trying to protect her reputation. Seems like she’s starting to get nervous, though.”
Hardison pulls up an audio file he’d snagged after hacking Gina’s Alexa earlier - it never occurred to evil rich people that it was a bad idea to talk about their crimes in front of their smart devices. He presses play.
“What am I supposed to do? Send my mailing list a Christmas card without my son? Like some kind of psychopath ? Do you have any idea what that would do to my public image? Hardworking mom is my brand !” There’s some annoying mumbling, presumably from a hired investigator, but Gina cuts it off impatiently. “If you bring up your friend who does Photoshop one more time , I swear to God you’re fired. Just find that goddamn brat by Thanksgiving.”
Parker flinches, and Eliot wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Hardison, can’t you just leak that to the press?” he asks, voice rough. “Police find out her kid’s been missing for six months unreported, that’s sure as hell enough to arrest her.”
“No,” Parker says. “She could say the recording was faked by her political rivals. She could fabricate evidence that Marco’s at boarding school. Her career might take a hit, but as long as she’s still out there, she could get Marco back. No.” Her eyes are like ice. “We destroy her. We get Andy out. We make sure Marco has a home where he’ll be safe, and we make sure she can never, ever touch it.”
There’s a beat of silence, of grim agreement, and then Hardison shuts off the monitors. “That’s it for the briefing.” He goes and sits down next to Parker. She’s smushed into Eliot, and he smushes into her other side. All the ropy muscles of her arms are taut as wire. “You okay, mama?”
“I want to make her suffer,” Parker says, with absolute certainty. “And I want Belgian hot chocolate.”
Eliot gives a mock groan. “In that order?”
But he’s already getting up, cracking his back and ambling off to the kitchen. Belgian hot chocolate - chocolat chaud, to be fancy - is basically a chocolate bar melted in heavy cream, which makes it one of Parker’s favorite things in the world, and Eliot usually saves it for celebrations after stressful jobs. It’s rare for him to whip it up on demand. Facing down a story like Marco’s, though…. Parker deserves all the comfort she wants.
She slumps against him with a wordless sigh, simultaneously boneless and poky, and Hardison runs his hand through her hair as they listen to Eliot clattering pans in the kitchen. His phone hums in his pocket. Ordinarily Hardison would ignore it during snuggles, but then he realizes it’s buzzing in a particular pattern that only goes off for one particular alert, and his heart leaps. If the intel is good, this could be just what Parker needs to lift her spirits.
“What’s that?” Parker asks, lifting her head from his chest as Hardison flicks through the link from the alert. It takes him to a Reddit thread, where someone has just posted an unmistakable picture, and Hardison does a mental fist-pump of triumph as he turns his phone to show Parker the snapshot: a black-and-blue figure, mid-flip above the Gotham Natural History Museum.
“Wanna go birdwatching?”
Parker grins. “Eliot!” she calls towards the kitchen. “Can you put the hot chocolate in a Thermos to go?”
Eliot reappears, giving them a mock-scowl. It’s the same as his regular scowl, but since it’s for him and Parker, Hardison knows he doesn’t mean it. “You want me to serve chocolat chaud–” he puts on an almost indecipherably thick accent– “with my very, very expensive imported Belgian chocolate, in a Thermos ?”
“With whipped cream.” Parker blows him a kiss. “Merci.”
There’s some obligatory grumbling by Eliot and some obligatory stealing of a mouthful of whipped cream by Parker, but it’s not too long before they’re out the door, spilling into a chilly autumn night with the streetlights of Gotham making haloes in the damp air. Hardison’s keeping one eye on the social media feed and another on the startup sequence for a drone he’s trying to activate, one Parker set up for him in a sheltered nook on the roof of the Gotham Gazette building. He has a grand vision of a network of drones across the city that he can call on to be his eyes in the sky whenever something exciting and/or terrifying is going down with rogues and Bats. But something in the smog of Gotham plays havoc with their batteries, and their usefulness has been hit or miss so far. Hardison can only cross his fingers that this drone can will itself to life during their drive.
“Seems like Nightwing’s hanging around Old Gotham,” he tells Elliot as they pile into his car. “Oh–” He scrolls through a few more posts that have just popped up. “And it looks like Robin's with him!”
“Maybe we'll see your new favorite too,” Eliot says, rather sourly, as he pulls out into the street.
“Who? Red Hood?” Hardison attempts to scoff. “Nah, man. I just - it’s not - he's got a vibe, okay? It’s like the Lone Ranger moved in next door. Hard to ignore.”
Parker frowns at Eliot, although the effect is slightly diluted by the fact she's got a massive whipped cream mustache. “I thought you were okay with Red Hood after what I told you the kids told me. And he's already stopped killing as many people.”
“I'm still not gonna be crazy about a guy who's killing at all,” Elliot grumbles. “Especially a guy who uses all those guns to do it. That so hard to understand?”
Ah. Now Hardison feels a little more sympathetic. “Yeah, man, we get it. You’re not a fan, that’s fair.”
“The guy’s trouble,” Eliot growls. “ Bad trouble.”
“Okay, fine.” This conversation is veering into unpleasantness, so Hardison decides to turn it around. He shoots Eliot a cheeky grin. “But you know you're still our favorite action hero, right?”
Elliot scoffs derisively, but his shoulders inch up to his ears in embarrassment. Parker laughs and piles on. “Spicier than a ghost pepper, more powerful than a Dodge Challenger, able to chop tall onions in a single slice, it’s - Mr. Punchy!”
They tease him all the way to Old Gotham. Hardison relishes the look on Eliot’s face, irritation at war with affection. Parker’s perked up a lot too, though that’s probably due in part to all the sugar from the chocolat chaud. She guides them to one of her favorite cathedrals, and graciously doesn’t insist that they rappel up to the top of it, instead picking the lock and taking them inside to the service elevator, a modern upgrade for the elderly building. They emerge at the roof level, but Parker just smirks when Hardison reaches for the door, and instead leads them to the bell tower, where the narrow, creaking wooden stairs are definitely not a modern feature. Hardison forgets the claustrophobia, though, as soon as they step out onto the belfry, wide open to the Gotham night, and get a perfect view of Nightwing and Robin swinging by at eye level, so close Hardison can hear a wind-tattered trill of laughter.
Parker whoops in delight. Hardison wraps an arm around her waist and grins as they take in the show. The two vigilantes are playing tag with their grappling guns, back and forth and up and down the long canyon of Grand Avenue. Robin isn’t as acrobatic as Nightwing, but he has an interesting parkour style, at least according to Parker, who launches into a slightly manic, chocolate-fueled analysis of the kid’s methodology and training. Eliot adds some gruff commentary. Hardison is completely lost, but it’s nice to just listen to the patter of Parker’s voice as he watches the vigilantes spin and arc through the air, occasionally glancing down at his phone to check the agonizingly slow creep of the progress bar as his drone boots up. It would be cool to get some video of this, maybe zoom in on some of the tricks Parker’s so mesmerized by.
Of course, as soon as the stupid thing finally comes to life, Nightwing and Robin pause on a ledge and their gloved hands go to their ears, clearly hearing something over their comms. They listen for a moment - then Robin droops, disappointed. Nightwing scoops him into an embrace and ruffles his hair. Robin hugs Nightwing back and makes a lunge at his hair in retaliation, but the taller vigilante slides away like an eel, laughing. It reminds Hardison of roughhousing with his foster siblings, back in the day - and now, too, sometimes, despite his best efforts. It warms his heart.
Then they go grappling off in two different directions - Robin towards Uptown, and Nightwing towards the docks. “Looks like the party’s over,” Eliot says, turning towards the stairs, but Hardison stops him, brandishing his phone in triumph. The screen shows a crisp view of downtown Gotham from a high angle, steadily rising. His drone’s finally working, and Hardison knows just where he wants to point it.
“How ‘bout we see what Nightwing’s up to now?” he asks, fingers hovering over the interface of the controls.
“Oo, yes!” Parker bounces eagerly.
“If he whacks that thing out of the sky with one of his throwing knives, don’t come cryin’ to me,” Eliot warns.
“Please,” Hardison scoffs. “These drones have got a NASA-level long-distance lens on ‘em. I won’t get close.”
So, with Parker and Eliot huddled against him on the belfry, drinking the sweet dregs of the chocolat chaud, Hardison steers the drone after Nightwing's flashes of blue as he swings down to the docks.
And that’s how they end up seeing Nightwing and Batman fight a giant robot.
And how they see Batman peel away afterwards in the freaking Bat-Jet to run down a car in a wild chase that ends with the vehicle smashing through the doors of Ace Chemicals.
And how they see - when Hardison oh-so-cautiously guides his drone down to the right angle to point the camera through the hole where Batman jumped through the roof - the freaking Red Hood confronting Batman with a drawn gun.
