Chapter Text
It’s important to know that Jason isn’t an idiot, he’s just insane. He falls somewhere in the spectrum between Harley, who lives in some cloud cuckoo land that’s less painful than this shitty world, and the fucking asshole Roman, who is only insane in the way that rich people who think their wants matter more than other people’s lives are insane.
So when Jason gets staticky people begging him to write their notes, or tell their loved ones goodbye, or get them revenge, he ignores them just as much as he ignores the green-and-white Joker in his head promising him that they can be such great friends, birds of a feather. Only occasionally, there’s a little staticky child who asks him for a sweet or a story or once, to find its grave, (and there wasn’t one, so he dug one for it, and ruined a perfectly balanced knife writing its first name down), and he does. He’s insane, but he knows he’s insane, so it’s fine. Anyway who isn’t a little bit fucked in the head, in their line of work?
Which is all well and good until one day he’s sitting on a boring fact-collecting assignment that would have gone much easier if Oracle hadn’t made it her mission to fuck him over whenever she found him in her digital sights. He’s just about deciding it’s a bust when one of the pack of staticky hallucination kids that have been showing up the last couple of weeks pipes up from behind him.
“The bomb’s going to blow in a minute.”
Another one says, “Well, it can’t hurt us, can it, dumbass?”
“You dumbass, it can hurt him.”
“Can it really?”
And Jason is… Jason is deciding that just this once he’s going to listen to his hallucinations because he’s been caught in enough explosions for two lifetimes, thanks, and he’s already running, bag flapping behind him, gun in one hand. Then he tosses the gun, even though it’s a fucking nice gun, with a great sightline, because he needs a hand free for the grapnel gun, and that one moment probably saves him from third degree burns and, given his current lack of backup, his fucking life.
From four rooftops and a concrete water tank away, Jason thinks they’re on to me, thinks bastard informant sold me out and port meeting’s probably a bust too.
He says, “I know I’m insane and I’m talking to hallucinations, but can you guys shut up for a second?”
“You’re not insane,” one of them says, “you’re dead.”
“Not anymore,” Jason points out, refusing to wilt under the judgmental gazes of a gaggle of staticky children between the ages of seven and twelve.
Of course, this is exactly why you don’t feed strays (although Jason does, always has, whenever he’s had a bite to spare, which hasn’t been that often). They’re everywhere now that he’s not ignoring them anymore. When Jason said that he’s going to protect every inhabitant of downtown Gotham, he had not been counting the dead ones.
Jason asks one old woman, who everyone calls aunty, “Aunty, don’t you think you should be moving towards the light? I feel like that’s a thing you do after you’re dead, you let go of your earthly attachments and move towards–” he waves his hands, “ – zen? Nirvana?”
He considers adding in an ‘om shanti,’ if it’ll help.
“Like you did?” Aunty responds tartly.
“Touche,” he protests.
“Now, if you’re done being rude and discussing my death, are you going to pass on my cinnamon bun recipe to my granddaughter or not?”
Jason only somewhat manages to convince her that giving her granddaughter a message from a grandmother who has been dead for seventeen years is unlikely to go over well, and he only does it by telling her he’ll write down the recipe and hide it in the apartment somewhere. Then, of course, they realize that in the last seventeen years the family has shifted out of the practically demolished apartment building that Aunty died in.
“Think I died when the ceiling fell in,” Aunty says thoughtfully. “Forgot that bit.”
Jason eyes her and wonders whether it’s time to call for an exorcism.
For about a week, it’s like he can’t go anywhere without Oracle setting a Bat or the police or the goddamned revenue service on to him. So he solves the only case he can solve: trying to help some people fulfill their last wishes.
