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Chapter Text

THREE
YEARS
LATER

“So I guess what I’m asking is … do you want to try again? Do you - you still like milkshakes, right?”

Barbara tilts her head back, squinting through the late August leaves at the sun high overhead. They’re at the park - Dick brought a blanket and Barbara brought lunch and they’ve spent the afternoon shifting with the shade, Barbara working on a new algorithm she’s testing while Dick naps on and off in the still summer heat. It’s nice - they can both take a break from Gotham, a break from crime, and enjoy these last golden days of summer.

And now Dick is asking her out. Nearly five years after they decided to take a break (and it occurs to her suddenly that they never actually, officially broke up), Dick is asking her if she wants to start dating again. If she wants to get back together; if she’s ready to be in a relationship with Dick Grayson, and all that entails.

It’s a surprisingly appealing offer. But unfortunately it’s the entailing bit that she might have a small problem with.

“You were in Belgium last week, right?” Barbara asks after a moment, instead of answering. She spreads her fingers in the cool grass, watching the dappled shade dance over her skin. Beside her, Dick stills.

“And two months ago - those men they found, on top of the Trade Center. Did you know one of them has a dog?”

“Mean little beast,” Dick mutters, but he’s not looking at her anymore and his shoulders are hunched a little in defense.

Good.

“They got DNA from that ‘little beast’s’ mouth, Dick,” Barbara says. “And seriously: Rick Johnson? You need to come up with a better alias if you’re trying to book trans-Atlantic flights under the radar.”

Dick leans forward, arms wrapping around his knees as he starts picking at the grass. “Babs….”

“‘Thank you,’” Barbara prompts him. She reaches over to poke him, and when he glances up she smiles. “The words you want are thank you, Babs, you’re a life saver.”

“Thank you, Babs, you’re a life saver,” Dick dutifully repeats, his lips twitching up in response to her smile. Then he sighs. “I can’t. I know you want me too, I know you don’t like cleaning up after me - and seriously, thank you - but I need to be sure. I need to be sure he won’t come back, that once the Joker is gone no one will step in to fill his place.”

“Besides you, you mean,” Barbara says pointedly, but when Dick turns to her she waves him off. “I know why you’re doing this, you don’t have to explain it to me. But I don’t like it. And I’m not going to give us another go until you’ve put it behind you.”

Dick, strangely, perks up at that. “But after?” he asks, and now he’s smiling again, something small and hopeful. “When this is done, you want to try again - to go out with me?”

Yes, is what Barbara wants to say. She loves Dick; she loves the way he moves, the way he talks, the way he gets excited about Star Wars and puppies and movie nights with Tim. She loves the way he smiles, whenever he looks at her. But then she’ll go home, she’ll turn on the news and there will be the Joker; there will be Dick, wearing the face of his brother’s murderer. And she hates to know what that’s doing to him, and she just wants him to stop. So:

“Let the Joker die, Dick,” Barbara sighs. “Then we’ll talk about it.”

Jason’s new apartment isn’t bad. He thinks, a little grudgingly, that Talia could have sprung for a nicer place. But she’s only paying the first month’s rent; after that Jason’s on his own, and if he wants to he can leave Gotham and forget Batman and move out to somewhere even more remote than Smallville. Tinyville, maybe. Jason’s sure there’s a town called that somewhere; he almost pulls out his new phone just to check, but decides against it.

The thing is, he doesn’t actually want to leave (not yet, at least). See, Jason has a mission. Jason has a plan, one that revolves around Batman and Black Mask and, most importantly, the Joker.

Because the Joker isn’t dead. Because just last week there were reports of the Joker in Belgium, where he’d blown up an old nuclear plant (out of commission, thank god). Because Jason died, and Batman did nothing, and now there’s another fucking Robin.

Jason sets the last box down a little forcefully, kitchenware rattling inside. He takes a deep breath, trying to calm the anger roiling under his skin, and turns abruptly to the box he set by the couch. He stalks over, folds his legs so that he’s sitting on the floor, and opens the box.

Ten minutes later the floor is covered in photos and newspaper clippings and blue prints, and Jason is feeling a little bit calmer. He leans forward to snag a loose paper from where it’s trying to make its way under the sofa - an obituary, impersonal and formulaic, printed on the fourth page. It’s his obituary, and for a moment he just stares at the small headshot included at the top.

He looks young. Jason’s hands tighten on the paper and he narrows his eyes, trying to force himself to remember: where had this photo been taken? It looks professional, so - school? But was it his sophomore or freshman year? These little things, these moments that he should remember - they escape him. He can’t remember why he’d chosen that dark blue shirt; he doesn’t remember that little scar along his nose, or why he’d looked so goddamn happy.

To Jason, the photograph seems as impersonal as the obituary.

He stands and pins the paper in the center of the poster board he has nailed above the sofa. Next is a headline announcing Robin’s return; after that, the Joker’s escape from Arkham. Jason pins a map of the city over a map of the world, tracking Batman’s and the Joker’s movements in the years since his death, and by the time noon rolls around the poster board is full. Some papers have been cut so they don’t obscure the photos behind them, others take permanent positions while dark red yarn connects them to disparate events, everything coming together in a web to trap Jason’s victim: the Joker.

But this isn’t just about the Joker. This certainly isn’t about Jason - he doesn’t care that he died (he doesn’t, really). He doesn’t care that the Joker killed him, or that Batman wasn’t there to stop him. No. What Jason cares about is what happened after his death.

From where Jason stands, he has two options: fuck Bruce, fuck the new Robin, kill the Joker himself and get the hell out of Gotham. Or maybe (just maybe) … he could have it all back. Because he hasn’t forgotten everything. He remembers the fights, he remembers Bruce’s disappointment and Batman’s condemnation and those memories sting like nothing else. But. He also remembers stars. He remembers driving across a desert in Egypt, just Wonder Woman and Bruce and himself, and he remembers the look on Bruce’s face that was captured, however briefly, within Diana’s camera.

And he remembers Bruce telling him that the reason he was after the Joker was to avenge Barbara Gordon.

So Jason’s feeling generous. He’s done his research, he’s scouted out all the potential players, and he’s come up with a plan to give Bruce a second chance. He’s no stranger to mistakes himself, after all, and he’d gotten a second chance. So Jason isn’t going to kill the Joker. No, he’s going to capture the Joker and tie him up with a neat little bow and deliver him straight to Batman’s waiting hands. And then maybe Bruce will kill the bastard, and Jason will be able to go home.

There’s a new shipment coming into Gotham, one full of illegal goods and illegal arms and illegal who-knows-what-else. It’s addressed to the Black Mask, and it’s due to arrive at two tomorrow afternoon.

Jason decides that there is as good a place as any to get started.

“But why not?” Morgan whines, dragging her feet through the notebook aisle of Staples. “Why can’t I bring my ivy to school?”

Mommy gives her an unimpressed look. “You know why, Morgan.” She stops to consider a row of notebooks lined up neatly on the shelf. “Come look at these: which one do you want?”

Morgan doesn’t want to look at notebooks. She doesn’t want to do back-to-school shopping, she doesn’t want to go back to school. Ever. Even if it’s a new school: even if no one knows her there, even if Daddy promised to help her exact petty revenge if anyone bullies her ever again. It’s not that she doesn’t like school. It’s not that she doesn’t like learning about vikings, or fractions, or the way hermit crabs change their shells whenever they outgrow them. She likes school, she likes learning, but she hates hates hates Emma. She hates Jeremy and Isabel and Lucy and Kyle, and even though they won’t be there, even though she’s switching schools and switching grades, Morgan knows enough about the world to know that bullies exist everywhere.

They just might exist less if Mommy would let her bring poison ivy to school.

“Can I get some glitter pens?” Morgan asks, deciding to try her luck as she shuffles a step closer to the shelf. There are lots of notebooks: some have fairies, some have dinosaurs, some have abstract patterns in lots of different colors. Morgan’s gaze lands on one that has a Mammuthus primigenius on the front, and she considers it before reaching out to brush her fingers over one with a glitter-covered narwhal on the cover.

“We’ll go find the pens next,” Mommy promises. She turns slightly, looking up to consider the grown-up notebooks on the higher shelf. Morgan stares at her own options, agonizing over the racing car and the single great oak. What if she picks the wrong one? What if she picks one she doesn’t like and then she has to use it for the rest of the year; what if she picks one she does like, and it turns out to be silly? Morgan’s hand creeps up to her mouth, and she has to force it back to her side. Only babies suck their fingers. And Morgan is not a baby.

Morgan sniffs, and feels a single tear slip down her cheek.

“Oh, honey, come here,” Mommy says, and then she’s kneeling in the notebook aisle, pulling Morgan into a hug. “It’s going to be okay. I know it’s scary going to a new school, but I promise it will be better.”

“B-but how do you know?” Morgan sniffs, pulling away a bit to rub at her face.

“Daddy and I have talked to the principal and we’ve met with your teachers; they know what happened at your last school, and they’re there to help so that it doesn’t happen again. And you’ll be going into the fourth grade, with kids who are interested in the same things you are. No one will care that you already know about decimals and significant figures because they’ll know about them too. And if anyone asks how old you are, you know what you say?”

“I’m small for my age,” Morgan mumbles. Mommy reaches up to tuck Morgan’s hair behind her ear from where it’s fallen loose of her pony tail. She squeezes Morgan, and turns her gently back to the shelf, pointing at the notebooks at the bottom.

“What about this one, baby?” she asks, lifting a black and yellow book with Batman’s symbol on the front. “Your new school is in Gotham, everyone likes Batman in Gotham.”

That’s true, but there’s another book that’s caught Morgan’s eye instead. She pulls away from Mommy, lifting the red and blue S of Superman from the shelf.

“This one,” she says decisively, wiping away the last of her tears. “He has steel skin and he likes plants, just like me.”

Timothy Drake’s assassination is a complete disaster.

The fact that the teen survives is bad enough. The fact that Anthony Stark stumbles upon them in the act proves to be Damian’s greatest oversight of all, and the one he comes to regret the most.

So while Stark fusses over a recovering Drake, Bruce marches Damian into his study and closes the door with awful finality. Damian immediately starts cataloging the space for potential death threats. He is… mildly confused when he only spots five.

“I understand you might be finding it hard to adjust.” Bruce says, looking down coldly at Damian as they stand before the desk. (Damian is ready. He knows that look, he knows what failure precludes, and he will do everything to prove himself worthy of another chance). “Today, I will be lenient, because I understand that you are a product of your environment. But let me make myself clear, because it appears that I have thus far failed to do so. I will not tolerate fratricide. Should it come to my attention that you are treating Timothy or anyone else under my protection as I have seen you treat him today, there will be severe consequences. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Father.” Damian dutifully says. I won’t fail again, he dutifully translates.

The next time Damian fails to assassinate the Placeholder, he is assigned dish duty for the next three months, and made to get down on his knees and garden under the eagle-eyed supervision of the butler. 

“Six inches, Master Damian. That was five. Do it again.”

Damian yanks out the bulb of garlic, angrily measures, and then shoves it back into the damp earth. He can feel the mud soaking into his knees, his shoes are going to be ruined, none of this is fair in the least! They have a perfectly functioning mechanical dishwasher, and Damian’s fingers are going to be ruined, they’re going to be dirty wrinkled prunes forever because he refuses to put on those ridiculous yellow gloves like some lowly servant - 

He may have underestimated his father. It seems Bruce Wayne has an arsenal of cruel and unusual punishments, locked and loaded and aimed at his wayward sons with nothing short of lethal accuracy. 

Despite himself, a shiver of warm pride makes its way past the raging unfairness of it all. Ra’s al Ghul had been right to fear his father, and he is his father’s son, his heir - his blood. One day, he will be everything the Batman is; one day, he will be more, and no one will ever be able to make him do a single dirty dish or plant a single stinky bulb ever again.

John Jonah Jameson Jr. texts Peter at 11:30pm on a Sunday night. I’m assigning you a piece on crime rates in Crime Alley, he writes, the text vibrating Peter’s phone in his pocket. I want an update in my inbox by noon tomorrow.

Peter reads the texts, and can only really summon a small amount of annoyance. It’s the principle of the matter, really: he should be annoyed that the Daily Bugle wants him dead. He sets his phone face down on the rooftop beside him, and lifts his face in the cool night air.

Jameson probably wanted to catch him off guard. He probably wanted Peter to receive his texts at six, maybe seven tomorrow morning, and then rush to catch the bus to Gotham and scrounge up enough material for a substantial report by noon. But Peter isn’t asleep: he’s on the roof of the Empire State building, considering the merits of patrolling before going to bed.

It’s been a while. Peter goes back to his previous train of thought, eyes moving idly over the sparkling lights of New York City and ignoring the texts from his employer. He’s gone out a few times here and there, sometimes even while wearing the uniform. Sometimes he goes out as himself in the middle of the day (when he has time off, Jameson is horrible about assigning him extra work and then not paying overtime). He brings a backpack and a trash bag and picks up litter, or helps people search for missing pets. It’s not quite the same, but it’s nice in its own way. It reminds him a bit of when he was just starting out, when he and Dick would run the streets doing small-time hero stuff.

He holds out his wrist, idly aiming it in the direction of Long Island. Happy and May are there, engaged now; he’d sent them a bouquet, and a gift card that he couldn’t afford for May’s favorite restaurant. Up here, he sometimes pretends that none of it was real. That it would simply be a matter of swinging to their new apartment and crawling in the back window. He likes to pretend that he could go to the fridge and find some of May’s kitchen sink casserole waiting for him on a cold plate.

He doesn’t like to do that often, though.

What Peter would really like, he muses, is to stretch his legs. He still has the suit Tony made him, technically he could still be Spider-Man. Technically he still is, because he still goes out every now and then and stops crime. But it doesn’t feel the same, and Peter is starting to get … not tired, really. Not bored, certainly not defeated, maybe just - cramped. He feels like he’s being held back by invisible strings, like he’s living in a closet and every time he tries to stretch out his hands meet a wall. Like maybe he needs a change of scenery.

Peter’s phone buzzes again, this time an alarm - he always makes sure to set himself an alarm so that he goes to sleep at a reasonable hour on a work night. (Pff, Dick scoffs. You can catch up on sleep later, just check out a sleep loan.) (Peter’s pretty sure that’s not how sleep works, he vaguely remembers a unit on sleep debt from high school.) He lifts his phone to turn it off, and sees those words again, that text: Crime Alley.

That’s Gotham. That’s Batman and Robin’s territory, and under normal circumstances Peter might actually say no. He doesn’t want to trespass on Bat territory, because he knows better than anyone that Bats can be scary when they want to be. But. Batman never goes to Crime Alley (except when Jason was young and still lived with his father. Except when Bruce left the Batmobile out in the open, hoping that Jason would find it and find his way home). Certainly Bruce never goes to Crime Alley now, not after the infamous murder of his parents, not after Jason’s death and all the memories that place would bring.

So. Maybe Batman wouldn’t notice him anyway. And … Peter frowns, opening an email he just received from Jameson. Details on the assignment, sent at an inconvenient hour (for normal people, that is), indicating a decrease in local crime. Huh. In his whole history of being a superhero, throughout his friendship with both Dick and Jason, Peter has never heard of a notable decrease in crime in any of Gotham’s most notorious boroughs.

He should be annoyed, but suddenly Peter feels a little flip of excitement in the pit of his stomach. This could maybe be … fun? Having fun in Crime Alley, Peter thinks wryly, pulling up Google Maps to search for affordable motels. It’s obvious what’s going on here: Jameson wants to get rid of him. Peter’s heard cautionary tales of reporters who missed a major deadline, or messed up one-too-many coffee orders, or who made a joke in poor taste: they all got assigned to Crime Alley, and were never heard from again.

Peter sits forward, elbows on his knees as his feet dangle hundreds of feet in the air. He zooms in on the main street, and feels a small smile spread across his face. So Jameson wants him dead. That is good news, that is excellent news, because that means that Peter’s plan is working. It means that Jameson is getting nervous, and maybe a little bit desperate.

Peter never knew that revenge could taste so sweet.

He taps on a run-down motel in the heart of Crime Alley, ignoring all the condemning one-star reviews and all the creepy five star reviews, and looks down at the price tag: twenty dollars a night, perfect. Peter books himself a week, and sends the receipt to Henny from HR. Then he stands, bare toes curling over the edge of the roof, and stretches his arms to the sky.

Chapter Text

Dick creeps catlike through the furniture, silent as a shadow as he slinks from chaise lounge to sofa to curtained window. He moves on the balls of his feet, breathing in time with his steps. The gun is balanced with practiced ease in his hands, and he doesn’t make a sound as he raises the end to his shoulder and takes aim.

Click-thwip

Damian startles, badly. Dick almost feels bad, but any remorse is far outweighed by satisfaction as Damian flinches to the left and takes the rubber-and-foam dart square between the eyes.

Dick shoots again, and gets Damian in the chest. Click-thwip. This time in the leg, a lethal shot to the artery. Click-thwip click-thwip. Damian dodges the first only to smack straight into the second.

And then there’s a plateful of cookies being chucked at Dick’s head, and he’s forced to retreat behind the bookcase.

“You creeping coward, I hate you!”

“No you don’t!” Dick calls back, “And I just killed you five times.”

“That was four, you lying piece of filth -”

Click-thwip

The dart hits Damian in the temple, and Dick laughs.

“I demand a rematch,” Damian spits, furious. “This is most unfair, Father said I was safe, and I… I will not be bested by some common street performer!”

Dick almost feels bad. He doesn’t know the magnitude of the abuse Damian suffered growing up in the fabled League of Assassins, and he doesn’t know to what lengths the kid went to to survive his own childhood. But he sees the way Damian walks, and he sees the way he holds himself before his father, and he sees the way everything changes when he thinks he’s alone; Dick sees exactly how small Damian is when he thinks he’s hidden, and when he thinks he’s safe. So Dick doesn’t know what happened, but he doesn’t need to to know that it was bad, and to know that Damian will never be going back.

So Dick does feel bad… almost. But then Damian does something like try to kill Tim. And then he does something like insult Dick’s mom and dad, and Dick finds he doesn’t have quite as much sympathy as Bruce and Alfred seem to think he should have.

And he gets why they’re putting on kid-gloves, he really does, but as he crouches beneath a row of books and waits for Damian to try and push them on top of his head, he thinks that it actually might be achieving the opposite of what they are trying for. He thinks that while Alfred tries to coddle Damian and Bruce freaks out and tries to ignore the trauma into non-existance, Damian is slowly spiraling into a tightly wound ball of highly explosive anxiety. And that anxiety needs a target, and that target just so happens to be Tim.

So. Time to give the little assassin a more level-headed, situationally aware and better equipped target. Time to show Damian who’s really boss in this household (hint: it isn’t and never has been Bruce).

“A rematch, huh?” Dick says, trying to catch sight of Damian in the reflection in the window. The kid is good, and doesn’t let it happen. He’s also silent, steps falling soundlessly as he creeps towards his ambush, and Dick is left debating whether or not he should risk peering around the mahogany shelves to catch sight of his attacker.

Dick launches himself out of the way just as a marble bust comes crashing down where he’d been sat, one of Alfred’s philosophers crashing to the floor and shattering into a thousand jagged shards.

Click-thwip

Damian ducks for cover as the shot goes purposefully wide, giving Dick enough time to stand and stride over with as much purpose and swagger as he can manage. Damian straightens with a fierce scowl, hands clenched at his sides as he glares daggers.  

“A rematch,” Damian confirms, chin jutting out.

Dick smiles down at him. “No.”

There’s a moment of real effort, as an absolute rainbow of emotions flit across the kid’s face, when Dick is sure he’s about to witness an explosion. There’s fury, incredulity, fear and loathing. There’s a tidal wave of emotions that he’s sure Damian hasn’t the first clue what to do with, and then his expression slams down in a familiar display of dissociation, and a blank mask falls into place.

“Well then,” Damian says, and gives a stiff bow, something Dick remembers learning and subsequently mocking at the age of eleven. “What is the price of my failure?”

“Lunch,” Dick says, relaxing the nerf-gun at his side and offering a hand. “Alfred’s preparing it, and Tim’s gonna be there. Come eat with us?”

The mask wavers, but only slightly. “Fine.”

Damian takes Dick’s hand.

A second later there’s a crash as Damian flips Dick onto his back, and then a strangled cry as Dick rolls, yanking Damian with him until they’re both tumbling across the carpet. A knife appears, which Dick dodges. And then Damian pulls a move that Dick knows he learned from Talia, and Dick counters with a move he learned from Bruce, and instead of taking a fist to the throat, Dick delivers a knee to the stomach and lands on top of Damian, pinning him down.

It’s much easier holding down Damian than it had been holding down Bruce. Dick stares down into hate-filled green eyes, and says, “You thought that would be easy, didn’t you.”

It’s not really a question, but Damian sees fit to answer anyways. “You are beneath me, Grayson. Your blood is inferior to mine in every way, you are a coward and a half-wit and an uncultured leech -”

Dick laughs. “Beneath you?” he interrupts. “I don’t think so, Dami. Who do you think just won that fight? Twice?”

“I will ruin you, I will make your life miserable, I will banish you from this house and end your pathetic life -”

“No you won’t,” Dick says, letting up somewhat on his grip and holding Damian’s gaze, staring him down. “Who do you think taught me everything I know? You forget that I too was trained by the League of Assassins; that I was trained by the best of them, and I was trained with kindness. I think this will not be so easy as you had imagined.”

Dick won’t go easy on Damian. He won’t scold him for violence, he won’t softly correct a vitriolic tantrum, because Damian won’t understand. Damian understands survival of the fittest, and he understands an eye for an eye, and he understands violent perfection and deadly grace. 

At Dick’s insistence, Bruce had taught him everything he knew. If Dick wanted to go out on the streets, he needed to know how to handle himself. And that meant days at a time of disciplined training, and it meant Bruce asking the impossible, and Dick delivering. This is how you stun, Bruce had instructed, this is how you cripple, and this is how you kill. Do you understand? Bruce moved like the night and Dick moved after, silence and shadows and hunters through the dark. 

So Dick knows exactly what kind of training Damian has been through, and he knows what Damian needs, and it’s not a pat on the head and it’s not a lecture and it’s not do better. What Damian needs is direction and focus and a target; what he needs is a childhood, and space to grow and unlearn all the habits that have kept him alive the past ten years. And maybe Bruce learned something by raising Dick and raising Jason - maybe he makes less mistakes now than he did back then - but Dick learned something as well, and he learned that there are some things Bruce will never understand. Childhood is one of those things; unstructured chaos is another.

It’s a very good thing that Dick had Tony; it’s a very good thing that Damian has Dick. Which brings them to foam bullets and hug attacks and passively annoying the shit out of one Damian Wayne in order to show him that there are less destructive, completely pain free methods of dealing with one’s frustration.

“So,” Dick says at last, rolling off Damian and pushing himself to his feet. “Lunch? I bet you can’t fit an entire apple in your mouth.”

Damian tries to sneak-attack Dick three times from the west wing reading nook to the dining room. Dick side-steps every time, and only on the fourth does he step forward just a second too late, as Damian leaps at him from behind and wraps small fingers around his throat.

“Master Damian!”

Dick chokes, gagging dramatically as Damian slides guiltily to the floor.

“I shall be informing Master Bruce of this young man, make no mistake. Master Dick, are you alright?”

“I think I have a bruised trachea, Alfie,” Dick rasps, winking at Tim and sending a covert smirk at Damian. “I think ice-cream would be just the thing to numb the pain.”

There’s a very brief pause, during which Dick is certain a lesser man would have rolled his eyes. Alfred only nods politely, however, and gets busy coddling Dick.

Damian, to say the least, is furious.

And then halfway through the meal Dick neatly and quietly swaps plates with Damian, earning a brief look of utter bafflement from the kid (and a longer one from Tim). Dick smiles guilelessly back, and when Damian takes his first cautious bite of the strawberry-chocolate sundae, Dick decides to count it as a win.

He also counts it as a win when, not two hours later, Damian gets an apple stuck in his mouth and has to sit still as Alfred sticks a knife in his mouth and carefully and gently cuts it out.

“Why?” MJ groans, throwing herself onto her bed and burying her face in her pillow. Behind her, there’s a series of thumps and squeaks as Ned drops his bag on the floor and settles into her desk chair. “ Why does Professor Himmel always assign these things last minute?”

“Dispute it,” Ned suggests. “Take it up with the registrar.”

MJ considers it, briefly. It would definitely be within her rights, and she’s done it before (first year Introductory Law; quite probably the reason she had received an A in that class instead of an A+). The thing is, though, she’s not actually that upset. An independent project instead of a final exam, a chance to get a head start on her thesis for next year: but it wasn’t in the syllabus, and on principle MJ hates it when professors blindside her with extra-curricular opportunities that weren’t in the syllabus. Maybe she’ll do the project, and then take it up with the Dean.

She lets out an incoherent groan, and rolls over. Then she lifts her head to peer at Ned, who’s currently rifling through her desk.

“What are you looking for?” she asks suspiciously.

“Pencil,” Ned hums. “All I have are pens.”

“Top drawer on the right,” MJ sighs, and lets her head fall back down. She stares for a while at her ceiling, which is covered in a multitude of sticky notes - basic principles, reminders about assignments, observances of her fellow classmates. Anything that might be useful in the future, color-coded by relative importance on any given day.

There’s a pause in Ned’s rustling, and a minute later he says “Hey. Do you still do this?”

There’s something off about his voice, and MJ props herself up on her elbows so that she can see him better. He’s flipping through one of her old sketchbooks - from her senior year of high school, if she remembers correctly.

“Draw people in crisis?” MJ asks. “Not as much. It’s fun going to the library during exam season, though.”

“These’re good,” Ned says seriously. MJ narrows her eyes, uncomfortable with the praise and unsure how to respond. She knows they’re good. “Maybe you should do something like this, for your project.”

“Oh, sure,” MJ says, and rolls her eyes. “Hey Professor, let me just draw everyone in your class, including you. Are you stressed about anything in particular? Let me see if I can capture it on this piece of paper here, and you can let me know how I did.”

“I’m serious!” Ned protests, but he’s smiling too. He flips a few pages, and pauses. “Who’s this?”

MJ pulls her legs in and leans forward, propping an elbow on the desk. Unlike the rest of the drawings in her notebook, this one doesn’t look like someone having a rough day. It’s the head and torso of a boy, curly head and twinkling eyes, and it looks like she scribbled some math pun onto his shirt where it fades into the edge of the page. And unlike everyone else in her book, it’s not someone she recognizes.

“Dunno,” she says. “Probably just someone I saw on the street.” Something doesn’t feel right about that though, and there’s something else she can’t quite put her finger on. A feeling, something warm and soft…. She reaches unconsciously for her necklace, running her thumb over the jagged broken edge.

Ned flips a few more pages, and stops again. It’s the same boy, but this time there’s more. He’s standing on the edge of a tall building, a troubled look on his face. The sun, behind him, sends out eight rays in such a way that, if she squints, make him seem almost like a spider.

Again Ned flips the pages, and MJ wants to tell him to stop. She wants to snatch the book out of his hands and bury it in the bottom of her suitcase, out of sight and out of mind. Because it’s not only warmth she feels when she sees this stranger captured in her own hand. It’s grief, as well.

This time the sketch features two people: Ned drooped over his computer in the cafeteria, the boy passed out on the table across from him. Ned looks up in confusion, and MJ imagines that she can see her own grief reflected in his eyes.

“It’s stupid, anyway,” MJ says sharply, reaching over to pluck the book from Ned’s hands. “Just a hobby. Nothing was ever going to come of it. And don’t you have homework?”

Ned’s eyes widen, and just like that the matter is forgotten. “Yeah, crap, I have that assignment due tomorrow,” he says, and yanks his computer out of his backpack. A few seconds later he adds “Barbara says hi, by the way.”

“Tell her you have homework, and to stop distracting you,” MJ informs him, and Ned winces guiltily before switching tabs on his computer. MJ scoots back on her bed, hugging the old sketchbook to her chest as she reaches to draw her own laptop out of her bag. She can’t help the resigned sigh that escapes her as she pulls up the independent project rubric to reread the description and requirements.

Some time later, Ned sits back from his computer and raises his arms to stretch above his head. “I still think you should, you know,” he says, and it takes a minute for MJ to figure out that he’s talking about her project. “It’s kind of like being a sketch artist for the police, right? And you really liked that class on criminal profiling you took last semester. You could do something like that.”

MJ considers it for a while. She did enjoy that class, and she does want to specialize in criminal defense.… “Yeah,” she says finally, decisively. “Yeah, maybe I will.”

The more she thinks about it, the more MJ realizes that Ned might be on to something. She doodles her way through social anthropology, covertly searches Gotham City records during neuroscience of psychology, and by the time her statistics class roles around she has an outline in one document and a drafted proposal in the other.

MJ wants to do her undergraduate thesis on criminal psychology, she decides. And wants a challenge; that’s the point of college, isn’t it? So she does her research and fleshes out her proposal, and books an appointment with her undergraduate advisor.

A week later MJ sits in Professor Himmel’s office, seeing her proposal reflected in the older woman’s glasses and trying not to get her hopes up too high (despite the fact that this, right here, is exactly what she wants to do).

“Well, I think this is a very promising idea you have, Michelle,” Professor Himmel says at last. She pushes her glasses up her nose, leaning forward slightly to squint at the screen.

“I was hoping to use police records to create a comprehensive history of a known criminal’s activity,” MJ explains. “And then I would make my own observations, get some experience in the field to create a new profile based on my findings.”

Professor Himmel glances up. “You were hoping to do this with an active criminal?”

MJ blinks, momentarily taken aback. What else would she be doing? Before she can figure out how to respond, though, Professor Himmel continues. “Well of course I can’t make any promises, we don’t usually allow undergraduates to perform research like this in person, but you are a very promising student.” She glances at her computer on the desk, which MJ is suddenly acutely aware must also be displaying her current transcript. “Did you have someone in mind?”

“The Joker,” MJ says, firmly and confidently. Like this isn’t an unreasonable request at all.

Now it’s Professor Himmel’s turn to look taken aback. She sets MJ’s proposal slowly on her desk, then reaches up to remove her glasses and fold them neatly into her shirt collar. “Goodness, Michelle,” she says finally, sounding for all the world like MJ just asked if she and Big Foot were friends. “Absolutely not.”

MJ has never been good at taking no for an answer. And besides, it’s not like she needs her advisor’s permission. She needs the registrars permission, sure, but if Professor Himmel won’t supervisor her she’ll just get someone else.

It might help, she realizes, if she had an endorsement from someone on the GCPD.

“Hey, Babs, so, I had this idea.”

“What sort of idea are we talking about here?” Barbara wants to know. It’s not an unreasonable question; MJ knows that Ned’s ideas are often wildly speculative if not downright absurd, and MJ knows herself well enough to know that her own thoughts are more than capable of trending that way as well.

“I want to do my thesis on criminal psychology,” MJ starts. She makes her way to an alcove, so the tide of students just released from class won’t knock her over. She adjusts the strap of her messenger bag, and resists the urge to clear her throat. Get it out. “I want to do it on the Joker.”

Silence falls on the other end of the line. MJ knows that Barbara has a history with the Joker (the entirety of Gotham has a history with the Joker, which is part of what makes him so fascinating in the psychology department) but for Barbara in particular this is a personal matter. MJ is asking for her help, as much as she is indirectly asking for her permission. “I’ve done some preliminary research, and there have been loads of case studies; people have labeled him with bipolar disorder, various psychopathies, one guy even suggested dissociative identity disorder.” (That same person suggested that Batman was one of his personalities, but for the sake of Science MJ couldn’t discount it.) “I’m trying to convince my advisor to let me do it.”

“That’s… that would be interesting,” Barbara says, although she sounds a bit uncertain. MJ barrels forward.

“I wanted to include personal observations in my methods, but my advisor thinks I’m crazy. I thought it might help if someone with connections endorsed me, so I was hoping you could put me in contact with someone at the GCPD?” She takes a quiet breath. “Like maybe your dad?”

“Joker’s not someone you want to mess with, MJ.”

Barbara doesn’t sound enthusiastic about the idea. Which isn’t surprising, MJ didn’t expect her to be, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t disheartening. “I know. And I’d take all the precautions, everything, it’s just -”

Why Joker? Professor Himmel had asked her. It was strange question, not least because it was almost rhetorical, in a way. The Joker was the most storied villain of Gotham, the most ruthless and chaotic; even though Bane had threatened annihilation, even though Riddler and Killer Croc and some guy calling himself the Mad Hatter regularly made the regional news, it was somehow the Joker responsible for the greatest death and destruction in Gotham. The expected answer was he’s the worst; he’s the most interesting; he is the greatest unknown. And that all held true in MJ’s mind, but the real reason she wanted to study the Joker was because it was personal. MJ had a history with the Joker, MJ’s friends had a history with the Joker: if she could figure him out, maybe she could put a stop to people like him. If she could figure out why he did what he did, maybe she could help institute policies which would prevent anyone else from straying down the same path.

“-this matters to me,” MJ says. “This - the Joker - is something I care about.”

For a moment there’s silence in MJ’s ear. Then Barbara says “I’m sorry, MJ. I’m going to be frank with you, and tell you to pick another thesis. You don’t mess with the Joker, and I’ve lost too much to him already.”

“Oh,” MJ says, feeling herself deflate. “Well. Okay.”

She’ll just … figure something else out, then.

Wayne and Stark aren’t anywhere near each other on the attendance list, yet somehow the two children end up seated next to each other anyway. When the teachers reflect back on this grave oversight, it will be determined that the leading culprit had either been Sasha Sinsky’s germophobia, or Hunter Williams’ anxiety. And with Stark trailing dirt and flowers and Wayne dialing the intensity up to two hundred, there’s really no wonder the others had allowed the swap.

“You have just become my next target.” Damian hisses to the girl seated next to him.

“Would you like a flower?” Morgan asks, pulling a crumpled parsnip from her pocket. “Careful not to let the sap touch you, it’s poisonous.”

Chapter Text

The first time Damian tries to assassinate Morgan is three days after they meet, when she has him cornered in an art supply closet.

“ - and the red glitter, and the green glitter, and that gluestick - no, that one, yeah - and the colored paper too, and those squiggly scissors - ”

“Stop following me around!” Damian yells, and tries to wrap a yellow pipe cleaner around her throat just to get her to shut up. Which is about the point she shoves a handful of shiny green leaves in his face, and Ms. Art-Teacher arrives to figure out what’s taking them so long.

Throughout the course of the next few hours, Damian finds himself discovering, on a very intimate level, just what it is Poison Ivy derived her name from.

It’s just after four in the afternoon and Tony has just retreated to his workshop after preparing Morgan her after-school snack when Bruce calls him.

“Yes?” he says, putting the phone on speaker and setting it beside him on the workbench. “How goes it in the mighty house of Wayne?”

“Tony,” Bruce says, and to Tony’s ears he sounds tired. “My son has just informed me that Morgan Stark is a rising contender for the Demon’s Hand, and should be closely monitored as a threat to our world.”

“That’s funny,” Tony says. “My daughter just told me that her new best friend is ‘an actual real-life ninja,’ and that he promised to show her how an assassination works.”

Bruce is silent for a moment. “I will have words with him on the matter -” he starts, resigned, but Tony interrupts.

“What do you say to a playdate?” he asks. “Your place, tomorrow afternoon. Did you know this is the first friend Morgan has ever actually wanted to play with?”

“Damian has knives, Tony. He is a League trained assassin.”

“Yes,” Tony says, idly scratching at a scar on his withered hand. “And Morgan’s a Stark. I’m sure they’ll get along wonderfully.”

“And this is Toxicodendron radicans, and this is Toxicodendron rydbergii, and I don’t have any Toxicodendron orientale, but Mommy said we could order some on Amazon.”

Damian ignores her, peering through the banister of the stair with a narrow-eyed look of deep concentration. Morgan spreads out her ivies on the stairs and then leans over Damian’s shoulder, squinting through the dim lighting. There’s a man sitting upside-down on one of the sofas, phone held above his head as he texts someone.

“Who’s that?”

“Ssh! That’s Richard.”

“Is he supposed to be here?”

There’s a long silence before Damian says, very grudgingly, “Father has nothing against it.”

As they watch, Richard lackadaisically rolls onto his stomach, ribs digging into the cushions as his feet tip, and then he slides gracelessly to the floor, landing with a muted thump on the hardwood boards. He reaches under the couch and pulls out a bag of jellybeans. Damian scoffs, and crosses his arms.

Footsteps echo from the hallway, and Damian goes absolutely still, eyes sharp and intent as Bruce appears in the doorway. Despite herself, Morgan feels herself shrinking in, growing quieter and smaller as she catches onto the meaning of the game, and the fact that they’re actually spying right now.

She can do this; she can make friends and play with Damian, and be quiet as a mouse as they spy on the grown-ups.

“Dick. What are you doing?”

Richard (Dick?) looks up and smiles, phone dropping to his chest. “Bruce! Jellybean?”

“No, thank you. Have you seen Tony?”

“Nope. Why, have you lost him?”

Bruce sighs. “I made the mistake of indulging him. He took that as permission to reconstruct the Batbike; it is now upright, and has two wheels that share a common axle…”

There’s a moment of incredulous silence, and then Dick is scrambling to his feet, jellybeans forgotten as he stares at Bruce. “Oh my god,” he says, a grin slowly growing across his face. “Bruce, does Tony have a moped? Did Tony build you a Batmoped?!”

Bruce shoves his hands in his pockets, and looks out the window. Dick cackles.

“And now he’s loose on the grounds and you can’t find him,” Dick continues. “Does Alfred know? Okay okay, I’ll help you look. Jesus, does Tim know? No? Alright, I’m calling in the cavalry.”

Their voices fade, and Morgan and Damian are left spying on an empty room, nothing but a light breeze to disturb the scene below them.

“Was I quiet?” Morgan asks, getting up and following as Damian marches down the stairs.

“Yes,” Damian replies absentmindedly. He comes to a stop before the couch, staring at it with a strange expression on his face. Morgan doesn’t wait and throws herself onto it, spreading out her arms to run along the satin covers. After another brief hesitation Damian joins her, perching precariously on the very edge.

“I’m good at spying too,” Morgan informs him, as he slowly and carefully spins around, propping his feet up on the back and letting his head dangle over the floor. Morgan follows suit, kicking up her feet. She’s wearing her gray socks today, the too big ones Happy knit her for Christmas a year ago. 

“You’re not as good as Richard is,” Damian says, and even upside-down he holds himself with a stiff composure, arms stiff at his side as he stares at the ceiling. Before Morgan can refute this, he slowly flips onto his stomach and slithers to the floor in a direct imitation of Dick. Thump. He reaches out and takes the discarded jellybeans, holding them above his head.

“What are you doing?” Morgan asks.

Damian frowns at her, before slowly holding out the bag. “Jellybean?” he asks, somewhat doubtfully.

“Ooh, sure!” Morgan says, and she reaches her hands down to the floor and tucks her knees to her chest, and does a somersault to land next to Damian. Damian offers her a black one, and then takes one of the same color for himself. 

“Do you know what a moped is?”

There’s a high pitched shriek from the garden, and then a bone-chilling wail.

Tony stumbles to his feet as Bruce disappears out the door. He catches up to him in Alfred’s herb garden, to the sight of Alfred holding a pitchfork-wielding Wayne in one hand and a sobbing Stark by the collar of her shirt in the other. Bruce is paused comically at the garden’s entrance, and seems to be fighting the sudden, violent urge to flee in the opposite direction.

He doesn’t, and instead strides purposefully onward, only a slight hitch in his step betraying his hesitation.

“What is the meaning of this?!” Bruce thunders, in that specific way he has of never raising his voice yet somehow invoking the belling of all the hounds of hell. Damian goes stock still in Alfred’s grasp, and even Morgan gives a startled hiccup, and stops trying to twist her way free.

“He t-t-tried to k-kill me!” Morgan starts.

“She tried to kill me first!!” Damian yells.

“No I didn’t! It was o-only a Death Cap, you didn’t have to eat it-”

“You said some people aren’t allergic, you said -”

“I did not! That’s poison ivy, you im-imbecile!”

Morgan aims a kick at Damian, and Damian swings the pitchfork. Alfred tightens his grip and clears his throat, and lifts his gaze to give both Bruce and Tony an exceedingly judgemental look.

“Did you eat any?” Tony demands, already reaching for his wrist. “FRIDAY, call Poison Control-”

“Damian, if you don’t drop that pitchfork in the next two seconds, there will be severe consequences. Morgan, behave yourself. I expected better of you both.” Bruce steps forward and takes Morgan’s arm, dragging her out of range of Damian’s impromptu weapon and pushing her in Tony’s direction. Damian drops the pitchfork as though it’s made of molten metal, and it lands with a clang on the crooked cobblestones. 

“Master Damian has not ingested any of Miss Morgan’s mushrooms,” Alfred says, finally releasing both children. “I dare say he has better sense than that. Both are unharmed, although I think that is only because of my expedient interference.” Alfred raises an eyebrow and continues, speaking to all four of them as his eyes move from one to the next; “I trust such an incident will not happen again on my grounds. Am I clear?”

As though this is somehow Tony’s fault; as though it is somehow Bruce’s.

“Morgan, apologize to Alfred.” Tony says, so he doesn’t have to. 

“Sorry, Alfred,” Morgan says dutifully, sending a nasty, teary-eyed look at Damian. 

There’s a moment of silence, and then Bruce clears his throat and Damian says, with about as much grace as a fish out of water: “My apologies, Pennyworth.”

After fifteen minutes, Damian has to grudgingly admit that he is impressed with the Stark’s residence. Presenting a modest exterior, it hides a wealth of technology and information that, if it were to fall into the wrong hands, would spell catastrophe not only for North America, but quite probably for the world at large.

