Chapter Text
For Jason, it started with bullets.
They were flying both at and from him. But that wasn’t the point. The point was he was running out of them. Fast. And the goons firing at him sure weren’t. Jason swore from where he crouched behind his overturned coffee table, and started rifling through the weapon stash in front of him.
He managed to find two bombs, four knives, and a plethora of stun traps. But no bullets.
Fuck.
He was unprepared for this. Completely, utterly unprepared. He should’ve made the deal airtight. And in his right mind, he would’ve.
But he’d been so tired. And because of that he’d forgotten to cover every single one of his tracks, and someone on Black Mask’s payroll had figured out that the ‘ally’ trying to get him out of prison...was actually the Red Hood. The guy who, a year before, had nearly single-handedly burned Sionis’ empire to the ground. And was probably- almost definitely- going to kill him the second he stepped on free land.
So yeah. This hiccup- it wasn’t good. Not for Jason, and certainly not for the coffee table of his sixth safehouse, which was becoming holier and holier by the second. Damnit. He’d liked that table. He’d liked this safehouse, too.
Just as Jason was about to move, a bullet tore through the back of the coffee table and, inevitably, through his stomach. Fuck! He bent double and damned the world.
His armour would’ve- and should've- been there to deflect that. Okay- so maybe he’d been asleep when the goons came. Maybe he’d been in the closest thing he owned to pyjamas. Maybe, just maybe- he thought he could've been a normal nineteen year old for once.
But no. Instead, he’d been stupid. And now, he’d left himself vulnerable. Weak. Defenceless.
He held his stomach and tried to stop his mouth from trembling. It was difficult, especially when a second bullet ripped through his forearm and splattered his chin with blood.
Before he could stop himself, he hissed. “Fuck!”
“We hear you!” A thug yelled.
“Yeah!” Another chimed in. “You can’t hide forever!”
He was right. Jason couldn’t. He swore again, glanced at the bombs in his lap, and released a short breath. Okay. Okay. Nobody taught by the greatest fighters and mercenaries on the planet was ever defenceless. He just needed to improvise.
Easy peasy.
Hands trembling, he released the pressure on his stomach and used his good arm to throw the traps. Then, he grabbed his wound, picked up the bombs, and ran- taking shelter behind the sofa.
The traps would buy him some time. But not enough. Not nearly enough.
There were yelps. There were screams. Ultimately, all it took was two minutes for the thugs to get on their feet and resume their search of the warehouse. But they were two minutes the thugs couldn’t afford. By the time they were over, Jason had already wired up the bombs in his hands, and in doing so sealed their fate.
“I think he went that way!” A thug yelped, shining a torch through the darkness.
“That’s right,” Jason mused, bomb wire between his teeth. “Say what you’re thinking out loud. Because that always works.”
The group of thugs came closer and closer to the sofa, guns at the ready. Jason waited until they got close- really close- before throwing caution to the wind, and the bombs over his head. What came next were screams.
“Oh--fuck!”
“What the Hell is that?”
The thugs dispersed like startled pigeons, and the one at the front of the group rapidly became the one at the back. If it had been an ordinary bomb, he might have been safe. But Jason had stopped making ordinary weapons the moment he’d left the Lazarus pit. The bomb swivelled in the air, looking for the nearest heat source, and attached itself firmly onto the his back.
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” The thug wailed. “Get it off! Get it off!”
As he tugged and tugged at the bomb, providing the perfect distraction, Jason made for the exit. But amusement took over just before he left, and he turned, pressing a button which released the bomb from the thug’s back. It clattered to the floor, seemingly harmless. The thugs breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Oh dearie me,” Jason said.
He pressed the detonation button and ran. Or- tried to. It was more of a determined hobble, considering that he was leaking blood everywhere, hurting all over, and growing more and more drowsy by the second. But he couldn’t help but grin as his warehouse burst into flames behind him.