And that’s all they see, because then Hood pulls the trigger, and Ace Chemicals explodes in a thunderclap of fire, and Hardison’s abruptly down a drone.
There’s a minute of silent staring at the big white ERROR text that pops up on the display screen. Hardison can feel that his eyes are as wide as saucers, but he can’t even bring himself to blink, entirely focused on trying to come to terms with the fact that he just saw the craziest shit he’ll probably ever see in his entire life.
Finally Eliot speaks, hoarsely.
“Told you that guy was trouble.”
Notes:
Chocolat chaud my beloved... mmmm.
It's been tough to figure out how accurate I want to be to Under the Red Hood - for one thing, Robin's not in it, and I must have my boy Tim, so we're already veering off-script. But I think we'll hit all the high points! And of course, the extremely extremely low points :)
I'm so excited for the next two chapters. See you then!!
Chapter 7: Spaghetti & Meatballs
Notes:
HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY JASON TODD!!! I'm sad I couldn't get this posted yesterday but I was completely and unavoidably booked (was canning apples).
And happy belated chapter! Thank you to everyone who has left such lovely and inspiring comments!!!!
Content warnings: lots of discussion about heroin; child worried for her safety (she is at the brewpub tho so she's fine); stalking and gun violence (against the stalkers)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
One week after the explosion at Ace Chemicals, Eliot crosses paths with the Red Hood.
And what a week it is. First, on the day after Red Hood's inaugural tangle with Batman, Eliot and Hardison go to the prison where Andy Scalzi is being kept. It's an hour's drive from Gotham. Eliot’s at the wheel, and Hardison is glued to his phone, talking the entire time - barely stopping to draw breath - about the previous night’s showdown.
“I still can’t tell how everyone knows it’s Hood, someone must have a traffic camera snapshot they’re not sharing, ‘cause we couldn’t tell until I got the drone in Ace Chemicals, right? I gotta find that footage. Man, though, the Alley is going bonkers over this. Hood pulling one over on Batman? It’s insane! God, I gotta start a new folder for the memes, Parker is gonna love these–”
Eliot tries to find a balance between being endeared by Hardison’s nerdy enthusiasm and being irritated that Hood’s becoming some kind of folk hero. He still doesn't like the guy, doesn't trust him. He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Finally, they reach their destination, but it’s a short-lived relief. Leading the lives they do, it never feels good to step into a prison. There's a tightness in Eliott's gut that he knows won't disappear until they're walking out again.
Of course, thanks to Hardison, their fake IDs are airtight; their cover story is that they're representatives from a New Jersey nonprofit that negotiates shorter sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. It gets them inside easily enough. But once they're sitting down in front of Andy, they have to explain the ruse, and it's awful to see the hope crumble from his face. Then he thinks they're just con artists - which, well, they are , but they're con artists who are trying to help him. They go back and forth about this for several valuable minutes of their visitation time until finally Eliot, frustrated, snaps, “Look, man, we're not just doing this for you. Marco needs you back, and -”
“Marco?” Andy's eyes widen. “Have you seen him? Have you talked to him? My lawyer got the address from Gina for the boarding school she sent him to, but I think she might've lied - all my letters have been returned. Is - is something wrong?”
There's an instant of hesitation from both Eliot and Hardison, and Andy goes ashen. “Oh god, oh god -”
“It's okay,” Eliot says hastily. “Marco is….” He doesn't know if he can say Marco is safe in good conscience, not with the kid living on the streets. “Marco's all right. We're keeping an eye on him. But he needs you home.”
Andy nods shakily. “Yeah. Of course. Of course. But I don't - my lawyer is already doing everything she can. We don't know how to fight this.”
“Tell us about the heroin,” Hardison prompts gently.
“I… I was an addict in college. I used pretty heavily. I got arrested twice for possession. Small amounts - I didn't do time. I got clean after I graduated, before I met Gina. She knows all that - I told her before we got married. I didn’t want it to be some big secret. But she didn't mind. She said it was….” He grimaced. “Real. Gritty. Said it made a good story. She's always been about image. I didn't really realize that until Marco.” He looks at them with desperation. “But I haven't used in fifteen years, way before Marco was born. And I never dealt it, never. You have to believe me.”
“We do,” Hardison assures him. “We can smell a setup. The police found the heroin in your car?”
“Yeah. Pulled me over when I was out running errands. They said someone had called in a tip. Said they saw my car at what looked like a drug handoff. The cops found the heroin hidden under some coats in the trunk. I swear, I have no idea how it got there.”
That was all in the file Hardison had prepared. “Seems likely it was planted by your ex-wife,” Eliot says. “Do you have any idea where Gina got the heroin?”
“No. But, I mean….” Andy fidgets uncomfortably. “She could've just bought it off the street. Right?”
“Uh, well.” Hardison purses his lips. “It was almost half a pound.”
“Is… is that a lot? I mean, I haven't bought any for so long, and I used to just get a dose at a time from my dealer -”
“It’s forty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin,” Eliot says flatly.
Andy buries his face in his hands. “Fuck me .”
“We assume Gina doesn't have that kind of cash to throw around,” Hardison says, shooting Eliot a reproachful look. “Is that right?”
“Not in the bank. Maybe from her campaign fund. But that would be risky, wouldn't it?”
Eliot knows Hardison's already looked there to see if he could find any transfers of cash, and came up empty. “Yeah,” Hardison admits. “Our guess is that it was someone who owed her a favor. Can you think of anyone like that? Did she have connections to organized crime?”
“I have no idea.” Andy looks bleak. “She kept me out of her political stuff, all the wheeling and dealing. Just trotted me and Marco out to play happy family on the campaign trail.”
“What about cops?” Eliot prods. “It could have come out of an evidence locker. Were there any police she was close to?”
“When she was a city councilwoman, we always went to the galas for our precinct, but I don't know….”
Their visitation slot is over. The prison guard stationed nearby is drumming his fingers on his crossed arms, giving them annoyed looks. Eliot shoots a glare right back, and the guy blanches. But they can’t overstay their welcome for long. Gina’s no doubt going to hear about this visit, and they can’t give her any reason to think they’re anything other than a couple ordinary do-gooders, trying to help out.
“If there's anything else you think of,” Eliot says, “let us know. Your lawyer has our card. It’s got our real number on it. We’re gonna figure this out, get everything pointed back at Gina. Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’ll try to think.” Andy's hands are trembling. “And Marco -” His eyes fill with tears. “You have to keep him safe. Please .”
“We will,” Hardison says, and Eliot just manages to hide his wince, because he knows what that actually means is, We'll try our best .
It's a gloomy drive home. When Eliot glances over at Hardison, he can see that he’s scrolling the dark web, eyebrows drawn tight, already trying to hunt down a lead on the heroin. Eliot’s instincts are that the deal was all verbal, Gina cashing in a personal favor, keeping it all off the books - but he leaves Hardison to it. It’s gonna be a slog trying to crack this one. It’s a small comfort to try and do something , at least.
Three days after their trip to the prison, Red Hood drops a damn helicopter into the middle of a busy street downtown.
Hardison doesn’t hear about this one in time to break out a drone, which he bemoans to no end, but there’s plenty of cell phone and security camera footage, and plenty of chatter on the web and in the streets too. Post-helicopter, Red Hood led Batman and Nightwing on a merry chase above the streets of Gotham before setting off another explosion, this one in a train station. It seems like a miracle that no civilians were hurt, although there are rumors that Nightwing was injured. Hardison chalks it up to Hood's skill and commitment to protecting ordinary people. Eliot thinks it's probably just dumb luck - especially when he finds out that the helicopter Hood targeted was delivering an arms shipment to Black Mask. Antagonizing the most volatile crime lord in Gotham doesn’t strike him as a sound strategy for keeping the city safe.
And then, three days after that - after seventy-two hours of Hardison playing and replaying every piece of footage he can find on Red Hood vs. Batman on his huge display of monitors, until Eliot feels like he’s trapped in the very specific purgatory of an editing room for an action movie - a girl shows up at the brew pub.
She's skinny, with a pinched face and remarkably steely eyes for someone who can't be more than twelve. She comes in late, just as they're about to close, slipping through a gaggle of regulars on their way out the door. Eliot assumes she's another street kid looking for a meal, but when he turns to get Parker, she’s already at his shoulder, her eyes round. “Gemma?”
Eliot recognizes the name as the leader of Kid City, though he hasn’t met her. From the way Parker described her, he didn’t think she’d ever venture as far as the brewpub. The girl looks nervous, but she holds herself with determination. “I have information about Red Hood,” she says. “I wanted to tell you right away.”
“Okay,” Parker says, but she’s clearly thrown seeing the girl on Leverage turf instead of Kid City. She shoots a furtive glance at Eliot for help.