Ghosts are more peaceful than living people, and they all seem to have come to some sort of consensus that those who died recently get first dibs, their last wishes more relevant than those who may just be chasing after other ghosts now. Jason does his best. Mostly what he does is write notes in forged handwriting telling people where keys were hidden, and remind them to call their great-aunt, and other mundane words of love that normal people use instead of bullets and knives. Then he breaks into people’s homes to hide the notes, which like, frankly, it’s not his first or tenth or maybe even hundredth time breaking into homes, but usually he’s taking stuff away. In payment, he raids their fridges. Being off the Oracle grid means he’s got about an hour in each day to sneak into some coffee shop, get a warm something, and charge his electronics, and then he’s gotta stick to the shitty dumps which only get electricity if you’re willing to risk setting yourself on fire.
They, he and the kids, stick around to see what happens a couple of times. When Joe, a middle aged plumber who died maybe a year ago, is trying to get whatever he had squirreled away to his kids, they see Joe’s youngest kid get his note about the bank account. The kid says, “Wish I’d got this before Ma’s boyfriend cleared her all out,” and rolls his eyes, wincing and touching where one is already puffy and beginning to bruise up.
Jason thinks, sounds about right, pays the boyfriend a visit to give him the speech about what happens to assholes who beat on kids in the Red Hood’s territory, and moves on when he hears sirens that have to be from an ambulance or maybe a police car.
Just after he realized that he’s let go of death, but it hasn’t let go of him, Jason had wondered, about his – about Willis, and about his Mom. But he doesn’t even know when or where Willis died, and he’s been back in the old street hundreds of times since he’s back, and Mom isn’t there, and honestly, Mom was barely there at the end anyway, so.
Still, it’s been a while since he’s been around that area, so he takes the time to look in on there, and then Oracle strikes again, and he goes on the run. The kids help, most ghosts can’t move more than four or five meters away from him without being forcibly sent back to the place they haunt, but this lot can move around because the place they haunted blew up. They’re a great help at keeping a lookout and spotting cameras or cops.
“In here,” one of them whispers, gesturing from a dark alley.
“You’re a ghost,” he whispers back. “Why are you whispering?”
Lila shrugs and suggests, “Keeping the mood.”
He moves quietly to the very back of the alley which has enough garbage in it to hide ten Jasons, and waits, very quietly, for the cops to decide they’re no longer interested. The rest of the kids play hopscotch but Lila cuddles up to him and plays tic-tac-toe with him, letting him make his move with slight movements of his eyes or fingers. She also cheats when he’s going to beat her 15-12, but Jason just rolls his eyes. It eases a worry Jason didn’t know he had, that they aren’t stuck to a single building anymore, even when he wants some privacy.
“They’re gone,” Miles reports, and springs up and does a backwards cartwheel, in a Robin move that he’s apparently spent the decade of his death perfecting.
Jason stands up and thanks them with a nod, stretching out his cramped limbs. He suppresses a groan at a particularly sore muscle. He takes off his helmet and rubs his sweaty face under it. It’s risky walking around without a disguise, but at this point, trying to pass for a normal gangbanger might be better.
Someone coughs politely, impatience well-hidden.
“Yeah, yeah, gimme a second, brats.” Jason says, thinking in the back of his mind that he needs to get some chocolate and burn it, and maybe the kids could try and taste the smoke.
The second cough is a little more pronounced. The hair on the back of Jason’s arms tries to rise. He turns around, even while his hindbrain screams at him to run run run.
A lady with dark, wavy hair in an old-fashioned dress and a pearl necklace says, “Mr. Hood, is it? We were wondering if you could do us a favor.”
Her husband adds, “We’re not sure how we could repay you, but I’m sure our son will be willing to make our thanks for us.” He’s got a strong jawline, a handsome face softened by eyes that would probably be very very blue.
Your son’s hunting me like it’s the Wild Hunt of Odin, and I’ve stolen his prey, he doesn’t say.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of help, Mrs. Wayne,” he does say, because Mom didn’t raise him feral, and makes a run for it.
He stops running a couple of alleys away and then leans against a wall and suppresses a groan against his now-permanent headache.
He hears a polite cough. Heart sinking, he opens his eyes.
“We can move through walls, you know,” Mrs Wayne says.
“It seems a little rude, so we try not to do it too often,” her husband adds.
