Chapter Text
Saturday 17th of June 1989; Crime Alley, Upper East End, Gotham, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Jason Todd stood on a rooftop ledge overlooking the bay.
Gotham City hadn’t changed much since his death.
Gotham never changed, no matter how many of her children died. Her rotten heart kept beating to her own twisted drum.
The stink of low tide was thick in the nighttime fog, blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. Dead fish always washed up around Ace Chemical. Only the very desperate resorted to frying them up in trashcan fires. Jason watched an old man—a feverhead, by his stumbling gait—clamber down the poisoned beach to grab a few fish by the gills and hike back up to his buddies under an overpass.
Once, when Jason was a pup, he had been hungry enough to eat one of those fish. It was freezing that winter, and he didn’t have money for a school lunch. He thought his sire was in jail. His stepmother was dead. What he could steal never lasted long enough. He was just so hungry. One dead fish wouldn’t kill him, right? He’d gotten lucky and found a nest of rats instead.
Another street kid hadn’t been so fortunate, too sickly to survive whatever poisons that Ace Chemical dumped into the water. She died choking on her own foaming blood.
Sure, there were programs, shelters, and outreach centers. Most of them were connected in some way to the Wayne Pack. Maybe he should have gone to one of them before he started scrounging around dumpsters for scraps of food. But those places were always overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. Street gangs were frequent robbers. There was never enough of anything to go around. People tended to disappear, too. Adults in the homeless shelters. Kids in the orphanages. No one knew where they went. No one wanted to.
Jason turned away from the sea and sky as black as pitch. He wasn’t here to feel his city’s toxic sand under his boots or listen to the Sprang River drain into the sea. He was here to save Gotham from herself…
… and from Batman.
He stood and breathed in Gotham’s putrid air. This was his home, his heart, his very soul. Its twisted streets were his veins. Its dark, looming towers were his bones. His blood ran with the four rivers, a pulse shared with nine million others born and raised on the overcrowded islands. Gotham was evil. Gotham was the only city that mattered.
The helmet in his hands was modeled off a motorcycle helmet, and the outer layer of fiberglass was polished to a glistening crimson-blood. Red Hood hadn’t been around for a while. It seemed fitting for Jason to take his new name from his murderer’s first.
With one last look over the desolate cityscape, Jason donned his helmet and Red Hood descended on Gotham.
He had work to do.
-O-
Sunday 25th of June 1989; The Hill, North Corners, Gotham, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Jason crouched by a headstone in a small cemetery in an older, quieter part of The Hill.
STEPHANIE A. BROWN
Cherished Daughter. Always Loved, Never Forgotten.
Jun. 25th, 1971 – Feb. 17th, 1989
“Hey,” he said to the chiseled grey granite block, “we never got to meet, but I’m Jason. I’ve heard a lot about you. The Girl Wonder from a crap neighborhood. You would have been eighteen today.”
Stephanie was a slip of a girl, an omega made street-tough by Gotham because survival was all that mattered. Surviving, because there was no room to just live in a place like The Hill. Or in a place like Crime Alley. Poverty had scarred them both from long before they were born, like a punishment for a crime they never committed. They had begged and fought for their own lives as the city’s wealthy watched from their gilded palaces.
She had been another costumed kid vigilante, calling herself Spoiler. Then she was the… fourth Robin. Then Black Mask murdered her.
Her mother (Crystal Bellinger, according to the newspapers) could not have afforded a nice grave like this on a nursing assistant’s salary. Batman had paid for it. “A charitable donation for a hero of the War Games”, a Wayne Industries spokesperson announced in a scripted press conference back in February.
Never mind that Stephanie was one of dozens killed.
Never mind that it was Batman’s fucking fault.
“I’ll avenge us, Blondie,” Jason promised with a low growl, “I’ll make them all pay for what they’ve done.”
Stephanie, of course, said nothing.
“I killed eight people last night. You wouldn’t have approved, but I know they deserved to die. They were nothing but scum, I promise you that.”
It hadn’t taken Jason long to find the lieutenants of the top eight dealers in Crime Alley. He felt nothing but vague satisfaction as he stuffed their heads into a duffle bag to present to their bosses. They were quick deaths. Almost merciful. Better than they deserved. (They were nothing but scum. Nothing but filth.) And if Jason had to stain Gotham’s streets in blood, at least the wretched vermin he hunted would know fear. Real fear. The one fear that the Dark Knight could never instill:
The true fear of death.