This is something Ra’s al Ghul would appreciate; it’s something Damian can appreciate (something that he thinks his father should perhaps appreciate a little more, since he has done absolutely nothing to curb Morgan’s burgeoning criminal career. Maybe once he realizes how much power his contemporary has, he will be more inclined to pay heed to said contemporary’s daughter).

They have a self-taught, evolving AI. The house is filled with holograms and bizarre gadgets that blend seamlessly with the more rustic furniture, holograms popping up from wooden tables and a woman’s disembodied voice floating from the rough-sanded rafters.

“This is where my plants are,” Morgan says, pointing. “And there’s my doll’s house; it’s about to be flooded with lava.”

“Mm,” Damian mumbles distractedly, squinting at the statue of a goat perched on the coffee table. Is that a secret lever? Is it a hidden camera, or a microphone or both? Damian doesn’t trust it one bit, whatever the case.

“This is the photo album Happy made me,” she continues, shoving something heavy into Damian’s hands. “Look, there’s me when I was a baby!”

“That’s stupid,” Damian begins, but the words trail off as his eyes find the photo; specifically, the people in it.

There’s Morgan, a little toddler with a ponytail sticking straight up from her head and a big grin spread across her face. She has a red elephant tucked under one arm and a sparkling unicorn clutched in the other. Behind her, spreading a pair of silk wings behind her back is a young man, a teen Damian finds he recognizes.

“Who is that?” he asks, even though the question is rhetorical. Even though he knows exactly who that is, because isn’t that his brother? Isn’t that… ?

Damian has seen many faces enter the League, but he has known only a few to leave by any means other than death. He remembers following Talia through the winding halls, creeping from room to room because he’d known she had another project, another son taking her away from him - and there he’d been; this boy, this stranger from another land, who never spoke and hardly moved and was still somehow favored.

He hadn’t died. He’d left through another door, Talia’s words whispered in his ear, and never returned. He’d been, for a short time, Damian’s brother, second of a set collected and polished to a shine by Talia al Ghul’s careful hands. And now here he is again, here in this photo in Morgan’s house in New York.

A plastic crown sits nestled among black curls, a beaming smile pulls at freckles scattered across his dimpled cheeks. He looks happier here than Damian had ever seen him in Nanda Parbat and Damian is struck by a sudden, ugly jealousy.

“That’s Jason,” Morgan says, her voice jarring him from his thoughts as she peers seriously over his shoulder. “He died.”

That’s not true. 

“He’s not dead,” Damian says somewhat disjointedly. Damian had been there when he’d left, he had been there for the aftermath. Not only is Jason not dead, Jason is now alive in the same way that Grandfather is alive. And if Father is not aware of this…

“He is,” Morgan insists. “He died when I was - when I was five. Mommy and Daddy told me. And he has a grave, too.”

“He can’t be dead-”

“Are you sure you don’t just have an imaginary brother that looks like him?” 

The statement is so jarring that for a moment, Damian’s mind is completely blank. 

“What?”

“Well, I have an imaginary brother. His name is Peter, like Peter Rabbit.”

“He’s not imaginary, Morgan, he’s alive and-” 

And Damian doesn’t know what the plan is. He doesn’t know why Talia let Jason go, he doesn’t even know where she got him in the first place. He knows that Grandfather was furious when Jason left, and he knows why. He knows, looking at this photo, that Jason had had a life before (something Damian never had). He knows that he was part of Morgan’s life, and he can guess that Jason is Jason Todd, and was part of Father’s life too. 

“We need to find him,” he concludes, making a conscious effort to loosen his white-knuckled grip on the photo book. If they can find him Damian will be able to gauge how much of a threat he is, and maybe if he is the one to bring him home Father will finally deem him worthy. “We need to find him before Father does.”

Morgan is quiet as she considers the photo, chewing on the inside of her lip. After a minute she lifts her eyes to his.

“Okay,” she says at last, voice slow and quiet and almost condescendingly gentle. “Okay. But if your brother’s not imaginary, then neither is mine. We’ll find Jason, but that means we have to find Peter too.” 

Damian can do this. He can make a compromise, it’s not that hard. He narrows his eyes and holds out his hand. “Deal.”

They shake, and then Damian slips the photo from its sheath and slips it into his pocket.

“So.” Damian confirms, once they’ve adjourned to Morgan’s bedroom. “I have a missing brother, and you have a… missing brother.”

“Yes.” Morgan replies, looking at him with those idiot soft eyes. “And I can’t find mine, and you can’t find yours.”

It’s not as simple as this, but Damian decides to prioritize. “How about this: in order to fairly distribute our resources, we’ll take turns looking for each. We’ll look for Jason one week, and then we’ll look for Peter the next.” This will ensure that Damian can use both Father’s Batcomputer and Stark’s AI in his search.

Morgan nods thoughtfully. “Mutually assured satisfaction,” she agrees.

That’s not how that saying goes. “That’s not how that saying goes.”

She gives him a look . It’s one of those I’m-right-you’re-wrong looks that completely destabilizes him and makes him question his entire reality. He grounds himself, and scowls. 

“I’m going to get my knives.” he snaps, taking back control. “Go get your Toxicodendrons. We shall meet in ten.” And then, like the mature grown-up adult he is, just as he’s about to go down the stairs and she’s about to go into her closet and they’re almost out of earshot, he yells back:

“It’s called mutually assured destruction!” 

And then he bolts.

Here is what Tony is doing. He is sitting at the table in one of Wayne Manor’s five kitchens, clutching a mug of coffee in his hand as he stares at Timothy Drake doing his homework. “Remedial,” the boy had explained when Tony expressed his interest upon entering the kitchen ten minutes ago. “Because I missed the midterm. Do you want some coffee?”

Here is what Tony should be doing: he should be walking out to the rose garden to locate his wayward daughter and her assassin-in-training best friend. Because they probably are not in the rose garden like they are supposed to be - more likely, Morgan is letting herself be talked into sky-diving adventures or escape-artist style “training” drills. Or maybe she’s even now convincing Wayne Junior to sample the jimson’s weed Alfred has (for some unfathomable reason) been studiously ignoring out by the shed.

On second thought, maybe he really should go check on them. There’s absolutely no good reason for him to be sitting in the kitchen of the east wing with Robin the Third -

“What do you mean the Codex is here?!”

- except for its proximity to Bruce’s study. Where Bruce and Clark are currently discussing (read: violently debating) something that Tony is definitely not interested in. Nope. He’s retired, he’s a permanent invalid, he’s a family man now, he said he didn’t want to be involved when Bruce invited him into the study after Clark arrived all serious on his doorstep. Tony is done saving the world.

Timothy’s phone buzzes on the table, and they both glance at it. Timothy reaches over to tap the screen, then stands, tucking it into his pocket and lifting his mug from the table. “Bruce wants me,” he explains at Tony’s questioning look. Then adds “This sounds big.”

Well damn.

Here is what Tony should not be doing. He should not be pulling out his own phone to tunnel into SWORD’s servers and try and figure out what could have happened to make Clark don his business suit on a Sunday. He should not (when this fails to turn up anything noteworthy) be abandoning his coffee in favor of creeping down the hall to press an ear to the door of Bruce’s study.

“- have been unable to reach the Atom. Dr. Pim and his team have been contacted, but I haven’t heard anything from them yet either. I thought it prudent to inform the other members of the Justice League, and to ensure the Codex was still secure.”

“But you said the world machine was destroyed,” Timothy says slowly. “Does the technology exist to build another?”

“Kryptonians were like fucking rabbits in their hay day,” Bruce growls, and Tony doesn’t need to be in the room to imagine the look he must be giving Clark right now. “All they need to do is find another failed colony and take what they need from there. This galaxy alone must be full of them.”

“So it’s only a matter of time,” Clark confirms. “They’ll find another world engine, fix it up, and bring it back here. And this time they know about me. This time, they’ll be ready.”

Now, just because Tony’s out of the game doesn’t mean he’s out of date. He still reads the news - he still chats with the Justice League, with who’s left of the Avengers. He still hacks SWORD’s mainframe every once in a while, just to keep them on their toes. And, well, he’s always been a genius. But even if he weren’t, Tony thinks, he would still be able to figure out what’s going on. He would still realize that SWORD’s pet Kryptonians must have escaped, that the Atom had something to do with it, and that they are now searching for another terraforming machine to level the Earth and remake it in their own image.

As though they were gods. As though they have any right to decide the fate of Tony’s fucking planet.

It must be saying something that Timothy is the only one who looks surprised when Tony slams open the door. Clark barely glances at him (the bastard probably knew he was there the entire time) and Bruce only turns to give him a look that’s partly exasperated, but mostly just judgmental. What took you so long?

“And these Kryptonians think us puny humans won’t fight back?” Tony demands, stalking into the room and throwing himself into the final seat by the window, the empty one between Batman and Robin. He folds his hands in his lap, fingers of his right dancing lightly over the watch on his left as he levels them all with the most disdainful look he can muster. “Hell no.”

Chapter Text

A Second Blip in Our Future?
Arrival of Aliens Sparks Worldwide Panic and Speculation

The arrival of a Kryptonian delegation in Earth’s airspace earlier this week has caused widespread alarm throughout the world’s population. After their first contact just last night, this alarm has in many places turned to panic.

“We’ve already been through this,” Jack Cassidy, a businessman from LA, remarks. “We see aliens in the sky, and we know what’s coming.”

“We offer to take over stewardship of this planet,” the Kryptonians stated in their public speech on worldwide news networks. “We will reverse harms already committed to planetary cycles, and will provide a standard of sustainable living which Humans will be able to follow.”

“This could be a good thing,” Dr. Harla Jensen, a climate advisor to the President, said earlier this morning. “If they have technologies which could help us battle climate change, then I’m all for peaceful collaborations.”

 While some see this as an opportunity, others are more suspicious of the aliens’ offer. “Take over stewardship?” Anika Keiner asked skeptically. “That sounds a hell of a lot like ‘Take over Earth.’ Didn’t we see this when the colonists came to America four hundred years ago? Sounds like history is repeating itself, to me.”

Understandably, many parallels have been drawn between this event and that of nine years ago, when the alien Thanos snapped fifty percent of the universe’s population out of existence. Many people are preparing for an apocalypse; school attendance is down as much as twenty percent in some districts, and in rural areas stores are beginning to ration the sale of essential products such as gasoline and toilet paper.

“We have everything under control,” was the statement issued by the President to the American people shortly after the Kryptonians’ broadcast went viral.

The Justice League and the Avengers are both confirmed to be on the response team. “We have faced threats like this before,” Superman reassured Earth’s population. “So far communications remain peaceful, but the Justice League is fully prepared to protect our planet should this change.”

“This is our home,” Captain America said, “And by God we are going to defend it.”

Although the full intentions of the Kryptonian delegation are still murky, some people are hopeful.

“It’s a big universe,” Dr. Jensen said. “It’s about time we became a part of it.”

“And this is the dinosaur,” Damian explains, pointing. “My Placeholder tried to manipulate me into befriending him, so I pushed him off it. Unfortunately, he survived.” He smirks. “Although he does seem to have learned his lesson.”

“Tyrannosaurus rex,” Morgan says wisely, staring up at the way the scales glitter in the dim light of the cave. “They were killed by a meteor- ite.”

“And these are my swords,” Damian proudly points out, gesturing to the triple-padlocked and electronically and magnetically secured case. “Father has banned me from using them in his presence.”

Morgan creeps up to the case, raising both hands to press against the glass. She leans in, pressing her nose up to it as well, and watches as her breath fogs across it. The swords are shiny and sharp and nearly as long as Morgan is tall, and she thinks that if she were to bring one home, Daddy might confiscate it as well. Teachable moment, he might say, Don’t wield a weapon you can’t use.

“And this is my suit,” Damian continues, and when Morgan turns he’s standing in front of another glass case, within which sits a suit of red and green and gold. Robin, Morgan knows. Damian wants to be Robin. “Not this exact one, of course,” Damian speculates, eyeing the thing dubiously. “Mine would be far more practical, and I would need a scabbard for my sword, and a hood as well to protect my head -”

On one side of the cave is a giant river, which Morgan knows better than to try and cross. On the other side is a steep cliff face disappearing into the ceiling, and then there’s the waterfall leading to the outside and the stairs leading up. 

It would be cool, Morgan thinks, if they found a cave full of crystals. But the only way the cave extends is on the other side of the river, and Morgan knows better than to try and cross it.

“What’s on the other side of the river?” Morgan asks, and Damian cuts off, tearing his eyes from the computer displays.

“What?” he asks, eyes narrowing. “What do you mean?”

Morgan points at the river, the one she is smart enough to stay away from. “That river,” she patiently explains. “What’s on the other side?”

It takes Damian an awfully long time to say “I don’t know.” This is quickly followed up by “And it doesn’t matter anyways,” and “would you like to see how Father sharpens his Batarangs?” 

And then halfway through Damian showing Morgan how to hit a target with a bat-shaped knife, he says suddenly “We should have a secret lair.”

“We could have one over there,” Morgan suggests, pointing to the other side of the river (the one she knows not to cross). “I can swim.”

In the end, they don’t swim. Damian finds poles they can use to find good footing, Morgan digs out several flashlights and a pen and paper, and then Damian ties the two of them together with a long piece of rope. 

“So I can rescue you,” he says importantly, tugging at the length between them to test the knot. “Ready?”

Morgan straightens her back and nods her head, and they both step into the current of the river.

Morgan slips three times before they make it to the other side, and Damian catches her with the rope once, when a particularly slick rock knocks her sideways and she’s unable to catch herself. She lands with a splash in the water, the current rolling her across the rocks, and then the rope snaps taut and she can hear Damian shouting for her over the rush of the water. When she pushes herself up, spitting water out of her mouth, she sees him just upstream, pole wedged in between the rocks to keep him from slipping down with her.

“Be careful!” he snaps when she sloshes back up to stand next to him, and she hides her scraped and bloody hands behind her back and nods her head, and they keep picking their way across, slower this time.

The river is fast, but it isn’t very deep, and the deepest part they ford only comes to Morgan’s waist, at which point Damian wades through first and then uses the rope to help tug her across. She slips two more times, this time managing to catch herself before she’s swept away, before they make it to the far shore. Damian is breathing hard, and Morgan is just about ready to burst into tears of frustration and call it quits.

Damian is eyeing her a little warily, and she can do this, so instead of whining, and telling him that what she really wants is a dry set of clothes and a cookie and to go back to the manor, Morgan puts on her brave face and says “I bet Daddy couldn’t have done that. I bet he would have given up.”

“Father could have done it when he was younger than we are,” Damian replies, and then reaches into Morgan's bag and pulls out the flashlights. They’re Batman’s flashlights, so even though they’re as wet as Morgan is they still work when Damian presses the button under his thumb.

The beam lights up the shore beneath their feet, the river on one side and pillars of waterworn rocks on the other, tunnels and crevasses disappearing into the dark, and Morgan feels a thrill of excitement run through her, warming her from her toes to her ears. They’re about to go exploring. They’re about to go spelunking, and Morgan has no doubt that they’ll discover many wonderful, new, and exciting things.

“I’ll go first!” she announces, skipping up to a gap between two boulders and wriggling through. There’s a sharp tug at her waist again, and then Damian creeps up behind her, dripping water, eyes almost as bright as the flashlight he’s shining in her face.

“Don’t go too fast,” he cautions, slipping into the gap beside her. “If you go too fast, you might slip and fall.” And then, so quiet she almost can’t hear above the roaring of the river: “Caves are dangerous, sometimes.”

So Morgan proceeds carefully, oohing and awing at all the sparkling rock formations, and Damian follows close on her heels, flashlight held firmly in one hand and the rope in the other.

Damian is just starting in on a lecture about weathering and erosion and lava tunnels and why fourth grade is the absolute worst, when something flashes in the corner of Morgan’s eye and she stops, spinning to her left. Damian bumps into her with a grunt.

“Why did you stop?”

“Look,” Morgan says excitedly, starting forward again. “Did you see that? Shine the flashlight over here!” 

Damian swings the flashlight at the narrow crevice, and again there’s a flash, the sight of light reflecting off metal. Hidden deep within the rocks, in a place probably no one has accessed for hundreds of years, is a dusty metal box.

“A treasure box,” Morgan breathes, and then she’s darting forward, wriggling easily through the narrow gap between the rocks, and coming to land on her knees in front of the box. Damian is right behind her, peering over her shoulder and already swinging his back-pack around and opening it up.

“It’s locked,” he says, and she can hear the undercurrents of excitement lacing his voice. “Father will have the tools to open it. Put it in here.”

Morgan reaches for it, taking the corners between her scraped palms. She tugs, and the box doesn’t move. “It’s heavy,” she says, frowning, and tries again, pulling with all her might. It finally moves, scraping against the rough surface of the cave floor a few inches before Morgan is forced to let go again, breathing hard.

“Let me try,” Damian says, and he pushes the flashlight into her hands and drops to his knees. 

“I bet it’s filled with gold,” Morgan guesses, ten minutes later when they’re both sweaty and out of breath, and the box is safely in Damian’s backpack. Morgan lifts her arms, examining them for new bruises - there aren’t any to see, but her muscles still ache from where the edges of the box had dug into her arms.

“No one would hide gold down here,” Damian scoffs. “I bet it’s filled with ancient mystical artifacts.”

Despite his claims to the contrary, Damian isn’t able to carry the bag by himself. They try getting it on his back, and then they try getting it on Morgan’s (at her insistence) but in the end they’re left defeated. 

“I guess we’ll have to carry it together,” Morgan says resignedly, and Damian huffs but doesn’t protest. So they sling their poles through the straps, and begin the long journey back to the cave. 

It must take them hours, Morgan is sure. By the time they reach the river she is sore and tired and hungry, and her knees are bruised and scraped and her hands as well, and Damian has been growing meaner and meaner as the box seems to grow heavier between them. At one point she has to take a break and sit down and cry because Damian keeps calling her weak and pathetic and useless. And then Damian sits down beside her with an uncomfortable expression and a clumsy pat on the shoulder, and he haltingly apologizes (almost like he doesn’t really know how, and it reminds her a bit of when Daddy tries to apologize to Mommy) and then he offers her a water bottle and a chocolate bar, and she’s able to catch her breath.

“I’m not weak or pathetic,” she hiccups, glaring. “You are!”

“I am not!” Damian instantly protests, outraged. “I am the best at everything!” And then he adds grudgingly, giving her a sideways look, “And you’re second best.”

“Well I’m one grade ahead, and you’re one grade behind,” Morgan points out, taking another large bite of chocolate. Damian scowls, and in the artificial light she can see his cheeks slowly turning red. Morgan sniffs and turns away; it serves him right to be reminded of that, for how mean he was being.

Their next and greatest obstacle is the river. They dither on the shore, and Morgan knew that she shouldn’t have crossed it (she knows how dangerous water is), and Damian doesn’t look any keener to try and cross it again, especially with a heavy treasure chest in tow.

“I suppose Richard might help us,” Damian finally admits, looking miserably at the rushing water.

“But then he might steal our treasure,” Morgan points out, and they are once again at an impasse.

And then Damian looks to his left and straightens, and says “Perhaps we could go around the waterfall.”

Half an hour later sees them both completely drenched on the floor of the Batcave, dripping puddles onto the floor as they attack the chest with knives and lockpicks, trying to pry the lid open. 

“It’s lined with lead,” Damian notes, pointing some sort of analysis gun at the thing as Morgan takes a hammer to the old lock. The noise clangs and echoes through the cavern, and Damian winces, glaring. And then the lock falls off, and suddenly he’s not glaring anymore and Morgan is feeling quite smug, actually. And very excited as they both shoulder each other to open the lid first.

“It could be dangerous!” Damian protests, trying to elbow Morgan out of the way.

“I bet it’s gold!” Morgan exclaims, yanking up on the lid.

It’s not gold, and it’s not dangerous. It’s not even a magical artifact, although Morgan has no real way of testing that; it just doesn’t look like one is all.

It’s a doll, an old thing and faded, with button eyes and a stitched smile and a blue calico dress, hair made of yarn and tangled about its head.

Damian sits back, disappointed. Morgan takes it into her hands, twisting it this way and that to inspect it. 

“Oh,” Morgan says, her own disappointment bleeding into the syllable.

“This was a stupid idea,” Damian announces, and he stands, aiming a kick at the box. “Who would put a doll in a box?”

“She’s kind of cute…” Morgan suggests doubtfully.

“Help me push this into the river,” Damian commands, pointing at the box. “We can’t leave things lying around, it’s one of Father’s rules.”

So they push the box into the river’s current (the one Morgan is never going near ever again) and then Morgan tucks the doll into her shirt, and they head upstairs for a dry change of clothes and a fresh batch of Alfred’s cookies to comfort their disheartened spirits.

“Did you see the news?” MJ demands, charging into Ned’s room with zero warning. Ned automatically panics and locks his screen before realizing that MJ won’t care that he’s messaging with FRIDAY instead of doing his homework.

“What news?” Ned asks as he types in his password to reopen his screen.

“We’re doomed.” MJ drops her backpack with a loud thud on the door and throws herself face down on Ned’s bed. “We’re a world of old white politicians and other morons of equal or lesser IQ and we’re doomed.”

“I thought that was a commonly accepted fact?” Ned ventures. He turns half his attention back to his computer, where FRIDAY has just confirmed his theory on mobius-looped algorithms.

“But this is, like, a big deal! You’d think we’d know better - you’d think after the Battle of New York, after Bane, after Thanos we’d have a protocol with a hierarchical chain of command for dealing with these sorts of things!”

“But we do,” Ned says. He squints at the page of code FRIDAY just sent him, and starts writing his response. “That’s just Iron Man, right?”

“Ned.”

Ned looks up to see MJ looking at him from under her elbow with a serious expression. “Twenty representatives from Earth’s most influential nations have been closeted in a room for two weeks, and they still haven’t sent a delegation to meet the Kryptonians. They’ve spent the last week arguing about which of them deserves to be the sole representative of Earth. I repeat: we are doomed.”

“I heard the Justice League wanted to send Superman,” Ned shares. “I heard the Kryptonians refused to speak with him because they wanted to speak with an Earthen human.”

MJ is silent for a moment before she lets out a loud huff of air and shoves her face back into Ned’s bed. “We’re doomed,” she reiterates, her voice muffled by his Star Wars-themed bed sheets. “They’re going to rain fire across the face of the Earth and we’ll all be extinct by next Tuesday.”

“So,” Clark says. He pulls up the holographic display, showing the Earth and its orbiting satellites in the center of the large round table. “This is what we know of the Kryptonians so far.”

Bruce leans forward slightly, analyzing the display. The Kryptonian ship is sitting in a geo-stationary orbit almost directly above Gotham City (which is just terrible luck, really, not that Bruce is surprised). They’ve been there for almost a week; this is the first time all members of the Justice League have gathered to discuss the situation.

“Do we know their intentions?” Diana asks. “Have we established a reliable line of communication yet?”

“We have not,” Clark says grimly. He turns to J’onn. “J’onn?”

“I attempted to approach them two days ago,” J’onn says. “They were insistent in their desire to speak with a representative of Earth; with an Earthen species, not a Martian.”

“We know that they wish to colonize Earth,” Bruce says quietly. The whole room plunges into silence as he speaks, and he carries on. “We know that they wish to use one of their World Machines to terraform this planet into a new Krypton; that they wish to become our overlords. They have come before. Clark. Tell them about the Codex.”

“The Codex was a database of Kryptonian civilization,” Clark says. He reaches for the display, bringing up a screen to show the old Kryptonian solar system, the faces of its leaders and its children. “It contained our history, our culture and, most importantly, our genetic code. With it, and with the right technology, one could rebuild the Kryptonian empire from the ground.”

“Let me guess,” Hal says dryly. “Our friendly visitors want the Codex. What does that have to do with us?”

Bruce turns to give Clark his most judgmental look. The man catches his eye, and his lips tighten. “When my birth parents sent me to this planet, they wrote the Codex into my DNA. It is no longer there; with the help of Princess Shuri of Wakanda, I was able to have the Codex transferred from my body to an inanimate object. That object was then hidden, in a place no one could find.”

“So we protect it,” Diana says. “I am assuming the Codex is hidden here on Earth?”

Bruce ramps up the judgment. Clark ignores him. “Yes. It was hidden nearly five years ago on the Wayne grounds. I requested to remain ignorant of its whereabouts, and given that it was Jason Todd who was tasked with hiding the object….”

There’s a brief silence at his words. Bruce is the one to break it. “We don’t know where it is,” he growls. “And neither do the Kryptonians.”

“They’ll raze the Earth for it,” J’onn says thoughtfully.

“Seems to me they were planning to do that anyway,” Hal snorts. He lifts his ring. “I could call in the Green Lanterns -”

“Absolutely not,” Bruce snaps. “One of you is more than enough.”

Hal gives him a look. He opens his mouth, and Bruce bristles, but Clark interrupts before things have a chance to escalate. “If it comes to it, we will accept all the help we can get,” he says pointedly. “However at this stage, we should be able to manage on our own.” He turns to Bruce. “Batman. You have a small supply of kryptonite. Would it be enough to deal with a Kryptonian invasion party?”

Bruce falls silent. Yes, is the simple answer. He has actually thought of this scenario; he thought of it years ago, after a particularly vicious disagreement with Superman before Thanos arrived. He’d started experimenting with non-disruptive global systems manipulations, and had chanced upon a contingency should he ever need to dispatch of more than one Kryptonian threat within Earth’s lower atmosphere.

Specifically, he’d managed to lace the upper atmosphere with enough kryptonite that, when triggered, it would rain from the sky.

But that is a simple contingency. That is in case of emergencies, and it was never meant for an entire delegation landing in multiple locations across the globe. Would it be useful? Yes. Would it be sufficient to eliminate the threat? No.

“I have a way to … slow them down, should they enter Earth’s lower atmosphere,” Bruce says reluctantly. “For a prolonged battle, however, I would need more kryptonite to construct a truly formidable defense."

“And there is no natural source of kryptonite anywhere in this solar system,” J’onn says.

“Oh hey,” Hal says suddenly. He straightens, and everyone turns to look at him. “I just remembered - Kor’an of the Julian system told me a few months ago of a trans-galactic shipment of kryptonite that would be stopping over on Earth on its way to the Ursian system. I think she said it was due to arrive around this time - a few weeks, maybe? We could purchase some of the shipment.”

“It already landed,” Diana says slowly. Bruce frowns at her, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Clark doing the same. He had not been aware of this. Diana’s tone isn’t promising anything, though, and she continues grimly: “The Amazons were charged with watching it while it was on Earth; we have handled the stuff before, and know how best to guard it from mortals. But there was a coordinated attack while the shipment was en route, and it was stolen before it could reach Themyscira.”

The room descends into silence as everyone absorbs this new information.

“So,” Bruce says at last. “We have the Codex of Kryptonian civilization, and we have the largest shipment of kryptonite ever to pass through this solar system. And somehow we have managed to misplace them both.”

Clark sighs. “Hal and I will keep trying to speak with the Kryptonians,” he says. “Diana, if you and J’onn could search for the kryptonite? And Bruce; you can develop a method for utilizing the kryptonite once we have found it, and ensure the Kryptonians’ attention stays away from Gotham and away from Wayne Manor.”

Chapter Text

Perhaps going into Gotham alone hadn’t been the best of plans. But with Daddy zonked out on the couch and Bruce giving the Lecture-Of-A-Lifetime to Damian on the proper distribution of sedatives, Morgan had found herself... bored. And maybe a little unwilling to face her own Lecture, because it had been she who had mentioned her dad’s insomnia and resulting paranoia in the first place. (Are you feeling okay, Maguna? You sure? But tell me if that changes, okay? No, you can’t go swinging from the ceiling, I don’t care how easy Mr. Wayne makes it look).

So now she’s sitting on the commuter rail, miles from the manor and only getting farther away as the buildings grow and twist around her like the snarling teeth of some beast from hell. The plan had been to get one-up on Damian while she had the chance, and go looking for his missing brother while he was distracted, but she hadn’t thought to worry about the time of day, and the growing dusk. The sun is dropping alarmingly close to the horizon as her stomach twists into knots.

Find the library , she thinks, taking big breaths, you’re smart, and intelligent, and capable. Find Damian’s missing brother so he can find yours. Except when she steps off the train, arms wrapped around herself and backpack bumping against her back, she doesn’t find the library. She finds instead the streetlights flicking on as the sun sinks beneath the horizon, and she finds a dirty, smelly glove wrapping around her mouth and squeezing .

She can’t scream. She can’t struggle, she can’t breathe . Her feet leave the ground for an instant, and then something warm and wet spills down the back of her neck and she’s dropped to her knees, hands scraping against the dirty pavement. It all happens so fast she can barely process what’s going on, but the glove is gone and she can breathe and she can scream. So she screams.

Another hand grabs her arm, hauling her roughly to her feet. “Get up!” a mechanical voice growls, “Where are your parents?”

“Get off me!” she shrieks, twisting around to kick at the man’s shins. “Let go!”

“Fuck. I’m trying to help you.”

She stops struggling, letting him hold her up as she stands trembling in his grip. Everyone else is gone from the train stop, and as she finally takes a look at the guy holding her she thinks she might understand why. It’s not just any guy. It’s a guy in a mask, a red helmet like Iron Man’s hiding his features and a leather jacket covering his shoulders.

“Oh.” she breathes, and it comes out more like a sob. “Oh, you’re a superhero. Okay.” And then she starts crying, because she’s stupid and childish and weak and all the other mean things Damian has ever called her, and all she wants to do is go home but she can’t get the words out, no matter how hard the superhero shakes her.

“For fuck’s sake.” he eventually says, and then, with one hand wrapped painfully around her wrist, he stalks back toward the train, dragging her behind him. She follows as best she can, still trying to take big calming breaths, but every time she thinks she’s almost got it under control there’s the memory of a hand wrapping around her mouth again and she freaks out, bursting into yet another round of tears. No one approaches them on the train. Her superhero's mask is probably scaring off the bad people and reassuring the good ones, Morgan reasons, and eventually she starts to drift off, the movement of the train and the arm around her shoulders lulling her into an exhausted, tear soaked sleep. He’ll make sure everything’s okay, she thinks as she drifts off. It’s what superheroes do.

When she wakes up she’s on a threadbare couch under a fluffy blanket, her backpack cushioning her head. Her cheeks are sore, and when she raises her hand in front of her she finds a purpling bruise wrapping around her wrist, in the place where the superhero had held on as he’d led her to the train. 

There’s a TV with a cracked screen sitting on a table across from her, but besides that the room seems to be empty. To her right she can see what looks to be the kitchen, and to her left a door, propped open by a heavy looking book. When she goes to stand up, something along her back crunches stiffly and crumbles; turning around, she sees that the back of the couch is covered in rust-red dust. In blood.

In a moment of blind panic, Morgan thinks it’s hers. But then she remembers the gush of warmth down her back as her attacker had dropped her, and she recognizes it for what it actually is. Reaching down, she pulls her shirt off, and tosses it across the room, as far away from her as she can. The stuff is still crusted in her hair, though, so she tiptoes into the kitchen and after a moment’s hesitation climbs onto the counter, and sticks her head under the faucet. Careful not to think about what she’s doing, she gently massages the stuff out of her locks, closing her eyes so she doesn’t have to watch the sink turn red. Perhaps it’s a good thing, she thinks, that Damian has always been so insistent in showing off his injuries to her. It means she’s not squeamish. It means she’s not weak .

“What are you doing?”

The voice makes her jump, but when she looks it’s only her hero, leaning against the door frame and watching her. He still has his helmet on, but the voice modifier is off, and she can’t help but be thankful for that; it’s scary, even if he is a hero.

“There’s blood.” she whispers, turning off the faucet.

“Any of it yours?”

“No.”

“Hm.” he turns abruptly and disappears back through the door, and when he returns a second later he tosses a red shirt at her. “Put that on.”

She pulls the shirt obediently over her head, and then slithers off the counter, landing lightly on her feet. The hem falls to her shins, engulfing her. 

“Can I go home now?”

“And where would home be?”

Home is in New York, but Morgan is smart enough to know that’s not the answer the hero is looking for. Home is where her dad is, and right now that’s Wayne Manor. So she tugs at the sleeve falling past her elbow, tugs at the collar slipping off her shoulder, and says, once more in a whisper, “Wayne Manor.”

“Fuck me.”

She tugs at the collar again, because now it’s starting to slip over the other shoulder, and then reaches up with both hands to scrunch the soft fabric around her neck. “You say that a lot.” she says uncertainly.

“I can fucking say whatever the fuck I want!”

“What’s your name?”

“Red Hood.” he takes an audible breath, relaxing his clenched fists. ”... what’s yours?”

“Morgan.”

He walks over to the fridge, and pulls it open. Morgan stays where she is in front of the sink, and watches as he pulls out a carton of milk and a banana, which he tosses in her direction with barely a glance. Startled, she only just manages to catch it, and then has to juggle it again as a glass of milk is shoved into her other hand.

“Eat. Drink.” Red Hood says shortly, and then proceeds to lean menacingly against the wall as she takes the only chair at the small table. 

She takes a gulp of the milk first, and then nearly gags at the sour taste, letting it run back out of her mouth and into the glass. “Tastes like shit!” she says, deciding to try her luck.

“Watch your fucking language!” he snaps, and snatches the glass back from her hands. “What are you, his daughter?”

“Whose daughter?”

“Wayne’s.”

“Oh.” Morgan says, trying to puzzle out how he’d come to that conclusion. “No. He’s not my dad.”

Her hero freezes halfway to the sink, shoulders hunching up around his ears as he slowly turns back. “Then why do you live there?” he asks slowly, and she thinks there might be something like dread in his voice.

“I don’t. Damian does.”

He turns back to the sink, emptying the glass. He still hasn’t relaxed. “Then why the hell did you say that’s where you lived?”

“I didn’t.” Morgan says, getting a little annoyed. She starts picking at the banana, trying to figure out how to peel it without squishing it. “That’s where my dad is though.”

Red Hood takes some more deep breaths, hands planted firmly against the counter. “Who’s your dad, then?” he finally manages.

Years of coaching kick in as little alarms start going off in the back of her mind, all the times people have told her to never reveal her parentage. But this is Red Hood, she tries to reason, this is her hero; he’s going to help her. She opens her mouth, fully intending to give her dad’s name, but what comes out instead is a quiet “Please don’t ransom me.”

“Why the fuck would I ransom you? Give me that!” He jerks forward from the sink and snatches the banana away from her grasp, neatly ripping the top off before throwing it back down in front of her. Before she can thank him though, or try to explain what a ransom is, he turns abruptly to lean against the wall, sliding down after a second until he’s on the floor, helmeted head in his hands.

“Holy fucking shit,” he groans. “You’re Morgan Stark .”

Morgan nibbles at the banana, and decides not to mention that it’s overripe. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. Red Hood just sits on the floor, muttering quiet curses into his hands as the sun slowly creeps across the table, and Morgan’s hair slowly dries. She manages to get the entire banana down without complaint (it helps that she’s hungry), and then spends the next ten minutes meticulously shredding leaf after leaf from a potted basil plant at her elbow, neatly sorting the bits into piles and counting the number of cells the veins create. It helps calm her a bit, but the anxiety is slowly creeping back, and she can’t help but wonder whether it’s no longer a question of when she gets to go home, but if . 

There are two problems: 1) Tony Stark is going to kill him and 2) Bruce Wayne is going to fucking end him. Because for all that he saved Morgan Stark’s life, it still looks a hell of a lot like a kidnapping. 

The girl had been so hysterical after the assault, he had given up on getting her to give him an address. He couldn’t go to the police for obvious reasons, so he had decided to hop back on the train with her and take her home for the night (there’s no question now that this is the dumbest idea he’s had in a very long time). And now he’s sitting in front of a ghost, the memory of a three and four year-old toddler using him as a tumbling mat dancing before his eyes. No wonder he hadn’t recognized her; kids grow so fucking fast. Some detective you are. But he sees it now, the big eyes hiding shrewd intelligence behind beguiling innocence, the nose that’s all Pepper’s, the smile that’s all Tony’s. He sees a four-year-old four years older, and wonders suddenly if this is what it had felt like for Alfred, for Peter and the Pretender: years gone by in the blink of an eye, a land of living ghosts that have moved on without you.

They’ll have pulled up the surveillance footage by now. Bruce will know where to look and Tony will know how, and they’ll have seen a man in a red helmet force a lost little girl into a train and disappear. They’ll know exactly who has her; he hasn’t exactly been subtle in his takeover of the Gotham underworld. He’s left a breadcrumb trail of bullets and decapitated heads in his wake, and sure they’re all rapists and drug lords and pedophiles and criminals, but they’re dead , and despite the sudden evidence to the contrary, Jason’s not an idiot. He knows exactly how this looks.

It looks like a goddamn kidnapping, and it looks like Red Hood will have the combined forces of Batman and Iron Man cracking down on his head. That’s not a force he wants to reckon with.

He takes several deep breaths, and decides that if he’s going to be found, if he’s going to be killed, it’s not going to be here in his own home, but out there on his own terms. He’s not ready to face Bruce - he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready - but there had been at least a semblance of a plan. Make him pay, make him hurt, make him remember . Make him choose. Vengeance or death, old man, you can only have one. Avenge me or kill me.  

(And Robin, of course. Why the fuck is there a new Robin?)

But Morgan Stark is sitting at his kitchen table, ripping his basil to bits and looking more and more stressed, and he knows the Batman will find them long before they can find Tony. So it’s only a question of where they’re to be found - and if there are witnesses, there will be distractions, and the opportunity of escape. Batman won’t castrate him in front of an audience. Iron Man won’t kill him in front of Batman, and certainly not in front of his own daughter - not unless she were in immediate danger; then, he wouldn’t hesitate, and that hurts more than Jason can bear. 

They’ll go somewhere public, then, with lots of people. Somewhere a normal person wouldn’t look twice at a father and his daughter casually passing the time. He won’t be able to wear the hood. Some flour to gray his hair and a pair of sunglasses will have to do, because he wants to draw the attention of two very specific billionaires, not every goddamn do-gooder in the city. When Iron Man arrives he’ll simply slip away, back to the shadows from whence he came. He knows how to be quick and quiet; he knows how to disappear.

Batman will likely be waiting in those very same shadows, but that’s a problem for later.

So where do you take a little girl to reassure her that everything will be okay, while waiting to meet your maker?

Jason pushes himself to his feet in one smooth motion. Morgan freezes, fingers covered in purple smudges, idiot soft eyes snapping to his face. And god, she isn’t an idiot, and she isn’t soft; she’s the smartest, most clever person he’s ever known, and she’s eight years old and thinks he’s a hero.

“Get your backpack.” he orders, reaching up to release his helmet with shaking fingers. “Get your shoes on. We’re going out for ice-cream.”

Morgan is on the floor, tying her sneakers when Red Hood comes back into the kitchen. He’s not wearing a helmet this time, and she can’t help but stare. He has a hoodie pulled on, his leather jacket on top, and a pair of dark sunglasses are resting against his nose, obscuring his eyes. His hair is black, and she only just notices the white streak before he’s pulling a bag of flour from the pantry and rubbing it in, turning his hair from black to gray.

That looks... fun.

“Can I do it too?” she asks, already reaching, and she has a handful before Red Hood’s hand clamps around her wrist, squeezing until she drops it. 

“No.” he growls, ignoring the mess and shoving the bag back onto the shelf. 

“Is Daddy going to be there?” she asks, following him out into the stale hallway, down narrow steps and past broken windows. He stops her at one point and lifts her over a rotten step, reaching under her arms before she can protest. 

“He’ll find us.” he says, and that doesn’t really answer her question, but before she can comment on it they step outside into the mid-morning sun. There’s a motorbike parked on the curb, and Red Hood leads her toward it. He climbs on, and when she follows he takes the helmet and places it on her head, yanking the chin strap as tight as it will go. It’s still too big.

“Hold on.” he says, and then they’re off, veering through the streets and skirting the traffic at what might have been a terrifying clip, had she not been her father’s daughter.

When they finally come to a stop, it is indeed in front of an ice-cream shop. 

Red Hood gets a chocolate sundae and Morgan gets a scoop of bubblegum and a scoop of cookie-dough, and the entire affair feels somehow surreal. I’ve been here before , Morgan thinks, but she can’t remember when or why or with whom. 

Red Hood isn’t talking much, so to stave off the boredom Morgan starts looking at the other people, and it occurs to her as she’s almost halfway through her second scoop that she can take this chance to continue looking for Damian’s brother. She looks at the boys playing on the playground, and the teenagers smoking on the curb, and the men walking past with barely a glance, and then her gaze snags on her hero sitting across from her, and - she recognizes him. Maybe it’s the way his shoulders are hunched, or the way the glasses slide down his nose, or the pinch of his dark eyebrows. Everything falls into place, and she doesn’t know how or why it’s taken this long, but she’s just had an epiphany and this is it: 

Morgan isn’t dumb. She isn’t stupid or childish or weak, or any of the awful things Damian has ever called her. She’s brilliant and smart and intelligent and shrewd, and every other kind thing he’s ever told her she is (and he has, every time some bully makes her cry), because she’s found him. She’s found the memory of a boy in a leather jacket, swinging her over his shoulders and buying her three scoops of ice-cream when she’s three, and four when she’s four, and promising that when she’s five she’ll get five scoops, even if that means two bowls.

It’s Jason, she thinks, feeling a little giddy as she gazes up at her old babysitter with starry eyes, Jason watched My Little Pony with me and read me scary stories when Daddy was sick. It’s Damian’s missing brother.