“I’ve changed my mind, I’d prefer to hallucinate the Joker again,” Jason announces to an uncaring world. Whatever, he’s been ignoring ghosts for three years now, he can ignore these two until they get bored.
He wakes up fuzzily to two lively conversations.
Dr. Wayne is explaining compound fractures and advancement in corpse recognition technologies to Miles, Lila, and the girl who died too young to have really learned to talk.
Tire, Jessie, GG, and Freak are sitting in a wide-eyed circle, listening to Mrs. Wayne’s story. Jason catches her voice faintly. “It blew up of course, but because we were surrounded by desert, it was a contained explosion. Now, naturally, we had to convince Eloise and Farzana’s parents as well, so…”
Oh my god, it’s genetic, he thinks and then turns the other way and drops off again.
Twelve hours later, the kids have abandoned him to his fate. Jason is staring at the smog that passes for a sky in Gotham through the broken half of the ceiling in his latest (un)safehouse, as Martha Wayne exclaims with real pleasure: “We’ve been stuck in that alley for decades now, this is such a refreshing change!”
“How long has it been, dear, twenty years, isn’t it?” Thomas Wayne says, frowning at Jason’s… everything.
“Thirty at least,” she replies. “Now, Mr. Hood, Jason, can I call you Jason? This is a nice little place that you have here, Jason, but if I can make a suggestion, I really do think you should maybe add some stairs. Maybe even a door. It would make a world of difference.”
“Not to say you’re not doing great at jumping on walls and breaking in,” Thomas adds, soothing, in a tone that a horrified Jason recognises from Alfred coaxing him to eat his vitamins.
Jason eats his pickpocketed chili dog breakfast to tut-tutting from Dr. Wayne.
“Growing children need a proper diet,” Dr. Wayne says, “May I suggest something that wasn’t made in a sewer.”
“Is that mustard.” Mrs. Wayne says, in the tone of one asking ‘is that a rat?’
Jason opens up the newspaper he also stole and reads it instead of saying ‘I have three million dollars in an offshore account and also several thousand in cash that I cannot access because your son is a bloodhound and I’m the deer he’s chasing.’
The efforts Jason goes to for this family, honestly.
He skims through the headlines and puts down the tabloid page as covering on a wet bench before sitting on it.
Dr. Wayne tuts loudly. “That awful little man is at it again.”
“The Mayor?” Jason asks, interested against his will.
“That Bratman,” Dr. Wayne said, wrinkling his nose in polite disgust.
Jason’s smile grows and he opens his mouth to say something but a moment later, he flinches automatically as Mrs. Wayne reaches through him. “What the h– oneyfudge?”
She flickers in and out, and Dr. Wayne puts both arms around her, murmuring something too softly for him to understand.
Then he gets it. “Uh, I’ll get, uh– steal another one, if you want to see him.” he says awkwardly and runs off to steal another tabloid page and spread out the pages so they can see. The front page is, as it very often is, taken up by a glossy full page picture of Bruce standing ambiguously close to a beautiful woman.
“My handsome little boy, all grown up,” Mrs. Wayne whispers.
“Looks like my father, don’t you think, dear?”
“He has your eyes,” she replies, and if ghosts could cry, Jason is sure she would be crying.
Jason turns around and stares at his boots to give them some privacy until Mrs. Wayne speaks up and tells him that she wants to go see that nice little dog on the other side of the park.
Jason looks at the nice little dog, which is a purebred pitbull with a mean look in its eyes, and suggests going literally anywhere else.
Anyway, after that it’s harder, a little, to ignore them. When they’re like grieving parents and not staticky black-and-white reminders that Batman once had a real family.
When Jason goes to a Starbucks to charge his electronics, he has to keep everything off and stay in the only CCTV blind spot to keep the Bats off his tail. He has nothing else to do except huddle under the Waynes’ expectant (but weirdly polite) stares, so he gives in and mumbles into his pumpkin spiced latte with extra whip, “Guess you guys haven’t had much news about him.”