“Sounds like valuable intel,” he says to Gemma, who eyes him warily. “Can we barter for it?”
“Barter?”
“Trade. How about we get you a meal, and you tell us what you know?”
Gemma stiffens. “I don't eat anything unless I see it made in front of me.”
“I could do that,” Eliot says easily. “You can watch me cook in the brewpub kitchen. It’s a little busy with staff, since we’re just closing up, but we can find a spot. Parker’ll come too.”
It’s plain to see the calculations running through Gemma’s mind - and heartbreaking. If Eliot’s willing to barter, she could ask for money instead of food, but she’s got a long walk back, and muggers can practically smell cash. Going to a back room is a red flag, but if there are lots of people around, that’s probably okay - chances that they all turn a blind eye are low, especially at a place with the reputation of the brewpub. Parker will be there, who Gemma trusts as much as she can trust any adult. And this way they’re even: when they walk away from this exchange, no one owes anybody anything.
“I'll make anything you want,” Eliot offers. “It’s no trouble.”
Gemma looks at him for a few long seconds, then blurts, “Spaghetti and meatballs.”
Then she snaps her mouth shut like she’s shocked by her own boldness, but Eliott nods. “Can do. Come on back.”
He walks in first, trailed by Parker, with Gemma cautiously creeping in after them. Eliot lets Parker get her settled on a stool at a prep counter while he commandeers a cook station. The rest of staff bustles around in the background, cleaning up, too experienced to ask who this sudden child is or where she came from. Eliot sets a pot of water on the stove to boil, grabs a jar of his own homemade spaghetti sauce out of the cupboard, then goes to the fridge for the meat. Kid probably hasn't eaten much rich food for a long time, so he'll try to keep it light as well as nourishing. One third Italian sausage, one third ground turkey, one third breadcrumbs for the meatballs. Lots of herbs, not too much cheese in the sauce, dash of olive oil on the noodles instead of butter. He gets to work.
He thought that Parker might try to ask Gemma for an update while he's cooking, but the girl's eyes are fixed on him, hawklike, and Parker doesn't distract her, just sits looking out over the kitchen as Gemma watches him cook. Eliot makes sure he stays relaxed under the scrutiny. He throws a handful of whole wheat noodles in the boiling water, shapes the meatballs, cooks them hot under the lid of the frying pan, pours in the sauce. The rich aroma wafts up, and he can see Gemma take a deep, appreciative sniff in spite of herself.
It only takes him about ten minutes total. He drains the hot noodles, adds them to a bowl with the sauce, unwraps a new block of Parmesan, and grates a healthy sprinkle over the top.
“There you go,” he says, setting the bowl in front of Gemma.
She gives him a businesslike nod and picks up her fork. She doesn't thank him. But Eliot can see the way her eyes light up at the first taste, the way she chews each bite, savoring it as long as she can, and that's more than enough.
He washes the pots while she eats; Parker continues to survey the kitchen. Most of the staff have left by now. Luckily, the brewpub hasn't been too busy lately; lots of folks have been out. Sasha is visiting relatives in Canada, Dianne’s down with the flu, and Eddie has been occupied with his other job. At this point in the night it’s just Britt, bringing in a load of glasses from the last diners, and Noor, loading up the dishwasher with some good-natured sighing about managerial duties.
Gemma finishes, sets down her fork, carefully aligns it parallel to her bowl, and says, “Red Hood knows about Kid City.”
Parker jolts out of her relaxed slouch. Eliot feels his own shoulders go stiff with alarm. “Are you safe?” Parker asks frantically. “Has he done anything? I didn’t think–”
“No,” Gemma says sharply. “I mean, yes, we’re safe, because no, he hasn’t done anything. Except help us.” She draws herself up, and glares at them both. “If you were thinking of trying to take him down, you need to stop.”
Eliot raises his eyebrows, surprised by the ultimatum. “Why would we want to take him down?” he asks, carefully.
It’s the wrong thing to say - fishing for information, the kind of question he would ask a mark. Gemma’s glare intensifies. “I know you fight bad guys,” she says, in a clear I’m-not-an-idiot tone. “And when Parker came to ask us about Red Hood, she wanted to know if he was a bad guy. I wasn’t sure then, but now I know. He’s not .”
“What happened?” Parker asks.
“He just - keeps on helping. Little things. People don’t try to sell us drugs anymore. Girls don’t get whistled at as much. No one’s gone missing since he showed up. He stole a bunch of medicine for us.”
Parker’s eyebrows shoot up. “And you took it?”
Gemma makes a face that’s slightly sheepish but mostly defiant. “It was all still in its packaging! And besides, he’s -” Her voice catches. “He’s one of us.”
Eliot frowns, confused, but Parker understands instantly. “He lived in Kid City?”
Gemma nods. “For a year or two, a long time ago. That’s how he knows about it. He’s too big to get in now, obviously. But he came to check on us, to see what we needed.”
Now this really is a valuable piece of intel. From the way Red Hood navigates the Alley, it’s clear he knows the territory. But if he actually grew up there, if he was a street kid -
That certainly explains a lot of the grudges he holds against the scum of Gotham.
But his armor, his weaponry, his tech - that’s all top-of-the-line stuff. Where did a former Crime Alley orphan get access to that ?
Parker’s clearly mulling all this over too. “So you really trust him?” she says. “I mean, I know you know this, but - just because he grew up like you guys, doesn’t mean -”
“I know,” Gemma snaps. “But we trust him. He doesn’t hurt kids. He told us that, and he's proved it.”
Parker studies Gemma for a few moments, then nods. “Okay.”
Eliot lets out a slow, silent exhale. He’s willing to let Parker take the lead on how they respond right now, but they definitely need to talk about this more.
“And,” Gemma says, a little faster, like she needs to get it off her chest, “my brother wants to work for him.”
Parker blinks. “Oh. I… didn’t know you had a brother.”
“He outgrew Kid City a few years ago,” Gemma explains. “He works for a chop shop right now. But he says he’s gonna ask Hood if he can help him. Says he needs it.” She glowers at them both. “My brother’s a good guy too.”
Ah . Worried her brother will be caught in the crossfire, if Leverage goes after Hood. Eliot feels a pang, and he can see it mirrored in Parker’s eyes. Siblings are always hard for her.
“I’m sure he is,” Eliot says gruffly, “if he’s much like you.”
That catches Gemma off-guard; she gives him a startled, bemused look, like a wild animal catching sight of a human for the first time. He’s not sure what kind of response she would have come up with to that - because just then, his phone begins to ring.
It’s not his personal cell, which has the permanent numbers for Parker, Hardison, Sophie, and Nate, or his current burner for jobs. It’s the one he keeps on hand at the brewpub so he can pretend to be a regular restaurant owner. Getting a call at this hour is odd; staff usually just text the managers if they need a last-minute shift change. Regardless, Gemma looks relieved at the break in their conversation, so Eliot holds up an apologetic hand, steps away, fishes the phone out of his pocket, and answers it. “Hello?”
“Hi - Eliot? Um, it’s Cleo - from the brewpub - sorry to call -”
He recognizes the voice. Cleo’s a young woman who was at the brewpub that evening, and must have left shortly after Gemma arrived. She’s part of a close-knit group of regulars who, when they’re feeling fancy, refer to themselves as folk of the night. They like having a spot outside Crime Alley to hang out, relax, and kick the grad students’ asses at trivia, and they especially like having someplace they’re not likely to be propositioned. Eliot tries to make sure the atmosphere always stays that way. He’s even given out his number to the group in case anyone makes trouble while he’s not around.
Right now, he’s glad he did.
“Sorry,” Cleo says again, her voice low and panicky. “I just - my roommates are all out of town, and you said to call if we ever needed -”
“Where are you?” Eliot says immediately. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Parker turn at his tone.
“Uh - corner of 4th and Myrtle.”
He gives Parker a Look, and then he’s racing for the door. “I’m coming. Keep moving. I’ll find you.”
“Thanks.” Cleo's breathing raggedly. “I’m sorry, I just - I just -"
“It’s okay. Just stay on the phone.” He’s six blocks away. “What’s going on?”
“I saw an ex-client at the brewpub tonight,” she whispers. “We hooked up a couple times, but he was - um - shitty, so I told him I didn’t want to see him again, and it was a while ago, so I thought it was just coincidence that he was there tonight, and I didn’t see him when I left, so I stopped at the bodega and now he’s - he came out of nowhere and he’s following me and there’s like three guys with him - ”
“I’m almost there,” Eliot says, and he’s been running this entire time but he forces himself faster.
“Shit,” Cleo mutters into the phone, and now Eliot can hear male voices in the background, yelling. “Shit, shit, shit - ”
Eliot bursts around a corner onto 4th and Myrtle, right on top of the four guys now surrounding Cleo.