He hasn’t noticed her epiphany yet. He’s sitting across from her with hunched shoulders, poking and prodding at an ice-cream that has long since given up and melted. She can’t see his eyes behind the glasses, but his mouth is turned down into an unhappy frown, his brows drawn tensely together beneath the powdered gray hair.

“How old are you?” she blurts out, because it’s suddenly very important. 

He looks up slowly, his frown deepening into a scowl. “What’s it to you?”

“I never got my five scoops.” she says, and now he just looks confused, but she presses on anyway. “And now I need three more on top of that.”

“What the fuck.”

“Can I have eight scoops of ice-cream?”

He looks at her like she’s gone crazy. Then he reaches into his pocket, and slaps a twenty down on the table, and says “Knock yourself out.”

Morgan goes to the counter and buys herself six more scoops.

He’s still watching her when she returns, like he’s trying to solve a particularly frustrating puzzle. She’s about to dig in when his expression suddenly freezes, his whole body coiling, and she knows he’s seen it, the same epiphany she’s had. 

“Morgan,” he says, very carefully, and something in his voice makes her stomach twist, and she puts her spoon down. “Why did you ask me for eight scoops?”

“Because you never got me five,” she says. “Because you’re Jason, and you promised.”

One second he’s staring at her with a perfectly blank expression, and the next he’s lunging across the table and grabbing her wrist, pulling her close so they’re nose to nose. Through the dark tint of the glasses, she thinks she catches a glimpse of green.

“If you say anything , I swear to god I will fucking murder you.”

“You’re scaring me,” she breathes, and her eyes prick with tears and she doesn’t know why, because she’s found him. She’s found Jason and Damian can find her brother now and she should be happy, but she’s not because she’s scared and she can’t get enough breath -

“Ah, shit.” Jason jerks away, dropping her hand as if he’s been burned, going so far as to scoot his chair back with a scrape of cheap metal on concrete. “Fuck, no, I didn’t mean - I just... it’s a figure of speech - ”

They’re interrupted by a crack of thunder, the sonic boom of something breaking the sound barrier. There are gasps and heads turning, and then a whining crash as Iron Man lands in the small plaza with all the subtlety of a missile upon impact. Jason is already moving, jumping back and fleeing and flying away, and Morgan hasn’t had a chance to catch her breath yet but everything’s okay now, Iron Man is here, her dad is here...

She makes him sit at the table and wait for her to finish her ice-cream before allowing him to fly her back to the manor.

When Jason slips into the shadows, head pounding with raging green, Bruce is waiting for him. He’s looming in the corner, hands hidden in his belt, and Jason moves, lips pulling into a snarl as he draws his gun and aims, and Bruce... hesitates. 

Maybe he sees the gun, and is reminded of his own mortality. Maybe he’s figured out that Red Hood isn’t a threat, at least not to innocent little girls. Or maybe he’s seen something he recognizes, something he thought he’d lost, someone…. 

Jason takes advantage of the brief lapse of vigilance and slips sideways, pulling up his hood and disappearing because he’s angry and hurting, but he’s not suicidal. He’s not going to take on the Batman with Iron Man right around the corner. So instead, he ducks his head and rounds a corner, and disappears like smoke in the wind. 

Like a ghost.

“Bruce, what happened - ”

Heavy footsteps stomp above their heads, and a door slams. “Fucking hell.” Tony hisses, barely audible through the floorboards, and there’s the sound of that same door rebounding off the wall as it’s yanked open again, and then lighter slightly uneven footsteps chasing after the first.

Damian hasn’t stopped staring at her since she got back, and the look on his face makes Morgan want to crawl out of her own skin. It’s accusatory and diminishing and patronizing, and just this side of scared.

“What,” he asks, “Happened. Why is Father acting like this?”

Morgan tugs at the loose sleeve of Jason’s shirt, and reaches up to pull the collar back up over her shoulder, and says, in a conspiratorial whisper: 

“I found your missing brother.”

Chapter Text

“Morgan!” Daddy shouts, his voice echoing through the house all the way up to Morgan’s room. A second later, FRIDAY says “Mr. Stark would like you to see him in his workshop, Miss Morgan.”

Morgan sets aside her coloring book, climbing to her feet and skipping down the stairs. She almost trips at the bottom because she tries to hop three steps at once, and only saves herself from face-planting by grabbing onto the hand-rail. (It’s a good thing Damian’s not here; he never would have let her forget it.)

Daddy’s sitting by his workbench, and he looks up when she pushes open the door. “Morgan, come here,” he says, gesturing her over. “I’ve got something for you.”

“What is it?” Morgan asks, weaving around miscellaneous projects cluttering the floor and walking through holographic schematics without a second thought. She climbs onto the stool beside Daddy, peering over his shoulder.

It looks like a watch. “It’s a watch,” Daddy says, holding out the shiny red and gold timepiece. Morgan obediently holds out her wrist, letting him strap in on. “Just like mine.” And then he twists the watchface, and nanites spill up from the wristband to encase Morgan’s fingers.

It’s not a watch. It’s an Iron Man blaster.

Morgan hops excitedly off the chair, hand held straight out in front of her, but Daddy catches the back of her shirt before she can get any further. “Slow down, Maguna,” he says. “Let me show you how to use it.”

Morgan can hardly keep still as Daddy shows her where to shoot. “Try and hit that coffee mug,” he says, arms wrapped around her as he guides her wrist. “When you’re ready, bring your thumb up and press here.”

Morgan immediately presses her thumb against the side of her index finger, and is shoved back into Daddy’s chest as the blast goes wide. “Again!” she says stubbornly, lifting her arm at the coffee mug and resolutely ignoring the shattered remains of a miniature mammoth. Daddy steadies her, and she fires again.

“It’s for self defense,” he tells her sternly, after she’s finally managed to hit the coffee mug. “No using it at school, and absolutely no using it on Damian.”

“Does this mean I can be a superhero now?” Morgan demands, and she can just imagine the look on Damian’s face when she tells him that she is going to be a superhero before he is -

“No,” Daddy says. “No superheroism. This is for self defense only.”

“You could do the Vulture,” Ned suggests. “Interview me, I’ll be one of your primary sources.”

“Vulture’s already been analyzed,” MJ sighs. She stares morosely at her new (blank) thesis proposal outline. “I’ve read the reports, it was just a case of poor circumstances and ego.”

“Mysterio, then. Ooh, or you could do Spider-Man!”

“All those reports about Spider-Man were bogus, anyway,” MJ mutters. “He was clearly never a villain, everyone knows those Daily Bugle reporters are shit at their jobs.”

“Thanos?”

“I’m studying United States Law, Ned, not Intra-Universal Law,” MJ sighs.

The second time the Joker breaks into her apartment, it’s midnight, and Barbara is already wide awake. She’s trying to explain to Ned why he needs to take bioinformatics before advanced machine learning when her phone starts buzzing, and a flashing notification appears in the middle of her screen. It’s her front door, triggered by something being inserted into the lock (something that’s not her key or her dad’s), and she nearly drops the phone even as Ned continues to text his arguments. (It doesn’t occur to her to wonder why the alarm on the electronic keypad wasn’t triggered first - almost as though the intruder knew the code, although that’s not possible.) She stares at the bright red banner, heart pounding and breath tight before she manages to pull herself together enough to swipe up the security feed.

She can’t immediately tell from this angle if it’s a man or a woman. They’re wrapped in a long dark coat over an off-colored sweatshirt, the hood pulled up so that she can’t see their face. The lock clicks, a strand of green hair falls out from under the hood, and Barbara’s thumb slams down on the call button.

She realizes what’s going on only a second later, but by then it’s too late.

“Hey,” Ned says through the speaker, just as the final lock clicks and the Joker stumbles into Barbara’s living room. Or tries too: the door opens about two inches before snapping against the chain bolt, and there’s an echoing thud as he bumps into the other side. Barbara watches through the camera from the relative safety of her bedroom as he stumbles a step back, giving the door a look of utter betrayal and reaching a hand slowly to rub at his head.

“So I get why understanding biology is important, but my grades -”

“Ned,” Barbara interrupts, and her voice comes out choked. She coughs, and hopes that it doesn’t sound too much like the incredulous, slightly hysterical laugh it is. “I have - a friend just showed up. And bioinformatics is not biology. I have to call you back.”

By the time she’s hoisted herself into her chair and navigated her way to the living room, the Joker has managed to snap the chain on the door and is currently swaying on her welcome mat, frowning with intense concentration at the nails on his left hand. He looks up when she comes into the room, and through the dirty green wig and stained white make-up covering his face, his eyes clear.

“Barb - Barb’ra,” he manages, and lurches a step forward. Barbara’s arm shoots out in alarm.

“Dick! Couch, now. I can’t pick you up if you fall.”

“Effing inconvenient, why’s ‘e born,” he mutters, stumbling obediently sideways and half-falling onto her couch. He sighs, turning his paint-stained face into one of her pillows as he reaches his hand out to her. She rolls forward to catch it just before it falls, staring in bewilderment at the colorfully painted nails which are each adorned with a tiny butterfly sticker. “Don’ let ‘em run away,” he mumbles, his voice so muffled as to be barely discernible, and a second later he lets out a loud snore.

Barbara huffs out a strained laugh before letting his hand fall, and then gets to work. She tugs off his shoes and wig, manages to get the purple overcoat off but gives up on the sweatshirt, and places a blanket over his sleeping form and a bucket next to his head. She then resets the locks and fixes the chain as best she can, and then messages Ned to let him know that it’s just Dick, and she has everything under control. Then, before she retires to her own room for the night (although she knows she won’t be able to sleep after this), she lifts her phone and snaps a photo of Dick passed out on her couch. Because you never know when blackmail might come in handy.

The next morning sees a shaky Dick clutching a steaming cup of coffee between his hands and looking queasy as Barbara offers to make him a bowl of cereal.

“Better not,” he says. “I already puked four times before you woke up.”

Barbara doesn’t bother telling him that she has in fact been awake all night, and that it had actually been five times, not four. “More for me,” she says instead, sliding the milk back into the fridge and taking a welcome sip of her own (second) mug of coffee. “And it’ll be the least you can do to clean my bathroom before you go.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick says, and to his credit he does look incredibly guilty. Barbara sighs.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Dick looks surprised for a minute. “You want to know?”

“I want to know why you showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night dressed as the Joker. And I want to know why you have butterflies on your fingers.”

“Oh,” Dick says, and he spreads his fingers before him with a smile. “Elsie painted them for me. Elsie Hayes,” he clarifies, when Barbara just stares at him. “The mayor’s niece.”

“Dick,” Barbara groans. “Christ, you’re kidnapping little girls now?”

“You asked,” Dick says defensively, curling his fingers back around his coffee. “And it wasn’t a kidnapping, really. I just took her out for the day. Scared the shit out of him , but you know I wouldn’t hurt a kid.” Barbara continues to glare, and after a moment Dick wilts. “Fine, maybe it was a little bit of a kidnapping,” he mutters to the carpet. “But you know the Joker -”

“It’s been three years, Dick,” Barbara snaps.

They sit in silence for a moment. Eventually Dick places his mug on the side table, curling one hand around his stomach as he leans forward to rest his forehead in the other. “Anyway,” he says, his tone more subdued as he continues talking to the carpet. “I had to let them catch me, obviously. They drugged me pretty good, some new concoction someone came up with. I couldn’t stay, though. It’s Tim’s birthday, and I told him I’d be there.”

“Dick,” Barbara sighs. “Don’t change the subject. Don’t you think three years is long enough?”

“But what if it isn’t? He can’t just die, Babs, because then what if there’s someone new, someone worse? This needs to be done carefully, I need to do this right -”

“Have you considered therapy?”

Dicks stops, and lifts his head to stare at her blearily. “What?”

“Therapy. It does wonders. Let me recommend you mine.”

Dick laughs. “I don’t need therapy.”

“Yes you do. Everyone needs therapy. Especially twenty-five-year-old heroic villains with an excess of traumatic life experiences.”

“I’m fine. I’m handling it. Besides, I have plenty of therapists. They come to see me in droves whenever I land myself in Arkham.” He smiles crookedly. “Like moths to a flame.”

“Dick -”

“I don’t need therapy,” he repeats. “I’m fine, the Joker’ll die soon, I promise. And I’ll clean your bathroom.” He pushes himself to his feet, pales, and takes a deep breath. Barbara watches warily, ready to slide out of the way should he start vomiting again, but he only takes another shaky breath and steadies himself against the armrest of the couch. “And you should come to the manor with me, Tim’ll want to see you. I’ll drive.”

“Christ, Dick,” Barbara sighs again, and pulls out her phone. “I’ll call Sarah, she can drive. Get cleaning, and we’ll leave in half an hour.”

Dick disappears into the bathroom, and after a moment’s hesitation Barbara pulls up MJ’s number.

You still want to do a profile on the Joker? she texts before she can think too hard about what she’s getting herself into. I have several outstanding favors with Lt Essen.

The response is alarmingly quick. YES. Tell me when, I’ll be there.

Next time he’s back in Arkham, Barbara texts back. Her eyes drift to the corner where the Joker’s wig lies on top of his shoes and over-sized purple jacket, and she suppresses another sigh. It won’t be long.

The problem is that there is a pattern.

Once is an accident. Tim knows this, so the first time the Joker shows up and Nightwing is down with a cold, he doesn’t make anything of it. People get sick, even vigilante heroes. It’s only in retrospect that he will think back on this particular instance and… wonder.

Twice is a coincidence. Dick sends the group a text, a short confidential mission, see you in a few weeks :) . He goes to ground, and a few days later the Joker pops up to rob a bank. With Nightwing embroiled in his own investigation, Batman and Robin are left to salvage the situation and save hostages as best they can. 

Three times, though. Three times is a pattern.

“Oh not again!” Damian huffs, looking exceedingly disappointed when Dick announces an upcoming trip to Europe. 

“Yes again.” Dick says, mildly perplexed by the outburst even as he moves the Froot Loops box out of the way to get a better look at the younger boy. “It’s called espionage, I thought you might appreciate that.”

Damian scowls, and the next thing Tim knows he’s drenched in milk and soggy wheat crisps, courtesy of Damian yanking his placemat out from under his bowl. Damian storms from the room.

Bruce rises with a halfhearted scowl, and goes after him.

“What did I do?” Tim wants to know, but Dick only shrugs, looking upset and strangely guilty. 

So Dick leaves for Europe, Batman and Robin continue to patrol Gotham, and two weeks later the Joker gasses a stadium and almost slits the mayor’s face in half.

Joker’s back in Arkham , Tim texts Dick, and then stares at the screen, waiting for a reply. He’s not really sure what he’s expecting (a thumbs up, a good , a thanks) but nothing happens. The message remains unread, and two hours later Tim gives up and closes the app and goes to join Alfred for lunch.

Joker’s back in Arkham, Barbara texts MJ, and MJ buys a bus ticket for Gotham.

Lieutenant Sarah Essen is a tall woman, the epitome of femininity in a man’s workplace. She’s wearing heels, MJ notes a bit judgmentally. She’s wearing delicate bobble earrings, a fitted v-necked suit over a loose blouse, and her curly blond hair is cut in a perfect bob just below her ears. Her make-up is flawless: red lips, subtle blush, and just the right amount of eye shadow to accent the blue of her eyes.

But MJ is not judging. In fact, maybe MJ is a bit impressed; the woman made lieutenant and she dresses like this?

“Miss Jones,” Essen greets her, and when MJ shakes her hand her grip is firm. “It’s nice to meet you: Barbara has only told me good things.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” MJ says politely, following as Essen gestures her into a small office with a large desk. MJ perches on the edge of the worn guest chair and starts trying not to fiddle with her binder (containing her transcript, her proposal, and all the research she’s managed to dig up). “I appreciate you taking the time.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Essen says. She folds her hands in her lap and tucks her chin, leveling MJ with a serious look. “You’re asking to do an in-personal psycho-analysis on the Joker.”

“I plan to use a combination of personal observation and conclusions made by past analyses -”

“I don’t care,” Essen interrupts, although it’s not harsh. MJ pauses uncertainly, and Essen continues: “I’m here to ensure you understand the risks of engaging with the most ruthless villain Gotham has to offer. Despite his moniker, the Joker is nothing to laugh at.”

MJ knows. She knows that his kill count is in the thousands; she knows that he likes to play with his prey, she knows that he is a psychopath. She knows that he would likely kill her as soon as talk to her, which is why she’s not actually talking to him in person. There is a reason one-way glass was invented.

“I understand -” MJ begins, but again Essen cuts her off.

“I don’t think you do,” she says, and again it’s not harsh. It’s not critical or judgmental, but it is firm and it makes MJ listen. “You would have heard that Bruce Wayne’s son was targeted because of Wayne’s influence; you know Barbara, so you’ll  know that she was targeted because she is Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. If the Joker gets wind of you, if he comes even close to finding out who you are, Miss Jones, he won’t go after you. You don’t need to worry about your personal safety, studying the Joker. You need to worry about the safety of your family and friends.”

MJ … hadn’t thought of that. And now she’s kicking herself, because in hind-sight it’s obvious; of course the Joker won’t go after her. That’s supervillain one-oh-one: target the main character’s weak spots. Target their family and friends, and despite the gravity of the situation MJ is suddenly struck by the image of Ned crammed into a refrigerator. And then she’s not laughing anymore, because actually that’s not funny at all.

Essen must see some of her thoughts on her face, because her lips thin slightly. “This is a serious business,” she says, and pulls a sheet of paper from one of the trays on her desk. She slides it towards MJ, who takes it. “I’ve already written and signed a letter of approval,” she says. “As I said: Barbara has told me nothing but good things, and if this is a path you are serious about following, I will support you in any way I can.”

“Thank you,” MJ says, and she’s relieved that it doesn’t sound the question it almost is.

“Think about it,” Essen says. “And let me offer you a final piece of advice: lie on your contact forms. Don’t list your parents as your emergency contacts, give a fake address, a fake number. Because if it’s in the system, the Joker will find it, and he will use it against you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” MJ says, but now she’s wondering if she really does. She’d thought she understood the dangers….

It’s okay, MJ reassures herself as Essen stands, opening the door to show MJ out. She’s gone up against terrible odds before; she’s gone up against supervillains before. She can do this. I can do this.

MJ arrives at Arkham Asylum a full twenty minutes before she’s supposed to, and has to wait in the seating area for half an hour before Mr. Cleary arrives with a mountain of paperwork.

“Here,” he says, setting it all down on the rickety table before her. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and pats his pockets before looking to her hopefully. “Do you have a pen?”

MJ produces one of her five pens from her backpack, and gets to work signing the papers.

Liability waiver. Waiver of right to sue. Security disclaimer. Acknowledgement of personal risk. It takes another hour for MJ to properly read, fill out, and sign all the forms (Mr. Cleary wanders off at one point and returns with a cup of coffee and a magazine) and by the end of it her hand is sore and aching. “Anything else?” she asks wryly, flipping over the last page and blinking up to clear her eyes. “Do you need me to sign away my firstborn or something?”

“Ah,” Mr. Cleary says, looking a bit caught out. “Yes, good idea. I’ll write to Patricia about that, you never know.”

Next is the visitor information video (which MJ watches with a combination of morbid fascination and horrified disbelief), then the tour of the emergency exits, a stern lecture on the procedure for a lockdown drill, and then it’s time to meet the orderlies who will be accompanying her at all times while she is within the building. There are currently ten on shift, and the one who will be escorting MJ today is named Greg.

“We’ll go in for fifteen minutes today,” Greg says, showing MJ where to stow her backpack. “Just set your notebook and pencil over here, and Jean will pat you down. You don’t have anything in your pockets?”

And then finally they’re walking down the stark white hall, MJ trailing obediently behind Greg as he leads the way to the observation room. Finally she’s going to start gathering data for her thesis, and she’s going to see the Joker.

“It’s one-way glass, and the room is sound-proof,” Greg reminds her as he unlocks the door. “So if he looks at you, or starts talking to you, it isn’t real.”

Greg looks nervous. MJ is starting to feel nervous.

The second they step into the room MJ’s gaze snaps to the Joker, and she can’t help freezing in her tracks. Because he looks just like the pictures. Green hair, lank and unwashed, hangs over a face smudged with white and red makeup. Scars stretch from cheek to cheek, drawing his mouth up in a terrible rictus, and through the glass (one-way) his sparkling green eyes meet hers head-on.

“He’s messing with you,” Greg reminds her. “Remember, he can’t actually see you.”

MJ tiptoes to the chair in the middle of the room. The Joker’s eyes follow her.

“Fifteen minutes,” Greg adds, and MJ straightens her shoulders and pushes her hair out of her eyes and gets to work on her notes.

The Joker is sitting on a chair, which is bolted to the floor. His fingers dance across his knee, tapping out a tune MJ can’t seem to match. His eyes, after having stayed on her for a solid five minutes, wander up to the ceiling as he leans back, green locks hanging down as his head tilts back.

“You know,” he says at one point. “Some consider me to be a very gregarious person.”

MJ writes it down. She notes the way he slouches, the way his gaze bounces from one corner of the ceiling to the other; she notes when he starts humming under his breath, although again she can’t decipher the tune. When he starts giggling twelve minutes in, Greg clears his throat. “Time’s up,” he says, and MJ stands without a word of protest.

She doesn’t have much. But she has enough to get started, and as she follows Greg down the bright white hall, the Joker’s laughter echoing in her ears, she thinks she might understand why this one man has caused so much fear in Gotham. Why Professor Himmel looked at her like she was mad, why Lt. Essen was so serious in her talk with MJ. Because there’s at least one thing that all the psych assessments and all the psycho analyses agree on, and MJ thinks that after just one session she agrees as well:

The Joker is creepy as hell.

A week later and the message remains unanswered, and then the Joker escapes Arkham, and Dick appears at the door to Wayne Manor, a grin on his face and a bowl of jello in his hands.

“Surprise!” he says, holding it out (there are gummies sprinkled liberally throughout, Tim notes), and something cold prickles at Tim’s spine and leaves him frozen in the door as Dick breezes past, calling into the manor to alert the rest of the household to his return.

“The Joker escaped.” Tim says later that evening. It’s supposed to be an apology, because he’s Robin and he should be able to do better, to keep the Joker where he belongs. It’s supposed to be an apology, but somehow it comes out half a question, and Tim snaps his mouth shut and watches and waits, and wonders if Dick even saw his first message at all.

Dick’s face goes eerily blank, his warm eyes darkening, and Tim thinks this is normal, right? This is a normal reaction. It is. Dick’s hatred for the Joker is a fearsome thing: Bruce’s hatred is burning coal, slow and steady and smoldering with catastrophic potential; Dick’s hatred is a glacier, ice freezing over and solidifying into something unyielding and unforgiving, destroying everything in its path.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Dick says eventually, and Tim believes him.

Sort of.

He would believe him, except that once hadn’t been an accident after all, and twice had been no coincidence. Three times had been a pattern, and Tim is willing to make the fourth a prediction: Dick will disappear, the Joker will resurface, and never the twain shall meet.

Tim has a… (Tim maybe has a suspicion).

Chapter Text

“Hey,” the Placeholder’s voice echoes through the cave, just behind them. “Whatcha guys up to? Lunch is ready.”

Damian instantly shuts down the screen, swinging around with a scowl, and Morgan looks up lethargically from where she had been leaning her head against her crossed arms and being no help whatsoever. A sleepy smile crosses her face.

“Nothing,” says Damian.

“Looking for Jason,” says Morgan.

“Uh.” says the Placeholder, eyes widening and mouth dropping open in a look of stupid shock. “What?”

And suddenly the threat is back, because Timothy Drake is smarter than Damian Wayne, and he doesn’t know how or why. And Tim doesn’t deserve to be Robin for his athletics, and not for his charms, and certainly not for his skill, but there’s a little voice that Damian can’t seem to shake that suggests that perhaps he deserves the title for being a better detective than Bruce himself. And that’s just not right.

They don’t need his help, or his input, or any of his tech skills -

Tim is already at the computer, shoving Damian’s chair out of the way as he clicks the screen back on, staring with wonder at the map they’ve got pulled up to try to triangulate the Red Hood’s safe-house.

“Oh my god.” he says, and even though he sounds on the verge of a breakdown he’s already researching, fingers flying across the keys as he puts in keywords and pulls up articles and journals and blogs.

“ I found him,” Morgan pipes up, digging the knife in further, and why can’t she just shut up, this is his mission, “He saved me from a guy and let me sleep on his couch and bought me ice-cream. His name is Red Hood. He’s my hero.”

“Oh my god!” the Idiot repeats, “Why didn’t you say anything?” He’s putting pins on the map and has a criminal profile for the Red Hood pulled up, next to a school report card from Bruce’s inbox. Damian has never hated him more. “How can he be here - are you sure? He died! We’ve... we gotta tell -”

He jerks back in a dizzy motion and Damian takes the opportunity to launch himself at the other boy, wrapping his legs around his neck and bringing them both crashing to the floor with a yelp. In the next second he has his knees on the Placeholder’s chest and a knife at his throat, and he’s snarling down into his shocked face.

“Don’t you dare say anything! This is my mission, I’m the one who’s going to find him, I’m the one who’s going to bring him back to Father! If you say anything, I will eviscerate you, I will carve out your insides and use them to hang you from the trees as crows feast upon your eyes. I will end you.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Morgan says, shuffling up to stand over them, and no it’s not - “You can help, if you want.”

Tim sighs, going limp under him. “Alright.” he says, voice tight from the knife still at his neck. “Alright, I won’t say anything. We don’t even know it’s him yet, right? No need for - for false hope. But I am going to help.” He glares up at Damian, and then pushes him off, heaving himself to his feet. He gives the computer one last longing look, and then says, “I’ll just delete the history from the main server, then we can continue searching on mine. More discreet that way.”

He deletes the last two hours of history, Damian takes some calming breaths, and Morgan hovers between them, excitement practically vibrating off her at the sudden stupid progress. 

“Now.” Tim says, turning away and looking strangely pale in the dim light. “I propose we get lunch, and then reconvene at my place afterward.”

“Fine!” Damian snaps. “But this is a temporary alliance, Placeholder. And we say nothing .  Understood?” he touches his knife as motivation, and Morgan makes a zipping motion over her lips.

Needless to say, it is perhaps the fastest, quietest lunch Wayne Manor has seen in years.

Red Hood - Jason - opens the door with a grumpy expression and a gun in his hand, and absolutely freezes, deer-in-the-headlights style. 

“Hi Jason.” Morgan says, a little starry eyed as she holds out a tin of home-made cookies. “I brought you a gift.”

“I found you!” Damian announces, triumphantly.

“You’re alive.” Tim breathes, eyes going just as starry as Morgan’s. In the wake of Jason’s shocked silence, he brings his backpack to his front and pulls out a neatly folded costume, red and green and yellow carefully creased and stacked. “Um, I brought you... Robin. Robin, you can have it back, it’s yours, you’re... you’re Robin .”

“What are you doing, that is mine!” Damian explodes, apparently unaware of and deeply unsatisfied with this newest development, and all hell breaks loose.

Morgan watches in fascination as Jason’s eyes go green, as Tim takes an uncertain step back, and Damian blanches. She stumbles backward into the wall as Jason lunges, knocking Tim back against the stairs with his fingers wrapped around his throat. She watches as Damian goes completely still, face blank and eyes empty. She pulls the cookies closer to her chest, glances once at where Jason is actively trying to strangle Tim as he chokes indignantly, and then takes three quick steps to stand beside Damian, and slips her hand into his.

Here’s the thing: Morgan sees things she’s not supposed to. She sees the trees bowing to the wind, she sees moss that devours the Earth, she sees people moving and living in a world too slow for them to catch. She sees them zipping and flying their way past unmoving giants, past organisms that have ruled the Earth for millennia, since the very first cells put two and two together and figured out how to live. She sees these things, and she sees her dad late at night, curled into her mom’s embrace, blank-faced and shaking like a leaf in the wind, fingers digging into the soft fabric of her blouse like the fingers of vines digging into brick. She sees how patient her mother is, how slow, and Morgan breathes in time with her dad, fast at first and then slower and slower, and she feels her roots dig in, sturdy and grounding and safe, and she knows that this is how it’s meant to be. Slowly breathing, slowly living, marking each moment that passes.

She sees Damian on the landing, blank-faced and barely breathing, and takes his hand in hers, and says, “Did you know trees can talk?”; she says “When one is sick, they tell the others, spreading the news through a giant underground network.”; she says “They find a cure and they help each other, and they’re not alone.”

Damian’s breathing stutters, his hand tightens on hers, and then he jerks away, expression twisting into a sort of horrified anger. He opens his mouth, eyes narrowing, and Morgan just knows he’s about to say something mean, but he doesn’t get the chance. Instead there’s a sudden explosive crash from the other side of the landing as Jason punches a hole in the wall, and Tim lets out a gurgling cough, scooting up the stairs he had just been pressed against in a mild attempt at escape.

“You don’t ha-” Tim coughs, wheezing, “Jesus, you don’t have to take it back, I just thought -” 

“Shut the fuck up, Replacement!” Jason snarls, hands moving up to tear at his hair. “You don’t get it, you don’t get it, how could you fucking get it?!”

“I...”

There’s movement at the top of the stairs, the clearing of a throat, and all four sets of eyes snap to the little figure standing in the shadows, to the old woman tottering on the edge of the step.

“Boys,” she says, her voice wavering but her eyes stern and disapproving. “What in God’s name is going on here? You’re making far too much noise, I can hear you from all the way upstairs.” Her eyes go from Tim to Jason to the hole in the wall. “Oh my lord. That just won’t do. You know I’ll have to tell Mr. Winsly, I’m sure he’ll add the damage to your next rent young man, this is why you don’t rough house - ”

Between her judging glare and her scolding tone, Tim has managed to guiltily bump his way back down to the last step, breathing raspily at Jason’s feet. Jason has stood up, fists clenched at his sides as he glares up at his neighbor. 

“The goddamn wall broke because it’s made of cheap-ass plaster, you hag.” he bites out, and then turns stiffly, and points to his flat. “In,” he says, voice cool and trembling with barely contained emotion. “All of you.”

“You cannot -” Damian begins, but snaps his mouth shut as Jason’s eyes flash green again. “Fine, whatever,” and he stomps into the kitchen, Morgan trailing in his wake and Tim skirting around Jason as he ducks to follow. Jason flips the bird to Mrs. Nosy-Neighbor and then stomps in after them, slamming the door behind him with a vicious bang.

Morgan goes to the table with the confidence of one having spent the night, and places the tin of cookies on top, removing the lid and taking two. Tim makes a beeline for the sink, and cups his hands to take a few sips before he starts to massage his sore throat. Damian places himself in a corner of the room, and preemptively draws his knives. Jason stands in the middle of the small kitchen, viewing the invaders with an appropriate amount of hostility, before he says abruptly, voice tight, “Who the fuck let you three go into Crime Alley alone?”

Tim has known for some time now that death is a bit overrated. He’s come face to face with the grim realization often enough, staring up at the reaper’s skull on more occasions than he cares to count: slipping into the pool at three years old, six years old and making an ill-fated attempt to skate the banister of the grand marble staircase, choking on popcorn alone at 6:00pm, slicing his finger while attempting to make an omelet, falling off a fire-escape at eight years old on his first-ever nighttime excursion to Gotham… and all the times after that.

(He knows what it’s like to drift away to dust; what it’s like to be dead for five years.)

The point is, Tim knows death. He knows that smiling temptation, that winged shadow, like one would know an old friend. And he knows that while death is nothing to scoff at, the inevitability of death is greatly exaggerated. It is easy enough to die. It is far easier to escape death (Tim is living proof of this).

However. He has never seen anyone escape it like this.

“Are you going to murder me?” Morgan asks, looking slightly concerned despite the fact that she has slowly been gravitating to stand right next to Jason, eating a cookie and staring up into his face with a wrinkled brow. “Because I asked Daddy what ‘figure of speech’ meant, and he said it means something’s not real. So you weren’t being for real when you said you would murder me. Right?”

Jason Todd is alive. Jason Todd is standing right in front of him, and all Tim can feel are the fingers wrapped around his throat and all he can see is Robin standing alive before him, and all he can hear are the words Are you going to murder me? echoing on repeat in his head.

“She is under my protection!” Damian suddenly speaks up from the opposite side of the kitchen, knuckles white around his knives and a fierce glare plastered across his face. “You will not murder her, and if you do I shall kill you for it.”

“No, don’t kill him.” Morgan says, face crumpling into an unhappy expression, even as Jason’s nostril’s flare, his expression thunderous.

“I’ll kill whoever the fuck I want,” he snaps, “and you’ll do shit all about it, you brat.”

“Okay,” Tim says, clearing his throat, “No one’s killing anyone. That’s not why we’re here.”

They’re here because Jason Peter Todd is back from the dead. They’re here because he saved Morgan’s life, and because he’s the Red Hood, and because in all the months he’s been back, he hasn’t once returned to the Manor or even given a single clue to his resurrection.

“I know why you’re here, Replacement.” Jason sneers, and Tim scowls at the moniker, hand creeping up to his throat against his will.

“I’m not your replacement, Jason, I said you could have it back!” Tim defends, but before Jason or Damian can try to murder him again, Morgan speaks up, reaching up to tap Jason’s wrist.

“Jason,” she says, and he tears his eyes away from Tim, down to the little girl pressed to his side.

“What?”

“Can I dye my hair?”

It is perhaps one of the tensest moments of Tim’s life. Damian is still wedged in the corner, Jason is still looming menacingly in the middle of the kitchen, and Morgan is still looking at him with starry eyes, as though Tim hadn’t just nearly been strangled to death. Not that Tim’s complaining (it’s Jason, after all) but some warning might be nice, next time. Or a solid reason why; who knows, Tim might actually agree.

And then the moment ends, and Jason reaches out a hand to put his palm against Morgan’s forehead, pushing her away a step.

“What color?” Jason asks, and Tim decides that, for his own health, this isn’t his problem.

So while Morgan starts running her fingers through her hair in an impromptu brush, and Jason pulls out some red hair dye (Tim is not going to ask, nope, this curiosity train is leaving the station without him, thank you), and Damian slowly scowls his way closer to the action, Tim decides that now is as a good a time as any to do some snooping around. To go exploring.

It’s a little overwhelming. There’s a dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on the coffee table. There’s a disassembled gun in the bathtub, as well as what looks like what might once have been an alarm clock, but is now a pile of plastic and wires. The bedroom he only peeks into, the taboo of setting foot in this specific room so ingrained into his system he barely questions it. It looks nice enough, if a little sparse. 

He wanders back into the kitchen. Morgan is on her back on the counter, head in the sink as Jason rubs dye into her hair and Damian watches with narrowed eyes, eating cookies from the tin on the table.

“Find anything interesting?” Jason asks, not looking up, and Tim stops in the doorway, trying to feel guilty. It doesn’t happen.

“No.” he says honestly, and then his eyes find the hook by the door, and the keys. Very specific keys, hanging right there with the motorcycle and house keys. And his brain pulls up at least ten different examples simultaneously of when he’s seen those keys before, that same little yellow tag hanging off the black-capped heads.

“Why do you have a locker at Ackerley’s?” he asks, mouth moving before his brain can slam down the gates. 

Jason’s gaze flicks to the keys, his fingers stilling momentarily on Morgan’s scalp, before he looks back down again. “I got shit I need to store. Okay, Morgan, we’re done. I’m gonna wrap a bag around your head and then you have to let it sit.”

Morgan sits up, reaching excitedly to hold the plastic bag in place as Jason wraps tape around her forehead. 

“Crime lord stuff?” Tim asks, and he knows he’s pushing his luck, he knows that Jason could snap at any instant (and isn’t that interesting, Tim’s brain points out, there’s something odd about that, something we need to test) and Tim doesn’t really want that to happen, but he can’t help himself. Because Ackerley’s isn’t just any storage facility: Ackerley’s is the storage facility for criminals and the criminally insane, not in the least because no sane person would dare set foot there. Even the Gotham police (those not corrupt enough to own a unit themselves) refuse to set foot there, leaving it to Batman and Robin to routinely break in and clear out the rotting corpses and tons of drugs and stolen money . Bruce and Gordon have been trying to shut the place down for years, with no success.

The point is, Tim knows Jason might kill him. What he doesn’t know is what the former Robin is storing at Ackerley’s, and why. And it’s what Tim doesn’t know that’s dangerous, and keeps him asking questions.

“None of your goddamn business,” Jason snaps, true to form, and Tim is about to dispute that statement (it is, actually, his business) when something green looks out from behind Jason’s eyes, and says “And if you go looking, Pretender, if you step one foot anywhere near that locker, I will shoot you in the knees and make you wish I had shot you in the heart.”

And isn’t that interesting, Tim’s brain points out, while his body decides whether fight or flight is the best strategy here. Green eyes, green anger, green envy. Jason had blue eyes once upon a time, and hair unmarred by white. Jason had a little scar above his left eye, and a bigger one running across the knuckles of his right fist. Gone now, replaced by smooth, unbroken skin.

Tim doesn’t run. Tim does back down, however, because he does have some self control and he’s not suicidal. And Damian is looking a little pale again (and Tim is telling Bruce about that panic attack, Damian has earned no loyalty from him whatsoever), and Morgan is starting to look a little bored, and a little annoyed. So Tim shuts his mouth and grabs a cookie, and rolls his eyes just a little bit (because Jason is being dramatic, even if he’s being serious), and says “I’m not interested in your stuff anyway. So. No need to kill anyone.”

That’s a lie. Tim is very much interested in Jason’s stuff (he’s interested in Jason too, and why he’s alive, and why his brain is preparing a powerpoint on Lazarus Pits (and how Damian figured it out first, and why a ten-year-old knows about Lazarus Pits and is so deathly afraid of them)), and a death threat isn’t going to stop him (Tim knows how to deal with death threats). But if Tim is right, and there’s something more (something big) going on here, then he’s not sure he wants to get into it in front of Damian and Morgan. 

There’s another moment of slightly awkward silence, before Damian speaks up, voice high and clear in the silence. “Todd,” he begins, straightening slightly, a serious expression falling in place over the suspicion, “I would like to formally invite you back into my Father’s house. He would be pleased to have you back.”

Jason blinks and says, firmly and without hesitation: “No.”

And that’s the end of that, apparently.

The first thing Tim does, once he’s dropped Damian off at Wayne Manor and lied to Tony about why his daughter is now sporting a head of tomato-red hair, is purchase a locker at Ackerley’s. 

It’s not the first time he’s done it for a case, and neither will it be the last. He creates an account under a fake name, reserves a locker (159, only three down from Jason’s 163), and then promises to have the money delivered first thing on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning dawns bright and early, and Tim with it. He downs five cups of coffee, two of Alfred’s croissants, and then starts to pack his bag, darting from room to room and running up and down the stairs to find everything he’ll need: camera, lock picks, infrared goggles, Geiger counter, foldable staff, taser, mask, money, trackers, and his phone. 

And then he sneaks out the front door, climbs on the bus, and heads to Ackerley’s.

The receptionist only asks twice before taking Tim’s money and tossing him a key. There’s a little yellow tag hanging off the end, the number ‘159’ printed in bold font across it. Tim takes the key, pulls his hood up over his face, and hurries to his new locker.

Once inside, he lets the door slide shut before taking out his phone. It takes him only thirty minutes of rearranging and patching together old code to hack into the security cameras and set them all on loop for the next hour. Then he puts on the infrared goggles, pulls out his lock picks, and heads three lockers down and gets to work. 

When he finally gets the door open, he finds the space almost disappointingly bare. He’s not sure what he had been expecting. A secret lair, maybe, or an arsenal of guns (or a Lazarus Pit, because Tim still doesn’t know how it’s all connected). He had been expecting something grand and worthy of his own demise; what he finds is an old shipping crate, as tall as he is and twice as long. It would have barely fit through the door.

“If this is what Jason is going to kill me for,” Tim mutters, adjusting his goggles and squinting, “I’m not impressed.”

Nothing comes up on the infrared, so there’s no heat being emitted. That’s good, probably, although it’s not very exciting. He takes some pictures with his camera, searching for a label which he fails to find. And then he pulls out the Geiger counter, switches it on, and watches the count-rate skyrocket.

… Maybe he should have started with the Geiger counter.

There’s a split second of indecision in which Tim considers the merits of running. Then he pointedly turns off the counter, pulls out his staff, and gets to work prying at the lid. 

It’ll be fine. High doses of radiation are okay, when they only occur occasionally. He’ll just avoid bananas for the foreseeable future, and everything will be fine.

There is a growing list of things Tim’s brain has compiled over the years that outweigh his own life and well-being. Batman is on that list, and so is Robin’s reputation. Damian is on that list (if barely) and so are Dick and Alfred. Bringing Jason home is on that list now too, and a new bullet point has just been added as a subsection to this one: figuring out what the hell Jason is storing at Ackerley’s, and why it’s giving off radiation on par with a nuclear reactor. 

Tim finally gets the tip of his staff wedged under the lid, gives an almighty yank, and manages to slide the thing three inches to the right.

It’s not an atomic bomb. That’s good, probably. It’s a pile of rocks, dirty and rough and glowing ever so faintly green.

It only takes Tim three seconds to draw the connection between Ackerley’s and rocks and radioactive. It only takes him three seconds to realize that Jason is hiding what looks like the world’s largest collection of kryptonite right under Batman’s nose.

Next up, Tim’s brain offers, as he stares at the tons of kryptonite, completely gobsmacked. Why does Jason Todd have kryptonite, where did he get it from, and what is he planning to do with it?

Chapter Text

“So,” Tim says. “Superman. Thoughts? Yes or no.”

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” Jason demands, and Tim internally sighs.