Jason bared his teeth under his helmet. No more.
Things would be different with him here.
Things would be better.
No victim would live in constant terror again. No homeless child would suffer. No pimp would abuse another street girl or omega. No rapist was walking free again. There was too much mercy in a prison sentence.
He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, forcing a deep breath. His rage wouldn’t serve him now. This wasn’t what he had come here for.
“I didn’t mean to…” Jason sighed. “I’m sorry we never got to meet. You sound like you were a good kid—a good Robin. Better than me. Better than Batman deserved. And I’m sorry I was the one to come back while you’re still six feet under.”
Though, with how wrong he felt in his skin, maybe it was better that way.
He spent six months in the dirt before something woke him up. It brought him back just enough for Jason to escape his casket. The next three years were a blur of stitched-together, incomplete memories. Beeping life support monitors in a hospital. Asphalt under him as he slept, dirty and familiar. Fear. Hunger. Cold. His rage at the sight of red, green, and yellow flying above him. His terror of not remembering his own goddamn name. He knew now. Just as he had known the instant that the acidic waters of the Lazarus Pit touched his skin.
He was Jason Todd, and he had some unfinished business.
Jason sat down on the fresh, young grass that covered Stephanie’s grave. It was still damp with the nighttime dew. The sun hadn’t risen yet—as if it ever did in Gotham—and he had the whole graveyard to himself for a few hours longer. It was just him and the lonely dead. And, really, what was the difference?
“I read your obituary in the paper.” He forced himself to speak again. Idle chatter as Jason imagined a conversation that they could have had if Stephanie survived what Black Mask did to her. (Though, he doubted that she would have wanted anything to do with him after the blood he spilled just yesterday. That was just fine. It wasn’t like Jason had a place left in his new life for anything good.) “It seemed like you had a thing for purple. Me, I always preferred green, but red suits me better nowadays. Red Hood, you know?”
It felt unnatural on his tongue. How could people talk to the dead like this? As if there were someone to respond? A voice to speak, an ear to listen? The dead didn’t sleep in their caskets like beds. They were dead.
Had Batman ever talked to his grave?
The question surprised Jason. Then it enraged him. If he had even glanced at Jason’s grave after he was buried, then he would have known. He would have known, and Jason could have been saved. It was too late now, of course. Batman had chosen to not kill the one ultimate evil in Gotham. Batman had chosen to continue the Robin name with a rich pretender and another poor dead kid. Batman buried his corpse and his memory.
“I have to say, you were brave volunteering to be Robin.” Jason shook his head with a sigh again, bringing his mind back to the present. “The Pretender must have been some coward if you had to step in for him.”
His first return to Gotham, not long after his resurrection, had been a brief one. He was drunk on rage and purposeless. Jason still remembered holding the Pretender by his scruff as he snarled at Batman across the graveyard. The empty pit of his grave stretched out between them. He had been stupid. Angry. Unfocused and undisciplined.
He had found a purpose again, in the two years since:
Jason was going to make things better in Gotham, one way or another.
His city and its people deserved to be protected. Its monsters deserved to be put down like rabid dogs. Batman would be forced to make a choice.
“You were brave to put on a costume in the first place. Stupid, but I guess we were both just stupid kids hoping to be heroes. And you had a villain for a sire! I bet that was fun. My sire was a numbers runner and a car thief. Two-Face probably killed him. Even Cluemaster is better than that.”
Arthur “Cluemaster” Brown at least cared enough to avenge his pup—or try to, anyway. Willis Todd probably would have been glad when Jason died (had his sire outlived him).
Willis loved him once. Before Catherine got sick. Before he lost his job. Before he found himself unable to feed the son he couldn’t afford. The pills were the only thing that helped her. Two-Face was the only employer with money. Jason was just another hungry mouth who needed new clothes and schoolbooks. All those times that Willis had threatened to kill Catherine and his own son still haunted Jason. His sire, exhausted and in pain, often (loudly) fantasized about getting rid of his “two worst mistakes” and starting over far away from Crime Alley.
They had still been the only pack, the only family, Jason had ever known, until Batman had hoisted him up with his wrist and called him “Robin”.