“Not a great deal,” Dr. Wayne admits. “We could only walk a little further than that dingy alleyway, so it was only when newspapers flew in. Mostly these filthy tabloids, making up lies about who Bruce is… associating with.”
“I don’t think they were lying,” Jason says, helpfully.
“He’s sowing his wild oats, as every young man should before settling down,” Mrs. Wayne insists brightly.
“He’s forty-three,” Jason judgmentally tells his drink.
“Prime of his life! He has plenty of time to find a genteel young lady and give us grandchildren.”
Jason tries – and fails – to imagine either Talia or Selina (or the Ghostmaker) falling into what the Waynes might categorize as ‘genteel young lady,’ and instead tells her, “You already have grandchildren. It’s up to six now, unless he’s managed to acquire one while I wasn’t looking.” Or lose one.
He mentally counts off, Dick; Drake; Talia’s kid; Spoiler- Steph?; the new Batgirl; and the other new one, the meta, which, nice to see Bruce could make some exceptions to his rules. Just not for Jason.
The Waynes speak up simultaneously.
Dr. Wayne: “But he’s unmarried. Do you mean he’s divorced?”
Mrs. Wayne: “What do you mean, acquired?”
Jason sips at his drink to hide his growing smile. The self-help books were right, you really can turn every failure into an opportunity. “He kidnaps them, mostly.”
Only an hour later, Jason is regretting coming back to life and many of his choices since doing so.
“Please don’t cry,” he says, absolutely terrified.
Mrs. Wayne’s lips tremble, but she smiles bravely. “No, I understand. You wouldn’t be able to take time out of your busy schedule and make the great effort of trying to meet my son.”
“Or our grandchildren,” Dr. Wayne adds, stoic. “It’s too much to ask.”
“Yes, we shouldn’t have asked,” Mrs. Wayne carries on, now sniffing, and holding a handkerchief up to her ghostly eye to hide a tear. “It’s only that we never saw him grow up.”
“Or held his babies in our arms,” Dr. Wayne says.
“He never held his babies either,” Jason tells them helpfully. “I’m not sure he’d know what to do with a baby. He’d probably try to teach it jiujitsu.”
Mrs. Wayne lets out a soft sob from behind her flickering handkerchief.
I’m being taken for a ride, Jason tells himself. This is Bruce’s mum, and he has to have gotten his filthy lying liar skills from somewhere, Jason tells himself. I’m going to find them some paparazzi shots to bill and coo over and then firmly tell them to fuc– take a hike, Jason thinks.
“Okay, okay, I’ll follow them around so you can see them. But that’s it.”
Mrs. Wayne drops her handkerchief. It vanishes into staticky nothingness, and she’s beaming dry-eyed behind it.
Jason looks balefully into the horizon behind her and adds spitefully, “I’m not going to talk to them, and if you want to hold his babies, then you’re going to need a time machine, or wait until he kidnaps a literal baby. At the rate he’s going, it won’t take long.”
“Thank you, son,” Dr. Wayne says, quiet and heartfelt, and Jason…
He shrugs. “Whatever.”
Stalking is practically a family bonding activity in this family. It’s fine, no big deal.
The problem is, when he starts looking for Bruce instead of hiding from him, Bruce is nowhere to be found. Jason does a quick check of the business news (and a quicker check of the tabloids) and there’s been no confirmed meeting with him in person in the last month. There've been a few virtual soundbites, but between Dick and (ex-)Batgirl faking a video would be laughably easy.
The problem is that he has informants, but his informants haven't been paid since Oracle got on him like a terrier with a cause and his informant would betray him in heartbeat to the Bats or the latest drug king in Gotham (because there’s always a drug king in Gotham – can’t throw a brick without hitting a drug king in Gotham).
While thinking about his next move, Jason explains awkwardly, “He’s kind of a big deal in this place. He hides his movements a lot. Paparazzi and all, you know.”
Dr. Wayne nods, frowns. “He really should get these people banned from the city.”
“Who?”
“Journalists,” Dr. Wayne replies, smiling indulgently, as if he’s speaking to a very young child, “are a bunch of parasites and fools. I suppose he’s too kind to do it.”