“I like Superman,” Morgan chimes in. “I sent him a card with a cactus on it. He sent me a card back with a Quercus. He said I was intelligent.”

“Superman is an idiot and a buffoon dressed up as a clown,” Damian sniffs. “And Father does not like clowns.”

“Oh, he doesn’t?” Jason begins, voice growing caustic. “That’s funny. Maybe you should remind him of that.”

“Okay, but Superman,” Tim interrupts a little frantically. Time to derail that train of conversation. “I mean, he’s still a really capable leader, isn’t he? And he means a lot to the people of the world. It’s not like we want him dead or anything. Right?”

“Superman can do what he wants, I don’t care,” Jason says, irritation lacing his voice. “Morgan, how many bullets did you count?”

“Sixty-seven,” Morgan says, nudging the case in Jason’s direction. Jason hums, and slides another piece of the pistol back into place.

“Father doesn’t like guns,” Damian sulks.

“Father doesn’t like guns,” Jason mimics nasally. “Would you quit it with your father bullshit? He doesn’t give two fucks about you or anyone else in that godforsaken house.”

“Father does care!” Damian instantly defends, at the same time Tim jumps in: “That’s not true, he cares -”

“I disagree with Drake!”

“Oh,” Morgan says, sliding off her chair to the floor as Jason slams the gun down on the coffee table, nostrils flaring. “There’s one on the floor Jason. You have sixty-eight bullets.” 

“I could kill you two thirty times over, and I would still have eight bullets to spare,” Jason says. “Shall we test that hypothesis, or are you going to shut up and behave?”

I didn’t do anything, Tim nearly protests. What about Superman? His brain asks despairingly. Tim doesn’t think he’ll get an answer today, not if he wants to survive the night. Damian’s eyes are dangerously narrowed, and Tim would bet his parents’ fortune that the little demon is calculating the odds of himself dodging all thirty bullets.

Fortunately, the odds seem to be against him, because Damian only lets out a quiet “Tt,” before taking an obnoxiously dainty sip of his tea. The move is so endearingly reminiscent of Bruce that Tim nearly forgives him.

Jason slides the last piece of the gun neatly into place, gives both Damian and Tim a last warning look, and then stands up and marches from the room to go stash it away with all his other cleaned and polished weapons.

Tim reaches for the TV remote, and turns it on with a click to the first channel. Anything, to quiet the endless questions vying for attention in his head.

“... do if we have another such attack, Perry, I think that’s the question on everyone’s minds today.”

“Well, a recent survey has just come in, and it would appear that the majority of people are unconcerned by the presence of these alien invaders. Since the Blip, they have confidence that the Avengers and the Justice League can and will protect us.”

“And what about the citizens of Gotham, who are living beneath the shadow of this UFO even as we speak?”

“The people of Gotham couldn’t care less! Did you know I spoke to a nice lady today who didn’t even know the UFO was anything out of the ordinary. ‘Strange things happen every day,’ she said. ‘I would be worried if something strange didn’t happen.”

“Do you think we can see it now?” Morgan asks, and Tim jumps, tearing his eyes from the screen. 

“Too cloudy,” Jason says from right behind them, and this time it’s Damian who startles, flinching so hard he nearly topples off the couch. Jason gives him an odd look, something between a sneer and look of concern. “What do you gremlins want for lunch? We have pizza.”

“Pineapple,” Morgan says.

Jason sends her a scandalized look. “We have pepperoni.”

“I’m vegetarian,” Damian mutters, just to be difficult.

“You are not,” Tim interjects, “You ate Alfred’s pulled pork just two nights ago!”

“I am too! I can be whatever I want to be, Richard said so.”

“Hey Morgan,” Jason says loudly, drowning them both out. “You wanna get some ice-cream? Eight scoops for being eight years old? Let’s ditch these morons.”

They all go in the end. Damian gets three scoops of lemon sherbert (vegan, just to prove Tim wrong), and Tim gets one scoop of chocolate and three scoops of a new flavor, some ungodly mixture of licorice, coffee, and bubblegum. The flavor is named The Batman, and when Tim orders it the look on Jason’s face is well worth the assault to his tongue.

Three days later, Tim returns to Ackerley’s. Three days later he steals himself a piece of Kryptonite, because maybe if he can figure out where it’s been he can figure out where it’s going. And then he can figure out if Superman is in danger, and if Robin will be the one to save him.

Corned beef. Potatoes. Carrots. Celery. Worcester Sauce. Jason meanders down the cereal aisle, running the list for Shepherd’s Pie over and over in his head. He’ll grab a nice bottle of red on his way out too, maybe treat himself to a cigar. He has a fake ID, he might as well use it. But he’s almost out of Cheerios, so he grabs two boxes first, and he should probably get more milk as well. (He still can’t think back on the night he rescued Morgan without becoming unbelievably mortified over the spoiled milk debacle. That would never have happened to Alfred).

“Hi!”

Jason swerves the cart just in time to avoid running into -

“I’m doing a piece for the Daily Bugle on Crime Alley’s recent decrease in crime.”

- into the reporter planting himself in the middle of the aisle, wrapped in a striped scarf and blue rain jacket, camera slung around his neck and recorder held out eagerly in front of him, who -

“Would you like to make a comment? I could feature you with a picture too.”

- who is Peter fucking Parker from New York City.

His brain stutters, and everything kind of crashes to a stop. Sound cuts out, the air stills, and the universe... winces. Oops.

“Peter.” The word comes out small, smaller than he’s felt in years.

“Huh?” Peter falters, bringing the recorder back to his chest even as he smiles uncertainly. “Sorry, did I already ask you?” And Peter’s not a detective, he hasn’t spent months - years - training to ask the right questions and find the right clues and string it all together, but he is fucking brilliant. And maybe they weren’t friends, maybe the last time they saw each other was when Jason was fifteen and Peter was sixteen, maybe the last time they actually hung out was when Dick was Robin and Jason was a nine-year-old tag-along, but he can see the exact second Peter realizes who he’s talking to. 

Peter goes white, his hand shooting out to latch onto the edge of Jason’s cart even as he takes in a gasping breath and just... stops breathing.

He looks young, is Jason’s first coherent thought, even though he’s six years older, even though he’s as old as Dick - wait. Rewind. Dusted, and now only one year older, but he still looks like that sixteen year-old kid (hanging out with Dick and being so effortlessly cool), and it takes Jason a second to come to terms with the fact that he’s now bigger and taller than him. He’s bigger than Dick, and that’s weird enough, but at least Dick has the appearance of strength. At least he can see the careful power Dick holds in his lean frame, the confidence of one who knows without a doubt that they can pick a fight and win; Peter Parker still looks gangly as shit, and not much more equipped for battle than a twig. 

“You’re... Jason, does - I thought -”

He sways, and Jason moves on autopilot, grabbing his shoulder and bringing them both crashing down to sit on the sticky tiles. “Breathe!” he says, his voice unaccountably strangled, feeling a little lightheaded himself, a little nauseous. There’s an empty feeling in his brain, like a hole has been drilled in his skull and filled with numbingly cold ice, like a headache just gave up and imploded. Like he maybe missed something important when he was dead in the ground, and it has come back to haunt him in the cereal aisle of Price Chopper.

He almost regrets asking Peter to breathe, because the second he does his eyes well up and pour over, tears streaming down his face in the world’s worst impromptu waterfall.

“I went to your funeral.” he whispers, “You died, and I went to your funeral, Jason. H-Here Lies Jason Todd.” 

Goosebumps pour across Jason’s arms at the words, and the taste of dirt and grit fills his mouth as his vision slides sideways, tinted green. You remain unavenged, Talia whispers in his ear, and he wants to ask what the fuck Peter has to do with that, and sure, he’s always had a sneaking suspicion that the dorky nerd is maybe more than he seems, but he had been barely older than Jason when that happened, barely more than a kid himself.

Get a grip, he thinks, and focuses enough to realize that Peter has wrapped him in a hug. Which - fucking suicidal - and he pushes, flailing a bit, but Peter doesn’t move an inch. It’s like he’s stuck himself on, and Jason can’t help the brief surprise when his struggles increase slightly in his desperation to break free, and he still can’t fucking knock the twig off. Maybe not such a twig after all.

“Let - let go. Stop it.”

“Dude, you were dead. Give me a minute.”

A minute is a long time, Jason discovers, to sit in a grocery store aisle, wrapped in the most insufferable hug on the planet. An old man wanders past, giving the two of them a slightly concerned look before abandoning his pursuit of Captain Crunch to leave them to their drama, but the store is thankfully pretty empty at 9:00am on a Tuesday morning. When Peter finally loosens his death grip (ha, learned something from you, Dickie) Jason takes the opportunity to finish shoving him off. He straightens his jacket, trying to keep the disgruntled expression on and the vulnerable one off , and when he finally decides it’s safe to look up, he’s blinded by the flash of a camera.

“Fucking hell.”

“Language.” Peter says mildly, examining the image, and Jason realizes abruptly he should probably be at least a little concerned about that. Before he can come up with a threat, or even a half coherent sentence, however, Peter says, “How did you recognize me?”

That’s a weird question. “Your face?” he says, and he sort of hates that it comes out as a question. Is there a wrong answer here?

Apparently there is, because the look Peter shoots him is one of incredulity. He opens his mouth, a lost look crossing his face, and for an alarming moment it looks like he might start crying again, but then he draws his shoulders up, takes a breath, and says, “You have to tell Dick.”

“Do you want me to shoot you?”

“Ha ha, very funny. I’m not joking, Jason. He was… he didn’t take it well.”

“You tell him, then.” Just see what happens, he thinks, perhaps a little viciously, but he doesn’t have time to sneer, or to think about the implication of Peter’s words, because even before the reply has completely left his mouth, Peter’s expression slams down hard. Full on guillotine-you’re-dead blank, static to black in the blink of an eye. And oh , he thinks, button found. Time to push and see what happens.

“Well. He’s in Blüdhaven now, isn’t he.” Peter says to his camera, and Jason can see the desperation on his face as he begins searching for a new topic of discussion.

“Did you and Dickface get in a fight?” he asks, trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice. Stranger things have happened, surely, he just can’t think of any.

“No.” Peter stands, and offers his hand to pull Jason to his feet. “We just… haven’t spoken. In a while. So. Um, do you actually live in Crime Alley now? Because we could still do that interview.” 

Nice try.  

And Jason wants to confront Peter right then and there, he wants to ask what happened and why are you lying and why the fuck are you lying to me. But there’s a tub of melting ice-cream in his cart (mint chocolate-chip, his goddamn replacement’s favorite) and a confused, twisted anger tangling itself into knots around his throat. 

So instead of pressing, and instead of inviting betrayal and calling Peter out on his lies of omission, he gives a shrug and a sharp smile, and says “Sure, why not.”

Peter starts rattling off questions from his phone, and Jason answers them one by one as they meander their way through the aisles, and Jason is able to comfort himself with the thought that they’ll never see each other again. It’s okay if Jason lies, and it’s okay if Peter only asks questions that go surface deep; they don’t owe each other anything more.

“So,” Peter says, standing unnecessarily close to Jason’s bike. It’s almost like he’s trying to keep him from leaving. “Where do you live? Where can I find you?”

“You don’t.” Jason locks the trunk, buckles his helmet, and turns the ignition. All in all making it very obvious that he’s about to run the guy over if he doesn’t move. “Crime Alley’s no place for you to be wandering around. Usually employers only send their employees here to make them disappear.” 

“Yeah, that tracks.” 

Jason stares. Because what the fuck, who the hell wants to eliminate someone as inconsequential as Peter Parker? Sure he’s smart, but there are lots of smart guys out there; there’s no way he’s being singled out. As if to spite him, Peter smirks, and taps the camera around his neck.

“I’m good.” Peter says, and it feels a bit like a threat. “The higher-ups know that, and they think I’m going to expose their stories for the fake BS that they are.” He hunches his shoulders, hands stuffed in his pockets, his shrinking posture at complete odds with his confident words. 

“Will you?” Jason asks.

Peter shakes his head, letting out a huff of a laugh. “No.” he says, “I’m playing the long game. Infiltrate their ranks with reliable sources and valuable data, writing good articles, that sort of thing. Once people realize the Bugle is actually spitting out good stories, they’ll send in more funding, actual journalists will start to apply, and all the corruption will be cycled out. They won’t know what hit them!” He scuffs his shoe against the pavement, and ducks his chin into his scarf. “Plus, I need the job. I need the money.”

That is… quite the plan. It almost sounds like revenge, and he wants to ask what the Bugle ever did to Peter, but the last words have snagged his attention, and he can’t let go. “Aren’t you like, Tony Stark’s kid or something?” he asks slowly, trying to figure out where the trick is, overloaded with too much information from a young man who is probably-actually-definitely more than he seems. “Isn’t he loaded? As in more money than Bruce fucking Wayne loaded?”

Peter shrugs, and starts fiddling with his camera again, gaze drifting up to the sky. “I guess,” he says. And then completely fails to elaborate.

He doesn’t have time for this. Jason doesn’t fucking have time for this, he’s on a schedule with an actual plan and an actual timeline, with actual people (ie the entire population of Crime Alley - nay, the entire population of Gotham) depending on him, and he doesn’t have time to worry about someone who wasn’t really his friend in the first place.

Caring has never been part of the plan.

He finds Peter later that night, camped out in the shadiest of shady motels, wearing headphones like a moron and playing Candy Crush while a drug deal goes down in the room to his left and a cleaning crew mops up yesterday’s murder in the room to his right. 

That’s not even the worst of it.

“Is that ramen?” Jason all but yells, standing in the unlocked doorway with a gun ready in his hand, because he, unlike another very specific someone, isn’t an idiot about to be killed. “Are you eating uncooked ramen?!”

Peter jumps (Jason could have killed him ten times over, and he has the audacity to be startled), looking up and wriggling to remove his headphones.

“What?” he asks, and then dares to take another nibble of the raw fucking ramen. “Oh, hey. How did you find me?” It crunches between his teeth, and Jason has to blink away the green. It’s not even the good kind, the kind that you can actually eat uncooked. It’s one of the crap brands, nothing but starch and artificially flavored clay particles.

“Get up,” he growls, fists trembling at his sides. He wants to punch someone. He wants to shoot someone, and for once it isn’t Batman. 

Peter complies easily enough, although he looks a little confused. “Everything okay?” he asks, expression turning guarded, and no, a lady was murdered here just last night. And Tony - Anthony E. Stark is a billionaire, probably a trillionaire by now, and his kid is sprawled across a bug-infested bed, eating a pack of ramen because he can’t afford real food and doesn’t even have a kettle with which to cook anything.

“You’re coming with me.” Jason says, and it comes out a little more threatening than he intends, but Peter just blinks at him, and then grabs his bags and follows without a word, putting his complete trust in a stranger he hasn’t seen in years.

This fucking guy.

They make it out of the motel unscathed, and the ride back through the winding streets is mostly silent, just Peter’s breath against his neck as he hangs on loosely to his jacket. Jason almost snaps at him to get a better grip, but he bites his tongue at the last minute. It’s not worth it, and he needs to conserve his energy for the upcoming verbal beatdown.

Peter’s shivering by the time they pull up outside Jason’s apartment, and fuck, it would be cold without the proper clothes; the wind has a chill to it this time of year that can be unforgiving at high speeds. Jason leads them through the door, key in hand, and then up the rotten steps, up seven storeys of increasingly dilapidated apartments until they reach the landing with the hole in the wall (goddamn fucking Replacement), and it’s not nice, not by any account, but it’s eons better than that hellhole of a motel.

He wants to yell. He wants to take Peter by the neck and strangle some sense into him, knock some survival instincts into that overly fragile skull. 

He wants to ask if he really went to his funeral.

He doesn’t say anything, and instead slams a pot full of water onto the stove, clicks on the heat, and begins chopping onions and tomatoes like they’re somehow solely responsible for the last four years.

“Why do you know who I am?”

Jason barely catches the question, too caught up in the dilemma of whether he should be cooking one or two bags of pasta (he has a startlingly clear memory of watching Dick and Peter compete to see who could eat the most spaghetti, and watching Peter win by… an alarming margin). 

“I’m sorry, what?” he says, and dumps in the second bag.

“Nothing.” 

Bullshit.

Jason turns away from the stove, fully looking at Peter for the first time since they’ve entered the flat. He’s sitting on one of the two chairs (yes, two, because apparently one wasn’t enough), picking idly at the rough wood grains on the table. His bag is at his feet, and the expression on his face is… too complicated for Jason’s comfort. He looks lost. He looks cautious and hopeful and weary, like he’s somehow expecting a miracle.

“I heard you the first time, Parker.” Jason says, and he notices how Peter tenses at the name, and he makes a note of it. Tell me what you see… a familiar voice murmurs in his ear, and he speaks up again loud enough to drown it out. “You asked me that in the store too. Why wouldn’t I know you? Christ, we weren’t friends, but you and Dick were close, and we hung out, and…” you went to my funeral. He can’t quite bring himself to say it.

“We were friends, Jason.” Peter says, a tired smile tugging at his lips. “We still are, I hope.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Jason says, turning back to the stove. He reaches up for the skillet and clicks on the front burner. “Answer the fucking question.”

The pan starts to sizzle, and Jason adds a bit of oil before shoving the onions around with the spatula. He should probably turn on the fan - there will be more oil stains on the ceiling otherwise - but at the present moment he can’t bring himself to bother. He turns the heat down a bit, and starts rifling through his spice rack.

“Do you have sage?” Peter asks instead, and Jason kind of wants to throw the spatula at his head. “I always liked it when May made pasta with sage.”

So Jason dumps in some sage, along with a spoonful each of oregano and thyme. He doesn’t miss the fact that Peter uses past tense when speaking of his aunt, and that… that sends up all sorts of red flags. He doesn’t have many memories of May Parker, but from what he can recall she definitely would not be impressed that her kid was interviewing people in Crime Alley. Which begs the question: where is she? Jason is trying to figure out how to ask the question without acknowledging that he cares (he doesn’t) when Peter speaks up again.

“It’s a long story,” Peter says, still picking at the table. “It’s not really a good one.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Jason says dryly, “but my life’s not super dandy at the moment either.”

“...and it’s pretty boring,” Peter adds.

Jason gives him a flat look as he sets the salt and pepper shakers on the table. “Try me.”

Again Peter is silent, and Jason’s just starting to wonder if he’s going to have to dig out his corkscrews when Peter sighs.

“I made a mistake,” he says at last, as Jason removes the pasta from the stove. Steam hisses up into his face as he dumps the boiling water in the sink, and for a moment he can smell smoke as the heat scorches his face. At least you’re still alive, he doesn’t say.

“It was just after we went to Europe. Just after you - anyway. I … got my first job with the Bugle. They wanted me to do a piece on Spider-Man, because there was something big going on and lots of supervillains were showing up everywhere in New York. So I found him. I followed him around, and I was doing pretty good, but then - well, I guess I got too close.” Peter smiles as Jason sets a large bowl of pasta before him, and seats himself across the table. Peter twirls his fork between his fingers, and looks Jason straight in the eye.

“Doctor Strange cast a spell to make people forget that Spider-Man existed. I got too close, and it caught me instead. Everyone forgot that Peter Parker ever existed. Everyone except you.”

Peter was right. It’s a shit story, and if he’s being quite honest Jason’s not sure he believes it.

“You said it was a long story,” he points out. Instead of the obvious: clearly Peter exists, he’s sitting at Jason’s kitchen table. (He went to Jason’s funeral.)

Peter shrugs, not meeting Jason’s gaze. “It seemed longer in my head, I suppose.”

And if that isn’t fucking tragic, Jason doesn’t know what is.

Before he can ask any of the hundreds of questions running through his head - why don’t I remember your job? Why did people need to forget Spider-Man? - and before he can point out that Dr. Strange’s spell obviously failed, just look at him - Peter takes a bite of the pasta, and lets out a sigh of satisfaction. Then he says “So what about you? What are you actually doing in Crime Alley?”

Jason knows that Peter’s changing the subject. He knows that he didn’t get the entire truth, probably nothing near the entire truth. But Peter went to his funeral. And he didn’t ask what happened - he didn’t ask why Jason came back from the dead. He asked what are you doing now, and … it’s been a while. Jason doesn’t actually think he can remember the last time someone was genuinely interested in how he’s been. So Jason decides to cede him the conversation, and dumps another spoonful of pasta on Peter’s quickly diminishing plate.

“I’m becoming the biggest crime lord in Gotham,” he says proudly, and starts laying out, in detail, all the plans he has been carefully crafting for the past few months.

Chapter Text

The aliens are broadcasting at a detectable frequency!! Ned messages MJ.

duh, MJ responds. they’re on the news.

I found the Kryptonian’s frequency!!! Ned texts Barbara.

Barbara’s reply is immediate. Let’s do this.

Ned likes computers, he always has. He likes hacking especially; there’s a thrill to it that nothing else seems to beat. And it’s nostalgic - he has a lot of good memories associated with hacking. But somehow he forgot this, and it’s not until he pulls up the Kryptonian’s frequency and starts noodling around with different decryption algorithms that he really starts to remember: hacking is fun.

It’s on a gamma frequency, Ned texts Barbara.

Have you tried the Schulter Method?

Ned tries the Schulter Method, and makes it to the next platform.

You pinged the feds, Barbara warns him, and Ned has a brief moment of panic in which he tries to remember the name of that guy from high school who knew someone who’s cousin could get him a fake passport. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.

“This is amazing,” Ned excitedly tells MJ, as she slumps disconsolately over her notes for her thesis. “I’m hacking aliens. This is, like, Avengers level of exciting.”

“Sounds like they’re an extremist version of Thanos,” MJ says.

“If I hack them and figure out their plan,” Ned muses, “do you think I could be an Avenger?”

I don’t know about the Avengers, Barbara writes. But this is definitely vigilante level work.

That’s enough for Ned.

The Joker is on sabbatical. Ned is neck deep in midterms, MJ is running interviews with criminal psychologists, and Gotham is being almost suspiciously predictable; it takes hardly any work at all for Barbara to find a source of disturbance, a potential future source of disturbance, and direct Batman and Robin to deal with it them both in a timely fashion. Things are running smoothly, and Barbara is starting to feel antsy.

So why not prepare for the worst? Why not practice hacking the kids’ trackers (and timing herself while she’s at it) in case she needs to find them fast in an emergency?

Barbara decides to start with Tim. She takes a few guesses while she’s building the framework; school is where he is supposed to be, but that is a highly unlikely scenario. Maybe the manor, or Drake Manor, or perhaps he’s out running errands with Alfred.

ping.

Barbara straightens in her chair, eyes narrowing at the error message. Error: blocked by trace scrambler.

…Okay. So he’s doing something he doesn’t want Bruce to find out about.

It takes Barbara about fifteen minutes to clear the scrambler, which is a personal best but still nowhere near good enough. The broad circle of the search algorithm narrows to a slightly smaller circle centered on Crime Alley, and Barbara reaches for her phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey Tim,” Barbara says. She takes a screenshot of her monitor and saves it to her blackmail folder. “Want to tell me what you’re doing in Crime Alley with a scrambled tracker?”

“You hacked my tracker?” Tim’s voice shoots up an octave. Something clangs in the background.

“I was expecting you to be in school,” Barbara says pointedly, even though she really hadn’t been. “You’re about ten miles outside your radius. Spill.”

There’s a short pause on the other end of the line. “I’m investigating the Red Hood,” Tim announces.

“By yourself?” Barbara demands. “In broad daylight? Tim -”

There’s another crash in the background, and the sound of voices. Barbara immediately starts recording the call so that she can parse through it later. “Is there someone there with you?” she asks sharply.

“I need to put you on hold I’ll be right back don’t tell anyone,” Tim says hastily, and then the line goes dead. Barbara stares at her screen, then lowers her hand to stare at her phone. She wonders, briefly, if she should be worried. She wonders if she has perhaps stumbled upon something much bigger than a typical Tuesday for Tim.

“Hi, I’m back!”

There’s no background noise that Barbara can pick up on now.

“I’m conducting interviews around the neighborhood, just with civilians, you really don’t need to worry about it. And. Uh. Please don’t tell Bruce? I’m supposed to be taking a day off.”

“You at least have your taser with you, right?”

“Yeah, of course.” Barbara can almost hear Tim rolling his eyes. “I’m not five.”

“I won’t tell Bruce,” Barbara says, “On the condition that you only do this once a week. You’re supposed to be in school, Tim.”

“Yeah okay sure. Once a week. Promise.”

Barbara lets him go. She runs the recording, but the snippets are so brief that they really don’t tell her anything (a man and a child, perhaps a father and child - none of the words are legible). She tries to narrow down the trace on Tim’s tracker without success

The next time she tries to track him (this time out of more than just idle curiosity) the tracker pings back from Drake Manor. And even though she knows that’s a lie, she can’t seem to trace it anywhere else.

Tony is just about to relax onto the sofa with a screwdriver and one of Morgan’s broken teddy bears, waiting for Bruce to find a suitable wildlife channel to watch, when Alfred appears in the door, face drawn and grim.

“Sir,” he says, taking a step into the room before halting, hands clasped in front of him and deceptively still. “Please go to channel four.”

Bruce flips to channel four, and the screen fills with a familiar face of white and red and green.

“Where is Robin?” the Joker sings, and Bruce is on his feet in the blink of an eye. “Where is Robin?” a hand appears on the screen, and the thumb - the nail bitten to the quick - begins to jerk around, dancing across their field of view. “Here I am, here I am!” the Joker moves back, cackling, to show them a view of the Gotham skyline. “How are you today, sir - very dead I THANK YOU,” and the Joker jumps back in front of the camera until it’s only his teeth, stained red and yellow, “run away. Run. Away!”

The rhyme ends, and then the Joker laughs, and the video loops, now muted as the channel anchor reports over it.

“Where’s Tim?” Bruce asks, voice low and dangerous and scared, and Tony reaches up to tap his glasses, bringing FRIDAY online. “FRIDAY?” he asks, trying to tamp down his own growing panic. Morgan, he thinks, running the list in his head, Damian, Tim, Dick, and - Jason. But Jason is dead, and Tim -

“Searching for Timothy Drake.” FRIDAY says, and the room falls into an uneasy silence. “Location: Unknown.” FRIDAY reports, and Tony can feel his veins turn to ice.

Bruce bursts into action, running out of the room without a backwards glance, and Tony is left standing in the lounge, listening to heavy footsteps fade down the hall, looking almost desperately at the old man still standing in the door.

This can’t be happening again. This can’t happen again.

“Go with him.” Alfred says, reaching out to put a faintly trembling hand on Tony’s shoulder. It’s probably supposed to be reassuring, although for whom Tony couldn’t say. “I shall call Master Damian and Miss Morgan inside, and make sure no harm comes to them. You have my word.”

Tony finds Bruce as he’s climbing into the Batmobile. 

“I’ve sent you the coordinates.” Bruce says, firing up the system. “Go.”

“We’ll get there in time.” Tony says, pressing a hand to his chest. Nanobots spill from the reactor, encasing him. Beneath it all, his heart is racing double time, pounding in his chest like a marching drum. Heart attack, he thinks automatically, but doesn’t say anything; now is not the time. 

“Pray that we do.” Bruce growls, and Tony turns to the waterfall and engages the thrusters, flying out into the late afternoon, towards Gotham city and the rooftop coordinates Bruce had sent.

He’s just crossed Bristol when FRIDAY links Alfred into the comms.

“Did you find anything?” Tony asks.

“The children are gone.” Alfred says, and Tony thinks his heart must stop. He can’t breathe, his chest is numb, his brain - “Master Damian and Miss Morgan left the house after lunch with Master Tim, heading in the direction of Drake Manor. They never arrived. I have not been able to find them.”

Across the line, Bruce lets out a string of violent curses. “You have full access to FRIDAY.” Tony finally manages, breaking the sound barrier as he careens towards Gotham. “I don’t care what it takes: find them!” 

Jason makes it to the rooftop in fifteen minutes flat. He doesn’t have a plan, not really. Those all went to hell the minute he opened his door to the Replacement’s face - no, before that: the minute he realized Morgan Stark was sitting at his kitchen table.

He simply knows that just under an hour ago, the Replacement, the Demon Spawn, and Morgan had all left his flat, stomachs full of cheese and fruit-salad, still bickering about whether Morgan had cheated at Go-Fish. Stop coming into Crime Alley! Jason had said, feeling a bit like a broken record; Come home, the Replacement had shot back, right on cue, and Jason had slammed the door in their faces.

And then the news had come on, the Joker’s face splashed across the television, and Jason had run. Guns loaded, helmet on, ready to murder that smiling lunatic. Because he had recognized that rooftop; he had known that skyline, he would have known it anywhere. It had been his favorite, once upon a time.

So here he is, skidding across the steel of the roof, gun drawn and heart in his throat as he comes to a standstill. 

This isn’t part of the plan. But maybe that doesn’t matter: maybe the Joker has Tim, and maybe he has Damian and Morgan as well, and maybe they’re worth breaking the rules for. Maybe they’re worth more than Jason ever was, because as soon as that clown shows his demented face, Jason is going to put a bullet through his fucking skull.

He should have done it ages ago. Bruce should have done it ages ago, because one dead kid should have been enough.

“Come out come out wherever you are!” Jason calls, letting the modulator cover the slight tremor in his voice (it’s adrenaline, that’s all). He spins in a circle, peering into the shadows, but there’s no sign of anyone. He can’t hear anything either, no diabolical laughter, no hard soles on concrete or the scrape of metal -

“Replacement!” he shouts, snarling the word into the crisp air, but no one answers. 

No one’s here.

Something crashes to the rooftop, and the next thing Jason knows he’s being thrown back against a chimney, slamming into it hard enough to leave a dent.

“Where are they?!” Iron Man shouts, repulsors charged and aimed at Jason’s chest.

“Don’t ask me,” Jason coughs, pushing himself to his feet, “you’re the one that lost them.”

“Now is not the time to play games, buddy,” Iron Man snarls, stalking forward.

“Now is not the time to be going after the wrong crime lord,” Jason snaps, drawing and cocking his gun to point at Iron Man’s armor. If push comes to shove, it won’t do shit. But it’s enough to make Tony hesitate, some primitive fear causing him to pause as Jason tips his head and smiles with a mirth he doesn’t feel.

Between one second and the next, Batman materializes beside Iron Man, stepping out of the shadows to stand beside his shining counterpart. It would have been more impressive, if Jason hadn’t been expecting him; it would have been more impressive, if he hadn’t spent years learning those same techniques.

“Red Hood.” Batman greets, and Jason’s hand tightens around his gun. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are, I suppose.” Jason drawls, something heavy settling in his chest. “I heard you lost something: a little bird, was it?” 

He should stop. The Joker isn’t here and neither are the kids, and he needs to extract himself before he loses it. He needs to step away, but the Joker isn’t here, and Batman is, and Jason has never been one to let an opportunity pass him by. So he doesn’t leave, and instead does something he really shouldn’t, and says nastily: “I wonder if this one will sing as prettily as the last - I’ll let you know, if he’s still alive when I find him. Going by your track record though, I wouldn’t hold my breath - it’s been what, thirty minutes? A shame. He’s probably choking on his own blood right about now.”

“Okay, that’s it, I’m taking this guy out.” Tony snarls, firing up his repulsors, and yep, Jason’s said enough. Time to make like a ghost and get the hell out of here. He leaps sideways off the rooftop, sliding down the sheer face of the floor-to-ceiling windows until he hits a ledge and takes off running, ignoring the steep drop to his left. In the air is a bad place to be when facing Iron Man (anywhere is a bad place to be when fighting Iron Man, period), but it’s not like he has much choice at the moment.

And it’s not like Iron Man is coming after him, apparently. Maybe Bruce talked to him. Maybe Batman said no, it’s not worth it. Jason’s not fucking worth it, and Iron Man agrees with Batman, and the Joker wasn’t even there (would they have stood back so easily, would they have done nothing, if the Joker had been there?).

Fuck them , Jason thinks bitterly, green malice seething under his skin. Fuck them, because their kids are dying and there they sit doing nothing at all.

The Placeholder opens the window and gets Morgan through it without making a sound, and Damian has to admit he’s grudgingly impressed.

Tiptoeing down the hall is the easiest thing in the world. Damian has long since learned how to sneak through life undetected, and even Morgan is hopping from floorboard to floorboard, sticking to the edges so they don’t creak. Drake holds up a hand, stopping them before they round a corner, and Damian has to bite his tongue on a scathing remark. He’s not an idiot, he knows how to sneak. He’s not an idiot, he knows the plan: primarily, don’t get caught sneaking back onto a property they should never have left in the first place, and eliminate all traces of ever having been anywhere near Crime Alley.

Which means that Morgan needs to either finish her stupid ice-cream or throw it out, because Damian doesn’t believe her when she insists that it can be refrozen in the freezer, ‘ good as new.’ It’s a piece of incriminating evidence, and it needs to be dealt with.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. In the end the Idiot Civilian straightens, beckons them forward, and steps around the corner to crash smack into Alfred, waiting with his arms crossed and both eyebrows raised (this is the first sign that they are in big trouble).

Morgan lets out a little eep, and quickly tries to hide her cup of melted ice-cream under her shirt. Damian is much more dignified, and quickly moves to hide behind the Placeholder.

“Alfred!” Drake squeaks, instantly straightening. “H-Hi. Hello. Um.”

“I’ve found them.” Alfred says, reaching up a hand to his ear even as he continues to stare them down (this is the second sign that they are in trouble: big trouble). “All three of them are safe. It appears they went out for ice-cream.”

“Oh.” Morgan says mournfully, taking the mess that is her ice-cream back out from under her shirt. “I couldn’t finish it!”

Alfred purses his lips and holds out a hand. Morgan dutifully passes the sticky cup over. “Your father would like to talk to you,” he says, taking his earpiece out and passing it to Morgan. She takes it, pressing it carefully into her ear. 

“Daddy?” she asks, and then winces, brows pinching down in concern at whatever it is Stark is saying. 

“Boys,” Alfred says, stepping forward before Damian can try to listen in. “Master Bruce will be home shortly, at which point he will want to speak with you both. Can I count on your cooperation?”

“Yes sir,” Tim says immediately. “I’ll wait in his office?”

“That would be prudent, yes.” Alfred says, somewhat more kindly at Tim’s easy acquiescence. “Master Damian, perhaps you would like to wait with me and Miss Morgan in the west parlor?”

It’s phrased like a question. It’s not a question.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Damian sniffs, and watches in satisfaction as Drake’s expression darkens in the corner of his eye. But he doesn’t say anything, and against his will Damian feels his satisfaction begin to sour. He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know why Father isn’t here, why Stark isn’t either, and why Morgan looks like she’s about to cry, her face the very picture of guilt. He doesn’t know why they’re in trouble, but he knows that Timothy Drake is gearing up to take the fall, and he knows he doesn’t like how small and cowardly that makes him feel.

He doesn’t like it at all.

Dick picks up after the third ring. Barbara’s not quite sure how she feels about this.

“Dick,” she says flatly, before he can say a word (before he can dig his own grave any deeper, she’s trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here). The tracking algorithm coughs up another error, and Barbara adjusts the parameters and starts it again. “What the actual hell.”

To his credit, Dick doesn’t pretend not to know what she’s talking about. “He was ticking me off,” he says grouchily, with not nearly enough remorse. “He wouldn’t get off my back about finding a better apartment. My flat is fine, I don’t need him hovering -”

“Do you know where Tim is?” Barbara interrupts. Her fingers tap nervously on the edge of her desk, her eyes tracking the progress bar on her screen.

There’s a short pause. “He’s… at the manor? Alfred’s making lasagna for dinner.”

“Tim is not at the manor!” Barbara snaps. “He vanished, Morgan and Damian are missing as well, I can’t find them, FRIDAY can’t find them! Do you have any idea how bad this looks?”

“I didn’t know he’d decided to go out! And what do you mean missing?”

“Oracle, come in,” Bruce’s voice growls in her other ear, and Barbara mutes Dick before switching to her comm. It’ll serve him right to worry, she thinks maliciously. It’ll serve him right to wonder where the kids have vanished so that she can’t find them. “Oracle here. You have an update?”

At least she knows that the Joker doesn’t have Tim.

“Alfred has found them,” Bruce says, and despite herself Barbara feels a weight lift from her chest. “They had ice-cream from a shop in the Bowery.”

“I’ll look into it,” Barbara promises, canceling the search progress and pulling up her own map of Gotham. “I’ll see what I can find on the Joker,” she lies, before cutting communications and returning to her call with Dick.

“That was Bruce,” she tells him tightly, pulling up a list of all the ice-cream parlors in the Bowery and aligning it with a map of the bus routes from Bristol. She feels tight: now that her worry has been dealt with, the anger is poking through and looking for a target. “Turns out they went for ice cream in the Bowery. What were you thinking?”

“Wait, the Bowery? Why didn’t they just go to Tammy’s -”

“Don’t change the goddamn subject, Dick!” Barbara yells.

“I’m sorry,” Dick says hastily, but it’s still too defensive for Barbara’s tastes. “I didn’t know they were out.” And then he has the gall to add “And it’s half Bruce’s fault anyway, he’s way too easy to rile up.”

Barbara closes her eyes, taking a deep breath in through her nose and letting it out slowly. Dick has a point, she tries to reason. He didn’t know Tim would be out; he didn’t know Morgan and Damian would sneak out after him, that they would take such pains to avoid detection. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he threatened Tim, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the fact that he used the face of Jason’s murderer to take petty revenge on the man who raised him.

Maybe she should tell him that the last time she tried to track Tim, she tracked him into Crime Alley. Maybe she should tell him that Tim freaked out when she confronted him about it, and that she has now lost all reliable access to his trackers.

Barbara takes three more deep breaths before she opens her eyes. “Okay,” she says calmly. “I’ll start with the apartment, because Dick: that thing you call an apartment? It’s a safety hazard. It was in violation before you moved in, and it’s looked like ground zero of an apocalypse ever since. The security is shit. You need a better apartment.”

“Okay, ouch. That’s the thanks I get for inviting you to dinner? It’s homey -”

“And two! You deliberately triggered Bruce. With the death of your brother - of a child he considered a son - no less. You crossed a line, Dick. That is not okay.”

“I would never hurt him, Babs,” Dick says quietly, and now he’s getting it. Barbara closes her eyes again, trying to steady herself for an entirely different reason as his grim voice carries across the line. “I would never hurt any of you.”

She knows that. And she understands, she really does, but she also realizes that there has to be an end to this somewhere. Every time the Joker resurfaces their entire dysfunctional family cracks a little more; if this goes on, eventually something is going to give. She can’t keep lying to Batman to cover Joker’s mistakes, and Dick can’t keep living two lives forever.

“This needs to end, Dick.”

The silence stretches on until Barbara decides she’s had enough and ends the call.

jason its tim

wer safe at themanor 

no sing of jkr 

No sign of Dick either, but … Tim’s not thinking about that right now.

The door to the study swings open and Tim shoves his phone deep into his pocket as Bruce sweeps in, coming to sit at the big desk across from him. To anyone else Bruce would have looked cool and collected, but Tim has been stalking him for years now, and he looks defeated. He looks tired in a way that speaks of resignation, and he looks haunted in a way Tim hasn’t seen in years.

At least he’s not angry. At least it doesn’t look like he’s about to fire Tim: like this might be salvageable in a way that doesn’t involve Tim breaking out the blackmail.

“I’m sorry.” Tim says immediately, back straight and hands clasped in his lap with his feet flat on the ground (yes, Mom, he knows about posture). “I should have told you we were going out, I take full responsibility.”

Bruce looks Tim in the eye and says, calmly and without hesitation, “You’re benched.”

“What?”

“You’re grounded. You’re not fighting anymore.”

The first thought Tim has, as he looks into Bruce’s unforgiving gaze, is I don’t live here. You’re not my dad. And then his brain catches up, flooding his head with flashing red lights and wailing sirens, because Robin has just been benched. Robin is out of the picture, the Joker is out of Arkham, and Batman wants to take to the streets alone.

This is a disaster.

“You can’t bench me!”

“This is not a discussion.”

“Yes it is, you need me as Robin -”

“I need you alive!” Bruce shouts suddenly, his fist slamming down on the table. “I need you alive, Tim.”

That has no bearing on the situation, Tim wants to say. My life isn’t worth yours. He can’t quite bring himself to say it though, and just ends up sitting there stupidly, blinking at Bruce and trying to come up with a more cohesive argument.

“If you like,” Bruce continues after a beat, flattening his hand against the polished wood of the desk, “You may have access to the Batcomputer. I could use some help on the Red Hood case. Robin, however, is nonnegotiable. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Tim says a little woodenly, not quite sure if he’s lying. Because if there is one thing they both agree on - albeit for completely different reasons - it seems to be this: Robin is nonnegotiable.

Chapter Text

It’s raining. Even in New York it’s raining, and Dick is really tired of it. It’s not even a nice rain; it’s a proper downpour, and even through his leather jacket Dick is soaked to the bone.

It doesn’t even make a difference when he splashes through a giant puddle at the bottom of the Stark’s driveway, because he’s already soaked anyway.

“Jesus, kid,” Tony greets him when he opens the door. “Didn’t I warn you about stringing up a tightrope over Niagara Falls?”

Dick reaches down deep and manages to drag up a mostly convincing smile. “Never said anything about the Hudson, though.”

Tony steps back and gestures him inside. As Dick steps past, the man frowns. “Did you ride your bike here?”

“Yeah.” Dick strips out of his jacket, hanging it gingerly on one of the hooks.

“Hm.” Tony looks out at the pouring rain, then nods to himself and shuts the door firmly. “Remind me to get you outfitted with my patented five season tires before you go. You had dinner yet?”