She’s got her keys between her fingers like brass knuckles and a snarl on her face, but the four men are big and burly, and Eliot can see the outline of guns in jacket pockets and waistbands. They’re on a street full of apartments. If any of those guns goes off, Eliot’s got to make sure he catches the bullet. He thinks, This is gonna be a rough one .
Then the Red Hood drops from the sky.
The men startle, turn, draw, and Eliot is on them, striking guns from their hands before anyone has a chance to aim. He chops one guy in the throat, heaves two towards Red Hood, bounces the last one’s head off his knee, a grim part of him reveling in the wet crunch of the breaking nose. Meanwhile, Hood easily parries the clumsy blows of the other two men, kicks out their knees, and pistol-whips them to the ground with brutal efficiency.
Just like that, it’s over. The stalkers are strewn across the sidewalk, either whimpering or unconscious. Eliot immediately puts his hands in the air and backs away from Red Hood, towards Cleo.
Hood glances at him. Eliot has no idea what’s going through his head behind those blank white lenses. He didn’t fire a shot, his body language isn’t threatening, but he hasn’t holstered his gun yet. And also, he recently beheaded a bunch of people. Better safe than sorry.
After a few uncomfortable seconds, the helmet turns towards Cleo. “You okay?”
His voice is heavily altered by his modulator, mechanical and emotionless. Cleo flinches. “Yeah,” she manages. “I’m fine.”
Hood jerks his head towards Eliot. “And this guy’s with you?”
“Y-Yes,” Cleo stammers. “He owns the Talvey Street Brewpub. I called him. Don’t - don’t hurt him.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
The voice is still robotic, but Eliot’s almost sure he can hear a twinge of sardonic humor in it. He lets himself relax just a fraction.
Hood looks at Eliot again. It’s impossible to say with the helmet, but there's something - searching, in that empty gaze, like he’s sizing Eliot up and he’s surprised by what he’s finding. Eliot stares back, flatly.
“Well fought,” Hood says at last, inclining his head.
Now it’s Eliot’s turn to be surprised. It’s an odd, formal turn of phrase and an odd, formal gesture - it almost reminds him of -
Of -
The way Hood fought just now - that was classic brawling, street stuff, but was there a hint, just a hint - ?
Hood twitches, like he realized he didn’t mean to say what he’d said, and throws back his shoulders. His voice growls out again. “Walk her home.”
“Yeah.” Eliot shakes himself out of his brief shock. He was definitely planning on that already. “Will do.”
“No one’s going to bother you like this again,” Hood says to Cleo, and even with his modulated voice it sounds like an oath.
The men on the ground are starting to stir, groaning, cradling their heads, but they’re still too messed up to get back to their feet. Red Hood turns away from Eliot and Cleo and fixates on the men, racking his gun with a loud clack . The four woozy men are suddenly alert, eyes fixed on the gun, their faces going ashen. Eliot pushes Cleo behind him and starts backing away, slow.
“So, boys,” Hood drawls, the modulator putting a menacing purr on each word. “Who can tell me the best way to keep creeps and stalkers off my streets? Wrong answers only.”
“We won’t do it ever again, swear to God–”
“Don’t kill me, it wasn’t my idea, it’s not my fault–”
“Please, please –”
“Thought so,” Hood says, and fires.
BANGBANGBANGBANG .
Even with the ten yards Eliot’s managed to put between them and Hood, the gunshots are shockingly loud, and so are the quadruple screams of agony. It takes him a moment to realize that Hood gave each man a bullet through the knee - instantaneous, precise, and demonstrating a level of not only skill, but also ruthlessness, that sends a chill straight down Eliot’s spine.
Without another word, without a backwards glance, Red Hood shoots a grapple up to a nearby rooftop and vanishes in a heartbeat.
Cleo stares bug-eyed at the men writhing and bleeding on the sidewalk, then looks at Eliot. “Holy fuck .”
He has to agree.
Notes:
:)
Oof, I really need to update tags. I'll do that for the next chapter for sure because it contains my very favorite tag: WHUMP!!
Chapter 8: Sourdough
Notes:
*slaps roof of fanfic* this bad boy can fit so many minor OCs
AT LAST, WE WHUMP! This is a chunk of a chapter and I really enjoyed it. Hope you do too! And thank you for all the wonderful comments that have been accruing!!!!!
Content warnings for a gunshot wound and what is essentially field surgery for it (medically inaccurate field surgery at that!), and a very brief allusion to queerphobia at the end of the chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a crime lord in possession of a new territory, must be in want of goons; or at least, that was what the aspiring henchpeople of Gotham seemed to think.
“Fuck off,” Jason says without turning around, and two pairs of combat boots come to a scuffling halt behind him. He keeps his eyes fixed on the Black Mask courier he’s watching through a pair of high-powered binoculars from the roof of a theater. “I already told you I’m not hiring.”
“Would you take us on as volunteers?” a low voice drawls. “We’re very civic-minded.”
Jason does not dignify that with a response, just gives the focus on the binoculars a few irritated twists so he can see better. The courier’s been sharing a cigarette with a couple bouncers outside a nightclub, chatting and laughing, after delivering a discretely packaged box of high-end party drugs. Now he throws the butt to the ground and strides back to his motorcycle, hopping on and twisting the throttle. A delicious snarl echoes through the canyons of the nearby skyscrapers and the courier goes whisking away. Jason’s not going to kill him for at least a couple more days - he’s still collecting intel on all of Black Mask’s customers - but once he does he’s definitely stealing that bike.
The two wannabe henches behind him still haven’t moved. With a gusty sigh that crackles like static through his helmet, Jason turns to face them.
The person who spoke smirks at him. If Jason did want goons - which he absolutely does not - he has to admit they would be a badass goon. Their name, as he learned the previous time they showed up to hound him, is Hawthorn. They’ve got a pair of lovingly restored 1967 Colt .45s in shoulder holsters over a vest covered in embroidered patches, the largest of which says DEATH BY DYKE. Their bare arms are heavily muscled and marked with an intricate tattoo of a snake skeleton, the tip of its tail on their right wrist and its open, fanged jaws on their left hand. Jason thinks they’re about thirty, but there’s something about their serene, sardonic face that makes them look ageless, like the Mona Lisa.
The other guy is almost comically ordinary in comparison. He introduced himself as Bobby. He’s seventeenish, with overlong hair and a sharp, earnest face that makes him look like he should be president of his high school’s LARPing society instead of jonesing for a position as a crime lord’s lackey - but that’s Gotham, Jason thinks sourly. His boots and denim jacket are worn, his shoulders perpetually tensed; he’s scrawny in a way that might mean belated puberty but might also mean childhood malnutrition. Jason feels an uncomfortable prickle of familiarity when he looks at him. Did he know the guy as a kid? Were they both on the street at the same time, hiding out in the dubious safety of Kid City? Or is Jason just seeing in Bobby what he himself would have become, if he’d never gone out with a tire iron on that fateful night?
It doesn’t matter, Jason reminds himself forcefully. What’s past is past - and what’s present doesn’t involve having employees.
“You know, most jobseekers use Indeed these days,” he says, putting as much sarcasm through the voice modulator as he can. “Otherwise, I saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign posted in the window of that froyo place on 14th. It's Mr. Freeze's favorite spot, so maybe you can pick up some odd jobs from him too.”
Bobby raises his chin bravely. “We don't want to work for just anyone. We want to work for you.”
Jason keeps forgetting that no one can see him roll his eyes behind his helmet. “Lucky me.”
“You keep Tarzan-ing away before we can pitch you,” Hawthorn says, with a pointed look at the grapple Jason has been unsubtly reaching for. “Give us a chance to make the elevator speech at least.”
“Hard pass. I’m a solo act.”
“That's your problem,” Hawthorn presses. “You got a lot going on, chief. You can't handle it alone.”
Jason bristles at them. “Watch me.”
Hawthorn is unfazed. “All I mean is, you're doing good work for Gotham, but you're doing more and more of it. And trying to turn Crime Alley around? You oughta have a small army. Especially if you want any of these changes to stick. You wanna build something that lasts? You're gonna need help at some point.”
The Pit hisses unpleasantly in the back of Jason's brain. Build something that lasts - it’s not why he’s here. Cleaning up Crime Alley - that’s a duty, an obligation. He has the ability to tear through the worst of the scum, lift up a few folks along the way, so he feels that he has to, especially when Batman hasn't made any fucking progress in the neighborhood. But it's a side quest. It's not why Red Hood came into being. His main mission is Batman, the Joker, a choice. Whatever happens beyond that - Jason can’t think about it. It’s a howling black void, the After. His mind shies away from it.
But, obviously, he's not going to say that to these two. Instead, Jason just snaps, “I don't need any fucking help.”
