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It starts when Jason overhears Bruce and Damian talking about a new rogue in town.
It’s weird, because they haven’t mentioned this one to him. They’re in the Cave now with the case file up on the screen, speaking in harsh whispers; Jason hugs the shadows of the staircase, straining to listen to whatever he’s almost certainly not supposed to be hearing. He doesn’t catch much other than a name: Redtail.
The file on Redtail is slim. He appeared in Gotham a few weeks ago, and since then, city moguls have started dropping like flies. There isn’t much else in the file except some speculation on his armor (kevlar under a layer of leather and cloth, and the muzzle seems to function as an air filter as well as a mask) and his fighting style (something based in Chinese martial arts, with hints of a possible history with the League of Shadows). The file doesn’t even include a possible base of operations; the assassinations have taken place all over the city, from Bristol on one end to Old Gotham on the other. The Bats could, in theory, run into him anywhere.
And they do.
Jason’s in Coventry when he crosses paths with Redtail the first time. He recognizes the figure from the footage attached to Redtail’s file and feels a thrill of excitement go through him. How will Bruce and Damian react when Jason calls them in to find Redtail already in cuffs? He practically preens at the thought.
“Hey,” he calls out, ready to drop a quip in Cardinal fashion, and is knocked silly the next moment when Redtail beans him with a metal pole.
He’s fucking fast. And the difference in their skill levels is immediately and frighteningly apparent. Jason finds himself wishing that he’d asked Damian to patrol with him, especially when Redtail pins him to the wall with a knife through his shoulder. He screams.
“I’m not going to kill you,” says the metallic voice from the modulator in the mask. Redtail flicks the hilt of the knife to make it shiver, causing Jason to moan in pain. “But if you follow me again, I’ll make you wish you were dead.”
Then he’s up the fire escape and vanishing over the edge of a roof, and Jason is left whimpering as he activates his distress signal.
Damian is the one who finds him. “Tsk. Oh, my little bird.” He removes the knife with practiced precision, pressing painfully against Jason’s wound to staunch the blood flow. “You’re in no shape to grapple. I’ll have Agent A bring around the car.”
“I’m sorry,” mutters Jason. “I thought I could get him.”
“Who?” Damian’s hands, adroit and confident, work to bandage his shoulder tightly.
“Redtail.”
Damian’s hands hesitate, just for a split second. Then he resumes wrapping Jason’s shoulder. When he finishes, he slides gloved fingers under Jason’s chin, tipping his face up to stare down at him from behind white domino lenses.
“Cardinal,” he says, deadly serious, “from this point forward you will stay away from Redtail. Is that clear?”
Jason pulls his chin out of Damian’s hold and looks away, pursing his lips as he resists the urge to say you’re not my dad. Unlike Jason’s parents, Bruce and Damian have never hit him outside of sparring, not even when he mouths off - but they both have a tendency to make his life miserable when they think he needs an attitude adjustment.
“Cardinal.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
Damian’s impassive expression twitches in a way that tells Jason he’s in for a hellish training regimen sometime in the near future. For now, though, Alfred is pulling up to the mouth of the alley with the Batmobile, and Damian guides Jason into the passenger’s seat without comment.
In spite of - or maybe because of - Damian’s warning, Jason finds himself becoming obsessed with catching Redtail. The rogue is fast, and violent, and mean, and he always seems to know when Jason is coming. Still, he never does any permanent damage - a broken arm, broken ribs, grazing gunshots… the kind of thing that gets Jason taken out of the field, but not killed. Jason almost starts to suspect that maybe Redtail's aim just sucks.
He learns better when Sionis' men catch him alone in a dark corner and one of them makes a comment about using him up before turning him over to Black Mask. Jason grits his teeth; he's familiar with the way some men on the street will trade money and food for a chance to use his mouth, but he'll be damned if he's letting these assholes do it for free - and if biting someone's dick off gets him killed, then he'll die proud.
Before anyone can make a move, the man's head explodes from the impact of a sniper bullet.
The next three seconds are mass confusion. Gangsters fumble for their weapons and hit the ground dead before even drawing. Someone tries to run and gets about two steps before a bullet tears through his spine. The last of them turns directly to Jason and lifts his handgun - but a bullet takes off his trigger finger with otherworldly precision, and then another burrows into his head on one side and explodes in a mass of gore out the other.
Jason presses back against the alley wall, gulping deep breaths of air, his shoulders shaking. His comm clicks, barely audible.