Jason opens his mouth, blinks, shuts his mouth.
“He was such a sweet child,” Mrs. Wayne says wistfully.
Jason makes an enquiring noise. It’s not like Jason wants to hear her talk about Bruce, it’s just that he’s forced to be here and he lost all his music since he had to get rid of his electronics.
Mrs. Wayne says, “Oh, any time I took him to the office, he would follow around all the executives who wouldn’t listen to me.”
Jason says, “Ah, eh?”
Mrs. Wayne continues, “He would tell me all about what they were doing. I had iron control of them from his information gathering.” She sniffs again, hiding behind the wisp of lace that is her handkerchief, before she concludes with, “Simply adorable.”
“Adorable,” Dr. Wayne echoes.
Jason says, “Huh.”
After a moment in which he can only think ‘the old man makes so much more sense now,’ the revelation gives him an idea.
Jason finds the kids, who are free to haunt most of Gotham after years or decades and have been misusing their powers to the hilt.
They are surprisingly happy to see him. Miles does four cartwheels and then jumps up to do a reverse spin in the air. Jason mimes clapping, lips curling up irresistibly. Lila floats up to sit on Jason’s shoulder. It’s a little cold, but nothing Jason can’t handle. It’s more awkward that he keeps expecting a weight that isn’t there.
Two of the kids cuddle up to his legs, but it’s all in vain, as their clever pickpocketing fingers go right through the clothes. They don’t know much, but what they know is bad enough. They’ve been zipping through the streets the past couple of days but haven’t seen Batman at all. In fact, in the two weeks since Jason nearly got blown up (again), none of them have seen hide or hair of him.
Jason thanks them and fishes out the candy he had pocketed. A couple of Snickers, a kitkat, m&ms, even a poor-man’s version of After Eights, which he had always wanted in a vague sort of way when he was younger. He burns them and the kids ooh and aah over it.
Tire rolls around on the ground in bliss. “Mr. Hood, you’re my favorite.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Jason says, finger guns and all but his smile is already dropping by the time he turns around to go back and collect the Waynes, who are politely pretending to give him space even though they can’t move more than about a hundred metres from him before being violently pulled back to the place of their death again.
He scrubs at his face briefly, sweaty and tired. The light makeup he’s using to get around face-recog for the more obvious cameras is already melting off. He needs his helmet. He needs to get somewhere safe. He needs to think about anything that’s not just a bundle of worry and resentful fear, and make a plan.
It’s a weirdass blunder on the part of his working memory that it takes him back yet again to the alley where the Waynes died, and where he met Bruce.
“Mr. Hood,” Dr. Wayne says, then pauses for a second before saying, “I see that this, uh, Ratman means a great deal to you. Who is he?”
‘My dad,’ Jason thinks automatically and then, ‘fuck that,’ and then thirdly, with a feeling like leaving the stove on and going out or leaving the heat on when you don’t have the money to pay the bills, ‘Oh shit.’
“You haven’t had a lot of news about Bruce, huh?” Jason asks, trying to put off the awkward moment of reveal as far as possible.
“Oh, dear, he isn’t your son is he?” Mrs. Wayne asks, suddenly looking concerned. “Talking of Brucie reminded you of your son, didn’t it?”
“I- ma’am, what?” Jason says.
Dr. Wayne shakes his ghostly head, the sun shining oddly off it and making him look like an old-fashioned gas lamp when he moves it from side to side. “Heavens! I should have realized. Well, Mr. Hood, I don’t know what it must feel like to have a son that’s practically a delinquent but you can’t give up on him.”
“What.” Jason says
“Practically more than a delinquent, a ruffian!” Mrs. Wayne agrees, “But he’s your son and that’s the important thing.”
“Now Bruce, my son, maybe he could be a good influence–,” Dr. Wayne starts and then lets out a wordless shout, throwing his hand out to Mrs. Wayne who caught it in hers and went into a rather good defensive crouch.