Undeterred, Hawthorn changes tactics. “Yeah? You couldn't use anyone watching your back? You got bullets coming at you from a lotta different directions. Not a bad idea to have another set of eyes.”
A memory surges through Jason’s mind. He was thirteen, propped up in his bed in the manor a day or two after a fight with Penguin, nursing a concussion that had him so dizzy he couldn’t even look at a book, the words running like watercolors off the page. Alfred had come in with a bowl of soup, glanced from the miserable boredom on Jason’s face to the copy of The Once and Future King laying sadly on the bedside table, and taken pity on him.
“Could I perhaps join you for a while, Master Jason, and read aloud?” he’d asked, creaking into the armchair beside the bed and reaching for the book. “It’s been a long while since I’ve enjoyed the wit of T.H. White.”
Jason gave a listless shrug. “Sure, if you want to.”
(Who had he thought he was kidding? His heart was doing cartwheels in his chest at the prospect of Alfred hanging out with him. Jason could kick himself for being such a disingenuous little shit.)
(What’s past is past.)
“I do indeed,” Alfred said, with only a scant trace of dryness, as he opened the book to the oak leaf Jason was using as a bookmark, giving it a raised eyebrow before peering down at the page. His voice warmed. “Ah, good, one of my favorite passages.” Alfred’s eyes crinkled as he smiled at him. “It makes me think of Master Bruce - and of you and Master Richard.”
“Really?” Jason croaked in surprise.
Alfred nodded. “I am reminded of Master Bruce when he started his crusade, and how much has changed for him.” He gave Jason an unexpectedly deep look, proud and sorrowful all at once. “It shows, I think, why Batman needs a Robin at his side.”
Alfred cleared his throat and read.
“If I were to be made a knight," said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, "I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it."
"That would be extremely presumptuous of you," said Merlyn, "and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it."
"I shouldn't mind."
"Wouldn't you? Wait till it happens and see."
The recollection is there and gone in a flash, like a bullet whistling past his face. It takes everything Jason has not to recoil - and to fight down the burst of green that tells him to kneecap Hawthorn right fucking now for reminding him of that.
Instead, Jason allows himself a long, irritated breath that he knows will come through the helmet as a growl, and reminds himself that he has better things to do than fly into a Pit rage at two annoyingly philanthropic hench-hopefuls. It’s two in the morning - midday for vigilantes, but it’s already been a long night of stealthily tracking the Black Mask courier, and after this he has to head to a rendezvous with a gang that Jason’s pretty sure is going to try and kill him, but he’s willing to chance it because they have excellent cocaine smuggling connections and it would make his life so much easier if they decided to play nice instead. And after that, he’s got a weapons shipment to break up on the docks at dawn, and then, because both Alfred and Talia trained him well, he has to clean, inspect, oil, and stash his gear before the sweet, sweet call of the surplus army cot at his nearest safehouse.
So, he won’t let his temper get the better of him and murder the minor annoyances standing before him, but it’s also time for them to go. Jason draws himself up to a full loom, and puts one hand on the heavy Glock at his hip. “You’ve heard what I do to people who don’t take no for an answer, right?”
Bobby pales. Hawthorn raises their hands, conciliatory. “Okay, fair play. But - think about it, maybe? We wanna help the Alley too. Real shit that makes a difference. And you’re the best game in town for that.”
Jason feels briefly, weirdly, extremely flattered.
“The Alley needs Red Hood,” Bobby blurts out. “We can’t - please don’t - die.”
There is absolutely no way Jason can respond to that, except by jumping off the roof and grappling away before his brain explodes.
It’s almost a relief when the gang meet does, indeed, turn out to be an ambush, and Jason can lose himself in a satisfying wash of green and scarlet. He has to say almost, though, because while the double-cross was expected, the sniper with armor-piercing rounds was not.
Jason’s very irritated, as he staggers away from the carnage, to realize that Hawthorn actually had a point about the value of somebody watching his back. Right now, it’s ironically literal too, because he has a bullet under his shoulder blade that he absolutely cannot reach by himself.
At least it’s only one. And he thinks the sniper was aiming for his head, which is super embarrassing for them. It’s clear that they didn’t practice before firing off the armor-piercing rounds - such a rookie mistake, doesn’t anyone appreciate that the weight of the bullet affects the kick of the gun, and on a windy night too, probably didn’t even build the rifle themselves, fuckin’ amateurs….
His thoughts are spinning to distract himself from the pain; Jason makes himself focus. He’s got a bit of a healing factor from the Pit, but it’s nothing to write home about - he’ll still be feeling this for weeks. Plus, it doesn’t do him any damn good if the bullet doesn’t come out first, as Jason knows from unpleasant experience. But he can’t reach the spot with his right arm, even with forceps, and he can’t twist his left arm enough without the torn muscles screaming and shorting out. At least he managed to dump half a packet of clotting powder into the wound before he had to give it up, so he’s not actively bleeding out, but it’s a short-term fix.
He needs a medic. Red Hood is notorious enough that he could show up at the door of any mob doctor in Gotham and demand their help, but the thought of a stranger’s hands on him makes Jason’s skin crawl. A miniscule shred of Robin-instinct whispers Dr. Leslie, but that gives him the shudders even worse.
There are no good options. He doesn’t have a crumb of trust in anybody in Gotham who’s not connected to his old life - not to mention he needs someone discreet, and competent, and -
Well.
Wait a minute.
He can think of one person.
~
Sunday is when Eliot bakes bread for the week - like some kind of pioneer woman, in Hardison’s words. He certainly doesn’t need to; the brewpub works with any number of excellent Gotham bakeries for various menu items. But it’s a soothing routine, a way to start a new week on the right foot. Besides, Eliot likes his own bread best; he makes it with a sourdough starter gifted to him years ago by Chef Toby, and nothing else tastes quite so much like home.
At four o’ clock sharp on Sunday morning, Eliot gets up. As he’s done for the past two decades of his life, he sleeps at the edge of the bed, facing the door, ready to attack a threat if it one appears - but these days he can’t spring into action quite so quickly as he once did, because he has to slip out from under Hardison’s warm arm and tuck it back under the covers as he gives a mumble of reproof, despite still being sound asleep. Parker, on the far side of the bed, is as light a sleeper as Eliot, and wakes up to watch this maneuver with a little smile. But her eyes drift shut again like a contented cat’s, and she nestles back into Hardison as Eliot starts downstairs, heart full.
He bakes four loaves at a time, which all fit nicely into the brewpub’s big commercial oven, so Eliot leaves their apartment dark and heads for the storeroom that separates their apartment and the kitchen. The four bowls are laid out neatly on the counter from his prep the night before, the dough beautifully risen into pale hills. He needs to punch them down and shape them, but first he’ll step into the kitchen to turn on the oven to warm for their second rise.
Putting his hand on the doorknob, Eliot freezes.
Nothing from Hardison’s security system is going off. There were no sounds that he could hear. But the instincts Eliot’s honed through a lifetime of danger are suddenly buzzing in his hindbrain, hissing, You’re not alone.
He turned on the light in the storeroom, but the kitchen is still dark. On the counter near him is a large paring knife that needs a chip ground out after Sasha ran into a rock in a potato. Slowly, Eliot wraps his right hand around the handle of the knife, and with his left, eases open the door to the kitchen.
Unbidden, the lights flick on.
The Red Hood is standing in the doorway across the room from Eliot, one hand on the light switch, the other dripping syrupy blood onto the floor. There are a few long, long seconds of silence.
Then Hood makes a little sound, a burst of static through his voice modulator, and says, “Morning.”
Eliot stares at him.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say Red Hood looks… sheepish? He lowers his non-bloody hand from the lights, drums his fingers on his thigh. “I’m not here for trouble. Uh. If you’re worried about that.”
Eliot looks pointedly at the spots of blood on the pristine floor of the kitchen. “Then why are you here?”
“Got an itch I can’t scratch.”
Eliot raises an eyebrow at him. Red Hood sighs. “Fucked up my back in a fight. Can’t reach it to take care of it myself.”
“So you want me to take a look.”
“If you’d be so obliging.”
Eliot ignores the snark. “Why me? You don’t got a real doctor you can throw a wad of cash at to fix you up?”
There’s a brief pause, and when Hood speaks again, there’s a different tone beneath his modulator. “The Alley trusts you.”
Eliot tries not to show his surprise - or rush of pride that courses through him at the words.
“And I saw you take down those guys who were after Cleo,” Hood adds. “Figured a man who fights like that must know how to patch himself up.”
Well, he’s not wrong.
Eliot grapples with the myriad reasons he himself has very vocally laid out against aiding and abetting Red Hood, but only for a moment. He knows how this is going to end. Guy shows up bleeding, not threatening him; only one thing Eliot can do.