“Run home, Blackbird,” says a voice in his ear, clear and cold, not scrambled by a modulator. “Tell Batman and Azhdar they’re welcome.”
Jason shudders, swallowing against the knot in his throat, and croaks out, “I’m not Blackbird.”
“No.” The voice in his ear takes on a tinge of amusement. “Cardinal, now, right? Like they think slapping a new name on it will keep you from ending up just as dead as the bird before you.”
“Shut up about Blackbird.”
The voice is silent for a moment.
Jason looks up, scanning the rooftops, but he doesn’t see anything. He pictures Redtail out there somewhere, butt of a sniper rifle pressed to his shoulder, staring down the scope at Jason. Maybe his finger is teasing the trigger. Maybe he’ll decide Cardinal isn’t worth keeping alive, even to win lenience from Batman.
Jason’s never been very good at keeping his mouth shut, even with his life on the line. “You don’t know shit about him. You have no idea what he went through. You have no idea what he died for.”
“Neither do you, Cardinal.” Redtail’s voice in his ear is almost gentle. “You don’t know what he died for because he died for nothing. He died because that’s what happens to people like him. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it can’t happen to you.”
The comm line clicks closed, and even though Jason says “that’s not true,” he knows by then that he’s just speaking to the empty air.
Bruce benches him.
“This isn’t fair!” he rages, shoving against Batman’s unyielding chest. “I wasn’t out looking for him, it was a regular patrol, I didn’t do anything wrong - ”
“Jason.” Bruce’s hand closes on his shoulder, hard. “This isn’t about you doing something wrong. It’s about the fact that Redtail knew exactly where you were, had access to and control over your comms and your beacon, and only didn’t kill you to make a point to me. I am not putting you in that position again.”
“So, what, you’re restricting me to the cave until he’s caught?” The answering silence is response enough. “Bruce! You can’t do this to me. You can’t do this!”
“I can and I have,” Bruce thunders. “I suggest that you run through the obstacle course a few times until you can come back here and discuss this with me calmly.”
Jason turns to Damian, ready to beg. Damian’s expression is unreadable, arms crossed over his chest.
“I told you to stay away from Redtail,” he says flatly, before Jason can say anything.
“Dami, please. I’ll go out with you. I won’t go anywhere on my own. Please!”
“No, you won’t, because you’ll be here,” Bruce answers in Damian’s stead. “Obstacle course. Now.”
Jason goes out on his own anyway, which is why he’s not willing to hit his distress beacon even when he ends up on the arm of a construction crane hundreds of feet above the dark surface of Gotham River with a mysterious assassin driving him back toward the edge. If Bruce catches him out when he’s already benched, there’s a chance he could be fired for real. He knows the story of teenage Damian, the first Blackbird, driven from the Cave and forced to strike out on his own after his “violent tendencies” caused Bruce to fire him. It took years for Damian to be allowed back into the fold as Azhdar. And Jason - Jason isn’t even Bruce’s real son. Surely he’ll be that much easier to discard.
But the strange assassin - decked out in all-black body armor and an elaborate golden mask with large, opaque goggles in the center - is too much for him. Jason slips. He’s weightless for a moment in the air; he shoots off his grapple, but the assassin slices through the rope before the hook even catches, and then he’s just… falling.
He doesn’t even have a chance to be afraid. He twists to align his body vertically, points his toes, pins his arms to his side, and tries to suck in a deep breath before he hits, but the speed of the fall steals his air. When he hits the water, the impact minimized by trained posture, there’s no breath in his lungs.
He struggles back toward the open air, his body ringing from the impact, his chest burning. Darkness steals in to claim him before he makes it back to the surface.
He wakes in agony from head to toe, but mostly in his chest, which feels like it was hit with a mallet. Spitting up a fountain of dirty water, Jason scrabbles until his brain catches up and he realizes he’s on land; he sucks in a hard breath, burning all the way down his throat and into his lungs, and opens his eyes.
Redtail hovers over him, wiping river water from his face with his sleeve. Jason notices, distantly, bizarrely, that Redtail isn’t wearing his muzzle mask; his revealed face, bare even of a domino, is sharp and pretty, scars criss-crossing high, pale cheekbones and a narrow mouth. His wide eyes are strikingly and inhumanly green.
“You are so stupid,” is the first thing Redtail says to him, unmuffled by the muzzle. “You didn’t even send a distress call. You would be toast if I hadn’t been three buildings over, you know that?”