A moment later, Jason feels an enormous awful cold sensation, freezing him from the inside out.
“Stay still!” someone yells at him, but that’s WRONG staying still gets you DEADDEADDEAD and Jaymyboy needs to NOTDIE someone told him to NOTDIE and then he opens his eyes and mom is there in her hospital gown needle in hand just to FIXTHISHONEY and then mom is there in her doctor’s gown needle in hand IMGOINGTOFIXYOU and then mom is there throwing him into the green.
“Please,” someone sobs, pleasepleaseplease, and Jason blindly grabs hold of them and spills out a mouth full of blood and worms in the dirt they spell out PLEASE FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT FOR THE ROUGH RIDE and he jumps out without a parachute because the parachute will weigh you down until you DEAD.
And then Jason wakes up sweating, on the floor.
Both Waynes have collapsed next to him. If their ghostly forms could feel exhaustion, they’d look exhausted. Dr. Wayne’s head flickers again, even though he’s absolutely still. Jason wonders if they’re dying. Can ghosts die? It would be typical, he thinks, that he would try to reunite Bruce with his dead parents and end up killing them even more.
Then Dr. Wayne nods gravely at him, and he feels a wave of relief that makes him want to burrow back down and sleep for about twenty years. It takes him another moment to realize that it’s not just physical exhaustion and shock keeping him down. There’s a shivering kid on top of him.
He struggles to sit up and gently wrestles the kid off him and down beside him.
“You’re fine,” he says, not unkindly, and fishes out a chocolate to give him. Hopefully the shivering was just shock and the food would fix it. He subtly flexes his muscles, arms: check, ribs: check, and on down to his toes. Nothing seemed broken.
“What’s up buddy?” Jason asks. Most of the time kids will tell him everything, and if they’re too scared to say anything, there’s nothing to be done, he needs to get them safe and figure out another information source.
This one seems to be running towards the mute, and Jason shrugs mentally. Figure out where safe family is and–
“Little man, are you well?” Dr. Wayne asks. He still looks hazy around the edges but he has a whole face again, and he’s turned his kind eyes towards the kid.
The kid looks up and nods his head yes, hesitantly, like he’s not sure what to say.
Mrs. Wayne smiles, and Jason now knows where Bruce gets the unconscious staggering charm. “Of course you are, I can see you’re the bravest boy. Where are your guardians, my dear? What’s your name?”
The kid begins crying. Nothing loud or obvious, just two tracks running down his face, which is plump and healthy under the grime of the alleyway. His clothes aren’t new but they aren’t falling apart, and his shoes are the light-up kind that a kid in Crime Alley could only dream of. A kid with parents who were at least somewhat parenting.
“My sister’s in there,” he says.
Jason’s heart skips a beat.
Mrs. Wayne’s eyes tighten but her smile only grew larger. She drifts towards the kid. “And you were searching for her? Brave lad.”
“My sister’s in there and Mom told her not to come home,” the kid says, voice breaking.
Dr. Wayne speaks with the bedside manner of one used to delivering unpleasant news. “Why don’t you tell Mr. Hood here about your sister? He’s also a brave lad, and he’s a little bigger than you so he might have a little more luck than you.”
“You’ll find my sister?” the kid asks, raising his eyes critically to Jason.
“Yes,” Jason says, promises, hopes.
“He will,” Dr. Wayne echoes, with more faith in Jason than anyone’s had in his life.
“I’m Donny,” the kid tells them. Then, to Dr. Wayne, “Hey, aren’t you Batman? Weren’t you just fighting the Joker? Your cross-jab needs help.”
“That thuggish ill bred man in the catsuit?” Dr. Wayne asks the world at large, aristocratic offense in his tone.
“Fighting the Joker?” Jason asks Donny urgently.
“Who did you say this Batfan was to you?” Mrs. Wayne asks Jason, sharp suspicion coloring her voice.
Ah, oops.
“I was going to say,” Jason says indignantly to her suspicion, even though he wasn’t.
“You’re going to save Hanna?” Donny asks again. “Can’t I have Robin instead?”