Tony hasn’t asked him why he’s here yet, and to be honest Dick is relieved. Even he’s not really sure; he’d just - needed to get away. Being the Joker takes its toll on him, and Dick knows this, he’d known exactly what he was signing up for when he shot the bastard through the skull three years ago. So he tries to take breaks. He lets the Joker go to ground for a little while, sends Batman and Robin on a harmless little goose chase while he resurfaces as Nightwing and just breathes. But this time….

Bruce had called him. While he was out playing the Joker Bruce had called him and asked for his help, and Dick hadn’t gotten the message until he stepped out of his little bathroom in Bludhaven, wiping the last of the make-up remover off his face as he checked his messages. So he can’t go to the manor right now, and he definitely can’t go to Barbara’s, and he can’t sit at home by himself and pretend that everything is okay.

The Joker’s dead, Barbara keeps telling him. Dick knows that isn’t true.

“Grayson? Hey, you with me?”

Dick blinks, and realizes with some surprise that he’s now sitting at the Stark’s kitchen table with a plate of curry in front of him. It looks homemade, the sauce thick over chunks of potato and chicken, and he must have microwaved it because there’s steam rising from the center - he must have zoned out.

“Sorry. Long day, I guess.”

“You look like shit.”

“Sorry.”

Tony sighs. Dick takes a bite of the curry, savoring the perfect balance of tomato and spice, and swallows. Tony shifts, and Dick can tell before he opens his mouth that he’s not going to like the question.

“Do you want me to call Bruce?”

When has the answer to that ever been yes?

“Can I stay here tonight?”

Again Tony sighs. He eyes Dick with a look that Dick can’t quite decipher, then stands with a scrape of his chair. “Of course, kid. You know where the guest rooms are.” He claps a hand on Dick’s shoulder as he passes, pausing a moment. “I’m headed to my workshop, but you know where to find me if you need anything.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

Dick finishes his poptarts. He washes the plate in the sink, sets it in the drying rack, then pads silently down the hall to the three guest rooms clustered in the back. He takes the one in the middle - it’s the one he’s always taken, whenever he visits. He’s even got a toothbrush and a spare change of clothes here.

He’s too tired to shower or brush his teeth. He leaves his wet clothes in a pile on the floor of the ensuite bathroom, crawls between the soft covers, and is asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow.

It’s already late by the time Dick wakes the next morning. He feels ten times better than he did last night, and it’s stopped raining - the sun is shining through the windows. Dick wanders into the bathroom, brushes his teeth, then ventures into the rest of the house.

Tony’s house is not like the manor. The manor is huge, walls of stone buried deep in the ground with arching windows and shadowed coves. It was the perfect place for a curious young boy to grow up; Dick had spent days wandering through the disused rooms, talking to the walls and telling them stories of all the people who used to live there. He remembers when Jason first came, when their relationship was still unsure; they would hold sleepovers all over the manor - a different room every night.

The Stark’s lakeside house is large as well, but in a different way. Where the manor traps the shadows, Tony’s home welcomes the light. Large south-facing windows capture the sun even in the darkest months of the year, and a large porch running around the building offers a sheltered place to enjoy the fresh fall air. The path down to the lake is well worn, and the lawn behind the house seems to blend almost seamlessly into the hemlocks at the edge of the forest.

Dick loves the manor, he truly does. But sometimes he just needs to escape.

He finds Tony in the livingroom, surrounded by holographic displays and looking extremely stressed. Dick watches silently from the doorway for a moment, before scuffling his feet slightly as he steps into the room.

Tony looks up, then swipes his screens down and away. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah,” Dick says. He steps further into the room, gesturing at the now-empty air. “You looked busy.” And stressed.

Tony lets out a puff of air. “The Kryptonians are starting to put pressure on us,” he says. “They want a decision, and the powers that be are still waffling.”

“Really?” Dick says, not bothering to keep the incredulity out of his tone. He takes a seat on the sofa, stifling a yawn behind his hand. “I’d’ve thought our answer would be a pretty resounding no.”

“It is!” Tony snaps. He takes a deep breath. “Enough about them. What about you? How are you holding up?”

Me? You know me, I’m always okay. Dick breaks eye-contact, trying to come up with a lie that won’t be quite so unbelievable. “Tired. But it’s fine, nothing new.”

“Listen,” Tony says seriously, and Dick has to suppress a wince. He came here because he didn’t want a lecture (he didn’t want to see the guilt in Bruce’s eyes), but it seems like he’s about to get one anyway. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

… Dick doesn’t really know what to say to that.

“Bruce and I should have been watching the kids more closely. We should have noticed when they left the grounds, but you? There was no way you could have known, kid. Nothing you could have done that Bruce and I weren’t already doing.”

Dick’s fingers tighten where he’s gripping his knees. It’s silly; Tim was never even in danger. That was the whole point of this, the entire reason Dick did what Bruce never could and put the Joker where he belonged. That’s the reason the Joker is dead, but -

You crossed a line, Dick.

“I still have nightmares, you know.” The words come unbidden, a confession Dick’s not really sure he’s ready for. He shouldn’t be telling Tony this; this isn’t Tony’s problem to fix. “I dream about the Joker, and sometimes in my dreams I kill him.”

And every time he does the Joker dies screaming, the sound bouncing out of his mouth and into Dick’s, into terrible choking laughs. Every time the gun drops and Dick wakes, shooting upright in uncontrolled fear, sweating and shaking and gasping for air. 

The Joker dies a million deaths every night in his dreams, and it’s never enough. He bleeds out in a dark alley, blown to pieces by a ticking bomb, beaten over and over every night, and every morning Dick wakes, alone in his apartment in Blüdhaven, and it’s never enough.

Does this make me a monster? Dick wants to ask. Does this make me the villain? He knows what Bruce would say. He thinks he knows what Barbara would say, but all of a sudden he wonders; might Tony understand? Because Iron Man has never had the same compunctions as Batman about laying villains in the ground.

“Would it be so wrong,” Dick says abruptly, before he can change his mind, “if I did kill him?”

Tony sighs, reaching up a hand to run through his hair. He stares at Dick for a while, the most serious Dick has seen him, and then he shifts, patting the couch beside him. “Come here.”

“What?”

“Come here,” Tony repeats, patting the couch again. He holds out his arm. “This is not a conversation I’m having with you half-way across the room.”

Dick blinks. Then, feeling a bit silly, he pushes himself up and shifts two cushions to the left.

“Mr. Wayne has the strongest morals of anyone on this planet,” Tony says. “And you are a close second. His whole ‘no killing’ schtick? There’s a reason for it, and it’s a good one; if we stoop to the same level as those we’re trying to fight, there will be no difference between us and them. You can’t be a hero if you don’t hold yourself to some pretty high standards. Now, that being said, there is a time and a place for standards, and sometimes - well. Rules aren’t written in stone, kid, and we all know that laws can be … malleable.”

Dick didn’t actually think Tony was going to take his side in this. Tony is Iron Man, Tony is the man who saved the world and defeated Thanos -

Wait.

“Do you know how many lives Bruce has taken?” Tony continues. “Zero. Now do you want to know how many lives I have on my hands - and these are only the ones I killed without hesitation, these aren’t the lives that were lost because I was negligent.”

“How many?” Dick asks.

“Fifty seven,” Tony says. His expression is dead serious in the face of Dick’s incredulity. “Or something like that; it’s hard to keep track sometimes when there’s a bunch of soldiers firing at you in the middle of a desert. I’ve killed to protect myself and those I love, kid. I wish I didn’t have to, but if it’s me or them then I don’t have a choice.”

So you think it’s okay. So you would have killed the Joker to protect your family.

“There is a difference,” Tony says, “Between killing a man in self defense, and killing the same man in cold blood. And sometimes there is a very thin line between the two.”

“Tony,” Dick says, voice light as he tries to mask the emotions vying to dominance within him. “Are you saying you would support me if I killed the Joker?”

“I guess what I’m saying,” Tony says after a moment, “is that I wouldn’t blame you.”

Well. That’s nice, all things considered.

“Not saying that you should, of course,” Tony adds. He squeezes Dick’s shoulder, then pushes himself up off the couch. He stretches. “And about the nightmares; they don’t go away. Wish I could tell you they did, but you’re old enough that I don’t have to lie to you about this stuff. They don’t go away, but they do get better. Eventually.”

Until they’re brought up again. Until Dick puts on the Joker’s face and threatens his little brother, and brings Bruce’s nightmares (and his own) back in full force.

This has to end, Dick.

It’s been three years. Maybe Barbara is right; maybe it’s time for Dick to move on.

“Damian.”

Damian looks up from where he’s slouched in a beanbag, struggling his way through Magic Treehouse: Night of the Ninjas. It’s so stupid it’s giving him a headache, and he has a feeling Morgan is about to make it worse. “Yes?”

“I’m bored. Let’s go look for Peter.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We were given strict instructions -”

“Pleeeaase? Pretty please with sprinkles and a kiss -”

“No!” Damian nearly shouts, slamming the book shut and shooting to his feet, already reaching out to shove a hand against Morgan’s mouth. She promptly licks his fingers, and he jerks back in disgust. “Fine, whatever. It was more of a suggestion anyway.”

“Daddy says rules are made to be broken.” Morgan says confidently, following as Damian stalks through the stacks towards one of the back exits.

“Father says rules are what keep you alive,” Damian informs her, weaving around the plastic palm trees to keep out of sight of the circulation desk. They’re at the Gotham Public Library. They’re supposed to be happily reading books like good little angels, but the more he thinks about it, the more concerned Damian is that Stark is somehow infecting Father with his foolishness. After all, how is Damian to blame for not staying put when Father should know very well that he does not tolerate such banal activities as reading on a beanbag. Perhaps he had somehow thought Morgan would provide an incentive for good behavior.

More fool him. And it’s full daylight, as long as they pull up their hoods and wear sunglasses, no one will be able to recognize them anyways; it’s not like Gotham is dangerous. Nanda Parbat is dangerous. Getting in the way of Grandfather’s plans is dangerous. Old Gotham on a Saturday morning is not.

“Well,” Morgan says, as they step out into a patch of sunlight in a dirty alley behind the library. “Mommy says there’s an exception to every rule.”

“Hide your face,” Damian instructs as they head for the street, and Morgan complies, pulling her sunglasses down from her forehead as Damian flips up the hood of his sweater. It’s a rare sunny day in Gotham, and there are more people out and about than usual for ten in the morning on a weekend. Damian twitches every time someone comes too close, fingers tightening around the knife in his pocket. No stabbing civilians, he has to remind himself, glowering at a young woman who’s trying to drag her yapping dog out of their way.

Morgan, for all she likes to pretend the world is made of rainbows and sunshine, is really quite good at making herself inconspicuous when it suits her. She blends right into the scenery despite her small stature, and when Damian finally looks away from the dogwalker it’s to find her almost a block ahead of him already, making her way confidently towards the small park between two towering apartment buildings.

When he catches up, she’s straddling the railing running down the stairs. “I bet you can’t do this,” she tells him and, leaning forward to hug the rail like a koala, slides down its length.

Damian scoffs. “Child’s play.” He hops up, wobbling for the briefest second before steadying and walking down the rail on sure feet.

Morgan juts out her chin and crosses her arms when he hops down to meet her. “So you can’t do it.”

Damian instantly swells. “What do you mean, I just did -”

“No, not like that,” Morgan interrupts, and runs past him up the stairs again. She clambers onto the rail, wraps her arms around it, and slides down. “Like this.”

Damian thinks this is stupid. He thinks it is idiotic and puerile and entirely beneath his dignity, but he also knows that Morgan will mock him for weeks if he doesn’t prove himself and that just will not stand. So he stomps back up the stairs and throws his leg over the rail and slides down just to show that he can.

Morgan cheers when he reaches the bottom. “It’s fun,” she reassures him as he brushes himself off, matching his scowl with an innocent smile (which doesn’t fool Damian one bit). She lifts her arm and gestures at an old abandoned building at the edge of the park; it’s been cordoned off with yellow tape, and seems to be overgrown with various vines. “Let’s go check that out, do you think Peter would live there?”

“No,” Damian says definitively a few minutes later, once they’ve drawn close enough to read the sign. Crime Scene; Poison Ivy the sign reads. Even Morgan’s not-imaginary brother wouldn’t be stupid enough to live in a building which had been the scene of a terrorist attack from one of Gotham’s more eccentric villains. “He’s not here, let’s look somewhere else.”

Damian steps back. Morgan drifts closer. “Poison Ivy? Like, the real alive Poison Ivy?”

“Father says she targets big corporations. He says that she wants humans to go extinct so that plants can take over the planet.”

Morgan studies the scene, head tilting up as she looks at the vines and tree branches growing out of the windows. There’s no one else here, which Damian thinks is a pretty good indicator of their current personal safety; it’s a pretty good indicator that they should leave well enough alone.

And besides: they’re civilians right now. Damian is Bruce Wayne’s heir, and he has an image to uphold just like his father. “Let’s go.”

Still Morgan doesn’t move. She just stands there, chewing on her lip as she gazes at the building through her plastic sunglasses. Damian shifts impatiently and opens his mouth, but before he can speak again Morgan says decisively “Let’s go inside.”

That sounds like a terrible idea. “What?”

“You want to be Robin, right?” Morgan says patiently. She turns to him, her face serious in a way he doesn’t think he’s ever seen it before. “You should practice. Batman won’t let you practice properly, you said; but Batman isn’t here right now. Let’s investigate a crime scene so you can practice being Robin.”

This sounds suspiciously like a favor. This sounds like Morgan trying to get him in trouble so that she can blame him when they inevitably get caught; this sounds like Morgan being nice to him, and - and no one is ever just nice to Damian. Ever.

He scowls. “I am permitted to train in the cave. I have not been expressly forbidden the role, it is only because of the Placeholder -”

“Batman’s not here, and neither is Tim,” Morgan says pointedly. “Do you want to be Robin or not?”

Damian wants to be Batman. He wants to be worthy of his father’s legacy, he wants to make his father proud, and in order to do that …

… in order to do that he needs to learn how to be an effective vigilante. “Fine!” he snaps, striding forward and ducking under the tape. Morgan scurries to catch up, already bouncing excitedly as she starts peering at all the plants. “But you have to stay close to me and do exactly as I say. Pretend I’m Batman and you’re Robin. Understand?”

“Capiche,” Morgan says happily. “Don’t worry, Damian, I’m very good at being sneaky.”

They make it half an hour. Morgan oohs and aahs at every single plant, and Damian practices his skills of observation; he steers Morgan around holes in the floor and warns her (multiple times) not to trip on stray roots and vines, and shows her how to duck cameras set up by the cops. He leaps up to the ceiling at one point, practicing his lurking while Morgan investigates a holly bush. All told it goes remarkably well, and by the time half an hour is up Damian decides that maybe this is actually fun.

Then, just as he’s about to suggest they start heading back (their fathers will be looking for them soon, and Damian does not want to be put on dish duty again), disaster strikes. And, as usual, it is entirely Morgan’s fault.

“Damian come look!” Morgan squeals, and Damian pauses despite himself, turning to scowl over his shoulder.

“Be quiet,” he hisses. “What?”

“It’s a flower that looks like a bat!” Morgan whispers back, voice carrying quite clearly despite her dutifully lowered tone. She reaches out to pick it. “I’ll come show you, don’t worry -”

“No -” Damian starts, making an aborted step forward too late -

There is small pop, a startled squeak, and a rapid succession of violent sneezes.

Damian launches forward, and tackles Morgan to the ground.

“Ow - atchoo - atchoo - ow!”

“It’s your fault!” Damian nearly shouts, just barely managing to keep his voice under control. “Don’t be stupid, you aren’t allowed to be stupid!”

“Ow,” Morgan repeats, and plants a hand squarely in Damian’s face to push him away. She sits up and sniffs, swiping at her nose. “I’m okay.”

Damian gets cautiously to his feet, looking around warily as Morgan gets up as well. It’s hard for him to accept that the flower wasn’t booby-trapped - Poison Ivy was here, after all. And Poison Ivy is the queen of booby-traps. Morgan shivers, and Damian feels a prickle of cold run down his own spine.

“It was a really cool flower,” Morgan says a bit mournfully. “You would’ve liked it.”

“We should go,” Damian responds. He eyes the corners of the ceiling, the window ledges, the loose floorboards. “Your brother clearly isn’t here, and Father will have finished his meeting by now.”

“We should get hot chocolate,” Morgan suggests, trotting quietly in Damian’s wake as he begins winding his way out. “It’s cold.”

They sneak between gnarled larches over the cracked pavement, Damian leading and Morgan following. He has to stop and wait three times while she gets distracted by more plants, but finally they make it back to the police tape and onto the legal side of the barricade. At which point Damian realizes that Morgan’s teeth are chattering. Loudly.

“Will you be quiet?” he snaps, rubbing at the goosebumps running over his own arms. “It’s not that cold!”

“I’m s- sorry,” Morgan says, and although her tone is innocent enough Damian can see the way her brown eyes have narrowed on him. “I bet it’s c-colder in N-Nan - N-Nan-da P-Par-”

“Nanda Parbat!” Damian says impatiently. He turns his glare to the sky, which is aggressively blue and sunny. It was colder in Nanda Parbat. It was also hotter in the summer, and much dryer, and much much more dangerous. If Damian had ever made a stupid mistake like Morgan does all the time, he would be dead. (And then he would be alive, and then maybe dead and then alive again and Damian doesn’t want to think about it.)

“C-c-can I w-wear your s-sweat-ter?” Morgan chatters, and Damian wants to say no. He wants to tell her that she should have brought her own sweater, that she should have known better and not been so stupid, but then he thinks of Morgan high in the mountains and he takes off his hoodie, suppressing a shiver of his own at the rush of cold against his skin. He holds it out silently, and Morgan reaches to take it.

Morgan’s hand brushes Damian’s, and less than a second later he almost falls over as she shoves herself against his side, letting out a sigh of contentment as her shivering subsides. “You’re warm,” she says, something almost like delight threading her voice.

I’m cold, Damian wants to say. He wants to correct Morgan, to explain that the only reason he feels so warm is because she is cold; that actually they’re both cold, and they need to get somewhere warm before they freeze to death. But despite the fact that Damian has been held back a grade (a fact that Morgan will not let him forget), he does know science. He knows that if Morgan is colder than he is, which is what her assertion assumes, then she should also feel cold to him. She doesn’t. She feels warm, and Damian strangely finds himself unwilling to push her away.

So of course this is exactly what he does. “Get off me!” he snaps, and shoves. Morgan stumbles back, and immediately starts shivering again.

“Don’t be m-mean, Damian,” she whines. “You d-d-don’t have to b-be.” And then she’s latched onto him again, and Damian is relieved against his will as the warmth floods back.

They stand like that for a minute in front of the police tape, Morgan hugging Damian’s stiff limbs, his sweater forgotten on the sidewalk.

“Very well,” Damian says at last. He shifts, cautiously bring an arm up to drape awkwardly over Morgan’s shoulders. (He will need to consult Richard later on the proper technique for a hug; for now memory will have to suffice.) Because Damian thinks he knows what’s going on. He thinks that they tiptoed their way through one of Poison Ivy’s crime scenes, and Morgan touched a flower, and that flower was booby-trapped.

“We have been infected with Poison Ivy’s pollen,” Damian informs Morgan, shifting a bit as she presses closer. “Do not worry: Father shall provide us with an antidote.”

“Poison Ivy has special pollen?” Morgan asks. She sounds excited. This is not something to get excited about - “So that’s why we’re cold and why it’s warm to hug? Poison Ivy’s pollen makes people hug each other?”

That’s a blatant over-simplification of the matter, but Morgan is still talking. “Poison Ivy likes hugs!” she announces. “Poison Ivy likes the planet, and she likes plants, and she likes making people get along?”

“Poison Ivy is a criminal and an environmental terrorist,” Damian snaps.

Morgan gives him an unimpressed look. Damian tuts, and inches around her to pick his hoodie off the sidewalk. “Our fathers will worry if we do not return in a timely manner,” he reminds her as she shuffles along with him. He considers their situation, then decides “You shall ride on my back.”

“Piggy-back,” Morgan agrees. They have to separate themselves for a second so that Morgan can get a running start, and in that second Damian thinks that he has never been so cold in his entire life - and then Morgan jumps, latching like a monkey onto Damian’s back, and he’s warm again.

“Here,” Morgan says, placing the hood of Damian’s sweatshirt over his hair (even though he didn’t get the chance to put it on properly; even though it’s now bunched between Morgan’s chest and his shoulders). “Now we’ll still be disguised as well.”

It takes them fifteen minutes to get back to the library. It takes fourteen minutes for Damian to break. “I will tell Stark that this is your fault,” he decides aloud, having graciously decided to warn Morgan of his decision. “You made a mistake, and it was preventable. If you continue in this manner, you shall never have a chance to be my Robin.”

Morgan is silent for a moment, arms draped over Damian’s shoulders and her chin nestled on his hood. “That’s okay,” she says after a moment. “I don’t want to be Robin anyway. When I grow up, I want to be Poison Ivy.”

Chapter Text

Tim is benched, and Tim is bored, and Tim has a lot of case files he could be working on and one glaring file labeled Red Hood that he should be working on. But no. This will not be a productive house arrest; this will be research at knifepoint, this will be ‘how many coffees can he drink before he convinces himself he’s hallucinating.’

Let’s go about this scientifically, Tim’s brain suggests, and he doesn’t want to, actually, this is a very bad idea and he wants to forget about it entirely. There are absolutely no grounds on which to base this Idea, and even if there were, he doesn't want to think about it.

Hypothesis: Dick Grayson is in league with the Joker.

Well. Hypotheses are made to be disproved. Tim is going to disprove the crap out of this one.

He starts by looking for the last time Nightwing and the Joker interacted. This isn’t as simple as one might have thought, considering Nightwing is based primarily in Blüdhaven and the Joker has a very specific vendetta against Batman and Gotham as a whole. But this is just another puzzle, and one Tim is determined to crack: so he hunches his shoulders, puts his nose to the screen, and gets cracking.

A week later he has a secret folder locked and encoded onto his hard drive, hidden behind a veritable ocean of encryption and unbreakable to even Oracle’s all-seeing gaze. A week later and he barely remembers what the sky looks like, and he only knows the taste of stale coffee on his tongue, and he finally has another hypothesis.

Hypothesis: Dick Grayson is the Joker.

Tim kind of wants to crawl in a hole and die. He wants to take back everything he ever had against his first hypothesis, because this. Whatever this is, he doesn’t want it. 

Unfortunately, that’s not how science works.

The next time Dick visits the manor, Tim decides to play a coward, and makes an excuse that allows him to return to Drake Manor before the man even arrives. He takes his phone and his computer and a taser, crams himself into the upstairs linen closet, and spends the night searching for any scrap of proof, no matter how small, that he’s wrong. For any scrap of proof that will indicate that Dick Grayson is anything but the Joker.

In the end, he finds nothing. In the end he falls asleep, curled up like a terrified eight-year-old, wondering if there will be a more permanent darkness waiting for him the next time he closes his eyes. Because while satisfaction might have saved him once, there is no satisfaction in this; because curiosity kills, and there is nothing more dangerous than knowledge.

Tim is panicking, just a little bit. 

“Hey, Babs,” he says, his voice embarrassingly high. He clears his throat and tries again; “Hey, Babs. Um. So you know how the Joker shot you. Was that - I mean, could that have been, um, your boyfriend? Ex-boyfriend? What’s his name, Dick, uh, Grayson?”

His reflection stares back at him from Janet’s vanity, and Tim is forced to admit that he both sounds and looks a bit insane. His hair is standing on end (unacceptable) and there are dark circles under his eyes (unavoidable) and he can’t keep his lines straight in his head. He can’t make it sound as careless as he wants to.

He lifts his voice to a falsetto. “No, Tim, I don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s ridiculous, how did you even come up with that? That’s your proof? Oh, well, let’s see. No no, this can’t be right, Dick definitely isn’t the Joker, don’t be silly. Look, because…”

And here the game ends. Because here Tim is, with all his evidence, and here Barbara isn’t. And he needs to ask her. He needs to know, because whenever Dick disappears, the Joker pops up. And Tim has done his research, he’s dug up past case files and reports, and he’s set a timeline for all of Dick’s disappearances and all the Joker’s acts of terrorism.

And now Tim is panicking, kind of a lot, actually. 

Because Thanos was defeated, and Dick disappeared. Dick had an argument with Bruce and disappeared, and for months no one heard a word. Only texts, and the occasional email. 

Because Dick was in space.

Right?

And then the Joker shot Barbara through the spine, and Dick wasn’t there. And then the Joker murdered Jason, and Dick wasn’t there. And then the Joker disappeared, and then Dick Grayson reappeared, and thus the cycle began.

And Tim is panicking. Like really, full-on can’t breathe panicking, the kind where his knees turn to jelly and he has to catch himself on the vanity as he lowers himself to the carpeted floor. Tim locks eyes with the Siberian Tiger spread next to his mother’s bed, and tries to focus.

How can you have missed this, what’s wrong with you?  

Tim doesn’t know. He really, really doesn’t, and it’s this that leaves him feeling light-headed and nauseous, it’s this that really freaks him out. He thought he knew everything. He thought he was smart, and he thought he was thorough, and Tim thought he knew his neighbors. And while he might admire Bruce Wayne, Tim adores Dick Grayson. He likes the way he laughs and he likes the way he smiles, and he likes how serious he is when he wraps an arm around Tim’s shoulders, how sincere. (Tim remembers late nights, and roof-top adventures, and jealousy and hope warring for purchase as he watched Robin and the new kid (the same age as Tim) and imagined it could be him.)

And now Dick is the Joker, and Tim doesn’t know what to do except keep gathering evidence, keep digging deeper, because maybe, hopefully, there’s a way out. If he can just find that one glitch, that one small mis-step that will prove him completely, certifiably insane, Tim will be happy. And then he’ll go home, and laugh and say to Dick Did you know I thought you were the Joker?

And Dick will smile and roll his eyes and rap Tim’s head with his knuckles and say Some detective you are, Timmy. How did you convince yourself of that?

And Tim will be wrong and the world will be right, and this nightmare will come to an end.

-

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Space Trip Itinerary

Dear Groot,

I heard that Nightwing went on a trip with you a few years ago. I was wondering if you could send me an itinerary so I can map out your route? I’m doing a project for Batman, it would be a big help, thanks.

Regards,

Robin.

While waiting for Groot to respond, Tim decides to take his stress out on his contraband kryptonite. It’s better than setting spiteful traps for Damian, probably.

The kryptonite ends up a fine powder under the unforgiving Bathammer, and Tim feels a little bit better.

- 

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Space Trip Itinerary

I am Groot,

I am Groot I am Groot I am Groot, I am Groot. I am Groot I am Groot.

I am Groot

I am Groot

Tim makes it all the way to Gotham public library before he chickens out.

“Is Ms. Gordon here?” he asks the lady at the reception desk, knuckles white around his camera. He doesn’t know what he’s going to be taking pictures of, but the feel of it held between his hands and slung around his neck provides immeasurable comfort, and Tim is not above taking a security-camera with him if it makes him feel safer. 

“She’s just about to finish up story-time,” the lady - Ginny Wilkers - says, clicking on her computer. “If you can wait ten more minutes I can let her know you’re here.”

“Sure, okay, thank you,” Tim manages, and then flees to the nearest shelves to wait. 

Jason likes reading, Tim’s brain helpfully supplies. Shut up, he mentally snaps, and picks up a book on archaeology. It’s full of photographs and charts and little cultural informationals, and Tim wonders if it’s the sort of book his parents might buy him, if they thought he liked books. Maybe. Yes, Tim decides, and sits down to read it.

Ten minutes later Tim hears the sound of wheels on carpet, and looks up to see Barbara coming towards him, her hair tied up messily above her head and a stack of books in her lap. 

“Tim!” she says, smiling. “Ginny told me you were here. What’s going on?”

Dick’s the Joker, Tim almost says. And promptly chickens out.

“Um,” he says instead, awkwardly and not reassuringly at all. “Nothing. How-how are you?”

“I’m fine,” Barbara replies, but the smile has frozen on her face and Tim really doesn’t blame her when her eyes start moving to catalog and assess all the exits and entrances. Her hands drift to her wheels, ready to move. “How’s your cat doing?”

It’s code. Because Tim is freaking out, and now he’s freaking Barbara out, and now she thinks that something is really wrong (and it is, it is, and god what if Tim’s right, and what if Barbara remembers).  

If Tim says she’s fine, Barbara will activate her emergency beacon. If Tim says sleeping, as always, Barbara will know that everything’s okay, and Tim is just being weird.

She’s fine, Tim almost says. Dick’s the Joker, he almost admits. But his brain and his mouth are doing their usual bit of pretending the other doesn’t exist, and what comes out instead is “Sleeping.”

Barbara frowns, and isn’t fooled.

“Are you in trouble -” she begins, voice low and barely audible, but Tim interrupts before she can get further.

“My parents are coming home,” he blurts out, the lie a muscle memory, repeated so often he’s even managed to fool himself once or twice with it. It’s the oldest lie, and the one that comes easiest now. Because he thinks that if he utters the word Dick and Joker in the same sentence, he might actually physically be sick. And he thinks that if he asks Barbara now if she knows anything, if she remembers, he’ll ruin everything forever.

“Are they home now?” Barbara asks, something sharp entering her tone. Target acquired, Tim hears, and quickly and frantically backpedals before she gets the wrong idea.

“No! No, I mean they’re coming home. And I…” Tim’s gaze latches onto the book held between his hands. “I wanted to get them a gift. Like, Welcome Home, that sort of thing. Um, a book, probably. They like archaeology. I think.”

“‘You think?’” Barbara mimics. “Tim, I…” she reaches up a hand, running it through her hair until it catches on her ponytail, cheeks puffing out as she lets out a breath. “Jesus. You’re here to buy your parents a book?”

The incredulity in her voice is palpable. There’s also something of bitterness, something Tim thinks he understands but doesn’t want to. It’s the tone everyone adopts when speaking of Tim’s parents: Bruce, Barbara, Tony, Dick, even Alfred. And Tim doesn’t like it one bit.

“I just thought you might recommend something,” Tim says. “And then I can order it online, or something. Because they’re coming home, and I want to do something nice for them.”

It’s a lie. It’s a boldfaced lie, and Tim knows exactly how pathetic it sounds, but that isn’t exactly an accident either. Because instead of worrying over Tim’s little display earlier (read: crash-and-burn trainwreck of a confession), Barbara can now worry about Tim’s home life and be indignant and sorry on his behalf.

“Okay,” Barbara sighs at last. “Alright. Let’s find something for your parents, Tim.”

Dick: Alfred’s making mac for dinner
Dick: watch something after?
Dick: I need to pick your brain, when are you coming over :( 
Dick: Dami misses you
Tim: No he doesn’t
Dick: Yes he does, he told me so himself
Tim: he wants me dead
Dick: ok fair. B misses you
Tim: nice try
Dick: he does! Fine. I miss you
Dick: I’ll show you my super secret stash of chocolate covered coffee beans
Dick: so when are you coming over?

Tim stands on the sprawling steps to Wayne Manor, staring at his phone and chewing his lip. You want me dead too, Tim doesn’t reply. Are you going to kill me like you killed Jason? he doesn’t ask, because that’s ridiculous and absurd, and he doesn’t believe it’s true. He doesn’t think that Dick shot Barbara because she broke up with him. He doesn’t think that Dick murdered Jason for stealing what wasn’t his.

Tim really, truly doesn’t believe that Dick Grayson could be a bad person if he tried, but there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence telling him otherwise.

Tim straightens his back and lifts his chin, and reaches up a hand to ring the doorbell.

Bruce opens it, looking out and then down as his expression morphs from one of bland politeness to one of confusion.

“Tim?” he asks, frowning. “Was the door locked?”

“No,” Tim replies. He crosses his arms, and then uncrosses them. “Dick invited me.”

Bruce somehow looks even more confused at this even as he steps back, holding the door open in invitation. “He’s helping Alfred in the kitchen,” Bruce offers. He coughs into his elbow, and Tim stops.

“Are you sick?”

There’s a pointed pause, before Bruce sends a dark look down the hall and mutters “Alfred seems to think so.”

“So no Robin tonight.” 

“Tim, you are grounded,” Bruce replies, with no small amount of exasperation. “Even if I were patrolling, you would not be joining me. Dick is taking my routes tonight, assuming Alfred continues with this nonsense.” He sniffs, although it probably sounds more congested than it’s meant to. “Perhaps we could run through some drills, however,” he allows, something almost hopeful creeping into his tone.

Tim doubts Alfred will be any more amenable to this idea than he is to patrol, but he smiles anyway and nods.

Dick’s face lights up when the two of them enter the kitchen, and he’s on his feet in an instant. “Tim!” he exclaims, “You’re back!”

As though Tim has been away for four years, rather than simply hiding for four days.

Tim has about a minute to gather himself as Dick looks around for something to wipe his flour-covered hands on, before Dick strides across the room and pulls Tim into a quick hug (it feels nice. It feels so nice, and Tim feels like an awful person for ever doubting Dick, and he feels like crying because it’s not even his fault and there’s nothing he can do to fix it). In the same move Dick spins Tim so that he’s standing further away from Bruce, who has just pulled out a black embroidered handkerchief and is looking at it with vague offense, as if it is to blame for his runny nose.

“Did you hear the big news?” Dick asks, letting go and punching Tim lightly on the shoulder. “B is sick, so we’re watching that new show about kittens tonight.”

“I’m fine,” Bruce sighs, and Alfred tuts from where he’s standing near the stove, rolling out the macaroni. And then Bruce sneezes, and Dick squawks something about germs and pasta and the plague, and then he starts laughing, fingers tapping against Tim’s shoulders as he’s herded from the room.

Tim wishes this were it. He wishes this was his home, and this his family, and this his happily ever after. He wishes he had never noticed the pattern, and never hypothesized the implausible, and never second-guessed his childhood idol. Never meet your heroes, says everyone ever. Tim has never wanted any advice to be less true.

He can’t keep up the charade. He can’t keep looking at Dick and seeing the Joker, he can’t keep looking for madness in Dick’s every smile, and he can’t keep listening for cruelty in his laugh.

Tim needs to know if Dick killed Jason, and he needs to know if he shot Barbara, and he needs to know why and when it all started. Because maybe then he can steal some Stark Tech, and travel back in time, and prevent any of it from happening at all. Maybe then he will know what kind of person Dick Grayson really is, and what kind of justice he deserves.

And because Tim learns from his mistakes, and he learns from his failures, Tim knows he can’t ask Barbara. Because if he’s wrong, and Barbara doesn’t know, then she will hate him and Dick forever, and it will be Tim’s fault. But there’s still one more person Tim can ask, someone who already hates him and already hates Dick, someone who will answer Tim’s question honestly and without preamble.

Do you remember dying? Tim practices, as Dick herds him down the hall. No, dumb way to start, get it together -

“Tim?”

Tim blinks back to the present. Dick isn’t smiling anymore, and is looking at him with a pensive expression, a small furrow between his brows.

“Huh?”

“Look, I’m not trying to pry or anything,” Dick starts slowly. Uh-oh, Tim thinks, and braces himself. “Just, okay. Babs texted me this morning, and I guess… is everything okay? Are you… you haven’t been home for a few days.”

They’re in the south-facing parlor, for an approximation of privacy. The door is ajar, and sunlight is streaming through the windows, warm on Tim’s face and arms. The golden light fills the room, washing everything in shades of fire and bronze. It makes Tim feel safe, and he wonders, against his will, if this is a trap.

I know, Tim almost says. You’re the Joker, he almost admits.

“My parents are coming home,” he says instead, voice small and miserable. “I was just preparing the house.”

“You told me last time your parents aren’t home until February,” Dick replies without hesitation, dark eyes boring into Tim. “Want to try again?”

Tim had said that to Bruce almost five weeks ago, when Bruce started prying and Tim thought he might stay here forever. Dick had been there, helping Damian with his homework and listening in to their conversation. And now Dick remembers, because of course he does: he remembers everything (Dick was Robin too, once upon a time).

Do you remember Ethiopia? Tim almost asks. He’s starting to feel a little light-headed, and a little afraid. Do you remember knocking?

“Tim?”

“I think I’m sick.”

Do you remember dying? Tim doesn’t ask, as Dick puts an arm around his shoulder and holds a hand to his forehead. Because there’s one more person who will know for sure, one more individual who might hold the final piece to this hellish puzzle. Was it Dick who killed you, Jason, and is this what it felt like when he did?

Later that night, Tim sneaks out. When Bruce and Damian have been put to bed, when Dick has left for Gotham and Alfred has settled in the cave with a cup of tea and a book, Tim slips silently into his Robin uniform and leaves by the back door, the one no one thinks he knows about. (Tim is Robin. It’s his job to know things, that’s why he’s sneaking out in the first place.)

Tim sneaks into Gotham and into Crime Alley, and settles on a rooftop to wait.

Chapter Text

Jason thinks if anything were worse than dying, this might be it. He is panicking, on the verge of hyperventilating, freaking out, fucking loosing it because he has a broken, bloody Robin in his arms and he - 

(Green is the color of rotten things. Green is the color of envy, the color of moss on a gravestone and decay in dead skin, the color of pond scum and Lazarus Pits and rage. Green is the color of violent cloying death, inevitable and all consuming and unforgiving.)

- he knows how it happened. He remembers every detail, every moment of sick pleasure he had taken in the deed, in pounding the Replacement into the ground and teaching him just how hollow little bird’s bones could be, just how easy they were to break.

The Replacement doesn’t deserve Robin, Batman doesn’t deserve Robin, no one deserves Robin because Robin is dead - was dead - will be dead - … He’s not thinking straight (he’s barely thinking at all). He knows that, how can he not, he would never do this otherwise, he hates Batman but Robin is forgiven, that was never the point , this isn’t him, he -

(They replaced you, Talia whispers, before you were even cold in the grave.)

- he takes the steps two at a time, putting all of his concentration into not stumbling, into making the journey as smooth as possible, because even if he isn’t conscious the teenager in his arms can still feel pain.

And God, he knows how it hurts, he knows how every crack and splinter is felt like an eternity of agony, how after a while everything just becomes numb and somehow that’s worse, because it’s numb and wrong but it still hurts like dying hurts, over and over and over and -

(He can smell the smoke of a cigarette. He can feel cool concrete and dust sticking to the blood on his hands as he tries to push himself up. He can taste bile and blood and bone, and his own agonizing fear sticking his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He can hear metal scraping against concrete, the scratch of a hard sole against chipped asphalt, a hard echoing laugh. He can see a white man in a purple coat, red lips stretched into a grin, green fingers and green hair and green eyes and green.)

- and he had beaten the kid with his own staff, smoke in his lungs and asphalt beneath his feet and hatred on his tongue and laughter on his lips and in his ears and in his eyes nothing but green.

He doesn’t know how he makes it through the door. It doesn’t matter, not when warm blood is seeping through his armor, running sluggishly down his pants and into his boots, and it’s not even his. He goes to the couch (new cushions strewn across it, three blankets draped over the back because one had never been enough) and gently lays the kid down, knowing it won’t make a difference. Broken bones hurt no matter how gentle you are.

It hadn’t been a fair fight. Jason had been taking a break, pack of cigarettes in hand as he pulled the first one out for a smoke, nerves fried and blood singing from crushing in the skulls of two rapists. Their odds had never been good to begin with; those same odds had slipped to sub-zero as soon as the men started laughing.

Then up popped the Replacement like a fucking jack-in-the-box, something about Batman being sick and him being in the area and stopping by to say hello, and something in Jason’s brain had snapped. Something had snapped so suddenly, like a rubber band stretched too tight, Robin perched before him for the very first time, hissing green blinding him and Talia’s voice burning poison in his ears, and the world had tunneled to an undeserving replacement in a costume of red-yellow- green .

And then -

(Tell me… how does that feel?)

And now -

(... you’re being awful quiet.)

Jason’s vision is sliding back to green, his heart jack-hammering against his ribs as he kneels on the floor, just trying to fucking breathe -

(Dark. Satin. Cedar. … Bruce.)

His phone is ringing in his hands, an outgoing call, and in a moment of screaming panic, he thinks he’s called the old man. If Bruce shows up now, Jason doesn’t know what he’ll do. He can’t think in a straight line, memories of the past and plans for the future all tumbling inelegantly into a whispered chant, a litany of verdant verse repeated like a prayer in his ears by a woman’s voice, smoothing everything over into a suffocating sea of green-tinged death.

If Bruce shows up now, he might just have to kill the Replacement. There’s a point to be proved here, after all. What had he thought would happen, when he brought Robin back to life - had he thought it would stay that way?

“... hello? Jason? Are you there - what’s going on. …Jason?”

That’s not Bruce’s voice. Jason looks numbly at the phone, suddenly adrift, because it’s Peter speaking to him, he had called Peter, and Peter had never been a part of the plan. Never once had he been mentioned, not like Bruce or Dick or the Replacement. You remain unavenged, Talia had said, and Batman and Robin and Nightwing had soured like unripe fruit in his mind, but never once had there been a mention of a polite, nerdy boy from New York. Never once had Peter’s name crossed Talia’s lips, and now that might just be his saving grace, because here the green has no purchase. Here is someone from his past who Talia’s words have not corrupted, who had gone to his funeral, who stands above it all like a lighthouse in a storm, and Jason catches the name, holding onto the voice like a drowning man holding onto a rope.

“ - and it was a really good picture too, but of course the Bugle wasn’t interested, but I kept it anyways and I was actually thinking of sending it to the Daily Planet - anonymously, you know -”

“Peter.” Jason croaks out, leaning forward to rest his forehead against the couch, right next to the Replacement’s (broken) shoulder. The carpet beneath him is red. The couch is gray, the cushions white and blue. His pants are black, stained red, his jacket brown. He forces his eyes to remain open, and breathes.

