Chapter Text
Jason doesn’t believe in God.
There are no gods in Gotham, no intelligent design, no Grand Plan for the universe. Gotham runs on chaos. Darkness rushes through the sewers and seeps into the waterways. Soot and smoke hang in the air like a curtain.
Jason doesn’t believe in God. But he does believe in the Devil.
He lives inside Jason.
The apartment smells like cigarette smoke and the dumpsters out back. The yellowing wallpaper peels in the corners and the sheets on the bed have been nibbled at by probably three generations of rodents. He drops his two crates of belongings in the entryway and takes it all in. He takes out one of his earbuds and the real sounds of New York City replace Taylor’s catchy beat. The walls are thin. The window is cracked and there’s no curtain, nothing to keep the people in the second-floor apartment in the building across from him from watching him like a TV show.
There’s one big room half-carpeted, with a moldering couch and a TV stand with no TV on one side and a kitchenette on the other, with a refrigerator that comes up to about his knees, a microwave, and an oven that looks like it might catch fire if he stares at it for too long.
The bedroom is a little better, besides the decrepit sheets. There’s a tiny walk-in closet with a couple of stray hangers laying on the floor and an extra comforter on the top shelf, like a hotel room. There’s a lamp on the bedside table and, on the wall across from the bed, someone’s tried to decorate a little bit, hanging a little collage of three framed art prints of New York City in a row.
Jason’s afraid to look at the bathroom.
He takes his backpack off and sets it on the kitchen counter. The last time he wore one of those must have been high school, he thought wryly. Sophomore year. He kissed a girl who then told the whole school that a millionaire’s son wanted to sleep with her.
He doesn’t even remember her name.
Jason opens the cabinets on the TV stand, dusts them out with the hem of his shirt, and starts to carefully shelve his books within. He organizes them alphabetically by the author’s first name. Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, Christopher Paolini, Harper Lee. There are two hundred of them in total, carefully puzzled into the two crates and treated like the precious cargo they were on the journey from Gotham to New York. None of them are from Before. They’re from second-hand shops and the library’s annual sale. The Hunger Games trilogy has someone else’s handwriting in red pen in the margins. The Great Gatsby had half a dozen newspaper clippings crammed between its pages. They were his lighthouse, his cornerstone. No matter what, he could trust that the words between those pages would always stay the same.
He spends over an hour on the books, stacking the ones that wouldn’t fit in the cabinet on top of the TV stand with some semblance of order. Then he pulls his laptop out of his backpack and plugs it into the wall beneath the window. He needs a desk and, preferably, a bookcase.
Then it’s only a matter of shoving his clothes in the closet, stripping the sheets off the bed, and sitting his toothbrush on the bathroom counter. As soon as he sees the bathroom, his heart sinks into his toes. Cursing, he slips his toothbrush back into the front pocket of the worn backpack. There’s no way he’s putting anything that touches that counter into his mouth.
He checks his pocket for his wallet and, finding it safe, jiggles the door open.
Jason turns to lock the door and something barrels into him from behind. Instantly he’s on his guard. Angry green flames leap before his eyes. He twists and grabs hold, flinging whatever it was that assaulted him across the hallway. His other hand strays toward the holster nestled in the small of his back, beneath his jacket.
But his assailant slides to the floor and doesn’t get up. And Jason sees the thin, bony arms, the silhouette of a ribcage beneath a light blue T-shirt, the mop of unshorn hair, and his world shatters.
It was only a kid. He just threw a kid into a wall.
“Oh, hell.” He snatches his hand away from the gun. “Are you okay, kid? I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m okay.” The kid’s voice wobbles, and Jason breaks all over again. He swore he was never going to hurt a kid again. Never. And here he was, on his first day in New York, trying to break bones. “Sorry. I didn’t see you there. Sorry, I—”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, kid.” He’s so skinny, and as he pushes himself to his feet Jason spurs himself forward and offers him a hand up. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The kid breathes in sharply in a laugh Jason recognizes, but doesn’t understand. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He takes a second, scanning Jason up and down. There’s something in those big brown eyes Jason understands far too well. He’s sizing Jason up, trying to decide if he’s a potential threat. Trying to sus out his weaknesses. “Did you just move in?”
The question puts Jason on his guard, even though he knows he has nothing to fear from this kid. “Yup. On my way out to buy some necessities and find a good restaurant. Know of any second-hand shops in the area?”
The kid relaxes slightly, but he still keeps his eyes fixed on Jason. “Yeah. Go right three blocks, it’ll be on the left.”
“Great, thanks.” Jason holds out his hand. “I’m Jason, by the way. Jason Oliver.”
The boy holds out one long-fingered hand. His grip is surprisingly firm. “Peter.” No last name. Jason respects that.
“I’ll see you around, Peter.”
Jason can feel Peter’s eyes on his back as he walks away. His mind whirls with calculations. The kid was maybe fifteen, but the set of his jaw was older, and kids like him looked younger than they were. So maybe seventeen. He probably lived in the building. He was starving. He had tugged the sleeves of his shirt down to hide a bruise that covered his whole shoulder, blessedly not the shoulder Jason had slammed into the wall.
Rationally, Jason knew there would be boys like him in New York, the same as Gotham. He knew there were boys like Peter all over the world, hiding wounds and treating every stranger like an enemy just to stay alive. Boys hanging onto life by their fingernails. But he wasn’t ready to see it here, hours after arrival, right outside his own door.
He stepped out onto the street and turned up the volume on the music filtering through his one earbud. Taylor Swift’s heartbeat melds with the undercurrent of New York, and Jason squares his shoulders.
This isn’t Gotham. Sure, it’s smoggy and full of vice, but darkness doesn’t hang over this city. Maybe, if he stays long enough, the darkness inside his own head will go away too.
The man had black dye on his forehead.
He had a holster beneath his jacket.
He moved like a fighter, smooth and confident, but ruthless. It reminded him of the few times he’d caught a glimpse of Daredevil, roaming the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
Peter’s new neighbor was a dangerous man.
He limps up to his apartment, hoping no one was home to see how Jason’s quick defense had busted the stitches on his side and now thick blood was oozing onto his last unstained shirt.
He curses himself as he sits on the toilet lid, restitching his wound. He knew better than to barrel around corners like that. But he was overdue on his rent by three weeks, and his landlord was out for blood. It wasn’t exactly easy to get a job when you didn’t technically exist.
He’s still thinking about Jason later that night when he creeps out onto the fire escape with a hoodie and sweatpants over his suit. On his way down the wall, he peers into the window of the apartment beneath his.
The man is laying on his back on the couch, reading a book. The sight gives Peter pause. He wouldn’t have pegged him as the reading type. He’s not wearing the jacket anymore, and even in the shadowy darkness Peter can make out a network of scars crisscrossing his upper arm.
Peter sheds the hoodie and sweatpants in an alley and swings out into the New York nighttime, wondering who, exactly, his new neighbor was.