He takes a second to mourn his bread - no way it’s getting kneaded and warmed now before it goes flat, he’ll have to throw the dough in the compost - then gestures towards the storeroom.
“Come back here, get out of the kitchen,” he says gruffly. “You’re a fuckin’ biohazard.”
Hood huffs, but navigates his way back while Eliot puts the paring knife away and clears off a small table. When Hood reaches him, he jerks his head at it. “Sit.”
Hood obeys, leather jacket creaking. Carefully telegraphing his intentions, Eliot moves behind him. Just below his left shoulder blade, there’s a jagged bullet hole punched through his jacket and - Eliot leans in, squinting past the blood - yep, through the body armor underneath too.
He straightens up. “What the hell happened?”
For a guy whose entire face is hidden, Hood can still give remarkably sarcastic looks. “Tripped on the stairs.”
Eliot gives a growl of irritation and stalks off to get his biggest first-aid kit. When he returns, Hood’s managed to pull off his leather jacket and the back piece of his body armor, and roll up the fabric of the thin shirt below it. His hand is pressed over the wound, but there’s a fresh spatter of blood on the table, and he’s breathing hard. Eliot puts down a single sealed tablet of Percocet before him.
“Take that before we get started.”
Hood shakes his head. “Pass.”
Eliot’s not surprised. He had the same attitude when he was young. Tough it out, never dull your senses. He still doesn’t like getting loopy on painkillers, but he’s getting old, and Hardison and Parker have sent him enough research articles on the importance of pain management in the healing process that he’s finally relented. Most significantly, though, he’s not flying solo anymore. He’s got his team watching his back when he’s laid up.
Of course, Red Hood doesn’t have anyone like that, or he wouldn’t be getting a bullet pulled in a storage closet. But Eliot’s still irritated. “Come on, man, you need it,” he says as he pulls on surgical gloves. “It’ll wear off in a few hours.”
“Who’s got that kind of time?” Hood’s voice is tight. “Once we finish here I gotta hit the streets again.”
“It’s four in the morning,” Eliot rejoinders. “Nobody’s out right now. Besides, you need sleep. Lots of it.” Even if he doesn’t mind working while he’s hurting, it’s clear Hood’s lost a ton of blood. That’s not something anyone can bounce back from fast.
“Got a weapons bust on the docks right before daybreak,” Hood says, reluctantly. “Can’t miss it. Assholes are bringing in some heavy ordinance. I can’t have that in the Alley.”
Tough to argue with that. An idea springs to Eliot’s mind, but he tosses it back out just as quickly. He’s told Hardison and Parker repeatedly that Red Hood is bad news. Eliot’s gonna patch him up and get him out the door, and that’ll be that.
He sets out supplies: forceps, needle, suture wires, antiseptic, beakers of alcohol. The white lenses of Red Hood’s helmet are unwavering, but Eliot gets the feeling his gaze would be just as hawkish if he could see his eyes.
Finally Eliot’s got everything laid out to his satisfaction, and leans over to take a look at the wound again. At least the armor did some good; the bullet didn’t go deep. He picks up the forceps. “You ready?”
“Ready. Yank that sucker.” Hood shifts his hands to grip the edges of the table. “You’re not gonna do some corny shit like a countdown, right? ‘Cause this ain’t my first rodeo, I don’t need - motherfucker.”
Eliot drops the bullet into a beaker of alcohol with a little plink!, then picks it up to take a look while Hood presses a wad of gauze over the wound, swearing a blue streak. The bullet’s smashed into a blob from its journey through Hood’s armor, but it doesn’t look like any pieces have broken off. Eliot thanks his lucky stars that he doesn’t have to go digging around in the vigilante’s trapezius muscle any more than he already has, then picks up a syringe of antiseptic. “Gotta disinfect before I start stitching,” he says, keeping his tone gruff - he doubts Hood would appreciate sympathy right now. “You good?”
“Fuckin’ peachy-keen, man.” Hood’s voice is rough as a chainsaw. “Have at ‘er.”
He’s remarkably unflinching as Eliot starts rinsing out the wound, but Hood’s not exactly a zen master; his breaths come short and shallow, and he vents his pain in a steady stream of cursing that gets louder and louder and more and more inventive until he cuts off with an abruptness that makes Eliot look up sharply, thinking he’s passed out. But Hood’s still conscious; it takes Eliot a moment to realize he must have turned off the external speaker on his helmet. It’s a little uncanny to see his back heave with ragged breaths that are absolutely silent. He looks, for a scant heartbeat, like a child trying not to be caught crying.
Eliot manages not to let out a heavy, frustrated sigh by reminding himself that Hood can still hear him perfectly well, but it’s a close thing. He’s spent weeks trying to hammer into Parker and Hardison’s heads that a wild card like the Red Hood is bad news. Surely he hasn’t gone so soft that one little bullet wound is enough to make him forget Hood’s grand murder tour through the gangs of Gotham, the careless way he’s winding up Black Mask. So what if Gemma says Kid City trusts him? So what if he defended Cleo? So what if he’s - now that Eliot lets himself admit it - had a fairly consistent pattern of behavior that points towards a strong if brutal moral code that prioritizes protecting the vulnerable?
So what if the fact that he showed up at the brewpub is pointing towards a likely scenario that Eliot has really, really been trying not to think about?
Muscles shaking, a dozen cuts stinging all over his body, a bloody knife in his hand and a body at his feet, grim triumph glowing through a haze of fading adrenaline. Moreau grinning like a jackal. Beside him, a tall, elegant figure, unperturbed by the violence, picking up the fallen fighter’s blade and tucking it away with a graceful flick of her wrist, inclining her head with a small smile.
“Well fought.”
He had not heard those words or seen a flick of a knife like that since that fight. Until Eddie Dantes, and the Red Hood, came to Gotham.
Damn it, Eliot thinks to himself.
He’s done with the antiseptic. He puts another wad of gauze into Hood’s hand and the vigilante mechanically presses it up to the wound. “Let that clot for a couple minutes before I start stitching,” Eliot grunts, and shucks off his bloody gloves. He puts on a fresh pair, carefully threads the suture needle, gives in to the urge to let out a huge sigh, and turns to Hood.
“Look,” he says. “This weapons bust. You want some help with that?”
Hood leans back a little, clearly surprised, and switches his speaker back on. “Unless you’ve got an AK-47 stashed in here somewhere, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he deadpans. “It’s always a gunfight with arms dealers. I got the impression from that scuffle the other day that you’re a hand-to-hand kind of guy.”
“Yeah, I am. But that ain’t what I meant.” Eliot takes a deep breath. “Me and my partners… we get things done a different way.”
Now Hood’s body language is clearly incredulous. “Your partners? The two you own the brewpub with? What exactly do you get done? Reasonably priced farm-to-table menu offerings?”
Oh, Eliot is going to regret this so much. “Among other things.”
Hood stares at him. “You mean, like… the money laundering? How the fuck is that going to help with a shipment of guns?”
“Money laundering?”
“Yeah, you know -” Hood gestures around. “Nice restaurant, low prices, paying your workers like real people? So I’ve heard,” he adds hastily, and Eliot barely resists rolling his eyes. “You gotta be washing cash for someone, right?”
Eliot goes to run his hands through his hair in frustration, then remembers he’ll have to change his gloves again if he does. “For ourselves. Look - we’re con artists, okay? Thieves. Grifters. Hackers.” Just one hacker, really, but Eliot doesn’t need to go into his and Parker’s technological shortcomings. “But we help people. That’s why we do what we do. Sometimes you need bad guys to take down worse guys.”
Eliot realizes as he says it that he’s just described the Red Hood in a nutshell. Well, now he really can’t take any of this back.
“You….” Hood sounds flabbergasted. “You three trick rich people out of money? Is that it?”
“That’s a lot of it,” Eliot admits. “But we do more. People come to us when they don’t have anywhere else to turn. We do our best to set things right by them.”
Hood cocks his head. “Give me an example.”
Eliot casts around for a case they’ve closed in Gotham that Red Hood might be familiar with. “Did you know the Rossing brothers’ dog-fighting ring?”
“Damn.” Hood sounds reminiscent. “The Rossing brothers. Those assholes have been around since I was –”
He shuts his mouth abruptly, so hard Eliot can hear his teeth click through the helmet. He pretends not to notice.
“Yeah,” he says. “Good at staying off the radar, and too small-time for the Bats or the cops, but making plenty of misery. Brad Rossing’s son came to us a couple months after we moved here. Said his dad was telling him it was time to join the family business, but he didn’t want to hurt animals for a living. Asked us if we could do something about it.”
“And?”
