Work Text:
Jason eyes the no smoking sign propped above the doorway to the ER, checks the time for the fifth time this hour, and fidgets the edge of the nic patch on his left arm. Twelve hours in, eighteen to go. The clock, as always, creeps towards daylight by the minute, but it's still dark for a while yet.
From the spare squares of window, during the sparse times he has to catch his breath, Jason can hardly see anything out there but the black night and distant, foggy, city streets. No Signal in the sky tonight, at least. Jason lets out a breath and knocks twice on the wooden countertop.
“Doe,” his attending calls, and Jason rolls his eyes.
“It’s Haywood,” he corrects, grabbing his clipboard and standing from the desks. There are other interns, and some of them look up from their paper to watch him leave, but Jason is the only one on Peds rotation. He jogs to catch up, ignoring the pull from his still-sore ribs and debating the merits of charming a nurse for more of the good painkillers. “It’s on the new birth certificate and everything.”
Johnson just waves a distracted hand in his direction and keeps walking. He mutters something about his age and keeping up and “all the same” and then lets it drop. Jason follows him close behind. “Tell me about room 217,” he says. Their footsteps echo on the linoleum.
Jason flips to the page on his clipboard, but he knows the case well enough without it. “Niko Adamu, Male, eleven years old. He’s been here for weeks with persistent, antidote-resistant symptoms of fear toxin poisoning. Increased baseline adrenaline, cortisol, anxiety, depression, aggression, and on top of that, acute insomnia. It's been,” Jason checks his watch, does some subtraction, “73 hours since we were last able to get him to sleep.”
Johnson sighs. “Eleven years old. This city, I swear.” He turns to Jason with a finger, puts on his wise old man voice, and says, “Get out of here as soon as you can, I'm telling you.”
Jason can only shake his head. He knows, obviously, that Gotham's a shit place to live. It's dangerous as hell, dirty, rainy, freezing in winter and humid in summer. The streets are shit, littered with potholes, the mayor gets more money in bribes than salary, and every few months a hundred people die horribly, horrifically, cruel and unusually thanks to Gotham’s finest rogues.
It’s also the only place Jason has ever known. The city lives in him. On good days, he even thinks he can feel it, the rush of traffic, thrum of lights, chop of airplanes and helicopters overhead patched in time with the pump of blood in his veins.
“Gotham’s home, sir,” Jason says. He flicks the clip of his pen and shrugs. “I can’t just feed her to the wolves.”
“If that ain’t the truth,” Johnson says, because isn’t that the reason he’s stayed so long, too, built a life and a career here for thirty years. Gotham doctors, Jason’s noticed, are like sailors on a sinking ship, trying in vain to bail out the boat, going down with it. During matchmaking after med school, Jason had only listed hospitals in the Gotham metro area. There was just nowhere else for him. He couldn’t see a point in practicing medicine for another city, a different kind of people.
Jason loves Gotham: her cruelty and her kindness. Sometimes he thinks the world might be better off letting her sink, but here he is, anyway, throwing water back into the sea.
The door to 217 is open, but Jason raps his knuckles on the doorframe anyway and waits a second before walking in. Inside, Niko is awake on the bed like he always is, legs tucked close to him, a stuffed teal alien in a deathgrip between his arms. On the TV, Niko has the news playing. He always does. Sometimes Jason thinks he misses being out in the real world; sometimes he thinks it's a nice reminder that things can always get worse.
“Hey, bud,” Jason says, smiling. Niko looks up at him and doesn’t say anything. He’s gaunt, a skinny kid too scared to eat much anymore. His eyes are wide and white and the bones of his skeleton poke through at his cheeks. “Have any good dreams?”
Niko slowly shakes his head. Jason grimaces.
“Didn’t think so,” he says, a lightness in his voice that he doesn’t feel. Johnson steps further into the room and grabs the chart from his table. Jason checks the levels on the IV, taking note of the monitor readings.
“How are you feeling today?” Johnson asks, flipping a few pages over and adjusting his glasses. Niko shakes his head again, tightens his arms to his chest. Johnson waits a second for him to go on, but he says nothing.
Johnson flips the page again, squints his eyes. “And the meds we started you on last week? Any improvements? Anything at all?”
“No,” Niko says, voice scratched out and hollowed.
Jason speaks before he can stop himself. “We’ve got some good news for you, though.” Johnson eyes him warily from across the room, but Jason continues. “Some very smart people have been working on a new treatment for people like you. It’s in the trial stage, but we’re working on getting you on the list.”
Johnson’s eyebrows shoot up, but Jason doesn’t pay him any mind. He sets his clipboard to the side and takes the seat closest to Niko’s bed. He needs Niko to trust him, and Jason finds that most kids take news better from someone at eye level.
Niko doesn’t even turn his head. “You’re always saying this,” he says. His eyes are wide and haunted. “It’s never true. It never gets any better.”
Jason looks at his arms, the limp head of the plushie where all the stuffing in its neck has been squeezed away. Niko’s hands are shaking, the readings on the monitor rising—the first indicators of an attack. Johnson shoots Jason a look and covertly goes to push a sedative.
“Hey,” Jason says, moving his hand very slowly to grip the bed’s plastic guardrail. “Look at me, okay.” Niko turns his neck very slowly.