It was a great loss resource wise. In his head, Jason could almost hear Talia Al Ghul tutting at him. A wasteful soldier is never a good one, she’d always said. But Jason had never been much of a good soldier. All you had to do was ask Bruce.
-
Jason woke groggily. You couldn’t really blame him. He had the worst headache, and because the sofa he was on was impossibly small and incredibly stiff, his limbs were bundled and compressed at unsavoury angles. For a second he just lay there, blinking at the ceiling. It was a ceiling he recognised, which was good. He wasn’t on the sofa of the warehouse he’d just blown up, which was also good.
But it was daylight outside, which meant that quite a lot of time had passed. And he was in different clothes, which meant that he must’ve gotten either cold or desperate in the hours prior to him falling asleep. Hours he couldn’t remember...which was unsettling.
Damnit.
Paranoia took over. Jason grabbed the gun strapped to the bottom of the sofa. Leaped from it, heart thumping in his chest.
And then he checked the windows. Analysed the doors. Reviewed his weapon stashes and data. Searched, tirelessly, for any evidence of intervention, danger or surveillance- from the bats, or anyone else. And when he was satisfied, he stood by the sink for a while, trying desperately to recollect what had happened to him in the hours between the attack on his safehouse and now…
It had been near midnight when it happened. And now it was eight in the morning. So he'd been missing for...about seven to eight hours. Shit. And hadn’t he been shot?
“Shiiiit,” he hissed, scrambling to pull his hoodie off.
He wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t in any fucking pain.
He knew something was wrong. Should’ve realised earlier. He remembered some things about last night. Being angry at Black Mask. Being shot...twice. Twice. And feeling so light-headed that the blood loss surely would’ve been fatal if he’d allowed it to be. Looking back, it could’ve been the closest to death Jason had been in a long time.
Either way, it was impossible that he was feeling fine right now. Unless he’d been drugged...or turned into a Kryptonian overnight...something was definitely amiss.
He tugged hurriedly at the remains of his t-shirt from the night before, fingers quivering. He was expecting to find something horrendous. A rotting wound, or some sign that he’d quickly, yet completely, lost his mind. Maybe even a few ‘HA, HA’s, written in blood, left there by the Joker, or another of his endless goons.
But all Jason was greeted with was a completely fine stomach. And a completely fine shoulder, too.
“What the Hell?” Jason muttered.
He rushed to his laptop and started clicking through the CCTV footage there. The log from last night was blank. But seven hours ago, he’d apparently stumbled through the back window, dragged his way to the sofa, and instantly fallen asleep. He’d looked completely out of it while doing so, too- like he’d completed these tasks on adrenaline alone. It wouldn’t have surprised him.
What did surprise him was the footage that followed.
About twenty minutes after he fell asleep, a flash covered the screen. The camera cut out, and when it returned, Jason was laying on the sofa once more- an hour later- as if nothing had changed. But his wounds were healed. And he was sleeping completely deeply- something he rarely did. Not unless some higher, darker powers were at work.
Fuck. Someone must’ve tampered with the footage. Either that or the camera had broken on him. But Jason’s tech didn’t do that often. Jason’s tech was good.
“Shit,” Jason said. He slammed his fist onto the desk his computer sat on, slumped into his desk chair, and span in angry, determined circles for a moment.
And then he pulled open his desk drawer.
Inside it was the laptop Dick had given him months ago. It was the only piece of WayneTech Jason owned, and the only reason he kept it- the only reason- was because it allowed him to review the cases the so-called bat-clan were working on at any given moment. Jason wasn’t even sure why Dick had given him it in the first place. It had been in a brief moment of weakness, months after the incident with Bruce and Joker. Dick had somehow gotten the address to one of Jason’s old safehouses, mailed him the laptop, and attached it to a label that read-
Hey, little wing. It’s been a while.
I know things are rough and we’re on different paths at the moment. But here’s a way in. If you want it.