Then Batman replaced him.
Batman found another, better bird to dress up and send out to fight, less than a year after he buried Jason.
“Our fathers failed us. I won’t fail you, or our city,” Jason quietly promised her grave. “I’m taking over from Black Mask, and then I’m taking him out. I’m just doing what Batman should’ve done years ago.”
Black Mask. AKA: Roman Sionis.
The crazy gangster was now the new undisputed kingpin of Gotham’s entire, crowded criminal underworld, thanks to Batman playing his fucking War Games. His empire was even expanding into Blüdhaven and Burnside—and bringing all its filth with it. Batman was allowing him to walk free, allowing him to keep enjoying his high-rise condominium in the Diamond Belt as he sat on top of a multimillion-dollar criminal empire. He had tortured a seventeen-year-old omega to death, and he was alive and out of prison.
Black Mask deserved the hell that Jason was going to rain down upon him. He wouldn’t let him live a second longer than his plan necessitated.
The flash of yellow headlights from the parking lot made Jason look up. It was too early in the morning for a typical visitor. A Bat, his instincts told him. Only the city’s unwanted vigilantes would visit a grave at this awful hour.
A yellow taxi from Blüdhaven pulled up and remained idling at the curb as a young alpha female stepped out. With the distance, even with his vision now enhanced by the Lazarus Pit, Jason couldn’t see much more than her short-cut black hair and a purple hoodie that didn’t fit her quite right.
He had a pretty good guess about who she was, though:
The new Batgirl. Cassandra Cain.
Jason stood, resting his hand on the cold headstone before he vanished into the darkness around the graveyard. “Happy birthday, Stephanie Brown.”
Batman had banished or lost almost all of his allies in Gotham City after the War Games.
Cassandra (from what Talia had told him) had moved down south to Blüdhaven with Nightwing. The Pretender Robin, Jason’s replacement, was with his Teen Titans. Oracle—Barbara Gordon, the original Batgirl—had left for her Birds of Prey team in shining Metropolis. Azrael was god-knew-where doing god-knew-what. Only Catwoman and another omega female, Onyx, still remained in Gotham, each in their own isolated neighborhoods.
It had been a long time since the city had been so empty of its vigilantes.
He watched as Cassandra knelt by Stephanie’s grave, tracing the carved letters on her headstone with a finger.
There wasn’t much that Jason knew about her. Talia had been sparse on the details—something-something one of her sire Ra’s al-Ghul’s usual, secret, morally bankrupt “projects”. But he knew enough. The League of Assassins agent, David Cain, had sired her and trained her to be a living weapon. She came to Gotham after the earthquake. She was very, very dangerous.
Cassandra let out a hoarse howl.
It was the cry of a young alpha calling to her lost packmate. No one would answer her. Not this time. Let life be like music, and death a note unsaid.
Jason turned away. This was private and she wasn’t his priority.
There was work to do.
He was a son of the Upper East End. The whole northeastern ward of Gotham City, burdened with poverty from the Sprang to the Gotham River, was his. Jason would claim and defend his territory and protect his people in the only way that worked. Beating up bottom-feeders for corrupt cops to collect wasn’t enough. Letting monsters continue to live again and again was sickening. Crime couldn’t be eliminated, only controlled.
Batman had never understood that.
That naïve, trusting, wide-eyed little Robin was dead. He had died six long years ago. Those days were over. Gone and buried beside another murdered child.
His motorcycle roared under him as Jason returned to his safehouse. He sped east on the overpasses and the wind whipped through his clothes. On the seafront, the sun bled onto the water as it started to rise over Gotham’s twilight gloom.
Days of planning and preparing, and nights of establishing his rule, kept him distracted. Kept Jason from thinking too long and feeling too much. The marks of torture from his head to his feet. The hideous, twisted bomb and shrapnel scars on his back. The autopsy Y-incision scar on his front. He had been dead for six months when some cosmic fuck-up rose him like Lazarus under six feet of mud, clay, and wood. Then he spent three years as a zombie before Talia threw him into the Lazarus Pit and restored his mind. Jason couldn’t linger on the accident of his continued existence.
He had a new purpose, now. A better one.
The ache between his ribs didn’t mean anything. But if Jason had to give it a name in the hours when sleep evaded him, he might have called it loneliness.