Peter falls silent with a relieved hum, and after a few seconds he asks, tentatively, “Are you okay? Are you safe?”

That’s not the point, Jason knows. Not when there’s a kid bleeding and broken on his couch, not when he’s the one who put him there.

“I fucked up,” he says, voice like shards of broken glass, “I really fucking fucked the fuck up, and I need - I can’t -”

“I’m on my way.” Peter says, tone calm and steady. “Stay where you are. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Peter is coming from New York with the bus. It’ll be a lot longer than half an hour.

There’s a clinic two blocks to the south. It’s practically run by Black Mask’s lackeys, but they’re lackeys who have each at one point taken the Hippocratic Oath, and as long as it’s not Red Hood showing up at their door - well. Jason has seen the people they treat - the hollow-eyed kids and the shaking adults, the ones who come back over and over again - and are never turned away. He’s seen the people they treat, and he knows they don’t ask questions.

Peter won’t be here for another two hours at least, and that’s far too long for the Replacement to wait for treatment. And Jason can set bones, he knows how to wrap a splint and check a concussion, but nothing has ever prepared him for this.

Half an hour later he’s in the waiting room, lights flickering above his head and the scent of bile strong in the stale air, head in his hands, when his phone rings, vibrating against his thigh as the tinkling melody chimes from his pocket.

He lifts his head, digging into his pocket with a soft curse, and when he sees it’s Peter he quickly swipes up, holding the phone to his ear.

“Ye-”

“Where are you? I’m at your flat. Where are you?”

“You’re at my flat.” Jason parrots, trying to dispel the foggy numbness he’s been hiding in since he managed to chase away the last vestiges of searing green. Peter is here. He’s here a full hour-and-a-half early, and something whispers that that doesn’t make sense, a low growl at the back of his mind telling him to pay attention, but it’s easy to ignore. It’s easy to drown out the uneasiness with the simple thought that he’s here, that he came when he called. He’s here, he’s just around the block, and something Jason hadn’t known was there loosens in his chest, leaving a hollow sense of relief behind.

“I’m at the clinic.” Jason says, eyes drifting to the left, to the mobster sitting across the room with a knife in his thigh and a nasty bruise across his face. This isn’t a place Peter should be, it’s dangerous (especially for him to be walking these streets at this time of night, alone) and Jason opens his mouth to tell him to wait, but Peter beats him to it.

“Stay there!” he says, firm and unyielding, brooking no argument. 

“Okay.” Jason replies, and watches the seconds tick up on the call as the faint sound of feet pounding down stairs comes through the tiny speaker.

A minute later the door bangs inward, and Peter comes to a running stop, breathing heavily as he stands in front of Jason, eyes moving over him in a search for imagined injuries. He doesn’t even look at the other occupant of the room.

“What happened?” he asks, and with those two words Jason realizes that the uneven breaths are maybe not the result of sprinting two blocks after all. That maybe Peter is remembering another phone call, another fucked up situation, and is maybe (just maybe) panicking a little bit.

“It’s not - it’s not me.” Jason says, and Peter collapses into the plastic chair to his right, reaching over to pull him into a hug. It’s insufferable, it’s the last thing Jason wants right now and it’s the last thing he deserves, but he doesn’t know how to pull away, not when the green is burned like a bitter memory into the backs of his eyelids, the red of the kid’s blood doing nothing to drown it out.

Over the next three hours, Jason explains, slowly and carefully, what happened. He keeps waiting for Peter to pull away in disgust, for him to pick up his phone and call the police. He keeps waiting for Peter to leave, but he never does. He doesn’t move away either, and he only takes his arm from around Jason’s shoulder when Jason moves, leaning forward to put his head in his hands again.

“We’ll figure it out,” Peter promises, and Jason tries to believe him.

“Mr. Peters,” a woman finally calls, and Jason’s head snaps up. A red haired woman is standing in the doorway, a chart in her hand and her face carefully, utterly blank. “Your brother is ready for discharge.”

“Okay,” Peter says slowly, looking at Jason, but Jason is already manhandling him up, pushing him towards the lady, and biting his tongue on the acidic words clawing their way up his throat - because the Replacement isn’t his fucking brother. Robin was a joke and his death the punchline, and whatever there is now is the lame follow-up, an explanation for a jest in poor taste made by a man who had only ever pretended to care.

(Somewhere, someone is laughing.)

Jason blinks, and the woman is gone and Peter is kneeling in front of a teenager in a wheelchair, introducing himself with a quiet smile and kind words. It’s clear the kid is high on pain meds, but even so he has eyes for one person and one person only: for Jason Todd, standing still as a statue with his hands clenched at his sides, a snarl trying to work its way onto his face. Piercing blue eyes gaze up at him, and the expression on the young face is one of horrible, cloudy resignation.

The Replacement thinks he’s going to die. (Jason thinks he might be right.) 

After all, there’s an empty grave to be filled; what else is a replacement for?

Peter Rabbit, Tim’s brain cautiously points out. Jason Todd tried to kill me!, the rest of him screams.

He’s trying not to panic. He’s really, really trying to hold it together, because he’s in the middle of a world altering interaction and the last part of him clinging to common sense is repeatedly reminding him that he cannot blow this. This is important. This is ‘ and they all lived happily ever after (except maybe Tim)’ levels of important, and if he blows this he’s never going to forgive himself.

He’s still with it enough to realize that Peter is probably Peter Rabbit is probably Morgan’s maybe not-so-imaginary brother. Morgan had explained it all on one of their first bus rides into Crime Ally, Damian periodically shushing her as she gushed about a person Tim felt weirdly reminiscent about. He’s still with it enough to put two and two together and realize that this might all be one grand hallucination. It might be. But it might not be, and right now everything hurts just a little too much and on pain of death and the unanswered questions flapping around his brain, he cannot mess this up.

Fortunately, he’s mostly feeling numb and floaty, and since he’s certain there are mummies with less bandages than him he knows there’s not much use in panicking (if Red Hood wants him dead, there’s not much he can do about it). So he doesn’t. He lets Peter wheel him from the clinic, he lets Red Hood stalk silently in their wake past two blocks of Gotham’s worst neighborhood, and he lets Peter carry him up the stairs as Red Hood follows. He still doesn’t panic when Red Hood stomps past them and slams the door to his room, and Peter deposits him on a bloodstained couch.

“How are you feeling?” Peter asks, helping him adjust his legs, draping a blanket under him to hide the blood and a blanket over him to help with the cold and the shock.

“I’m not.” Tim says, and tries to help with broken fingers. He’s hyper aware of the door to Jason’s bedroom, listening for any sign of approaching footsteps or the turning of the knob.

Peter’s expression pinches into something unhappy, but he doesn’t push, instead pulling out the bottle of medication they’d been given and frowning down at the label.

“Have you eaten?” he asks after a long pause, and Tim blinks sluggishly, trying to pull any coherent thought together besides Robin wants me dead.  

“Says here you need to have these with food.” Peter continues in an apologetic tone, when it becomes apparent that Tim’s mouth is on strike. “I can go see what Jason’s got in his kitchen, but I think soup would be best for the moment. I could also make you some tea?”

Okay, Tim wants to say, or maybe Coffee, please, but before he gets the chance the bedroom door slams open again and Jason stomps out, steel toed boots overcompensating for the job, in full body armor sans helmet. There are at least four guns clearly visible on his person.

“What are you - where are you going?” Peter moves gracefully to his feet, putting himself between Tim and the Red Hood in a motion that could have almost been unintentional. The action makes Tim pathetically relieved, and he can feel tears pricking at his eyes, because it’s not fair, he doesn’t want to fear Jason, but… there’s a shit ton of bandages that say otherwise

“Out.” Jason says, voice hard and flat. “Got some people I need to decapitate.” His eyes find Tim as he says this, and there’s murder written behind them. Tim feels like a mouse in a glue trap.

“No, you can’t -” Peter begins, whole body tense, and Jason laughs, sharp and cruel. He pulls a gun and points it at Peter’s chest, cocking it in one smooth motion, head tilted to the side as he bares his teeth. Tim needs to do something, he’s Robin, he needs to protect - he can’t move. He can’t breathe.

“You gonna stop me, Parker?” Jason asks, low and dangerous, and Tim’s hands creep up to his ears despite himself, because he doesn’t want to hear this. He doesn’t want to hear that cruel tone, he doesn’t want to hear the gun going off, he doesn’t want to hear Peter choking on his own blood.

For a long time, no one moves.

“The Replacement needs you.” Jason finally says, his voice dipping bitterly, and then he turns on his heel and strides from the room, and a second later the door slams and silence descends, thick and suffocating and final.

Peter lets out a shuddering breath and lowers himself to the ground, elbows to knees and head in his hands as he continues to take in breath after breath. They’re measured, Tim knows. Measured like his own, counting the inhales, counting the exhales. After a few minutes Peter raises his head and reaches out, wrapping his fingers lightly around Tim’s upper arm.

“Sorry.” he says, like Jason - the Red Hood - is somehow his fault. He looks exhausted. “So. Soup. Do you like chicken?”

Tim nods, and wishes he could curl into himself like he so badly wants to; wishes that he had never stopped on that rooftop, never talked to the Red Hood; wishes that he could feel anything besides vague, floaty pain.

He wishes he could just go home, and never have to worry about Jason Peter Todd and Peter (Rabbit) Parker.

Unfortunately, it isn’t really up to him.

“So.” Dick says, starting on his third bowl of cereal. “The Red Hood was on a warpath last night.”

“So it would seem.” Bruce rasps miserably, staring into the depths of his tea like it contains both the poison and the cure to his life’s suffering. Dick had draped a blanket over his large shoulders upon finding him stubbornly waiting at the breakfast table, and Bruce has yet to find the strength to shrug it off. Dick isn’t sure if that makes it a win or not.

“Any headway into figuring out who this guy is?” he asks.

“Tim is on the case.” Bruce deflects, but at Dick’s raised eyebrow he glowers, hunching down and trying to hide a miserable cough. “No. There has been no headway .”

“Speaking of, where is the little B?”

“Damian is fetching him to breakfast.” Bruce says curtly, tone clearly indicating a wish to stop talking. Dick suspects it has less to do with the current topic and more to do with the likely sore throat.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

“Hey, it’s my favorite little assassin!” Dick exclaims dramatically, tipping sideways to catch a scowling Damian around the shoulders.

“Get off, you are insufferable!” Damian shouts, but with a distinct lack of knives (win, one-hundred-percent). “Father, Drake has decided we are beneath him. I suggest we respond in kind.”

“He’s not in his room?” Bruce translates, straightening with a frown.

“I just said -”

Dick pulls up Tim’s contact in his phone and presses call. A little worm of anxiety has made itself known in the pit of his stomach, and if he’s not careful - if Tim doesn’t answer - it’s going to triple in size. 

Fifteen minutes later and Dick is changing into his suit, tucking the mask around his eyes and violently shoving away any and all doubts he might have. It’s fine, Tim knows how to handle himself, he has his panic buttons (he has his suit ), and he probably just crashed at Drake Manor again, and is sleeping with his phone on mute, and is absolutely, one hundred percent fine.

“I shall come as Robin.” Damian tries, watching them prepare and valiantly trying to hide his own concern. “You will be twice as effective.”

“You will be on comms with Alfred.” Bruce responds, voice a rasp rather than a growl, but otherwise betraying none of his previous weariness and lethargy.

You will be safe goes unsaid, as it almost always does, and Dick is immensely relieved when Damian doesn’t argue the point further. He knows his own face is expressionless, a blank mask pulled on in favor of the panic that had risen at the sight of Tim’s empty locker and the absent suit. He wants to shout, he wants to shake Bruce and ask why Tim had left, why none of them had noticed, why Tim hadn’t told anyone in the first place (isn’t he grounded?), but he knows that’s not fair. Tim is a sneaky little bastard at the best of times, and when his mind is made he is unstoppable. 

They’ll get their answers soon enough anyways, when they track his location and find him, alive and well and with that stupid, surprised look on his face he gets whenever he’s confronted by the idea that someone might be worried about him. The image makes Dick want to throttle someone, but it’s better than crying because ‘ the Red Hood was on a warpath last night’ and the one time Bruce had come within shouting distance of the crime lord he had come back with the verdict that Robin was never, ever to be within a mile radius of the man. Ever.

Just see what happens to villains who mess with my little brothers, Dick thinks, perhaps somewhat preemptively, and climbs onto his motorcycle to follow Batman out into the early morning air.

Chapter Text

“What do you mean no?”

The bloody dent Jason had put in Crime Alley’s criminal population last night, along with the ensuing five hour power nap, had done wonders for his tenuous hold on his temper. The fucking Replacement is about to undo all that hard work with a single word.

“I’ve thought about it.” Tim says, magnitudes more lucid than he had been the night before. “No.”

“You’ve thought about jack shit!” Jason shouts, and dearly wishes to shoot someone. Nevermind the half dozen he had dumped in the harbor last night, nevermind the three heads he’d dropped off at the GCPD (if they want him to stop killing off their criminals, maybe they should consider doing their fucking jobs and packing the shit off to Black Gate). Nevermind the entire night he’d spent shooting everything that dared look the wrong way. Just one word out of the worthless Pretender’s mouth and it’s all undone.

Jason grinds his teeth and locks eyes with Peter, and glares. He glares because when he’d awoken it had been to an apartment several guns and two dozen knives down, and not even the hint of a trail to follow for their whereabouts. Even those he had taken out last night had been whisked away during his nap (stupid, who needs naps anyways, he had been so stupid) , and all that’s left in the kitchen are some measly butter knives.

Apparently, Peter had taken the gun to the face a little personally.

Peter blinks calmly back, clearly unrepentant, and Jason wants nothing more than to banish him to the void (or similarly, to the streets of Gotham), but even this unsatisfying option has been taken from him. Because Peter’s stupid face is the only thing keeping him from hulking out on the patched-up Replacement and tearing him to shreds. Because Peter’s stupid face is the one thing left on which the green has no purchase, and if he leaves it will be just Jason and Tim and malice and blood.

“I suppose you agree with him?” he snarls.

“No, actually.” Peter says, his eyes going disapprovingly to the couch and Jason’s unwanted guest. “If it were up to me, he would be back at his house or in a real hospital.”

“Then why the fuck is he still here?! Instead of stealing my weapons, you should’ve been carting his ass off back to Wayne Manor!”

“If you bring me back, I’ll just tell everyone anyway. You both need help!” Tim interrupts, and then has the gall to sound smug when he continues with “And I have evidence. Lots of evidence, so being dead and nonexistent isn’t going to help either of you.”

…So Peter is being blackmailed as well. Jason can work with this.

“How about I change your mind.” he says silkily, finally turning so the Replacement is square in his sights, and Tim’s flinch is almost as satisfying as the recoil of a pistol, like a shot of adrenaline - like the jarring splash of a body into murky green waters -

(He replaced you, Talia says sadly, there’s a cuckoo in the robin’s nest.)

“Back off.”

His eyes snap to Peter’s, and then down to the hand placed firmly on his chest, keeping him from moving forward. He can see Tim over Peter’s shoulder, pale faced but still with that godawful resolve, broken hands and arm pulled up in a pathetic shield. He’s riling Jason up on purpose, what does he think is going to happen? But Peter is still there, and already the rage is being replaced by hatred and annoyance and a deep, shuddering helplessness.

Jason steps back, and reaches a hand up to drag down his face, like he can wipe away the vestiges of emerald embedded beneath his skin. But it's a useless motion: if the eyes are truly the windows to the soul, then it’s already far too late, the rot has gone too deep, because Jason’s soul is nothing but poisoned green.

“I’ll talk to him.” Peter says, once it’s clear Jason isn’t about to murder the local invalid. “Do you want to get us some breakfast?”

“I’m not your fucking maid.” Jason snaps, regaining his composure somewhat, before turning on his heel and storming to the kitchen to whip up some waffle batter.

“I’ve been thinking -”

Peter can’t help the groan that escapes, focused as he is on not slamming his head against the table.

“No, I have! I’m serious.”

“Tim.” Peter says, “I don’t know what you think it is you’re doing, but it’s not thinking. I can’t believe I’m being the voice of reason here.”

“Actually, I think you’re being very unreasonable.” Tim grouses, stabbing his waffle with his fork and wincing as the movement aggravates his injuries. It makes Peter’s head hurt, watching him try to eat the syrupy concoction with his newly broken appendages, but when Peter had suggested cutting it up for him, or that Tim at least try to eat slower, all he had gotten for his efforts had been a withering look.

Across the table, Jason stabs his own waffle with equal fervor, and continues to be no help whatsoever. On the other hand, he isn’t trying to murder Tim, so Peter isn’t complaining.

“I can’t believe I have to explain this again.” Peter sighs, reaching up to rub at his eyes. How hard is it to understand that living in close proximity to a violently unstable vigilante is a bad idea? Very, going by Tim’s obstinate expression.

“Just hear me out,” Tim says, “Jason doesn’t actually want to hurt me.”

“Beg to differ,” Jason says, around a mouthful of waffle.

“What he said!” Peter exclaims, unable to keep the complete incredulity out of his voice. What does Tim think happened? Granted, Peter hadn’t actually been there, but Jason had laid things out for him well enough. Tim showed up. Jason tried to violently murder Tim. End of story.

Apparently not.

“No, but listen,” Tim sighs, giving Jason a look of utter betrayal before focusing once again on Peter. “It’s the Lazarus Pit. The signs are all there! And, okay, maybe it was my fault, because I’ve known about the Pit thing since, like, forever. And I guess I knew Robin was a trigger for it. So yeah, it’s definitely my fault, and not Jason’s at all, and I think once you explain it to everyone they’ll all come to the same, very reasonable, conclusion.”

Q.E.D., Tim's expression practically screams, and Peter… has no words. He has literally no words, in the face of the utter nonsense Tim has just laid out for him to consider. Yes, he knows about the Lazarus Pit. Yes, he knows that Jason hadn’t been in control. No, that does not make any of this okay; no, that does not make it Tim’s fault.

“That,” Jason says, pointing a fork at Tim and looking straight at Peter, “is what I like to call victim blaming.”

“It’s not- but it’s true! You guys aren’t listening!” Tim looks, for just a second, like he wants to scream. Like he wants to throw himself across the table and strangle some sense into Jason. Fortunately for all their physical health and well-being, he doesn’t. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and then says through clenched teeth, “Why aren’t you listening to me?”

“We are -” Peter begins, frantically trying to figure out how to placate the situation. Jason, unfortunately, has no such reservations.

“Don’t worry, Replacement, we’ve been hearing every word coming out of your mouth. Thing is, though, they don’t make any sense. Thing is, even if they did, we wouldn’t agree.”

“You are literally the worst,” Tim mutters sulkily, before taking another too big bite of his waffle. He sends a halfhearted glare at Peter, which Peter takes to mean that he’s included in this You, but he can’t bring himself to care. Peter never wanted to be one of the bad guys. Maybe, though, if Tim stops blaming himself for Jason’s attack, it’ll be worth it.

The thought occurs to him while he’s washing the dishes.

“Where’s your suit?” Peter asks abruptly, stopping where he’s halfway through scrubbing the sticky plates.

Tim frowns, and then sends a cautious look at Jason. “I don’t know?”

“Jason. Where’s Tim’s suit?”

Tim winces, and Jason scowls, and says, “I did what Bruce should have done years ago. I threw it in the nearest dumpster I could find, and good fucking riddance!”

Peter stares at his hands, at the soap slowly sliding from his elbows to his fingertips. If he were feeling at all poetic, he might compare it to his life, slipping out of his grasp and out of his control. But he’s not, so he just plants his elbows on the basin’s edge, and sinks his face into his hands, and draws in a breath that tastes of limes.

“Jason,” he groans, “you did not just say what I think you said.” He looks up, and meets Jason’s challenging gaze from across the room. “That suit has trackers. People are going to find it. People I - people we care about are going to find it.”

There’s a small noise behind him, a small intake of breath quickly smothered, so brief that Peter barely catches it. He lifts his head to see Tim looking away, clearly not wanting to meet his gaze but (despite his previous bravado) not quite daring to look at Jason either.

“Um,” he says. “I don’t think that’ll … that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Why not?” Peter asks wearily, and wonders if he really wants to know the answer.

“Well. I’m grounded, right? So. I deactivated the trackers before I left.”

“You deactivated your trackers?” Jason asks, managing to sound both incredulous and impressed at the same time.

It does not escape Peter’s notice that this is the first time Jason has addressed Tim with anything other than barely controlled rage (it does not escape his notice that Tim literally preens under the implied praise). Unfortunately, this does not solve their problem. Because, unfortunately, those trackers were designed by Tony Stark, and are not quite so easily deactivated as Tim and Jason seem to believe.

Unfortunately, knowing Bruce - knowing Dick - this is a problem of nuclear potential.

“Tim,” Peter says, trying to hide some of his desperation from his voice, but not entirely succeeding. “I’m bringing you home. Now.”

They find Tim’s suit in a dumpster off Crime Alley. They find Robin’s colors bloody and torn beyond repair, Robin’s staff in splinters beside it. They find no sign of Tim. They find no sign of a young boy, injured and unmasked, and it’s this that freezes Dick’s breath in his chest - it’s this that gives him hope.

“There’s no body,” he says, voice flat, vision tunneling as he holds the bloody mess between numb hands. That will be your saving grace, he thinks, even as Bruce orders Oracle to pull up all security footage of the area. That will be your damnation.

They search for hours. Bruce calls Tony in thirty minutes after they find Tim’s suit, and Iron Man arrives within the hour, red and gold falling like a comet from Gotham’s sky.

“Gordon’s brought me up to date,” he says, helmet sliding back as he looks out at the two of them, worn lines drawn deep into his face. “Jesus, Bruce.”

They split up to cover more ground, Tony taking to the air as Dick takes to the streets, the routes returning easily as he runs along the rooftops of his childhood, leaping over alleys as familiar as the back of his hand. 

“How’re you holding up, kiddo?” Tony asks at one point, voice crackling over the comm as Dick creeps through an abandoned building, dust swirling around him like decade-old snow.

With my legs, sir, just like I’m s’posed to. The words are there on the tip of his tongue, waiting to break the tension, waiting to bring life and laughter to a darkening world. The first time Tony asked that question, Dick had been counting down the days to his own death, watching the days of his life turn to hours before his very eyes. He had been fourteen, and he had been scared and alone, and he had been Robin. And Dick had answered, and Tony had laughed, and Dick had lived.

But the words don’t come now, they stop just inside his throat, because Dick is no longer a child and he is no longer Robin. He can’t laugh in the face of danger, he can’t wave a hand and conjure a happily ever after; he can’t pretend that life is eternal when he knows firsthand how swiftly death falls.

Dick knows Tim doesn’t believe in death. Every time Dick or Bruce have tried to caution him, or asked him to take fewer risks, his eyes have grown distant, his attention slipping as he nods along like some bobblehead, humming and agreeing if only to get them to shut up. Yes, I’ll be more careful, no I won’t go into danger, I know how to handle myself and I won’t get caught.

Tim never watched his parents die like Dick or Bruce; he never witnessed the cruelty of the streets like Jason did, and was never forced to kill as Damian had been. Tim doesn’t believe in his own death, and Dick wishes it could be like that forever. 

He wonders if Tim believes in it now, and if they are already too late.

“Grayson?”

“Clear,” Dick says, climbing up onto a rotting window ledge, turning his baton and setting the grapple. “I’m headed to the docks. No sign of him here.” He reaches up to his ear-piece, and taps into the private channel with Tony.

“Tony.”

“I’ve got all my resources on this. We’ll find him, I promise.”

“When I was fourteen. When I was Robin, and Bane took over Gotham… how close was it? How close did I - how close did we all come to dying?”

There’s a moment of silence. Dick aims the grapple without looking (Overconfident, Bruce growls, It’ll get you killed, and all Dick does is laugh) and Dick leaps, plunging into the open air. He twists and pulls, and all but flies onto the next rooftop, twisting and rolling to absorb his momentum. The air rushing past is cold despite the midday sun, the crispness of autumn reddening Dick’s cheeks. 

It’s been ten years, and Dick is still alive. But sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, Dick will wake from sleep and convince himself that it’s been no time at all; that he’s still here, still watching the snow build over broken ice, and still waiting for his own demise. The memories (if that’s what they can be called) always come around this time of year, and it’s always the worst when the first snow falls, and the river begins to freeze.

“Tony?”

“We saved you. You didn’t die.”

“I know a pattern when I see one. How close -”

“You didn’t die, Dick, because you had me, and you had Bruce. And Tim has the same, okay? We’ll get to him just like we got to you. You remember that part, don’t you?”

Dick does. He also remembers Alfred, standing over the body of Dick’s nightmares, a smoking rifle in hand and nothing of remorse in his gray eyes. And Dick remembers too another dead man, and another smoking gun, this one clenched in his own numb fingers: vengeance for another dead Robin. Dick knows a pattern when he sees one: he wonders who it will be this time holding the gun, and who it will be who invites death back with open arms.

He wonders who it will be who takes the Red Hood’s life. 

Jason orders a wheelchair accessible taxi using Peter’s phone, and then shoves two-hundred dollars into his hands.

“That’s not necessary, I can pay-”

“Shut the fuck up, take the goddamn money, and get him the hell out of here.”

Tim sulks the entire ride back to the manor.

“I swear I’ll tell everyone on the planet that you exist.”

Years ago, when Dick was Robin and Peter was Spider-Man, Bruce had sat them down each evening before dinner and forced them to meditate for fifteen minutes to the mouthwatering smell of whatever Alfred was cooking up. It had been torture. Dick had been sure to make sure they all knew it was torture, and Peter had calmly agreed. But now here he is, six years later with a headache and the chronic urge to sigh, and he thinks he might finally understand Bruce’s unwavering insistence. 

“Please don’t,” he says. “Listen. I get it, okay? And I promise I’m working on it, but it’s going to go a lot better if Jason is the one to tell people he’s alive. We’re going to tell Dick first, we’ve already decided that much.” Well. Peter had decided that much. Jason had mostly just glowered and glared and grunted in a wonderful imitation of Batman. “And I’m working on getting him to choose a date. I’m nearly there, but if you tell everyone that we’re alive, it’ll blow the whole thing. You know how volatile Jason is right now. He’ll either run away to the League of Assassins, throw a fit and blow up half of Gotham, or go get himself killed just to spite everyone. Probably all three.”

“Okay, so you’ll tell Dick first, and then- oh.” Tim cuts off, suddenly looking a little pale. “Oh. Okay.”

“Okay?” Peter asks, a little skeptically. Surely it’s not that easy, not after everything.

“Well…” Tim is now looking everywhere but at Peter. “Can’t you tell Bruce first? Or Tony? I think Dick’s a little… busy right now.”

Peter was right. It’s not that easy. And the fact that Tim is suddenly acting even weirder than normal feels like a big red warning sign that Peter should definitely heed. “Surely not too busy for Jason,” he says slowly, watching Tim carefully.

Tim glances at him, quick and away. He actually looks so miserable right now that Peter half wonders if there isn’t something else going on here - if maybe Tim knows something Peter doesn’t. Which … he knows he’s been out of touch. He knows it’s been nearly three years since he saw Dick face to face, but he likes to think that if something were wrong, he would know.

They’re almost at the manor. Peter recognizes the trees; he recognizes the twists of the gravel drive and the big granite boulder rising through the old oaks that tells him they have five minutes. It suddenly occurs to him that he hasn’t been here in three years - no, that’s not right. He hasn’t been here in eight years, not since he and Dick were the same age and Dick invited him to spend the night.

Can’t, Peter had said regretfully. We’re going to MoMA tomorrow.

“Tim,” Peter says slowly. “Is everything okay?”

And finally Tim looks at him, brow still furrowed in that perfectly sculpted frown, but behind the polite facade there’s a shadow of fear. It’s different than what Peter saw in Jason’s apartment. This is a fear of the unknown; or of something known, but terrible for the simple fact that it exists. Peter’s unease spikes: No, says Tim's face.

“Yeah,” says Tim's mouth. “Everything's fine.”

Peter stares at him. He opens his mouth, fully prepared to begin a full on interrogation, but he's interrupted as the cab rolls to a stop before the gates.

“You want me to drop you here?” the driver calls through the speaker. Peter hesitates only a heartbeat before pushing the door open to help Tim out. Tim is silent as Peter pays and generously tips the driver, only speaking to give Peter the passcode for the gates. Peter pushes him up the smooth gravel drive, right up to the large wooden doors of the manor. (They look the same. Eight years later, and Peter thinks that if he opens those doors now he’ll come face to face with Dick, sixteen years old and already complaining about Bruce and Batman and Robin.)

If only Dick were actually here, and Peter could ask him why Tim sounds more afraid of him than he ever was of Jason. Unfortunately, Dick’s not here; unfortunately, Peter is about eight years too late.

“Tim,” he says again, resigning himself to the problem at hand as he lifts his finger to ring the doorbell. “Listen. I know you think it’s a good idea to tell everyone about me and Jason, but - can you just … give us some time? You know where we are,” he adds, a wild gamble he’s hoping the kid will take. “Just give us a month, okay? I promise, I’m working on it.”

“Okay,” Tim says. His eyes are distant, his expression far away, and it gives Peter the unnerving sensation that he is only half listening; that in fact his thoughts have moved on to something else entirely. “Okay, fine. I won’t say anything.”

“Okay,” Peter echoes uneasily, and reaches forward to ring the doorbell.

A little black-haired boy opens the door, mouth pursed in a scowl. His eyes widen comically when they land on Tim, and he steps back almost involuntarily, arms crossing over his chest.

“Drake,” the kid says after a pause, scowl deepening. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Tim says grumpily, face falling at the sight of the other boy, and it occurs to Peter to pity Bruce. Dick and Jason had each been a handful in their own right, but just one conversation between these two and he’s beginning to wish he were on the other side of the city.

“Do not blame this on me -”

“Not everything’s about you!”

Between one blink and the next, the kid - Damian, Peter suddenly remembers, from the celebrity gossip magazines at the grocery store - has a knife in his hand, and Tim is trying to push himself up from his chair. To defend or attack, Peter isn’t entirely sure, but whatever the plan is he can tell right now it’s a bad one.

“Woah, hey!” Peter jumps forward, putting out a warning hand before Damian can attack. Tim sinks back in his chair immediately, breathing hard and looking perilously close to tears. “Hey. I’m Peter. Is Mr. Wayne here?”

“No, he’s not,” Damian sniffs. “He was worried. Although I don’t see why, because Drake is obviously just fine - wait. Did you say Peter?”

Peter gives Damian a slightly confused look. “Yeah? Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t stay. Is there anyone… here. Just take these. Tim, you’ll make sure Mr. Wayne or your parents get this?” He reaches into his bag and pulls out the prescription to fill Tim’s medications, holding them out to Damian.

“You’re Peter,” Damian clarifies, taking the papers with a triumphant look on his face. Which is about the point at which Peter finds himself wishing, quite suddenly, that he had never left New York.

“So?” he asks resignedly, wondering with no small amount of concern how it is that everyone suddenly knows who he is.

“So you’re Morgan’s brother,” Damian announces. “So you can come home, and so can Jason, and then I will have proved myself to Father and he will allow me to be Robin.”

“What?” Tim speaks up, leaning forward again with a frown, “No, that’s not what’s going to happen, that’s not how that works. And besides, Robin is mine -”

“And obviously you have failed, and quite disastrously. And you were perfectly happy to relinquish the role to Todd.”

“That’s different!”

“I don’t see why. I shall inform Father immediately -”

“No! No one’s telling anyone anything yet.”

Damian is beginning to look a little red in the face. “I’m telling Father, and you can’t stop me!”

“Finders keepers,” Tim shoots back, “And I found him, so he’s my secret to keep. Or are you dishonorable as well as a liar?”

“I am neither dishonorable nor a liar, you imposter - !”

“Master Damian?”

Just in time, Alfred appears. Just as Damian is about to slit Tim’s throat and Tim is about to push Damian past the verge of a meltdown, Alfred materializes out of the shadows of Wayne Manor, coming to Peter’s (and Tim’s and Damian’s) rescue.

Tim and Damian’s mouths snap shut in comical unison, Damian adopting an expression of blank apathy while Tim pulls up a perfect mask of guilt and chagrin.

“Hi, Alfred,” Tim says, giving a little wave.

“Master Timothy! My dear boy, what happened?” Alfred sweeps forward, reaching out to take Tim’s hands gingerly in his own as Peter steps back, arms raising to cross over his chest.

Alfred looks… older, than the last time Peter saw him. His hair is thinner and grayer, the lines more pronounced around his eyes and at the corner of his mouth. Laugh lines, Peter notices, something was done right. The last time he saw Alfred face to face, they were standing over a young boy’s grave.

Peter clears his throat. “Um. Hi. I’m… sorry. I gave Damian the prescription, everything should be in there.”

“And you are…?” Alfred asks, straightening. He has a pleasant enough smile, but Peter has known him long enough to see the steel behind it, and the questions.

“Ben O’Reilley,” Peter replies. “Reporter for the Daily Bugle. I found Mr. Drake outside a clinic in town, and offered to accompany him home.” It’s not all a lie. Just mostly. Out of the corner of his eye, Damian scowls. Tim’s slightly strained smile doesn’t falter, although his gaze does go momentarily to Peter.

The lie is just believable enough. Either that, or Alfred is more concerned with the well-being of his young charge than he is with the stranger at his door, because between one pleasantry and the next Peter extricates himself, giving some excuse about curfews and deadlines and making it home before dark.

Tim is home safe, he texts Jason as the taxi drives him over the bridge, out of Bristol and into Gotham proper. So when do you want to go see Dick?

Peter has never been above a little guilt trip, and right now Jason owes him.

Chapter Text

“He won’t say what happened. He won’t say it was the Red Hood who tried to fucking kill him, he won’t even say who saved him - and neither will Damian! Bruce has tried everything, he even asked Alfred to get it out of them. They’re not talking, Barbara, and - and I just need to know that - I need to know who did it. We need to know.”

“Of course, Dick,” Barbara says, already pulling up waypoints on a map of the city. “I’ll find them. You have the coordinates, right? Where you found the suit - and Tony’s extracted the GPS history?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s all in the servers.”

“Get some sleep, Dick. This is going to take me a little while, but I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything. We’ll make sure they’re safe. And give my best to Tim, okay?”

“Okay,” Dick says. “Okay, Barbara. Thank you.”

“Get some sleep,” Barbara repeats, then hangs up. She turns to her computer, and digs into Batman’s private servers.

First she traces Robin’s movements from the time he leaves Wayne Manor to when he pops up just east of Crime Alley, and there’s a significant lull in the tracker’s movement. Barbara presses her lips together and pulls up her cam layer, and gets hacking.

Tim’s own camera and audio are conspicuously disengaged. Despite this Barabara manages to find two cameras in the area which, between the two of them, manage to capture most of what occurs. The first time she watches it she has to pause several times to steady herself (Tim is safe; Tim is alive, and if not well at least healing; Tim is being his usual infuriating self, so why is this so hard?) .

 The first time is hard. But then she watches everything a second time, and then a third and a fourth. Because something is strange, and she’s not entirely sure what to make of it: Tim doesn’t appear to be fighting back. He tries to defend himself, and he even makes an aborted attempt to flee at one point, but he never goes fully on the offensive. Barbara knows the kinds of weapons he carries with him, and she remembers the safety nets she’d carried herself, and she can spot several instances Tim should have defended himself more aggressively. Then the Red Hood gets hold of Robin’s staff, and it’s game over - until the end. Until Robin’s lifeless body tumbles down a fire escape onto harsh metal grating and the Red Hood lifts the battered staff above him, aimed to kill - and then staggers back, staff falling to the alley below as he sinks to his knees, reaching out jerkily to the kid’s bloody body.

Barbara frowns, and runs through the footage a fifth time.

The Red Hood takes Robin’s broken body in his arms, and disappears. She searches all the cameras in the area (which are, regrettably, quite few) and when that turns up nothing she turns to nearby clinics with emergency services (surprisingly many). When she still can’t find anything, she has to take a moment to sit back and evaluate.

Two hours later, after countless dead-ends and less productive rabbit holes, she finds herself scrolling the call logs of the taxi company used to return Tim to Wayne Manor. It doesn’t take long to find the call she’s looking for; it doesn’t take long to.  connect it to a mobile in New York. Energized by the sudden progress, she takes the name the number is registered to, and plugs it into the FBI database.

Another hour passes, and Barbara is starting to seriously question her ability to track people down. Because “Peter B. Parker” doesn’t exist. It’s not an alias; it’s not a dead baby some criminal stole the identity of; it’s not the name of some poor Dusted who got lost in the system. “Peter B. Parker” does not exist, has never existed, and for some bizarre reason doesn’t register anywhere in any databases anywhere in the world. Except for: one lease for an apartment in Brooklyn, one part-time contract as a reporter for the Daily Bugle, and one rejected application for a social security number.

And one search from the computer lab at Gotham Academy Elementary School. A search surrounded by similar searches of Peter Peters and Peter Powells conducted two months ago by one Damian Wayne.

Barbara sits back slowly, staring at the monitor. Something’s going on here - she knows that, Dick knows that, Bruce and Tony and Alfred all know that something isn’t quite right. Because Tim isn’t the sort to protect criminal’s identities, even if it means he’ll put himself in danger because of it. And Damian isn’t the type to stay silent when Batman asks his cooperation. But staring at the screen - watching Tim not fight back, seeing the Red Hood stop, seeing Damian’s search and the void surrounding the name “Peter B. Parker” - Barbara sees what she’s found, and what she’s failed to find, and for the first time in a long time she feels a cold prickle of dread.

So she isn’t surprised when she tries to find Damian’s search history through the servers at the Manor, and finds instead a slate wiped clean. And she isn’t surprised that she recognizes the signature - that it was Tim who wiped Damian’s search history, and that he then updated the encryptions on his own secure file system.

Barbara knows that she won’t be able to hack it. Tim has always been especially good at keeping secrets, and he’s made it a point to perfect his ability at keeping secrets from her.

Fortunately for Barbara, she knows someone who might just be better at this than she is.

-
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: IMPORTANT

Ned,

I’ve linked a file I need you to look into. This is a level 9 - please be careful.
Let me know what you find.

Barbara

Bruce has dark circles under his eyes when he returns to his study. His footsteps are silent, his body held taut with a deadly grace despite the exhaustion evident on his face. His gaze meets Tony’s as he enters the room, and for a moment he just stands there, hand resting lightly on the doorframe.

Tony sets his phone on his lap, closing the screen where he had been updating Pepper. “How is he?”

Bruce shifts, stepping forward and striding to the chair behind his desk. “He will be fine,” he says. He sits, and lifts the lid of his laptop. After a moment he says stiffly “He says he doesn’t remember what happened.”

“Amnesia?” Tony asks, frowning. His fingers drum on his legs as he considers the possibility; of course it’s not uncommon after a traumatic experience. Tony’s got his own share of gaps, holes that he only remembers in his nightmares. That Tim would remember nothing, though….

“He is lying, Tony,” Bruce says flatly, glancing up. He goes back to his computer, the bruises under his eyes heightened by the blue light of the screen. “And it hardly matters. All evidence points to the Red Hood.”

Now it’s Tony who’s tense; now it’s Tony who’s watching carefully, because he knows that tone of voice. He remembers, all too clearly, the catastrophic aftermath of Jason’s death. He’ll suffer, Bruce’s voice promises, an echo of a conversation already had. I’ll make sure of it.

“Where is Morgan?” Bruce asks abruptly, and Tony blinks, thrown by the seeming change in topic. He has a brief moment of panic where he thinks that something must be wrong, why else would Bruce be asking - and then he reminds himself that he spoke to Morgan not ten minutes ago, when he was updating Pepper.

“At home,” he says after a moment. “Why?”

“I would like to speak with her,” Bruce says, which absolutely does not answer Tony’s question, until he adds: “The Red Hood must have taken her to one of his safe houses.”

“No,” Tony says firmly. “No, Bruce. Absolutely not.”

“She may know -”

“You are not interrogating my daughter,” Tony says loudly, cutting off whatever bullshit excuse Bruce is about to make up. Bruce glowers, and Tony glares right back. “Maybe she remembers something. Maybe he took her to one of his safe houses -” and the very thought of that gives Tony the creeps, makes his stomach drop and blood warm in renewed anger - “but you are not going to question my eight-year-old daughter about the man who abducted her.”

“The Red Hood -”

“No.”

“Tony,” Bruce says calmly, his voice so tight that Tony can hear the cracks around the edges, can see the fractures threatening to split behind his eyes. “I need to know who the Red Hood is.”

It’s on the tip of Tony’s tongue to say no again, to keep repeating the word for however long it takes to finally get through Bruce’s skull. But this… this is a different question. And honestly, it’s not one Tony ever thought to expect.

Since when is Bruce concerned with the civilian identities of the criminals he faces?

“Then figure it out,” he says at last. “You’re the World’s Greatest Detective, Bruce. And I’ll help, you know I will; but Morgan is where I draw the line.”

For a moment Bruce is silent. For a moment Tony wonders if he’ll try to insist (and what will happen if he does), and then he sighs, lifting a hand to drag down his face. When he looks up, his gaze is exhausted. “I’m going down to the cave,” he says tiredly. “I would … appreciate your help, should choose to accompany me.”

“I’ll finish up with Pepper, and I’ll be right down. We’ll find him, Bruce. I promise.”

Tim is currently conked out on prescription pain meds, and Dick is feeling reckless. It doesn’t happen all at once, it doesn’t come to him out of nowhere. Rather it accumulates, a pressure slowly building within him that he only now notices. 