Jason tries to answer and only really manages to moan in pain. Everything hurts, and he thinks he might be a little bit in shock, so it’s hard to determine just how bad things really are.
“Sit still. You’ll be lucky if your spine is all in one piece.”
Jason runs his tongue over his teeth, tasting the faintest cut of mint. He wonders vaguely if Redtail chews gum behind the muzzle sometimes. “Did you give me CPR?” he croaks.
Redtail gives him a sharp look. “You have a problem with that?”
“Cardinal!”
Damian is there, skidding to his knees on Jason’s other side, ripping his golden Azhdar mask off with one hand. His face is screwed up with concern in a way that Jason’s never seen before.
“Are you alright?” he asks urgently, reaching down to cup Jason’s face in his palm. “Are you hurt, habibi?”
“I’m okay…” Jason glances back toward Redtail, who has taken to his feet again already, balanced back on his heels like he’s braced to run. Or get hit.
Damian follows his gaze up to Redtail’s face - and he stops, stunned, his lips parting slightly in surprise. Redtail stares back with an expression like a dare. Jason looks between the two of them, struggling to make sense of the tableau while his brain swims and his body cries out in pain.
“Get him back to the Cave,” Redtail says, reaching up to fasten the muzzle mask around his face again. He looks up, toward the arm of the crane, where the assassin who tried to kill Jason is conspicuously absent. “I have work to do.”
Ignoring all protests, Damian insists on carrying Jason from the car to the medical bay. He settles Jason onto one of the cots and starts going through a rudimentary medical checkup, testing to see if any of Jason’s bones are broken, until Alfred arrives and is able to take over. Then Damian withdraws to the Cave proper, where Bruce has just arrived.
Alfred tends to Jason carefully, raising an eyebrow but staying quiet when he notices Jason straining to hear the conversation in the other room. After a moment, though, Jason doesn’t have to strain anymore; the conversation quickly devolves into a shouting match.
“ - could have kept this from me, Father - ”
“ - doesn’t change anything - ”
“ - changes everything! How can you say that? He’s your - ”
“ - made his choices - ”
“ - will never forgive you for this - ”
Alfred brushes a hand over Jason’s forehead. “Can I bring you something to eat, Master Jason?”
Jason shakes his head, then changes his mind and nods. After Alfred leaves, he scrambles out of the cot and limps to the doorway to peek. Damian is gone; the sounds of flesh hitting leather coming from the training rooms seem to indicate that Bruce is working off his frustration before writing up his reports for the evening.
Jason’s still in uniform. He glances toward the entrance of the Cave. If he’s fast, he can probably still catch up to Damian.
He follows at a distance. Damian isn’t moving his fastest, or his most discreet; Jason definitely wouldn’t be able to keep up with that in his current condition. If he didn’t know better, he’d almost think Damian was letting him follow.
His heart starts beating harder when he glimpses a figure ahead - Redtail, grappling across the Diamond District with a grace that Jason would describe as otherworldly if he hadn’t spent the last two years watching Azhdar move like an expression of divinity itself.
Redtail clearly knows he’s being followed. Jason rounds a skyscraper to see Damian alighting on a rooftop where Redtail is waiting for him, arms crossed over his chest. Jason shifts his weight and pushes lightly off the side of a building to change his direction mid-grapple, trying to avoid being spotted; he manages to take up a position on a rooftop just across the way, crouching and peeking over the edge to watch as Azhdar approaches Redtail.
He can’t exactly hear what’s being said - he doesn’t have the right gear for eavesdropping, and all he can hear is the murmur of voices floating to him on the nighttime breeze. But it doesn’t seem like there’s a fight threatening to break out. When Azhdar takes a step toward Redtail, Redtail raises his voice angrily, but he doesn’t move. Jason wishes desperately that he could make out any of what’s being said.
Especially when Damian moves all the way in, pulling off his Azhdar mask, and places his hand along the side of Redtail’s face, cupping the edge of his muzzle.
Redtail stiffens visibly, but he doesn’t pull away. Damian speaks to him, more quietly than Jason can pick up from here, and then - then he wraps an arm around Redtail and pulls him in for a hug.
Jason gapes. Okay, it’s clear now that Redtail is someone Damian knows. Could it be someone from his past with the League of Shadows? A fellow assassin trainee? An ex-bodyguard?