Eliot smiles. It had been a brilliant and convoluted plan of Parker’s involving an Adirondack cabin retreat, a fake body, a massive pack of bloodhounds, and an all-important bottle of cloves. “Made the brothers think they were being set up to take the fall for a murder by a mob boss, sent ‘em running to witness protection, got shipped off to Utah in the company of some very unamused feds. Once they were out of the way, we took all the cash they’d stashed from a decade of fights and gave it to an animal rescue in Warren County to take care of the dogs.”
Hood gives a mildly delirious laugh. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.” Eliot smirks. “That’s what we do.”
“You know,” Hood says, sounding like he’s talking to himself, “somehow, it makes sense.” He shakes his head. “Okay, Soapy Smith. How’re you gonna con an arms dealer out of fifty thousand dollars’ of semiautomatics?”
Eliot goes to an intercom on the wall - one of the more visible parts of Hardison’s security system, connected to the apartment - and leans his shoulder against it. “Parker?”
There’s a beat, and then an only slightly groggy reply. “Mmhmm?”
“Get Hardison up and put him on the line. We’ve got a client.”
He can picture Parker sitting up at that, instantly at full alertness. “Aye-aye, captain.” She must keep one finger on the intercom button, because Eliot hears the sounds of much sleepy complaining. “Girl, stop it, stop it, it’s the middle of the night, quit poking -”
“Hardison,” Eliot says. “Get up. We got a job. Time-sensitive.”
“A job? At Balls A.M.? How in the ass did that happen?”
Eliot is enjoying himself now. “Client showed up at the brewpub.”
“Seriously, Eliot?” Hardison yawns so hard Eliot can hear his jaw pop. “On your holy bread-baking day? What kind of sad little wet cat of a person is there looking pathetic enough you actually let them in?”
“Red Hood.”
“Red Hood. Red. Hood.” It clearly takes a few seconds for everything to click. Then Hardison is shrieking, much closer to the intercom, “Red Hood’s in the brewpub? Our brewpub?” His voice shoots up an octave. “Oh my god. Does it look okay? Who closed last night?”
“That’s your first question?”
“I swear to God, Eliot, if you’re bullshitting me –” There’s rustling, whirring from the security camera in the corner of the storeroom, and then– “Oh my god. Parker, Parker, look– Why is there blood? And wait, can he hear us?”
“Hi,” Hood says, dryly.
“Eliot, I am never going to forgive you,” Hardison hisses, then, louder, “Um, good morning, Mr. Hood. How can Leverage Incorporated assist you today? And also, like, are you… good?”
“I’m super.”
Eliot remembers that he still needs to sew up the bullet wound, and the clock is ticking towards dawn. “We need to set up a Twelfth Night on a weapons sale at the docks,” Eliot says. “Hood, how are the sellers and buyers communicating?”
“Dark web message board. I’ve got their handles.”
Eliot picks up his suture equipment. “Give everything you have to Hardison while I get started on stitches.”
While Eliot sews, Hood instructs, and Hardison stammers his way through his minor case of hero-worship, Parker doesn’t say much. But Eliot can practically feel her pleased smugness radiating out of the apartment, all the way down the stairs and into the storeroom. She’s going to be insufferable about his change in heart - and the worst part is, he can’t even bring himself to mind very much.
Finally, the plan is in place, Parker and Hardison are off getting prepped, and Eliot’s tying the last suture. For all his toughness, Hood’s finally starting to slump, the blood loss taking its toll. When he speaks, he sounds almost tipsy, a dreaminess in his voice that’s jarring to hear through the modulator.
“‘And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’”
Eliot shoots him a concerned look. “What?”
“From Twelfth Night.” Hood turns his head, and Eliot has a distinct impression there’s a raised eyebrow under that helmet. “You know, the play you mentioned?”
Eliot has no idea how to respond to the fact that the Red Hood quotes Shakespeare off the top of his head. “Gotta admit, I haven’t read it,” he says at last, handing Hood an alcohol wipe so he can clean the tacky blood off his back. “Just the name of the con. I was more into Steinbeck myself.”
“Oh, sure.” Hood makes a sound between a laugh and a scoff. “Let me guess. ‘I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.’”
Eliot flinches, hard, like someone’s curb-stomping his grave - because it’s true, they read Travels with Charley in high school, and he doesn’t even remember the context of the quote, but he does remember the blue Oklahoma sky stretching over him like he was a bug under a bowl, some wretched, frantic, scrabbling thing in his chest screaming get out get out, reading those words and thinking God, yes, it’s true, it’s true, I don’t belong anywhere, I don’t belong to anyone, get away from me, let me go-
The dramatics of a teenager. And yet it took many long and hard years before Eliot really moved beyond the loneliness of that quote, before he took pleasure in being found again.
He doesn’t like that Hood clocked that. He doesn’t like that Hood sounds as though he understands it too.
But all Eliot says is, “Been a long time since I read it,” and goes back to tucking his equipment back into the first-aid kit.
They’re silent as Eliot finishes repacking everything and Hood gets the worst of the blood off. He winces as he rolls his shirt back down, and reaches stiffly for his leather jacket.
“You can stay here for a bit,” Eliot’s surprised to hear himself say. “Drink some water, catch your breath. We gotta go, but the brewpub doesn’t open until eleven, so staff won’t be in until nine.” He fixes Hood with a wry look. “You can let yourself out however the hell you got in.”
“Thanks.” Hood sounds unsure. “But I mean, I’ll be fine, I don’t need –”
“Just do it,” Eliot says, exasperated. “I know you wouldn’t’ve come here if you had a better place to go.”
“I have safehouses,” Hood sulks.
“Seems like they’ve been really helpful.”
Hood doesn’t answer that, but he’s clearly glowering. Eliot sighs.
“You’re a grown-ass crime lord, I’m not gonna lecture you. It’s just - you can have all the safehouses and guns and armor you want, but sometimes you need people too. Trust me. I did the lone-wolf thing for a long, long time and I -” He takes a breath. “I’m lucky it didn’t kill me, honestly. I’m lucky it didn’t break me down so much I couldn’t grab hold of a good thing when I found it. Without those two?” He jerks his head back towards the apartment. “I wouldn’t have done anything in my life worth a damn.”
Hood’s quiet, but it’s not the stewing fury of a moment before. Eliot gets a ping from his phone; Parker and Hardison are ready to go. He spares a last, wistful look at the four bowls of dough on the counter. Keeping Red Hood from bleeding out, preventing high-caliber weaponry from flooding into Crime Alley - objectively more important than bread baking. But still. It’s too bad you can’t have everything.
“See you around, Hood,” he says, and heads for the door.
It’s swinging shut behind him when he hears a quiet, “Thanks.”
Yeah, Eliot thinks, we’ll see, and heads off to do his second good deed before sunrise.
~
The heist of the weapons shipment is almost embarrassingly easy. Back at the brewpub, using Hood’s intel, Hardison had hacked the dark web chatroom and told the buyers that the boat carrying the guns had been delayed by a day because of police patrols. Once they were confirmed to be out of the way, Parker got dressed in her menacing-businesswoman getup with Eliot acting the bodyguard, Hardison monitoring via drone, and they went down to meet the sellers at the waterfront.
“Hey,” Parker says as she and Eliot walk down from their car to the dock where the boat is scheduled to land, her voice altogether too bright for a morning where the sun isn’t up yet and the reek of dead fish and polluted water is even thicker than the chilly fog around them. “Do you wanna talk about how you told me and Hardison that Red Hood sucked and was bad, and then you nursed him back to health and made him a Leverage client on the spur of the moment?"
Eliot considers many responses, like I didn’t nurse him back to health, I helped him for like, twenty minutes and I never said he sucked, just that he was killing dozens and dozens of people, which is still true and not great, and This is probably just a one-off job and it’s barely taking any time, he’s not really a client. But all he says, in the end, is, “Nope.”
“Okay,” Parker says, but there’s a gleam in her eye he doesn’t like. “I’ll say no more. For now.”
Then the boat is drawing up, and Eliot tenses. There was nothing in the messages from the sellers that implied they’d been tipped off about the switch, but in case they’ve been played, he has to get Parker out of there -
But when the arms dealers step out on deck, they’re plainly still in the dark - and their eyes light up with joy and greed as they zero in on the heavy briefcase Parker’s carrying.
The crates of guns are hauled out and duly inspected, and then Parker cracks the suitcase open. “Fifty k, pure cash,” she says with a sharky smile. “Totally untraceable.”
One hundred percent traceable, actually, because it’s also fake. Parker had nabbed it from the safe of a police lieutenant who, in a classic example of greed matched only by stupidity, thought he was getting real bribes from a gang running a counterfeiting operation. Harrison had alerted the feds to the whole situation, and now the second someone tries to spend so much as a fake dollar of this payment, the US Mint will pounce on them like panthers.