You can contact any single one of us from this laptop, as well as use it to see our latest intel. It might be a little buggy, because I programmed it myself and didn’t want Babs to know. But if you want to get it fixed, I’m sure she wouldn’t hesitate to help you. None of us would.
I know you have a lot of enemies. This laptop is meant to, at the very least, help to keep you safe from them. I know you probably don’t need it. But I’m your brother, and I’m never going to stop worrying about you. I should’ve been there for you when you returned to Gotham, and I wasn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that. But this laptop is my attempt at bridging the gap without freaking you out.
Stupid, I know.
If you use this for malice- even once- Bruce will know. And he’ll come for you. You know he will.
I love you, Jay.
I know you’ll do the right thing.
P.S- I don’t even know if this will reach you or not. But if it does, your address is safe with me. I’m sure you’ll burn it to cinders and move on from it instantly anyways- but I just thought you’d like to know.
Jason had done exactly that, of course. But he’d kept the note. And the laptop too. He’d checked it a couple of times since receiving it. It was how he’d learned that Black Mask had been apprehended, after all. But now- now he was using it for a different purpose entirely. If there’d been freaky things happening in Gotham last night- or a couple of hours ago- the bats would know. There were very few things that they didn’t.
The second it booted up, a barrage of tabs flooded across the screen. There were notifications left right and centre, as well as dozens of messages Dick had left him that Jason outright refused to read. The way Dick had configured the operating system on this laptop was so damn strange. Then again, the way Dick did everything was pretty strange. It almost made Jason miss him.
He clicked through the family’s recently accessed files, foot tapping as he did so. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for. He kept seeing the standard stuff...Penguin doing dodgy deals through the Iceberg Lounge, as per usual...Riddler being as useless and irritating as he’d always been...Two-Face splitting everything in half, like he’d always done…
And then a call popped up on the screen. It appeared so quickly Jason had no idea of what to do, or how to stop it. He jumped, moving back in his seat, and only comprehended what was going on when a voice spoke from the laptop-
“Jason?”
Jason’s heart began to rattle. “Dick?”
“Oh my God,” Dick let out a sound that seemed to be in the middle of desperation and gratefulness. “Jason.”
Jason started to panic. He tried to turn the laptop off, to no avail. Not even removing one of its drives worked.
“Jason, what-” Dick cleared his throat. “Where are you? How are you? Are you okay?”
Jason opened his mouth to reply, but failed. His breaths were erratic. Fear was creeping up his stomach. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. How to react. God. This was crazy. This was crazy this was crazy this was crazy.
He left the room to pick up a sledgehammer. When he returned, Dick was still talking.
“Please- just say something. There was an explosion in East Gotham this morning. We're worried sick.”
Jason held the hammer above the screen.
“Jay?"
Jason was about to swing. But then his grip wavered at the nickname.
It was one thing reading it. It was completely another hearing it out loud…
God. Jason hadn’t talked to Dick since that whole fiasco around Black Mask’s stolen Kryptonite. Even then, it had been painful. But it had been bearable. Dick hadn’t known who Jason was back then. Hadn’t known he was even alive. And now…
Now things were different. And Jason couldn’t bear listening to Dick talk like that- like nothing had changed, like everything was still the same. It would kill him.
“Please talk to me,” Dick said. “Bruce said- Bruce said that the warehouse that blew up could’ve been one of your safehouses, and if so-”
At the mention of Bruce’s name Jason swung the sledgehammer down. Hard. The laptop screen shattered instantly, and the audio splintered into fuzzy, faint garble. For good measure, Jason hit it again. And then, because it felt good, he hit it again, and again, and again, until the laptop was devoid of life, and even then, he swung twice more.
When his arms burned and the laptop lay in splintered pieces, Jason threw the sledgehammer across the room. It landed in a heavy heap, and after a second, so did he. He felt disgusted with himself. He rested his chin on his knees and tried his very best not to cry.
Fuck.
He thought that things like that didn’t affect him anymore. He was sure that they wouldn’t.
But he was wrong.