There is no plan. If there were one it might be something like Don’t murder Red Hood, but that’s only if Dick pauses to think, which he doesn’t. Thinking means Tim. Thinking means thirty-seven broken bones, severe concussion, internal bleeding and bruises uncountable, bleeding into one another even as Tim insists: I’m fine! Thinking means questions, like why is Tim lying and what does Red Hood want and where was Nightwing and where was I? Because Dick sure as hell wasn’t where he was needed.

Two days after Tim returns Dick breaks.

“Come on,” he says.

“I’m busy,” Damian begins, but Dick interrupts him.

“No you’re not.”

They go to the Museum of Natural History. Dick smiles and lies through his teeth and gets Damian a free pass and then buys one for himself. “Happy birthday kiddo,” he says, and Damian takes the ticket without a word, face blank.

Bruce calls when they’re standing in front of the rows of impaled insects. 

“Is Damian with you?” Bruce asks, and Dick hums in confirmation.

“We’re at the museum,” Dick says. “I’ve got him.”

“You should have said something-” Bruce starts, and Dick hangs up. Damian continues to stare at the bugs, but Dick knows he’s not really seeing them. He’s holding too still for that. His arms are crossed too combatively.

“Let’s go look at the fish,” Dick suggests five minutes later, and Damian nods once and turns to lead the way.

There’s not much to look at. The tanks are filled with murky water, algae blocking most of their view. A blue lobster waves drunkenly from the gravel bottom of one. Something with two heads and five eyes and teeth longer than Dick’s index finger emerges from the dark of another, swims in a lazy loop and then disappears again.

“What are we doing here, Grayson?”

Dick drags his eyes from the jellyfish. Damian’s eyes are locked on the tank to their right, the one with the plaque describing an electric eel. Dick is pretty sure the tank is empty, but the water is too opaque to be entirely sure.

“We’re having fun,” Dick says. “We’re relaxing.”

Damian reaches up and taps the glass.

Dick says “Who brought Tim home?”

Damian says “Some reporter from the Daily Planet.”

It wasn’t the Daily Planet. It was the Daily Bugle, and Dick knows that Damian knows this. But for some reason Damian is warning him off, and for some reason Tim is lying himself into the next century, and for some reason they have finally figured out how to get along. It’s not as much of a victory as Dick thought it would be.

The octopus at least is interesting. It moves through its garden with tender affection, contorting and camouflaging at each object it touches. Damian actually takes an interest, leaning forward as his expression opens and the pinch of his brows relaxes.

“Is Morgan okay?” Dick asks when they’ve finally circled back around to the giftshop. Damian is staring with mild bewilderment at a stuffed thing, a thing with two heads and five eyes and teeth the length of Dick’s index finger. He drags his eyes up when Dick speaks, his expression frozen in place.

“Morgan is fine.”

“I just thought - with the Red Hood and everything - she might… I dunno. But she’s okay?”

And there. Just for a heartbeat, just for less than a second, Damian’s expression cracks. Guilty. Annoyed. A ten-year-old in too deep who just wants to be left alone. Damian definitely knows, and there was never any question about Tim, and now maybe Morgan knows too. The question is: What? The answer is: Dick isn’t going to traumatize an already traumatized kid trying to figure it out.

Dick buys Damian the plushie, and at Damian’s grudging suggestion buys Morgan a book on Gotham River algae. He drops the kid off at the gates to Wayne manor and watches until he’s safely inside, and then puts his foot to the pedal and guns it for Bludhaven.

There’s no plan. Don’t murder Red Hood maybe, or Don’t scare Damian. Maybe he has succeeded at both and maybe he’s still doomed to fail anyway, because the minute he steps foot inside his apartment he heads for the closet.

No thinking. No plans, because plans fail and Dick can’t.

He calls Tony as he’s applying the bloody smile, green hair falling through his eyes and white powder dusted across the bathroom sink.

“Tell me I’m crazy,” Dick says. “Tell me they’re all safe.”

“You’re crazy,” Tony says. “Why do I feel like you shouldn’t be alone right now?”

“I’m not alone. I wasn’t. I took Damian to the Museum of Natural History.”

“And now?”

“I’m going out,” Dick says, staring his reflection down. The words echo oddly coming out of his mouth, as though they don’t really belong to him. “I can’t be in Gotham right now. Tell me they’re all safe. Tell me I can- tell me it’ll be okay.”

“Everyone’s at the manor. Everyone is safe. What about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You better be.”

Dick pulls on the coat and laces up the shoes and smiles at his reflection. “I’m going to ground,” he says. “Don’t look for me. I’ll call you when I get back.”

Dick disappears, and Tony tells himself that the kid is fine. This is just his way of coping, and no one understands coping better than Tony. And it’s not like he vanished without notice. And it’s not like Dick is Bruce; he won’t work himself into a spiral that ends up with the villain dead and Arkham blown to high heaven.

This is what Tony tells himself. Sometimes even he struggles to believe his own bullshit.

“You know what,” he tells Pepper, “maybe I’ll give therapy a go.”

Pepper doesn’t react for a moment. Then she looks up, her face impressively impassive behind her magazine. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

She looks like she doesn’t believe him. Which, fair: the first time she suggested he go to therapy was two weeks after he hired her. He told her she was fired, never got around to the actual firing part, and she’s been deploying various tactics to get him to reconsider ever since. Without success, obviously, because he has yet to step foot in a therapist's office.

“I think Dick needs to talk to someone,” he says. He swipes down the blueprints for kryptonite-laced missiles he was doodling on so that he can see Pepper more clearly. “He won’t talk to me.”

Pepper frowns. “Have you tried talking to Bruce about it?”

“No. But, you know, Bruce isn’t exactly the chatty type. And he’s worried about that Drake kid now. They both are.”

And Bruce still hadn’t cracked down on the Red Hood. Which on the one hand means he isn’t as hell-bent on revenge as he was when Jason died, but on the other hand is leaving Tony wondering what exactly he’s planning instead. And in the meantime Dick’s run off to god knows where to do god knows what, Tim is being suspiciously tight-lipped about the entire ordeal, and every time Tony thinks of Tim’s disappearance and subsequent broken bones he gets flashbacks to waking from a drug-induced sleep and realizing that Morgan was gone.

“So you want to see a therapist?”

Well, no. Because despite the near-constant anxiety, the PTSD, the panic attacks (which are better but definitely not gone), despite the nightmares which plague him every night, Tony still doesn’t think that ‘ needs therapy’ is a label that applies to him. Because he’s fine. He’s coping.

And while Tony is an expert at coping, he’s not so sure that Dick is. Punching the bad guys only works for so long, despite what Bruce would have the world believe, and Tony is intimately familiar with what happens when that goes wrong. He thinks of Bruce “coping” and he thinks of unanswered phone calls and localized EMPs and Gordon saying he’s rigged the whole thing to blow!

Which brings him roundly back to the Red Hood, who is without a doubt the bad guy in this scenario. And while Bruce is being strangely hesitant to confront the Red Hood head-on, Tony doesn’t get the sense that Dick has any such qualms. (Not to mention that Batman and Nightwing are far from the only masks Red Hood has managed to piss off. Black Mask has apparently been growing increasingly irate about the Red Hood’s rise to fame, and there are even whispers of the Joker poking his nose where it definitely doesn’t belong.) So yes, Tony is worried. And, being a father himself, he knows that leading by example can sometimes have the best outcomes.

“I want to lead by example,” he tells Pepper. “Like I’m a lemming, and all the other lemmings will follow me off the cliff.”

“Well I think that’s a wonderful idea, honey,” Pepper says after a pause, and returns to reading her magazine.

In the spirit of goodwill and actually talking about things, Tony decides to broach the subject of the Red Hood with Morgan the following morning. He fills a glass with orange juice and places it in front of her, pulling his own mug of decaf closer. “Morgan, I need to ask you a question. You don’t have to answer, okay?”

Morgan doesn’t even look at him, too preoccupied with making sure every single one of her Cheerios has been properly soaked in milk to pay proper attention. “What?”

“Remember when you went into Gotham by yourself, and you met the Red Hood?”

That makes Morgan pause. “Yeah.”

“Can you tell me anything about where you went? Did you see his face?”

Morgan squints at him, then frowns back down at her cereal. Her gaze goes to the carton of milk sitting beside her elbow, and she makes a face that Tony doesn’t know how to decipher.

It takes a while. It takes several minutes of different emotions making their way across Morgan’s face, several long minutes during which Tony becomes increasingly convinced that he never should have raised the subject in the first place. Then, finally, Morgan looks back at him.

Her expression is, of all things, guilty. “I don’t want to answer.”

“That’s okay,” Tony says quickly. “Thanks for trying, Maguna.”

If anything, that only serves to make her guilty expression worse.

Chapter Text

Ned works through the night. He doesn’t mean to, he doesn’t even realize it’s in the cards until one moment he’s munching on the last sesame balls from dinner and the next MJ is walking into his room, straight past his desk and to the curtain which she jerks down and releases up.

“MJ!” Ned protests, throwing his arms up and blinking groggily in the early morning light. His mind is sluggish, still stuck in the Java-Python hybrid he’s been working with and the new (incredible) Kryptonian language he’s been decrypting. “Ow, my eyes.”

“Did you just pull an all-nighter?” MJ demands. She comes to peer into his empty cup of coffee. “Dude. It’s not exam season, what are you doing?”

Ned blinks, trying to formulate a comprehensible response. I’m not studying. It probably won’t even work. It’s not in any known alphabet, which means I can’t use the Roman alphabet in the syntax. He needs to stop thinking in negatives. “I’m….”

MJ squints at his computer screen, before letting out a light snort. “Wow. That’s really impressive, nerd.” It’s a strange combination of sarcasm and sincerity that’s unique to MJ, and Ned feels his face start to heat up. “Have you had anything for breakfast yet?” MJ asks.

“No,” Ned says. His brain is slowly starting to surface from its fog of focus, and he’s starting to remember all the assignments he’s been ignoring in favor of hacking the Kryptonian spaceship. “Uh. I need to -”

“Nuh uh,” MJ says. She yanks his computer away, and Ned is still out of it enough that he reacts ten seconds too slow to catch it. Thankfully she doesn’t shut the lid, only places it out of reach on his bed. “Food and coffee. I’ll take two creams no sugar, thanks.”

Ned sighs, and starts digging around his backpack for his slingring and his wallet.

Ten minutes later they’re both sitting on Ned’s bed, coffee and breakfast sandwiches on the comforter between them. Ned takes a large gulp of his coffee, and after a moment feels the fog start to clear from his brain.

“Why don’t you portal everywhere?” MJ asks abruptly. “Why don’t you, I dunno - live at home with your grandma? You’d save a lot of money.”

Ned blinks. He takes another sip of his coffee, then says “I don’t want to make Dr. Strange mad.” Dr. Strange is scary when he’s mad.

“Why would he be mad at you for portalling home? He makes way bigger portals all the time. And if he doesn’t like that, why is he okay with you portalling to breakfast?”

“It’s the distance,” Ned explains. He wipes his fingers on his pants so that he can wave them in the air as he explains. “The bigger the portal, the more inter-dimensional energy it draws and the bigger the footprint. Dr. Strange isn’t going to notice me portalling to the cafe because it’s literally two blocks away. But if I go to New York, or if I do a bunch of little magic all in the same place it’ll ping his alarms or something.”

The last time that had happened, Dr. Strange had shown up yelling that Ned had just distracted him from a crucial diplomatic meeting between realms. He’d been streaked with paint of multiple shimmering colors and wearing a strange hat in the shape of a mushroom cloud, and it had been three in the morning. Ned still hasn’t quite recovered.

“So I mostly just practice within my own room. Small portals, short distances, not a lot of cosmic energy required.” He lifts his sandwich and takes a bite. “I’m getting pretty good at precision, though, and Wong let me borrow a few books to read from the Sanctum’s library.”

“I thought Wong didn’t like lending you his books.”

“He didn’t,” Ned agrees. “But then I think he and Dr. Strange got in an argument about it, and now it’s personal.” And now Ned gets new books every weekend, regardless of whether he’s finished last week’s load or not. He’s decided that, for his own sanity, he doesn’t need to know.

They finish their breakfast, and MJ stands. “I’m off to Gotham for the weekend,” she tells him, pulling out her phone. “You know the drill; daily check-ins, send rescue if you don’t hear from me, etc. etc. And take a nap, you look like a zombie.”

MJ leaves. Ned gets back on his computer and picks up where he left off.

When he finally slips into the Kryptonian ship, he doesn’t realize at first that he’s made it. He ends the page and sets an anchor point and doggedly starts poking and prodding to find the next obstacle he needs to get through, because there’s always a next one. There’s always a next step, a next challenge, a next error that needs to be wrangled into shape.

But this time there isn’t. This time Ned tidies up his code and runs the page and then - from one blink to the next - there’s a wall of code staring him in the face that is composed entirely of an alien language. And it isn’t attacking him: it isn’t infiltrating his computer or leaping out of his screen to bite his face off or anything like that. It’s just existing, and Ned realizes that he has full, unrestricted access to the Kryptonian’s spaceship. And everything included within.

“Holy shit,” Ned whispers. Then, louder: “Holy shit!”

He stares at his screen for ten minutes. Then he stands up, paces around his room, and returns to his screen; a big dopey smile spreads across his face and then he’s scrambling for his phone, sending a text full of typos and exclamation points to Barbara.

I didit i hacjed the soaceship im in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It takes longer than it should for MJ to realize that she has no idea what she’s doing. Because the Joker is a mess. He’s sporadic, chaotic, impossible to predict and creepy as hell. The Joker is, to sum up six weeks of research and one week of observation: a nightmare. Figuratively and literally.

So, she may be in over her head. But MJ has not felt this challenged in a long time, and she finds herself strangely excited each morning with the prospect of observing the Joker. Because he’s a puzzle that she just can’t figure out; he’s the villain, almost more of an idea by now than an actual physical threat, that has terrorized the East Coast (but particularly Gotham) for decades. Ask a room of ten Gothamites if they have lost a friend or family member to the Joker, and three of them will say yes (and four will look away, eyes averted, and not say anything at all). Some people flock to him, calling him revolutionary, and MJ knows that all these people put together could never in fifty years match the damage the Joker has wreaked in one.

So what’s his trick? How does he do what he does, and every morning wake up with a smile? Because MJ knows he’s cruel, she knows he’s unpredictable, and she knows that he’s only human.

On the other side of the one-way glass in the depths of Arkham Asylum, the Joker starts to hum. MJ bounces her eraser against her notebook, and Orderly Jordan shifts uncomfortably behind her. It’s frustrating. She feels like she’s running out of fresh observations, and even when there’s something new nothing seems to fit. Nothing makes the puzzle make sense.

March of the Gladiators, she scribbles at the top of her sheet, finally recognizing the tune. She lets out a quiet sigh as the tune bubbles up into a crescendo of mad laughter. Of course it’s circus music. What else would it be?

Maybe she should sketch him. Unstable, dangerous, extremely volatile - that was how the Daily Planet had described him, not two days ago. The very definition of a crisis, if ever there was one.

MJ puts pencil to paper, and begins to draw. It’s funny - even though she hasn’t done this in a while, the movements come back naturally. The quick glances, the almost instinctual strokes which one by one layer beside and on top of one another to create the final coherent portrait of the worst Gotham has to offer. It doesn’t take very long. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and MJ places the last line and sits back to see what she’s drawn.

She doesn’t like it. It doesn’t help at all, it was a stupid idea and Ned clearly will never make it as an art critic. Because this? This isn’t good. She doesn’t quite know what happened, but the patient in her portrait doesn’t look cruel. He doesn’t look merciless, sadistic, uncaring or unkind. He looks exhausted. And he looks sad.

MJ slaps her notebook shut, and picks her bag up off the floor. Clearly she needs to leave, and start again tomorrow with fresh eyes. She stands and Orderly Jordan takes a step forward, looking relieved. No one likes being so near the Joker (as though his crazy is contagious, and isn’t that a horrifying thought?), and this is the first time MJ herself feels an inkling of that same fear.

Behind the one-way glass, the Joker starts to hum again.

Ned tries to wait, he really does. He paces, he texts Barbara again (slightly more coherent this time), and then he sits at his desk and stares at his screen and waits, his phone open in his hand as he waits (waits) for Barbara to check her messages and respond.

I’m in! he texts again. Ready to initiate contact.

He knows she’s at work. He knows that Barbara has an actual job where she makes actual money and that she can’t just stop whatever she’s doing to contact an alien race with him. But she’ll be off work in one hour, and then they can move forward together. A good friend waits, Ned tries to convince himself. A good friend shares his victory.

Ned paces. He tries to study for an upcoming test. He practices his portalling, walking through the wall from one end of his room to the other.

He makes it ten minutes.

Ned Leeds of the USA, Earth, reaching out to any receiving intelligence. Do you read me?

Of course it was bound to happen eventually. She’d gone through the trainings, she’d read the manuals, she’d participated in drills, and she’d been sat down by a very serious Lieutenant Essen for a very sobering discussion of what would happen if the Joker ever found out who she was. So when a slight flicker of the lights is followed immediately by a panicked alarm, MJ scoops her backpack off the floor and walks to the exit without hesitation and without looking back.

She should have hesitated. She should have looked back, because the second she strides out of the observation room is the same second the Joker waltzes out of solitary confinement. The sirens cut out abruptly and for a moment it’s just the two of them, standing in the stark white hallway of Arkham with red lights flashing in complete and utter silence.

MJ halts in her tracks, and the Joker - he doesn’t freeze, not quite, but maybe he skips a beat. Maybe as her breath stills, his hitches; maybe as panic surges up through her she sees a spark of recognition, a suppressed reflection as his eyes latch onto hers. But maybe is a weak word in the face of certain death, and none of these are observations she’s willing to bet her life on.

She takes a futile step back just as a door to their right flies open and two orderlies rush out. The Joker spins (graceful, so graceful) and raises a gun from his side, aiming and shooting with almost careless precision. The man (Kammers) falls to the ground and the woman (Jordan) raises her own gun, but it’s too little far too late. The Joker lifts his left fist into the air above his shoulder and cocks his head to the side in a terrifying imitation of a curious bird. *BANG* goes the gun as his left fist snaps open by his ear (boom!) and Jordan falls to the ground mid step, blood seeping onto the white tile to mix with the pool forming near Kammers’ left hip.

MJ swallows the scream trying to claw its way up her throat, and forces herself to lift terrified eyes to the Joker.

He lowers the gun to his side as he steps towards the guards, kneeling down to run his fingers through the spreading pool of blood. Then he stands, hand dripping red at his side, and turns towards her with a mocking smile on his face.

MJ’s back hits the wall behind her, and she tries to turn her face away. The Joker stops her, tucking his gun into his pocket and reaching out to cradle the side of her head.

“Don’t be scared,” he whispers, too close, and she can’t stop her eyes from scrunching tight or her lips from pressing shut as he reaches his bloody hand to her face. His fingers land lightly on her cheek, and trace down across her mouth and up the other side. “Smile.”

His hands disappear from her face, and when MJ finally screws up the courage to open her eyes he’s gone. Red lights strobe across the bodies on the floor and flash against the blood creeping across the newly-stained tiles. Her legs give out a second later and she sinks to the floor, just as another door opens down the hall and more inmates slowly creep out to investigate.

She should run. MJ’s not stupid, she knows that the Joker is far from the only inmate who would happily see her dead in this place. But somehow she can’t, and somehow it doesn’t matter. A few white-clad patients stop before her, reach out, but she has only to look up at them with her red-stained face and they move along. They see the Joker’s smile on her cheeks, and they know to leave her alone.

“ - I don’t care if they’re literally a million dollars, I don’t care if I’m in debt for the rest of my life. I need better locks, and - oh god, do I need some for my mom and dad too? Do you think he knows? I gave them a fake number -”

It’s Sunday night, and Barbara is scrolling through the Arkham security footage with no small amount of disbelief as MJ understandably freaks out in her ear. And honestly, despite the fact that she knows it wasn’t actually the Joker, and despite the fact that both orderlies survived the attack and only suffered mildly debilitating gunshot wounds (they won’t be paralyzed for the rest of their lives), she thinks that she might be having a similar reaction if she were in MJ’s shoes right now.

“They’re Stark Tech,” she says, watching as Johnny Dee sways to a stop before MJ’s hunched form, hesitates, then moves on. “I’ll get some for you, and your parents. Don’t worry about the money, it’s taken care of.”

MJ takes a gulping breath on the other end of the line, and Barbara startles as her phone buzzes against the table. She glances down and tilts the screen towards her, reaching up to adjust her headphones as she listens to MJ trying to convince herself that moving to Switzerland is unnecessary. She swipes open her messages.

It’s from Dick, because of course it is. babs WHAT THE FUCK why the hell was mj in arkham???

Like this is her fault. Like she wanted anything to do with Dick’s crazy revenge scheme in the first place. Like it was her idea for MJ to do a psychological assessment of Gotham’s most notorious criminal.

“Switzerland wouldn’t do much, he found Jason in Ethiopia,” Barbara says, distracted, and immediately regrets it as MJ’s voice rises in renewed panic.

“Can I come stay with you? Please. Just for a night, or - or maybe a week, I promise it won’t be for long, you won’t even know I’m there -”

“MJ, breathe, you’re going to be okay,” Barbara says, even as she replies to Dick’s message: Remind me how many times have i’ve told you this was a bad idea - “You can come stay as long as you need to. Are you still at the station? Ask my dad to drive you, I’ll clear up the spare room.”

is mj okay?

“Okay, I’ll - I’ll be there soon,” MJ sniffs, and Barbara lets out a quiet sigh. The camera on her computer loops around again, starting the footage from the beginning as she replies to Dick’s question. She’ll be fine.

The frame shifts and her eyes flit up to her screen, and she watches as Dick reaches out to gently trace a bloody smile on MJ’s face. And she looks back down at her phone, and sends a final text to Dick before locking the screen and setting it back on the table.

Thank you.

It takes Peter an awfully long time to realize that the break-in Jason is currently describing was carried out by three children.

“I had to buy a new TV, blankets and pillows for the couch, another chair , I’m chronically short of food, I have to lock up my weapons -”

“You do live in Crime Alley,” Peter points out, instead of the obvious.

“- and I had to set up cameras to feel even remotely secure! And those things are notoriously insecure!”

Peter steps sideways, sliding onto a couch and spreading his arms over the cushions. There’s a lamp to his left and a coffee table to his right, and at the end of the aisle there’s an employee, giving him the stink-eye.

“This one’s nice,” Peter says, tapping his fingers along the corduroy. “So just to get this straight: there’s a gang of kids hanging out at your place, and you want them to leave you alone? Have you tried telling their parents?”

“I’d rather shoot their parents dead,” Jason admits, and Peter, rather unfortunately, believes him.

“Okay, well, that’s not an option.”

Jason glowers, and doesn’t deign to agree.

Peter gets up, and wanders to the next couch. It’s green and leather and scaly, and quite literally a monstrosity. He sits down, poking the seams. “Do you think this is made with real crocodile hide?”

“Who the fuck knows,” Jason mutters, and aims a kick at one of the legs. “Structurally un sound, next.”

Peter rolls off and follows Jason to a red couch which, under different circumstances, might be compared to a pompom. “You think the kids would like this one?”

Jason hesitates, and Peter grins. Jason turns as red as the couch, and swivels the cart to march in the other direction.

“So,” Peter tries, once they’ve found a couch Jason doesn’t hate and are browsing through shower curtains. “Dick’s in Bludhaven now, isn’t he?”

“Would you shut up about Dick fucking Grayson?” Jason snaps. A little undeserved, Peter thinks, considering this is really only the second time he’s brought it up since they met.

“Hey, I’m just making conversation,” Peter says innocently, holding up his hands. “I really think you should tell him though, just for the record. Look, I know he didn’t go to your funeral, but he didn’t know. He was in space, a galaxy away. He didn’t know.”

Jason’s fist is tangled in a rose-covered curtain, knuckles white even as his lips press together and his eyes narrow.

“That’s not true, he hated me -”

“He loved you,” Peter interrupts, leaning forward. “I don’t know what you’ve been told or where you’re getting your information from, Jason, but Dick was devastated. And I know you’re mad at him, and I know you’re mad at Bruce, but - look. Don’t take it from me. Please talk to him?”

For a long minute, Jason doesn’t say a word. For a small eternity, they stand in the aisle, surrounded by printed curtains, and Jason doesn’t move. And then he steps back, head lowering to his hands as he props his elbows on the handle of the shopping cart, and he says, “Fucking christ, Parker. There’s a bullet with your name on it if you don’t shut up. How the hell am I supposed to believe anything you say when I can’t fucking remember?”

“Come with me to Bludhaven,” Peter suggests, even though the thought makes his skin crawl. Just the thought of coming face to face with Dick, and Dick not recognizing him makes him want to run away and hide, but this isn’t about him. This is about Jason, alive and angry. This is about Dick, who should know that the kid he has been mourning is alive.

“What?” Jason asks, looking up.

“We’ll go to Bludhaven,” Peter repeats, but Jason is already drawing himself up, and giving Peter a sizing look.

“We’ll go to Bludhaven,” Jason parrots, “And you’ll talk to Dickface?”

It’s Peter’s turn to hesitate, but it’s not really a choice. “We’ll both go,” he finally confirms. Jason holds out a hand, and Peter takes it. “Deal.”

“Deal,” Jason echoes, and then turns back to the curtains with a satisfied smirk. “Now, back to business; frogs or flaming cars?”

“What about vigilantes,” Peter asks, pulling out a curtain covered in stylized sigils, and then has to duck for cover as Jason chucks a box of lightbulbs at his head.

Chapter Text

The journey from point A to point B had been long and arduous, but now, finally, here they are. Bundled up in layers of jackets, scarves, hats, and gloves against the biting cold, and Jason is wearing a pair of sunglasses for good measure, but they’re here.

Here in Blüdhaven, in a narrow alley in front of a tilting door that looks like a gust of wind could knock it down. 

Here outside Dick Grayson’s door.

“No.” Peter says, and watches Jason freeze in the corner of his eye.

“Jesus fuck, I didn’t even move .” Jason huffs under his breath, but he stops preemptively fleeing and slouches in defeat at Peter’s side. After a few more seconds of silent contemplation, he snaps “Are you gonna ring the doorbell or what?”

They’ve made it here to point B, standing outside Dick’s door, and Peter doesn’t know if he can do it. They’ve been staring the door down for the better part of the last ten minutes, Jason making various halfhearted escape attempts and Peter digging in his heels and just… not fleeing.

Just standing, and pretending like this isn’t a big deal.

It has been getting easier, this whole not existing thing. He gets coffee at the donut shop every summer and watches Ned and MJ out of the corner of his eye, and not four months ago he managed to nod when he and May crossed paths at the cemetery on the anniversary of Ben’s death. It’s been getting easier, and he’s been able to smile when MJ catches his eye, or give Ned a quick fist-bump when they recognize each other as regulars of the same cheap cafe. It’s been getting easier to accept the hollow greetings and empty pleasantries. 

But ever since walking up to Jason two months ago and being recognized , there’s been a thin, shaking sliver of hope that has been irrevocably resurrected, digging itself into Peter’s chest and suggesting that there might be more . More to this life he’s built, more to the people he knows (knew), more than the simple black and white of being forgotten.

And with this sliver of hope rekindled, with the knowledge of just how much it’s going to hurt when it is inevitably snuffed out, ringing Dick’s doorbell has become something of a Sisyphean task.

Jason isn’t exactly helping.

“Don’t tell me I drove us all the way here only for you to chicken out.”

Peter sighs. It’s okay, he silently encourages his friend, we’ve got this. You chicken out on the inside and I’ll chicken out on the outside. We’ve got it.

He squints at the small button, and wills it to ring on its own. There’s a beat where nothing happens, and then Peter sighs again, and says, “I don’t see you making that much of an effort.”

“This isn’t about me.” Jason sniffs, and Peter quietly marvels that Jason has finally admitted this during the one situation when it is, in fact, mostly about him.

But no. This isn’t really about Jason, and it certainly isn’t about Peter. No. This is about Dick.

“Okay.” Peter says, and shakes out his hands like he’s getting ready for a fight. His fingers feel tingly as his heartbeat ratchets up a notch. “Okay, I’m going to do it, I’m going to ring that doorbell - we have a deal , Jason, stay where you - ”

Peter raises his hand, Jason takes one aborted step in the direction of the motorbike, and the door swings inward with an anticlimactic click of the doorknob being opened from the inside.

Dick blinks at them from the dim interior, dressed in a loose-fitting tank top and sweatpants, hair plastered against the left side of his face and sticking up and out in every direction on his right. There are dark circles under his eyes, and even as he gapes at them his mouth cracks open in a yawn.

“Wha-aah-at’re you selling?” he manages, reaching up to dig a palm into his eyes. “‘S the doorbell broken’r something?”

Peter’s hope dies a quiet, agonizing death in his chest, the remnants floating up to lodge a lump in his throat. He tries to stifle it (he knew this would happen, this is exactly what he’d wanted ) but Dick’s expression sharpens somewhat, and he looks slightly more awake as he straightens.

“Sorry,” he offers, at the look on Peter’s face, “It’s just you’ve been standing here for… fifteen minutes? Are you okay?” He turns a slightly worried gaze to Jason, who is standing stiff as a statue and - is completely unrecognizable bundled up as he is, and with the sunglasses, wait a minute -

“Fine.” Jason mutters in response, and it sounds like he’s speaking around a mouthful of gravel.

“Jason. Our deal.” Peter says, before he can rethink this, before Jason gives into his impulses and actually runs away, before Dick can slam the door in their faces.

“Jason Peter Todd.” Peter repeats, louder, like the world’s most demented herald, and he’s not really sure who he’s talking to, but his senses start screaming danger as Dick tenses in the doorway, now very much awake, now very much paying attention.

“Fuck.” Jason says, and glares, and takes off his sunglasses. “Dick.”

It sounds more like an insult than a name. 

“No,” Dick says, hand shooting out to steady himself on the door-frame. “No, I… um. I think I’ve been drugged. Excuse me.” 

He tries to close the door, but Peter gets there first, moving fast (too fast, sloppy, stop panicking) and catching the door-frame. Dick pulls, and it doesn’t budge. 

“You’re not drugged,” Peter says, “Dick. He’s not dead.”

“But Bruce said…” Dick trails off, his eyes wide as he stares at Jason. Like if he blinks, Jason will disappear. “Bruce said -”

“Bruce is a fucking liar,” Jason snaps. He isn’t moving though - he isn’t trying to flee anymore, which Peter hopes is a good thing. He shifts so that he’s more firmly planted against the door. Dick’s eyes dart to him before flying once more to Jason.

“You’re - dead. No.”

Jason amps up the glare. He turns to Peter. “What happened to you and Dickface catching up? What happened to our deal, Parker?”

Peter thinks that Dick should only have to deal with one life-altering revelation at a time. He thinks that they should let him process the fact that his dead little brother is actually not dead at all before trying to convince him that he forgot his childhood best friend after a spell went awry.

But Jason is still glaring, so Peter decides to humor him. “Hi,” he says, raising his hand in an awkward little wave. “I’m Peter. Um. Parker. We met once, a few years ago.” Technically not a lie. They met. And then they kept meeting, but Dick won’t remember that part.

“Sorry,” Dick says after a moment. He blinks, then turns to Peter. He frowns, and Peter tries to ignore the way his stomach drops at the lack of recognition. “I don’t -” he turns back to Jason. “How?” he whispers.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jason mumbles. Peter clears his throat. “Maybe we should step inside?” he suggests, and tries not to wince as two pairs of blue eyes snap to focus on him. “Sit down. Maybe … talk?”

They make it inside, barely. Jason hesitates just a second too long on the doorstep, and Peter nearly trips over a pile of notebooks, and Dick tries to lead and shepherd both at the same time and ends up bouncing off the walls and hovering just a little too much as they all crowd into the living room.

“So this is a dream,” Dick concludes at last, and Jason rolls his eyes and glares.

“It’s not,” Peter sighs, taking a perch on the edge of the sofa as he tries not to sit on the load of laundry that’s been dumped there. Jason looms over his shoulder, and only when Peter gives him a pointed look does he huff and settle awkwardly on the couch beside him.

Dick stares at Jason. Jason glares at some nebulous point over Dick’s shoulder. After an awkward minute, Peter clears his throat. “So,” he says. “I know this is weird. How … are you okay?”

Dick blinks, his gaze shifting to Peter. “Sorry,” he croaks. He shakes his head firmly, and when he speaks again his voice is stronger. “You said - Parker, was it? And you know Jason -”

“Knock it off,” Jason says sharply. Both of them turn to see him glaring straight at Dick now. “Seriously, Dick? ‘Parker’?” He sneers. “You’re really trying to tell me that you don’t know him?”

Which is when Peter realizes, with a dawning sense of horror, that Jason never truly believed him about Doctor Strange’s spell in the first place.

“Peter,” Dick corrects himself, frowning. “I - sorry. Jason. How are you alive?”

“You don’t get to talk to me,” Jason says harshly, “until you quit messing around!”

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe Jason was right, maybe they never should have tracked Dick down, maybe Peter should never have forced them into this small apartment together. In fact, it might not be too late to salvage the situation. If they leave now, Dick will probably just convince himself it was all a dream -

“I don’t - I mean, you’re from New York?” Dick tries, a hint of desperation creeping into his voice. “We met. Uh, was it before or after Thanos?”

Before he can say anything - what, he doesn’t know, but god, anything - Jason explodes.

“Dick, what the fuck?! That’s Peter. Peter Parker, you guys used to do everything together! No? Still nothing? Peter, Tony Stark’s weird intern, he used to come by every weekend , I swear to God!”

Dick’s slightly panicked gaze meets Peter’s, and Peter can see how badly he’s trying, how much he really wants to get this right, to agree with everything Jason is saying and be everything his little brother thinks he is just so long as Jason is there, and alive , and he’s trying so hard to remember something he can’t, and it’s - painful. It’s painful to watch, painful to stand here and be forgotten over and over, but this isn’t about him. It never has been (despite Jason’s continued noises to the contrary).

So Peter shrugs, pushing his lips into a half-quirked smile, trying to say yeah I don’t know what he’s talking about either without begging Dick to remember. If he opens his mouth, it’s game over. The expression stretches like plastic across his face, and he knows half a heartbeat before Dick’s face drops that he hasn’t been able to fool him. The misery and the loneliness are all there, a chimera rearing its ugly head, and his smile twists into something tremulous even as Jason shoots him a look of utter betrayal.

Dick is Robin . Dick is Night-Stalker, and Winged Menace, and Robber, and Night Owl, and Wingman and every other ridiculous name they ever came up with in his quest for autonomy. Dick is Nightwing, and a simple smile could never fool him.

“Wait.” Dick says, breathless, eyes moving back and forth, assessing, and suddenly Peter is the one having to convince himself not to flee. “You’re serious? Wait, you’re being serious?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Peter says, and he’s actually pretty proud of himself for getting those words past the thing in his throat, for dragging them up and laying them out clearly and concisely, but what small moment of pride he has allowed himself is quickly smothered by the look of pure outrage on Jason’s face.

“No way.” Jason growls, jerking up from Dick’s couch, whole body coiling up into a tense knot of aggression. If venomous were a color, Peter belatedly thinks, it would be the shade of green flickering in Jason’s eyes. “I cannot believe you! What was that you were saying, Parker, ‘ we have a deal’? I’ve held up my end, it’s time for you to hold up yours.” He turns to Dick, a sneer tearing into his face. “I don’t owe you anything. You weren’t there when I needed you, you weren’t even there after. Peter was. So from now on, the only way you get to see me is through him. Can you get that through your thick skull? You don’t get to see me, you don’t get to talk to me, I’m fucking dead to you - until you figure out whatever… this is!”

“That’s not fair, he didn’t know.” Peter begins, because Dick looks shattered , fists clenched at his side and lips pale at the accusations. He doesn’t protest, though, not until Jason pivots away and starts stomping towards the door.

“Don’t, Jason -” 

Peter watches in horror as Jason whirls, teeth bared in a snarl, gun out and aimed; watches as Dick freezes, hands half up, half stretched out in supplication. He watches as Jason’s green green eyes flick to him, and sees the strange hatred pulling and pushing at his emotions like a master puppeteer. Then he’s backing out the door, letting it slam shut in his wake, and Dick is moving, escrima practically materializing in his hands as a look of dangerous determination takes over his expression.

“No you don’t.” he growls, and bolts out the door after Jason.

That… escalated. That escalated fast, and Peter knows he has to do something about it, he just isn’t sure what. 

If he doesn’t do something, someone’s going to get hurt.

But right now he’s Peter Parker, and he knows that if he goes outside he’ll find Nightwing and Red Hood, and because neither of them know he’s Spider-Man, there’s not much he’s going to be able to do if things get out of hand. 

There's a whine of electricity followed by a crackle-POP , the distinct sound of a gunshot, and Peter knows, with a long buried instinct, that things have gotten out of hand. He makes for the door as fast as he dares (still a little slower than he could, because does he really want to get any more involved in this?), and when he steps outside it’s to see Jason’s bike smoking and shorted out on the pavement, Jason himself struggling in a choke hold, and Dick bleeding rather alarmingly from a hole ripped in his right thigh.

“Dick - can’t breathe - get OFF - ”

“Shh, it’s okay, I’m not actually choking you. Just making sure you don’t leave.”

“Fuckin’ psycho - can't kidnap -”

“Says who? It’s a perfectly valid method, as far as I’m concerned. That’s it, just relax.”

Jason’s struggles stop as he goes limp, eyes rolling up into his head, and Dick relaxes his grip, letting them both sag to the ground. He makes a quiet pained noise as he catches Jason against his legs, cradling him nonetheless gently in his arms. Peter takes a hesitant step forward, and then hesitates again when Dick looks up, face pale and lips pressed into a firm line. 

After a measured pause, Dick lets out a sigh, and says, “Let’s get him inside.”

Peter doesn’t say anything as he takes Jason’s arm over his shoulder, trying to be subtle about taking the majority of his weight while Dick limps along at his other side. By the time they make it through the door and back to the couch, Dick is ashen and wheezing, and he crumples alongside Jason onto the cushions, fingers trembling as he clutches at his leg.

“Where’s your first aid?” Peter asks, trying not to look at the blood. If he looks, he won’t be able to look away, and then it will be Ben all over again, and May, and -

“Bathroom.” Dick says, and Peter moves so fast he practically teleports into the small room. He knows he’s moving too fast, dodging the piles of clutter too agilely, not reacting with the appropriate amount of alarm and concern to a gunshot and a kidnapping , but he’s trying to stave off a panic attack, and he can only focus on so many things at once.

Maybe if he doesn’t mention the escrima, the kidnapping, or the blatant violence, Dick won’t mention… Peter. 

He finds the med kit stashed under the sink, and returns to find Dick tucking a blanket around Jason, fingers trailing across his face and lingering guiltily at his throat. 

“Here.” Peter says, kneeling onto the floor and pulling out bandages and antiseptic. “Is the bullet still in?”

“Yeah.” Dick says, tensing as Peter takes out tweezers and needle and thread. “He’s not dead.” he adds after another heartbeat, and Peter tosses him a bottle of ibuprofen.

“I know.” Peter says quietly. He knows Dick isn’t talking about Jason Todd, passed out and choked to unconsciousness on his couch. He’s talking about Jason Todd four years ago, about a missed phone call and a broken promise, and a bomb in a warehouse in Ethiopia. He’s talking about a funeral he hadn’t known to attend, and a gravestone he hadn’t known how to find, and a grief that had snuck up and crushed him with all the bludgeoning force of a meteorite upon impact, two months worth of believing in a kid who was already dead.

“I’m sorry.” he says, even quieter, and then holds up the tweezers. “Ready?” he asks, and it’s not really a question but Dick nods anyway and sucks in a breath through his nose, whole body going tense even as he tries to relax his leg.

Peter’s not really sure why Dick is trusting him with this, but he makes quick and efficient work of it, dropping the bullet onto a discarded sock and sterilizing the wound and stitching it up with neat little stitches that would have made Tony proud. Well, proud and then worried, and then when the truth got out probably a little horrified as well.

“Okay.” Dick says, still shaky but with the steely resolve of one who can do nothing but weather the storm or drown. “Now, Jason won’t be down for long. And correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the only surefire ways I know of to keep him in place is to prove yourself completely and utterly inept at feeding yourself.”

“Uh, yeah. That tracks.” Peter remembers his own unsuccessful attempt at staying in touch, Jason’s point blank refusal, and subsequent invitation (in the loosest sense of the word) to a proper dinner.

The look of profound relief that crosses Dick’s face at this confirmation is jarring.

Dick makes it halfway across the room, pirouetting precariously around discarded clothes and piles of books and odd gym equipment, before Peter realizes what’s happening and jumps up to offer him a shoulder to lean on.

“I’ve got Kellogg’s.” Dick starts listing off, arm draped around Peter’s shoulder so readily, so casually, that he has to dig his nails into his palm to remind himself that it’s not real. “Cereal for lunch is a good bet, but if we really want this to work I think I can do better. Soup out of a can is okay, especially if it’s already opened and cold from the fridge. Then there’s my classic PB’n’fluff with chocolate sprinkles, that always sent him into a tizzy, especially if it was the first meal of the day past noon. Oil on spaghetti is another good one, but I think he’ll wake up before we get the water boiling.”

“Potato chips and ketchup.” Peter offers despite himself, maneuvering to deposit Dick into one of the relatively empty chairs. “Spinach from the bag. Over-steeped tea.” 

Dick snickers. “Yeah, that one’s all on Alfred.”