But the sellers are none the wiser, and in fact, very pleased. Parker shakes hands all around. Eliot grinds his teeth. Then, finally, the boat departs, Hardison comes out of the shadows, and the three of them contemplate the enormous amount of weaponry they now possess.
“What should we do with all this?” Eliot asks, nudging a crate with his toe. Red Hood was right - this one’s stuffed with machine guns that just scream massive civilian casualties. “Toss it in the harbor?”
“We could,” Parker says slowly. “Or… Dr. Metcalf is throwing a party this afternoon on his yacht, and there’s this supply closet where people go to make out that would be the perfect size –”
Eliot groans. “Parker, we’re trying to bust the guy for selling endangered rhino horns, not gunrunning.”
“I know, but I’ve had to pretend to be his tennis coach for two weeks now, and I’m so bored,” Parker complains. “We said we had to find a way to tip off the police after the latest shipment, right? Well, they’re definitely going to get a warrant to search his house after they find all the guns - I can give one of the officers a hint so they know to look in the garden shed! Plus, we already know he’s communicating with the poachers on the dark web. Hardison can just add Metcalf’s handle to the conversation with the gun dealers, flag the rhino horn messages too, and send it all to the commissioner.”
“Baby girl, you are diabolical,” Hardison murmurs, his voice mushy with adoration.
Eliot throws his hands up in the air. “Fine! But you two gotta get all this on board. I don’t do yachts.”
~
Parker and Hardison head off to get themselves on the list of catering staff for Dr. Metcalf’s yacht party. In the meantime, Eliot hauls the guns back to the brewpub. Getting premium weaponry seized by the GCPD is a great way to channel it promptly back into the hands of criminals; as has become clear through their research into the heroin in the Scalzi case, the various mobs and gangs of Gotham seem to regard evidence lockers as bespoke retail outlets, with dirty cops as their personal shoppers. But Hardison’s cleverly turned that to Leverage’s advantage: he’s got a stash of tiny trackers that Eliot’s going to glue into the barrels of the guns, so when they reappear on the streets, they'll provide all kinds of useful evidence. But that still leaves the issue of allowing deadly weapons to proliferate, so Eliot’s also headed for his workshop in the garage to solder all the firing pins shut first.
When he steps out of the car to begin unloading, though, Eliot stops in his tracks. He’d meant to go right to his workshop, but instead his feet begin carrying him back towards the brewpub kitchen. Even from outside, the smell is unmistakable: freshly baked sourdough bread.
It’s still too early for staff to be there. The kitchen is quiet and still. But cooling on the counter are four loaves - risen tall, beautifully shaped, golden and perfect. Next to them is a note, in surprisingly fancy handwriting.
Thanks for the help, boss.
Now Eliot smiles.
Okay, he thinks, turning around and heading back for the guns. Not bad, kid.
~
After Eliot’s bread is finished baking, Jason beelines for a safehouse - his nicest one, just to spite Eliot - collapses in bed, and sleeps for twelve hours. When he wakes up, he stares at the ceiling for forty-five minutes, mind spinning, then says, “Goddamn it,” gets out of bed, puts on his gear, and heads out.
Obviously, he did background checks on Hawthorn and Bobby when they first showed up, just in case they were plants from a rival gang, instead of the well-meaning weirdos they turned out to be. From that, he knows that Bobby works for a car-stealing operation, run by a minor gang that had wisely capitulated to Red Hood straight out the gate. It’s not hard to make passes through the likeliest spots for a boost until he finds Bobby loitering on a street full of gambling dens, eying the cars haphazardly parked on the curb. Hawthorne is with him, hands in their pockets, breathing out clouds of steam. It's a quiet enough night that Jason, landing silently on the rooftop right above their heads, can make out their conversation.
“Sure, obviously The Mummy is everyone's bisexual awakening,” Hawthorne is saying, “but that’s just based on hotness. The characters themselves don’t scream queer -”
“Objection,” Bobby protests. “That is blatant Jonathan erasure!”
“I was gonna say, except for Jonathan, you interrupted me! But everyone else? I literally know a straight porn star whose stage name is Rick O’Connell. Now, Indiana Jones - have you seen the way he looks at Marion? Never has a man wanted to get pegged so bad.”
“So you’re saying straight men can’t enjoy pegging?” Bobby shakes his head. “Not very progressive of you, Hawthorn.”
Okay, this is a conversation Jason feels a little bad about interrupting, but he needs to do this now or he's going to lose his nerve. He drops down behind them with an audible and terrifying thunk, and they spin around, Hawthorn’s hands flying to their guns. Then they realize it’s him.
Before they can say anything, Jason spits out, “The pay’s not gonna be good.”
Bobby blinks at him. Hawthorn, slowly, starts to smile.
“And it’s not gonna be consistent,” Jason barrels on. “I’ll blow up someone’s whole deal and then I’ll throw wads of cash at you. But that happens on my fucking schedule, and not every two weeks or whatever the shit. Got it?”
Hawthorn bobs their head. “Totally workable, chief.”
“I’ve got a warehouse where I’m stashing most of my equipment. That can be… headquarters.” Jason wants to throw up in his mouth. Bobby looks thrilled. “But it’s not gonna be a hangout spot, okay? You can show up there for jobs and that’s it. I’m not adding a fucking minifridge for drinks and corporate team-building after work.”
“Got it,” Hawthorn says, their voice grave but their eyebrows quirked in a way that suggested deep, profound amusement.
“And I’m not holding anyone’s hand! If you say you can fight, you goddamn better be able to fight. And if you get shot –”
He was about to say Don’t come crying to me. But there are moments in life when a person discovers something new but profoundly immutable in themselves, and Jason realizes: he is not the kind of person who can refuse to provide health insurance to his employees.
Fucking. Fuck.
“If you get shot,” he says grudgingly, “let me know and go to the hospital. I’ll pay for it. And… whatever other shit you need. Medically. Including vision and dental, it’s fucking insane that those are separate things in the first place.”
He plows on before he has to see Hawthorn’s eyebrows climb any higher. “But! This is just for you two. The positions are filled. Don’t think you can bring all your goon friends around to take advantage of my generosity.”
“Oh, that’s fine!” Bobby chirps. “We don’t have any other friends!”
At that, Jason shoots a bemused glance at Hawthorn, who shrugs. “Gangs ain’t exactly known for being queer-friendly workspaces, chief.”
Great. Just perfect. Now Jason has to find his goons some non-homophobic friends or he’s going to be haunted by the knowledge that he, Red Hood, zombie crime lord, is one of their main sources of social interaction.
See if he ever listens to con artists again. This is exactly the kind of shit he should have expected. Jason tips back his head and groans, too quietly for his modulator to pick up.
“Can we go see headquarters?” Bobby is almost bouncing in excitement. “Is your bike there? That thing is sick, dude, did you build the engine yourself?” His face falls. “Uh - I probably shouldn’t call you dude, right? I worked for Riddler for a hot minute and he got mad if you forgot to call him sir –”
“Or are you busy tonight?” Hawthorn cuts in. They’re watching him carefully now, with a caution that speaks to a long career working for volatile men. The realization leaves a bitter taste in Jason’s mouth. “We can rendezvous again another time, if that would be better.”
“No.” Jason straightens his shoulders. If he’s going to do this, he’s not going to be a little bitch about it. Hawthorn and Bobby are part of Crime Alley too. He needs to do right by them. “I’ll show you headquarters, and we can talk through what needs doing around the Alley. And -” He looks at Bobby. “For fuck’s sake, do not call me sir.”
Bobby gives him an improbably sunny smile. “Okay, boss.”
Heroically, Jason allows it.
Notes:
I have a lot of thoughts on this chapter so here are the footnotes in order of appearance:
- I don’t know that much about guns, so Hawthorn’s specific models are referenced from a song. If you know it, I think you’re really cool!!
- Jason calling Eliot “Soapy Smith” is an even more niche reference to a real-life con man from the 1800s who I was just reading about. He has such a good nickname I couldn’t resist. How does Jason know about him? Uhhh *flips pages of manual frantically* Bruce Wayne’s various hyperfixations?
- If you don’t know the plot of Twelfth Night, it basically involves everyone’s identity shifting one to the left, so I thought it would be a good name for the con. That makes me sound really smart and well-read, but I actually know about Twelfth Night because it was made into the modern movie She’s the Man, and as a high school soccer player this was essentially a religious text.
- I also have not read Travels with Charley, oops! But I do know that this quote is actually about being a person who doesn't rely on maps. However, I think an angsty high schooler could easily take it out of context and glom onto it for all the wrong reasons.
- I’ve only seen The Mummy once because I’m a wimp and it’s too scary for me! So I’m sorry if Rick and Evelyn are way queerer than I remember! Blame Hawthorn for their taste in action movie leads!Thank you for reading!!
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