Redtail seems frozen for a second. Then, slowly, his hands slide up Damian’s back. Jason stiffens, ready to grapple across the gap if he sees the flash of a knife in Redtail’s hand - but Redtail just folds against Azhdar, dropping his head onto Azhdar’s shoulder and clinging to him with both arms.
Something turns over in Jason’s stomach. He tries to pretend away the jealousy. Damian loves him devotedly - he knows that - but Damian’s hugs are rare and precious; the most Jason can usually hope for is a hand on his shoulder and a nod of approval. It’s more than he gets from Bruce - though he has the vague idea that Bruce used to be warmer, kinder, before losing his second son.
Damian holds Redtail, and murmurs to him, too soft to make out over this distance. Redtail replies without pulling away, the modulator in his mask making his voice harsh and staticky; Damian reaches up to tug down Redtail’s hood and run his fingers through his black hair with its jagged shock of white.
They finally part, though Azhdar keeps one hand on Redtail’s shoulder. The other hand he lifts to his ear, and Jason jumps when the comm in his own ear clicks to life.
“No more hiding, my little bird.” Damian’s deep, velvety voice has a very slight upturn that tells Jason he’s teasing. “Come here and let me introduce you.”
Chagrined at being so easily caught, Jason makes his slow way over to the other rooftop. His adrenaline from all the events of the night is starting to wear off; a part of him just wants to curl up on the fire escape and spend the night there. When he climbs up over the edge of the roof, Azhdar and Redtail are both looking at him.
Azhdar extends a hand to him. “Come here, hayati.”
Cautiously, he takes Damian’s hand, lets Damian pull him to face Redtail and settle both hands on his shoulders. Redtail is looking down at him, inscrutable behind his domino mask and muzzle.
“Hatha akhi Jason Todd-Wayne,” Damian says to Redtail, and squeezes Jason’s shoulders. “Jason, this is my younger brother, Timothy.”
Timothy? Jason’s mouth drops open. “You’re… Tim Drake?”
“I was, at one point,” Redtail concedes.
“You have to come back to the manor,” Jason blurts. “Bruce won’t believe that you’re alive.”
“Bruce already knows.” Is that bitterness dripping from his tone? It’s hard to tell through the voice modulator. “He’s not interested in forgiving me and he doesn’t want me back.”
“I don’t care,” Damian says calmly - surprising both of them, if the way Tim’s head whips around to him is any indication. “You are my brother. Everything I have is yours. Say the word and my inheritance is at your disposal.”
Tim looks at him for a long moment. Jason shifts uneasily in the silence.
“I’m not coming back,” Tim says, finally. “The Court of Owls is out of commission, so I can be done killing. At least then Bruce won’t try to run me out of town.” He shrugs. “But I wasn’t planning on sticking around.”
“Stay,” Jason blurts, and then shrinks when both men look at him. “Just - you should stay. You saved my life. Twice. And you’re Damian’s brother, and Alfred will want to see you, and just - you should stay. Please,” he adds.
Redtail huffs out a little laugh. It sounds like a rush of static behind his voice modulator.
“You’ll get sick of me fast, Jason.”
Jason catches his breath, hearing his name in that voice.
“No, I won’t,” he says stubbornly. “You stabbed me a few times and I’m not sick of you yet.”
Redtail shrugs. “That’s hardly anything. What’s a little stabbing between brothers?”
Jason brightens slightly. “You called us brothers. Now you have to stay.”
Redtail stares at him. Jason wilts for a moment until he hears Damian’s quiet chuckle.
“While we’re on the topic of your injuries,” the eldest says smoothly, “it’s time to get you back into the infirmary, my little bird.”
His injuries twinge as if responding to Damian pointing them out. “Yeah… okay…”
Stepping past Jason, Damian slides his hand to the back of Tim’s neck and pulls him in to press a kiss to his forehead. When he releases Tim, he turns back to Jason, the corner of his mouth quirked up in a half-smile.
“Come on. You grappled yourself here, you can grapple yourself home. Let’s go.”
They leave Redtail on the rooftop, staring after them. Jason can’t help glancing back in between swings on his grappling line. The first two times he looks, Redtail is still standing there, watching him; the third time, Redtail is gone.
“What are you gonna tell Bruce?” Jason asks as they alight on a rooftop uptown, near enough to Bristol that they might walk the rest of the way.
Damian casts him a look that’s difficult to parse - but then he reaches out to comb his fingers through Jason’s hair in a rare show of affection.
Gently, warmly, Damian says, “That I don’t plan to repeat his mistakes.”