Peter fills a glass with water and finds a Snickers bar to place in front of Dick, then starts rifling through the cupboards, trying desperately not to read into the warm feeling spreading through his chest. Talking with Dick is just so easy, so natural, it almost feels as if…

“So.” Dick says. “If I understood everything between the resurrection and the temper tantrum, you and Jason have a deal.”

He had really been hoping Dick would forget about that. He should have known better.

“Yeah,” he says. And then doesn’t elaborate.

“Hey.” Dick’s voice sharpens, and Peter’s shoulders jump up to his ears before he can relax them. When he slowly turns, Dick is looking at him, eyes narrowed and head tilted bird-like to the left, the posture so familiar it sends goose bumps across Peter’s arms. 

“I knew you.” Dick says, and it isn’t a question. “We were friends. What happened?”

“You forgot.” Even now, from just those two words, Peter can see him mapping out everything he knows, stringing together the fragments of history Jason had managed to communicate between glares, all the things Peter had left unsaid and all the ways he had reacted  - or more specifically, not reacted - to a typical disagreement between Robins. He can see him analyzing and compartmentalizing in all the ways Bruce taught him, and he knows he’s not escaping this.

So he sighs, and says, “It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got time.” Dick says, leaning back to kick his uninjured leg up onto the table. “And this was Jason’s condition. We figure this out, he stays. I’m not letting him go.” 

The again hangs in the air between them, weighted down by both their collective guilt, and Peter knows he’s lost the fight before it’s even begun. There’s an unexpected relief to that, and it leaves him feeling slightly light headed and giddy as he takes the seat across from Dick, spreading his fingers against the fine-grained wood of the table and trying to organize his thoughts.

He’s never tried to explain this to anyone before. Not the full truth of it, at least.

“How can you just accept it? Don’t think I don’t know exactly how crazy it sounds.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Dick says, tilting his head meaningfully in the direction of the living room.

“Right. Of course.” Of course, Peter thinks, and wonders if Dick will still believe him when he hears the whole story. “Um, okay. So in short, my - identity was revealed, I tried to make everyone forget, the multiverse exists, and… I succeeded. Everyone forgot.”

“What identity?” 

Of course Dick would know exactly the right question to ask. He doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t bat an eye at multiverse, or everyone forgot. He goes straight for the heart of the matter, and Peter really shouldn’t have expected anything less. It doesn’t make it any easier, but despite how much his instincts are screaming at him to rewind, to pack up and flee, Jason had been right: they had a deal, and Jason had held up his end; it’s time Peter held up his.

“So.” he says, and fixes his eyes resolutely on his hands. “So. I know you’re Nightwing. I know you and Jason were Robin. I know… because I’m Spider-Man.”

Chapter Text

“What the fuck.”

Dick jolts upright, sweeping his leg from the table and taking a plate, three magazines, and at least five pens with it. Peter manages to catch the plate and two magazines before he’s even really comprehended what’s going on, and when he looks up it’s to see Jason standing woozily in the doorway, blanket draped over his shoulders and a ten pound dumbbell held at the ready in his right hand.

He’s staring at Peter, mouth gaping and a look of complete shock warring with the murderous outrage already there.

“Hey! Just in time.” Dick says, reaching blindly to grab a bag of marshmallows from the window sill and not missing a beat. “It’s microwaved s’mores for lunch, come grab a cracker.”

“What - s’mores - Peter… jesus fucking sonofabitch -”

Okay. This was not part of the plan. Not to say there was much of a plan to begin with, but Peter is pretty certain that, had there been one, revealing Peter Parker is Spider-Man to both Dick and Jason would not have been on it. Telling Dick is one thing; Dick had known, not so long ago, that they were one and the same. Jason Todd, however…

“You’re a fucking liar,” Jason says, sounding almost indignant in his outrage. “No way in hell - you? Please.” He scoffs, hand tightening around his blanket before he says flatly, “You’re joking.”

Jason Todd had never made the connection. Peter and Dick were friends, and Spider-Man and Robin worked together, but somehow in the nine-year-old boy’s world the two had remained separate. And then Spider-Man left Earth and never returned, and Peter Parker’s name entered the list of the Dusted, and Jason had been Robin alone. And then Peter returned, and the rest of the heroes and all the Dusted too, and then Jason died. And while Peter and Jason might have been friends, Spider-Man and Robin had kept each to their respective cities, and Jason had never found out the truth.

Peter reaches out wordlessly, places his hand flat on the plate, and lifts it up into the air.

Dick whistles, and offers Jason a marshmallow-graham cracker sandwich. “Neat party trick,” he says. Jason numbly takes the offered sandwich, staring. Then his eyes narrow, and he throws himself into the empty seat between Peter and Dick.

“I knew that was bullshit,” he says. “That whole cock-and-bull story you came up with - reporter my ass, Parker, you’re a terrible journalist. So what, there was some spell - and it was aimed at you? So it wasn’t some accident…”

“Well, yeah,” Peter interrupts, a little frantically. Because Jason is drawing conclusions. Jason is drawing conclusions fast, and Peter doesn’t know where this is going but he has a feeling he isn’t going to like it. “But it’s fine, everything ended up okay -”

“Do MJ and Ned know?” Jason interrupts, leaning forward. “You wanted to date MJ, right? So did you guys get together?”

Yes, Peter almost says. No, he almost admits, but Dick gets there first, pausing in his search for chocolate.

“You know Ned and MJ?” he asks, head tipping in a quizzical manner. “They’re from New York. So you must’ve gone to… what’s it called. Midtown Prep? Midtown Tech. Yeah, hang on, I remember that field trip in DC, with Spider-Man and the Vulture… that was you?”

Peter is starting to feel a little ganged up on. “Yes,” he says, but doesn’t get any further before Jason interrupts again.

“You haven’t told them, have you?” he says, and he actually sounds incredulous about it. “Jesus christ, is everyone on this planet such a fucking hypocrite? What’s wrong with you?”

There’s nothing wrong with him. This isn’t a choice he had made lightly, and Peter leans forward, something like anger creeping into his tone even as long-buried terror stirs in his heart. “No, I haven’t told them, Jason, because they nearly died. I almost killed the people I love because of some foolish mistake, and I - I was too late. People got hurt, and May - her heart stopped. She died, and it was my fault, and then they saved her and I… Don’t blame me for saving the people I care about.”

“Oh,” Jason says lightly, nastily, and Dick stills on the other side of the table, eyes darting between the two of them. “Oh, they nearly died, and you think they would blame you for that, you think they would care? Guess what: I did die. And I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame Dickhead, and maybe Bruce came too late and out of everyone, maybe fucking Batman could have stopped it. But he didn’t, and it was my fault, and I don’t care anyway. And I’d bet my life that your aunt sure as hell doesn’t care either.”

“It doesn’t matter though,” Peter says. “As long as they know who I am, they’re in danger, and maybe they’ll say they don’t care but I do. Dick is different; Dick can take care of himself, he’s Nightwing, but… I’m not telling Ned or MJ or May or - I’m not. It’s better this way.” It has to be.

“Well tough luck, because you don’t get to decide that,” Jason snaps. “You think they’re happier not knowing? You think they’d prefer to just forget?”

Dick is still watching the two of them, a small frown on his face as he lets them argue. Peter kind of wishes he wouldn’t, but before he himself can jump in Jason continues.

“Take it from someone who’s forgotten half his life. Losing memories sucks, Parker, and you don’t have any fucking right to decide that someone’s better off without them.”

“Well it’s done now,” Peter says firmly. “Everyone forgot and there’s no way to undo the spell, so it’s done.” Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t remember Peter. Even if he told them the truth, even if he walked up to Aunt May and said you raised me there’s no reason she should believe him. To her, he’d just be another psycho lost in the streets of New York.

And this isn’t even about him, anyway.

Dick places a bar of chocolate between the two of them, making Peter jump and Jason scowl. He glares for a moment longer, but Peter’s not budging so eventually he turns his attention back to Dick. “Hershey’s?” he says irritably, tapping on the label. “Seriously?”

“It’s tradition,” Dick says, elbows on the table as he leans across to pick at the wrapper. “Crappy chocolate to go with gooey sugar blobs and sweetened cardboard. You said you have some memory loss; do you remember Alfred teaching us how to make a fire in the backyard?”

Jason falls silent. He’s still frowning, and he still looks uncomfortable, but he doesn’t seem as angry as he was before; he doesn’t seem prone to throw himself at Dick at the slightest provocation. Peter takes a tentative nibble of his own sweetened cardboard.

“Anyway,” Dick says, when Jason stays silent. “We made s’mores. You burnt all of yours, but Alfred said it was okay. And then he gave us honey graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate, because Alfred is a man of tradition.”

“Traditions are crap,” Jason mutters. “Just read the Lottery.” And then, so quietly that Peter wonders if Dick hears it at all: “And they tasted better when they were burnt anyway.”

The rest of their visit goes okay. Jason doesn’t try to run away (or, alternatively, attack Dick), Dick doesn’t realize (or doesn’t care) exactly how insane this all is and decide to kick them out, and Peter manages to hold onto his composure by a single thread. Jason eats the s’mores and the slightly more acceptable Thai take-out that Dick unearths from the fridge, and responds to Dick’s tentative questions with grunts and monosyllabic answers. Eventually Dick changes tactics, and starts making conversation with Peter instead.

It’s really nice talking to Dick, because Dick believes him. He seems to accept without question that he had his childhood friend erased from his mind, and instead of asking Peter about himself, he asks about Spider-Man. Because Dick remembers Spider-Man, Peter realizes. And now he’s trying to remold those memories so that they contain Peter as well.

It’s really nice, and Peter only just manages not to cry.

“So you’re around?” Dick asks, balancing on his uninjured leg as he helps Jason run jumper cables from his own bike to Jason’s shorted one. “You’re back in Gotham, I mean.”

“I’m here during the week,” Peter offers, when Jason ignores this. “I mean, I am actually on assignment here from the Daily Bugle. Um. Indefinitely, I think, so … yeah. We’ll be around.”

Jason sends him a withering glare, which Peter in turn ignores. Jason kicks the bike, the motor sputters to life, and Dick leans over to unhook the cables.

“Jason,” Dick says abruptly, as Jason swings his leg over the seat. Peter slowly (slowly) climbs on after him, stalling as much as he can to give Dick a chance.

“I won’t tell anyone else, if you don’t want me to,” Dick says seriously. “I’ll leave you alone, I’ll - I’ll try to remember Peter, I promise. Just - will you give me a chance?”

He sounds scared. Peter wonders if Jason can hear it too.

For a moment, Jason is silent. Then he shrugs away, revving the engine. “I got my own life now, Dickface,” he says. “I got shit I need to do. Parker, you good?”

Peter meets Dick’s gaze. It’ll be okay, he tries to promise. I’ll help, I can fix this, you’ll see. It’s a promise he’s made a million times before, but that doesn’t mean he makes any more lightly now. I promise.

“Good,” he says, and tightens his grip as Jason pulls out and away.

Peter is surprised when Dick texts him, not a day later. He’s surprised that he answers, and he’s even more surprised when, two days after that, Dick asks if he wants to hang out.

Let me show you around Bludhaven, Dick suggests. I don’t think I ever got the chance to.

Peter stares at the text for a full ten minutes trying to sort through the emotions vying for attention in his stomach. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Dick was supposed to forget him, he was supposed to forget and not remember and even if he by chance met Peter again he wasn’t supposed to care. He wasn’t supposed to try.

I don’t think I ever got the chance.

He didn’t. He left for space after Peter returned from Titan, and then Jason died, and then Peter messed up, and somewhere along the way life fell through the cracks and disappeared. Peter never went to Bludhaven, never saw Dick’s first apartment or met any of his new friends. And it occurs to him now, as he stares at the message on his phone, that he never had a chance to learn how Dick grew up during those five years when the world moved on without him.

“Let’s just walk,” Dick suggests, when Peter shows up at his door a day later. “I’ll show you some of my patrol routes, and the gym I work at.”

They go down streets as familiar to Dick as they are unfamiliar to Peter. Dick points out where the shelters for the Dusted were, he points out where playgrounds have been constructed and trees planted and where construction has been constructing castles in the clouds since Thanos snapped his finger.

“I take Babs here all the time,” Dick says as they stand outside an ice-cream truck in the park. Peter is feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choices. “You know Gordon, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Peter says, and then a bit awkwardly: “but I guess she doesn’t know me.”

“You’d be surprised at the things she knows,” Dick laughs, and Peter can’t help but smile a bit sheepishly back. Dick buys himself a Nightwing popsicle and he buys Peter a Spiderman popsicle, and when Dick sticks out his tongue five minutes later it’s completely blue. 

“Do you know why he won’t come home?” Dick asks two hours later, as they come to the banks of Gotham River. It takes a moment for Peter to figure out that he’s talking about Jason.

“I think there’s a … number of reasons,” he says slowly. He doesn’t know how much he should tell Dick; he doesn’t know if he should say anything about the Lazarus Pit, about Tim and Robin and the strange hatred that seems almost unnatural.

He settles on something safe; something he thinks Dick will understand. “I think he’s angry that the Joker is still alive, and he blames Bruce for it.”

Now, over the past three years (over the past seven) Peter has slowly become better and better at interpreting his spider-sense. He can usually tell when it’s warning him of danger, and when it is simply unsettled. He can use it to pinpoint an enemy blindfolded, and when to wait before stepping out in front of a red light. It’s been a long time since he’s been unsure of what the familiar tingle of goosebumps is trying to signal to him.

A prickle runs up the base of Peter's neck, and he doesn’t know what it means. It’s not danger; no car veering towards them, no sullen face watching from the shadows. He doesn’t think he needs to be alarmed, but he starts to pay attention anyway.

“He needs the Joker dead,” Dick says, a strange lilt in his voice turning what should have been a question into an observation. And suddenly Peter realizes what his spider-sense is telling him - he freezes in the middle of the sidewalk, turning disbelieving eyes to Dick as he stops as well.

Peter remembers a grieving young man in a graveyard over a newly turned grave, promising vengeance. I need the Joker dead, Dick had said, and he remembers him laying out his plan in terrifying detail, explaining how he would kill the Joker and why he would get away with it.

“Dick. You didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

It’s a genuine question. Dick doesn’t remember their conversation, he doesn’t believe that Peter has any reason to know what he did. But goosebumps are racing along Peter’s arms, telling him that he’s right and Dick is lying, and as Peter stares at his childhood friend he wonders how he could have missed this. How he could have removed himself so completely from their lives that he missed his best friend killing Jason’s murderer.

“You killed the Joker?” Peter hisses incredulously. But that can’t be right, that doesn’t make sense because -

Dick looks bewildered, and a little offended. “No. Didn’t you hear about the mayor’s niece?” His expression folds into one of practiced disgust. “Joker’s definitely still alive.”

Peter might have been fooled, if he hadn’t known exactly what Dick was capable of.

“Does Bruce know?”

“That Joker’s alive? Yeah, I think he knows -”

“Dick,” Peter says flatly. His fingers wrap lightly around Dick’s wrist, and he drags him over to the nearest alley where they can talk unobserved. Dick resists slightly, but when Peter persists he gives up. “Does Bruce know that you killed the Joker, and that you - what? Hired someone to act as him?”

“I literally don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bruce can’t know. There’s no way he would allow it, especially not having someone else stand in the Joker’s stead. But Dick would need to pay someone, and while he has an impressive inheritance the Joker has been running around consistently for the past three years, and Dick doesn’t have that much money -

Peter remembers a carnival, a maze of mirrors, a child’s scream. He remembers Dick standing over a bloodied clown, gun in hand and ice in his eyes.

Come on, the sixteen-year-old boy scoffed. You can come up with a better joke than that. How about this: why was the clown so sad?

“Oh my god,” Peter says faintly. “Dude. You’re the Joker?”

Dick is definitely starting to look a little panicked, although he’s hiding it well. He’s always been good at acting, good at putting on a performance and smiling for all the world to see. And he’s smiling now, a nervous thing that on anyone else would seem confused and a little annoyed.

Dick is definitely panicking.

“I’m Nightwing,” he insists, gesturing up at the rooftops like that has anything to do with guns and clowns and - god, Jason - “You think I have time to go running around in that clown’s get-up? You think I would, after what he did?”

“So if I go to your apartment right now I won’t find the make-up. I won’t find a purple coat or a green wig or any of that?”

“Listen, Peter -”

They’re interrupted by a faint trill from Dick’s pocket, the sound of his phone receiving a text. The sound doesn’t mean anything to Peter, but it clearly does to Dick because he frowns, cutting off mid-protest to pull his phone from his pocket.

Dick is the Joker. Dick killed the Joker, and now he’s pretending to be him. Peter definitely has thoughts on this, he definitely has opinions. He thought they’d cleared this up. He thought he’d managed to convince Dick that vengeance wasn’t the way to go, that he should grieve properly instead of turning to violent revenge -

Dick’s face drains of color and he shoves the phone into his pocket, already moving out of the alley. “I need to go,” he says, and despite everything Peter tenses at the tone of his voice. “I’m sorry, I just - my … friend’s in trouble. Red Hood’s there, I - I have to go.”

God. What is Peter supposed to tell Jason?

There’s a tentative knock on the open door, and someone clears their throat. Barbara turns from her computer, adjusting her glasses. “Yes?”

It’s Abby, one of the high school circulation interns. She looks terrified. “Larry said to get you,” she squeaks. “It’s the Red Hood.”

To be quite honest, Barbara’s first reaction is one of surprise. Her second is to reach for her phone. “How many civilians?” she asks, pulling up her contacts. “How many families?”

Red Hood’s here, she texts Dick before setting her phone on silent. She places it in her lap and lets her fingers brush reassuringly against her escrima concealed in her chair.

“I - I don’t know, he said he wanted to talk to you -”

It’s not an emergency, necessarily. Nothing that requires her activating her emergency beacon (yet). But she’s not stupid, she knows better than to go up against a known criminal without backup, and while she also knows that the Red Hood doesn’t hurt civilians, well. Barbara’s not exactly a civilian.

“Stay here -” she starts, when there’s the sound of a door slamming down the hall and the sound of stomping footsteps getting closer. Abby lets out another squeak, and practically teleports to hide behind Barbara.

Barbara straightens in her chair, fingers poised to release her escrima. Sure, Red Hood doesn’t hurt innocents, but he’d beat up Tim. (And then he’d stopped, and isn’t that interesting?) She knows she can’t do much against a bullet (proven fact, her brain reminds her helpfully) but perhaps she can be distracting. Maybe she can stall, at least until Nightwing arrives.

And then the Red Hood is standing in her office doorway, a large man in a large jacket and full body armor, sleek red helmet contoured to a human’s face. He has four guns that Barbara can see, and an old-looking medium-sized book tucked under one arm. When he sees her, he freezes.

For a moment, they just stare at each other.

What do you want? Barbara wants to ask. What are you doing? Why did you beat up Robin, and why did you stop? Apparently her brain has other priorities, though, because what comes out of her mouth instead is: “Who is Peter Parker?”

“Question of the goddamn century,” Red Hood snaps, broken from his stasis. His voice is modulated through the helmet; Barbara curses herself for not starting a recording on her phone, but it’s too late for that now. He takes two quick strides closer, and Barbara tenses, but all he does is throw the book on her desk.

It’s wrapped in a paper cover. Magic For Dummies, is written in bold red font.

“Get that to Ned Leeds,” Red Hood growls, “and tell him to get his fucking shit together.”

And then he leaves, stomping out just as loudly as he had come in.

Barbara blinks, then turns to stare at the book on the desk.

She pulls it into her lap, letting the thing fall open. The page that it opens to has been dog-eared by multiple pages, with the heading underlined multiple times and little red stars doodled all around it. For a moment it makes Barbara think of Jason - he used to doodle little stars on the library tables, when he thought she wasn’t watching. The book isn’t about anything Barbara recognizes, though; it has diagrams and jargon-filled passages, and the best Barbara can make of it is that it’s witchcraft.

Which apparently isn’t too far off. “Those are runes of the Mystic Arts,” Abby says shakily, almost making Barbara jump; she’d forgotten the girl was there. “My aunt went to study with them.”

So somehow the Red Hood knows that Ned has an affinity for magic.

“Do you know what this spell does?” Barbara asks, lifting the book so that Abby can see it better, but before she can respond there are more footsteps in the hall and then Dick bursts into her office, eyes wild and out of breath. His gaze skips briefly to Abby before landing on Barbara.

“Babs! Are you okay, what happened? Where’s the Red Hood?”

“I’m fine, he left,” Barbara says, and then she gets a proper look at Dick and is … less than impressed. He looks exhausted. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week, there’s a haggard look in his eyes that she doesn’t like one bit, his clothes are rumpled (but not from being slept in, clearly) and it looks like he’s lost weight. She frowns. “Are you okay?”

Dick ignores her. “Where did he go? Is anyone hurt? Did you -” his eyes dart to Abby - “did you call B?” He steps towards her, and Barbara’s frown turns to a scowl.

“He left, no one’s hurt, and no I did not call B, I had it handled,” Barbara says. “Dick, what happened to your leg - why are you limping?”

“Nothing, it’s fine,” he lies, his attention zeroing in on the book. “What’s that book -”

“Abby,” Barbara interrupts. “Can you tell Larry I’m taking the rest of the day off? You can tell him it was the stress. Actually, you should go home too; take tomorrow as well if you need it. Dick, drive me home? I’ll tell you what happened on the way.”

Dick wilts slightly, reaching up to rub a hand over his eyes. He takes a shaky breath, and lets it out slowly before lowering his hand and turning to Abby. “Do you need a ride, or do you have someone who can come and get you?”

“I have a ride,” Abby whispers, and edges her way to the door. “Thanks. I’ll tell Larry - yeah. Thanks.” She disappears, and Barbara sighs.

“Come on,” she tells Dick, shutting down her computer and grabbing her bag from the floor. “MJ’s at my place, and I need to get this book to her anyway.”

Chapter Text

Pepper is in a meeting when the Kryptonian broadcast goes live. It’s supposed to be a relaxing meeting; it’s supposed to be enjoyable even, because Pepper likes Lucius Fox. She’s worked with the man for decades, both as business rivals, business partners, PR fire-fighters, and un-official superhero wranglers.

The news isn’t even on in the meeting room. It’s only when Pepper’s phone starts buzzing an emergency alert and Fox’s gaze becomes fixed on something over her shoulder that she realizes something is wrong.

Chris from finance knocks on their door and pushes it open even as Fox rises gracefully to his feet and Pepper turns to see what the distraction is. “You guys are going to want to see this,” Chris says, and they all go to join the employees gathering in the kitchenette.

“Citizens of Earth,” the man on the screen says. The Kryptonian - he looks human, but the more she looks the more Pepper feels that something is just ... off. And it’s strange, because she’s seen Superman, she’s met Clark Kent a handful of times and never considered him anything more (or less) than human. But this man ... she can’t quite suppress the shiver that runs down her spine.

“We have come to secure your surrender; the means by which we do this is up to you. Will you submit to your Kryptonian superiors? Will you allow us to heal your civilization, to heal your people and your planet? We have asked Earth’s leader to show themselves, to answer our proposition. Your leader has not come.”

At her side, Fox pulls out his phone and starts rapidly texting someone. Pepper feels like she should probably be doing the same, but she can’t pull her eyes from the screen (how many times has she watched the world crumble from the other side of a screen?).

“We must be gracious. We must come in good will, and assume that you as a species have accepted our proposal. Should the humans decide to accept our presence, they will be assimilated into our society and given a place within our bright new world. Should they stand against us, they will be annihilated. We understand that this is a turning point in your history, so we will be lenient. You have one Earthen week to give us your answer.”

The screen flickers. The screen cuts to black, the Kryptonian’s face shuttering out of focus, and then the screen goes black a final time before switching on to a different man, a human. Pepper’s breath catches high in her throat, and in the silence of the room at Stark Industries you could hear a pin drop.

“You want to come colonize Earth? You want to play house, you want to play God? Well I’ve got news for you, Zod. Earth is already occupied, and we’re at full capacity. No room for tyrants, overlords will be exiled.”

On the screen is another face, a face the entire world knows but Pepper knows best. Tony Stark faces the world head-on, and doesn’t blink.

“You don’t have to wait three days, because I’ve got an answer for you right now. Go. To. Hell.”

Tony’s hacked the visual feed, but the Kryptonian’s audio is still functioning; Zod’s voice rings out, dry gravel over Tony’s firm eloquence. “Then you will be annihilated,” he says. “And you have seven solar days to change your minds.”

The broadcast stops. The TV switches to the channel it had been on previously, where a pale show host and a gaping guest are both trying to gather themselves in front of a live camera. The room is still silent as a grave, so Pepper turns and walks back into the meeting room before pulling out her phone and swiping up her speed dials.

When she first met Tony, she tried to talk sense into him. It took years for her to accept him for who he was; it was years before she figured out that there was really only one person who was better than her at getting Tony to change his mind.

Fox slips into the room after her. “Kind of hate to say this,” he says, still texting furiously, “but I’m glad I’m not the one having to clean up the mess on this for once.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow, but before she can respond her call is answered.

“You saw the news,” Bruce growls, and Pepper doesn’t bother to hide her sigh.

“Yes. You’re on top of this?”

“I will be at your house within the hour. Is Fox there?”

“Yes,” Pepper says again. “I’ll put him on.” She passes the phone to Fox, and smirks. “Here. Now it’s your problem.”

Morgan leans over, hands carefully poised in the water as she slowly steps forward, intent on her prey. She holds her breath, completely still, and then - she lashes out, hands flying together and scooping up to bring the ribbon-like leech out of the water.

She holds the writhing thing in her cupped hands and wades back to shore, where she had a small bucket full of black slithering blood-suckers.

“They’re really good,” she reassures the cattails as she wades back into the muck. “They taste just like licorice, all the other kids at school eat them.” Then Damian will scoff and tell her to show him, and she’ll pout and say I’m allergic to licorice.

“I’m allergic to licorice,” Morgan practices, then straightens as an explosion echoes from the direction of the house. A light wind tickles her hair, just as smoke begins to drift up from behind the row of pines.

Morgan stares for a moment at the twisting column, then slowly steps out of the water and starts making her way up the pebble-strewn shore. It’s just an explosion, she tries to reason with herself. Daddy was experimenting, and DUM-E got excited. But she can’t quite manage to squash the ball of anxiety forming in her stomach, and she quickens her pace as she steps onto the soft needles under the trees.

There’s a hole in the roof of the garage. The sprinklers are on, and the steel shutters have slid down to cover all the doors and windows of the main house.

“Daddy?” Morgan calls uncertainly, stepping out from under the trees. No one answers, and she hops a tiny step closer to the garage. “Daddy?”

The only answer is the wind, and the sound of something breaking and clattering to the floor.

It’s okay, Morgan reassures herself. She can be brave. She can be strong and sneaky just like Damian, she can walk into her own house and find her dad. And besides: it’s just a little explosion. And Jason isn’t afraid of explosions (she can be like Jason). It’ll be a game, Morgan decides nervously. Hide and seek, and the floor is lava.

Morgan twists her watch to activate her blaster, and trots over to crouch beside the porch steps.

It takes her five minutes to decide that there’s no one here. She’s not sure where Daddy went; she’s not sure if there were any villains involved, but if there were they are no longer here either. She creeps into Daddy’s workshop as the sprinklers shut off, staring wide-eyed at the scattered tools and upturned chair, and feels something like dread settle in her stomach.

She thinks that if she started crying now, Damian might not tease her for it after all.

“Miss Morgan,” FRIDAY’s voice comes from what’s left of the ceiling, and Morgan jumps so high she’s surprised she doesn’t hit her head.

“FRIDAY!” Morgan squeaks, recovering herself. “FRIDAY, are you okay? What happened, where’s Daddy?”

“I cannot locate Mr. Stark,” FRIDAY says. “I have contacted Ms. Potts. She would like you to go to the porch and wait there for Mr. Wayne.”

“Okay,” Morgan says, voice small. Batman’s coming. Mommy knows about the explosion and FRIDAY doesn’t know where Daddy is and Batman is going to come get Morgan. Which probably means that she’s going to stay with Damian, which means that she’ll need a sleep-over bag.

“FRIDAY, can I go inside and get my backpack?”

There is a brief pause, and then FRIDAY says “I have disabled the barrier on the front door.”

Morgan keeps her blaster activated as she creeps up to her room. The house is dark, despite it only being the afternoon, and the silence of the empty house makes Morgan feel jumpy. It makes her feel scared to run upstairs, it makes her check the corners and keep her bedroom door open, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

She packs her favorite clothes in her favorite backpack, because she thinks that it might be a long time before she can come home again. She tucks Superman’s doll into one of the waterbottle holders (not inside, dolls need to breathe too). She pulls on her favorite jacket and her fluffiest pair of socks and her blue sparkly rain boots, and then she runs back downstairs (feeling a little braver, a little safer) and into Mommy’s office.

Morgan isn’t supposed to know about the secret button which releases Mommy’s suit. But then, there are a lot of things Morgan isn’t supposed to know. She presses the button, then lifts Mommy’s helmet from the stand in the wall. “So you aren’t alone here,” she tells FRIDAY. “I’ll take you with me.”

Next is the kitchen, where she climbs onto the top shelf and pulls down a full container of cookies. Then the entryway, where she digs up the Rain Day Jar and empties its contents into her backpack. And then it’s down to the lake to retrieve her bucket of leeches and finally to the backyard, where she fills her pockets with poison ivy.

Ten minutes later, Morgan feels much safer as she considers her gathered supplies. She’s ready for anything now; she’s prepared to face Batman and Mommy and Damian, and she’s prepared to figure out exactly what happened to Daddy.

When assassins are after you, you have to hide, Damian had instructed her, and Morgan trusts Damian. So instead of staying on the porch like Mommy told her to, she trots over to her old playhouse and crawls inside to wait.

Some nights, patrolling the shadows and battling in the neverending war on crime, Bruce thinks that Gotham will kill him. He thinks that a sane man would have given up years ago; a man with even a single ounce of self-preservation would have thrown his hands up and turned away. Normal people would (and do) call Gotham a lost cause.

Bruce isn’t normal. He is sane and he does pride himself on his self-preservation, but he also prides himself on his optimism (and it is optimism, even if Dick always insists that Bruce needs to lighten up). He believes that Gotham can be saved, and he believes that he can make a difference.

And then Tony will go and do something like this, and Bruce knows that it won’t be Gotham that will be the death of him; no. It will be Anthony Edward Stark.

Alfred connects to the comms just after he’s crossed the state border. “Master Bruce, I have Pepper Potts on the line for you. I believe you will want to take this.”

“Pepper,” Bruce greets, as Alfred connects them. “I’m fifteen minutes out.”

“You need to get there faster,” Pepper tells him, and Bruce tenses at her tone. “FRIDAY just informed me that there was an attack on our home - Tony was taken, and Morgan is there on her own.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Bruce growls, and increases his speed along the interstate.

This isn’t the first time Tony has been kidnapped. Somehow, Bruce still hopes it will be the last.

He sees the smoke first, a thin trail spindling up and dispersing in the light breeze. It’s not enough to signify a fire; just damage, just evidence of heat vision perhaps. Bruce skids up the driveway, spraying gravel all over the peonies as he slams on the breaks and leaps out of the car.

He isn’t Batman right now. He’s Bruce Wayne, and he has never wished more that he could pull out his mask midday and wrap himself in shadows. This isn’t a scene for the Prince of Gotham; this place belongs to the Batman, and even as he stalks forward Bruce can feel the tightness rising inside him, a twisting fury which he has only felt a few times before.

Perhaps if he were a more merciful man, he would be thinking of what the Kryptonians might do now that they have Tony Stark. But he sees the ruined garage, Tony’s tools and projects scattered haphazardly behind shattered windows, and he sees that thin wisp of smoke meandering up to a blue sky, and Bruce can only see what has already been done.

Bruce is not a merciful man. He never has been.

He’s just turned to the porch, his gaze going to the shadows cast by the mid-afternoon sun, when there’s the sound of small feet pattering across soft needles and he turns to see Morgan Stark approaching from a small wooden shack beneath the pines. Her hair is blowing about her face, and she has a purple sequinned backpack hanging heavy against her shoulders. There’s a yellow bucket clutched to her chest, and as she approaches Bruce can see water sloshing inside.

“Morgan,” Bruce says.

“FRIDAY said you were here to get me,” Morgan whispers. She reaches up to tug on her lip, and when Bruce meets her gaze he sees a strange resignation there. Some fear, yes, perhaps some tears held tightly back, but there’s a determination there as well, and it’s something Bruce recognizes.

“Are you hurt?” Bruce asks. He steps forward, kneeling before the girl and holding out an arm invitingly. Morgan drifts closer, but she doesn’t initiate contact and after a moment Bruce lets his arm fall.

“No.” She hesitates. “Daddy doesn’t have his Iron Man suit.”

“No,” Bruce agrees. He stands, turning back to the ruined workshop. “He doesn’t.” He steps forward, eyes going over the wreckage: to the idle observer, it might appear that one of Tony’s projects had simply exploded in his face. To Bruce’s trained eye, it is evident that the attack was carried out by Kryptonians - three of them, if he is correctly interpreting the scene.

“You’re Batman,” Morgan whispers. Even though there’s no one else here - even though it’s just the two of them, Bruce’s eyes still dart around at the admission. “Are you going to rescue Daddy?”

Did you come to help me find my mother?

The memory comes out of nowhere, hot winds and dry dust and Jason, watching him with a guarded expression in the streets of Beirut. He stares at Morgan, and he can feel his heart rate picking up, he can feel his nails where they’re digging into his palms.

There’s smoke swirling through the air behind him, curling up to disappear with the wind.

“I’m here to take you away,” he finally manages, and Morgan’s face falls (just like Jason’s had, before Bruce told him the truth). “Then - I will find Tony.”

He’ll find Tony, and he’ll find the Kryptonians who thought it was a good idea to kidnap Bruce’s best friend. In the short time he’s been here he has already formed three individual plans, and he knows that at least one of them will work. (He swore it would never happen again, he swore he wouldn’t be too late - and now look, the scattered tech, the ceiling torn away -)

“Okay,” Morgan says, and this time when Bruce offers his hand she leans into it, still clutching her bucket in her arms. There’s something black and writhing within, but Bruce is more focused on the scene before him; something catches his eye, flashing in the low light of the sun.

It’s Tony’s walking cane. Bruce gestures at Morgan to stay where she is before he picks his way through the workshop, lifting Tony’s cane from where it’s fallen to the floor. He examines it for a moment, face carefully blank, before making his way back to where Morgan is waiting for him.

“Get in the car,” he tells her, his voice rough. Morgan obeys, climbing into the back and pushing her backpack onto the middle seat before pulling the seatbelt across her chest.

They’re halfway back to the manor before Bruce has calmed his mind enough to focus on the moment and, more specifically, the little girl in the back seat. He glances in the rearview mirror, studying her; she still has the bucket wrapped in her arms, her forehead resting against the window as she watches the trees fly by. At least she doesn’t seem too distressed; it occurs to Bruce suddenly that she must have been trained for a situation like this. Tony Stark’s daughter must know that this is a dangerous world.

“Morgan.”

She startles, her gaze flying up to meet Bruce’s in the mirror. “What?”

“What’s in the bucket?”

Morgan hesitates, then looks down at her lap. After a minute her gaze returns briefly to his before she turns away, staring out the window.

“I’m allergic to licorice,” she says at last, clear and concise. It’s a tone that Bruce knows well and he decides that, for his own sanity, he doesn’t need to know more.

Ned doesn’t quite know what he was expecting when he messaged the Kryptonians. Well. That’s not true. He was kind of expecting an explosion (of the computer variety). He was maybe expecting Boston to be plunged into a dead-zone by a massive alien EMP, or for the Kryptonians to start raining fire on the state of Massachusetts, or for their secretary to respond and say that sorry, they needed the leader of Earth, not some random guy in a chair from MIT.

What he was really expecting was for Doctor Strange to portal into his room and start telling him off for recklessly practicing his portals.

Hello, Ned Leeds. My name is Jor-El. It is fortuitous that you have contacted me outside the main frequency. We must keep our correspondence well hidden; the fate of this world rests upon your shoulders.

Ned stares at the green words blinking into existence on his screen. He blinks. He blinks again. And then he has to take a minute to just sit there and breathe ( not hyperventilate, no sir, Ned is breathing normally).

Then he sits forward and starts typing a reply. Hello Mr. Jor-El sir. I am a third year undergraduate at MIT, top of my class and grand master in competitive coding. I have worked alongside Avengers on multiple occasions, and Dr. Stephen Strange will be happy to provide you a reference of my character. I am at your service, sir.

He checks for spelling. He hits send.

Maybe this is it. Maybe today is the day Ned becomes a superhero. He’s never really aspired to be anything more than the behind the scenes guy - he’s never felt the need to be anyone other than the guy in the chair. But what if, a small part of him whispers. What if you could be more?

Ned has never exactly had the ambition to be anything more than perfectly happy, but if the opportunity is presented to him on a metaphorical golden platter, he will quite happily take the chance.

I have done a small amount of research into the technological capabilities of your species. If you could obtain access to a physio-auditory-visual message processing system, we might communicate in an easier manner.

Ned switches tabs to his chat with Barbara. DO YOU HAVE A PHYSIO-AUDITORY-VISUAL MESSAGE PROCESSING SYSTEM?

Ned waits two minutes, during which time he takes several deep breaths. Then he texts FRIDAY. Does Mr. Stark have a physio-auditory-visual message processing system?

Mr. Stark has a prototype PAV-MP system in his workshop, FRIDAY replies.

Can you please send me a picture? Ned writes, and as soon as FRIDAY sends the image through Ned raises his sling-ring and makes a portal straight to Tony’s workshop in New York.

This is not the time to be cautious. This is the time to make big portals and save the world. This is the time to be an Avenger. Although Ned’s not quite sure who he wants to avenge yet -

Tony’s workshop is a mess. As Ned steps through the sparkling portal, computer and charger clutched to his chest, he’s greeted by a sharp wind to the face courtesy of the large hole in the ceiling. There are precious experiments and odd tools and miscellaneous parts scattered around the large room, the explosion seeming to be centered around a toppled chair and shredded metal work bench in the center of the room.

“FRIDAY,” Ned squeaks, as the portal fizzles out behind him. “What happened - do the Avengers know?”

“Mr. Stark was abducted by three Kryptonians,” FRIDAY informs him from the ceiling. “Ms. Potts and Mr. Wayne have both been informed, and Miss Morgan is currently in the care of Mr. Wayne.”

“Oh,” Ned says. After a brief hesitation, he steps forward over a pile of scattered wing knuts, and starts setting up his laptop on a table that doesn’t look like it’s been shredded by literal lasers. “Well. I can help. Can you connect me to the - the PAV-MP system, please?”

It takes about half an hour to get everything properly set up. Ned has to fix a few wires which somehow got crossed, but he understands the theory enough that he’s pretty sure he got it right, and by the time he flips the little on switch of the device and plugs it into his laptop he’s nearly vibrating with excitement. Because this is it. This is the day that Edward Leeds makes contact with an alien species, all on his own.

The lens on the PAV-MP machine flickers, rays of light shooting upward into a vaguely humanoid shape. Ned has half a second to panic as he realizes he doesn’t actually know whether or not this particular alien can be trusted, before Jor-El is standing before him in Tony’s wrecked workshop.

“Ned Leeds,” Jor-El says gravely, hands folded within the long sleeves of an ornate gown. “We meet face to face. I am gratified to meet a human as courageous and resourceful as you, and hope that our collaboration may be a fruitful one. May Telle’s wisdom guide us, and may Yuda’s four moons protect us. I fear we have a great task before us, if we are to have any hope of saving your planet.”

Oh my god, Ned wants to say. He wants to shout his excitement, he wants to throw both fists into the air in victory, he wants to catch this on camera so that he can show his Lola and all his friends exactly how awesome Kryptonian technology is. But Ned is no longer sixteen years old. He knows how to conduct himself in a professional manner, so instead of bursting into the thousands of questions he has for this man not of Earth, he says “Yes sir, whatever you need, sir, I’m ready. Sir.”

God he wishes Barbara could see this.

“My people have come to your planet in the hopes of colonizing it for their own,” Jor-El says, and he conjures the image of a strange space-ship that looks like a jagged bullet. “This is a World Machine; with it, they aspire to terraform your world into a new Krypton, find the Codex which contains the molecular coding of our entire civilization, and from here repopulate the galaxy. I cannot begin to describe to you the devastation this would bring; although perhaps you do understand. You would have lived through the Infinity Annihilation, would you not?”

“Yes,” Ned says, mind racing as he steps forward to study the images Jor-El has conjured. “Yes - Thanos, the Blip. I was there. I mean, I wasn’t, I was blipped, but - yeah. I was there.”

“Then you understand the seriousness of our predicament,” Jor-El says, sounding pleased. He conjures a hologram of the Earth. “One day ago they delivered an ultimatum - that your people must surrender, or five cities around the world will be forfeit. We must stop them; working together, we must sabotage their attempts to overtake this world and save the people they wish to destroy.”

“Yes,” Ned agrees. “Absolutely.” He kind of feels like he should be writing some of this down -

“I cannot allow my people to drive another race to extinction,” Jor-El continues. “I will not stand by as another civilization is brought to ruin.”

“I know people,” Ned says. “I know the Avengers and the Justice League, and Oracle knows people overseas as well. Don’t worry, sir. This isn’t new; We’ve faced greater odds than this, and we’ve fought, and we’ve won. We can do it again. Sir.”

Jor-El smiles at him, and Ned feels as though he has been graced by the light of a brilliant sun. “Very well, then,” Jor-El says. “Let us get to work.”