Jason takes a deep breath in and out, again and again, and Niko catches on, starts trying to do the same. Jason tightens his grip and says, calm and even, “It’s gonna work this time. I promise. I’m a doctor. Would I lie to you?”
Niko presses his eyes closed and slowly shakes his head.
“Then there,” Jason says, glancing up at the monitor. BP is still elevated but dropping steadily. Niko's hands are gripped tight, but he’s stopped shaking. “See? You’re gonna get better real soon, and then you’re never gonna have to see me or Dr. J over there ever again.”
Niko nods, eyes still pressed closed. His brown skin is in patches sweaty and ashen. His nails are covered in bandages, another color of the rainbow for each one, but underneath Jason knows they’re bloody.
“We’re gonna give you something to help you sleep again, okay?”
“No!” Niko’s hand shoots out, grabs Jason by his wrist. “No sleep,” he chokes out.
Jason puts his other hand on top of Niko’s. “I’ll be right outside that door, right in that hall,” Jason says, only partially a lie. “Anything tries to get you, and I’ll get them first. You see this scar?” Jason motions to the one that splits his temple, because the kids always love to point and ask about the scars. He grins and says, “Well, you should see the monster that put it there.”
Niko gives a small, watery smile. Jason’s ribcage feels punched open, and it’s not just from the fading bruises. Niko lets go of his hand and leans back again, his bloodshot eyes falling closed. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
“Jason, we’ve talked about this,” Johnson says, door shut, in the hallway outside of Niko’s room. “That trial is experimental, not to mention expensive. There’s no way the parent’s can afford that.” He glances around, as if the empty stretcher bed or radiology student hustling by have the answers he needs. “Where are they anyway?”
“Working,” Jason says, and it’s an understatement. Jason didn’t know two people could have five jobs between them, but they have to. No insurance. The father doesn’t have his papers. Jason can’t imagine how it must feel to have a kid in the hospital and not be able to be with him, to not be able to hold his hand when he cries. The nurses check up on Niko every few hours on their rounds, and Jason sneaks him chewing gum and warheads, which he read somewhere help with anxiety. His parents visit when they can. It isn’t often.
Johnson sighs. “I know you hate this Jason,” he says. “I do, too, trust me. But there has to be a conversation about finances. The city and donors can only cover so much, and trials like this aren’t part of it.”
Jason presses his eyes closed, leans his arm and face against the wall edge. “They’re working on it. We’re trying to set up a payment plan. They’re good for it, I swear.”
“I know you’ve gotten close,” Johnson says. “I respect that. The care you have is the sign of a good doctor. But this is Gotham, Jason.” He says it like a veteran talks about war. “There’s a reason it’s called the city of no second chances. I can give them to the end of the week to get the money. Next Monday, tops.”
“Johnson, come on, that’s impossible,” Jason presses, and Johnson sighs.
“Jason, the trial starts in days,” he says. “With more time, maybe we could apply for grants, but that’s not happening with this turnaround. There’s no way out of this. It’s now or never. For what it matters, I am sorry.”
Jason presses the pads of his fingers to his eyelids, drags his hands down his face. Johnson clasps him on the shoulder. “You picked a bad day to quit,” he says. “Who else do we have today?”
Jason checks the chart. “Hit and run, stabbing, two more GSWs. The man from the last Croc attack is almost ready for discharge, but the ones from the last Hatter plot are probably going to be transferred to long term care. There are three patients in the ER that need to be admitted, but they’ve reserved our remaining beds for the factory burn victims heading here from West Center.”
Johnson shakes his coffee thermos and finds it lacking. “Let’s take ten. Meet me at 212 after. You should grab something to eat,” he looks at Jason, the dark thumbprints of his under eyes and the wrinkles in his scrubs. “And for the love of God, just smoke a cigarette.”
The city lights blur together with the passing cars. Downtown Gotham always has an air about it, but especially this near the ambulance bay, bathed in red and blue shadows. The city seems to be forever holding its breath — waiting for the shoe to drop, a bomb to blow, a gun to shoot through the bony spine of 11th Avenue. After a shift that long, it’s hard for Jason to feel much of anything.
No one is waiting up for him. Jason stands just outside the hospital and wonders if he should light a smoke, or call a cab, or just walk home. The drizzle of rain collects on the slick fabric of his jacket.
He takes the subway instead, crammed full and damp smelling, seats all taken so he has to stand. He never bothers changing, so he stands among the crowd in his light blue scrubs, holding his brown leather jacket, trying not to fall asleep against his own bicep clutched to the overhead bar. Tattoos slither down the exposed skin of his arms, stopping at the elbow. Ambiguous designs. Some look like snakes and some swords and some horror-movie-Frankenstein stitches, painted on over the real ones.
After a while, his ribs start to ache again, shoved around by the swaying of the traincar. He’s too tired to even take another pill, so he stands there and bares the ache of it until it fades, background noise, to numbness.
After the 28, Jason has a day off for rest and recovery. The rest of Wednesday passes in brief fits of consciousness, startling awake from sleep and strange dreams, heating bread and soup under butter-yellow kitchen lights, a womb in the dark around him. Eventually, he can’t make himself sleep any longer. He tugs on sweats and promises himself, distantly, that he’ll go out for groceries in the morning.
He’s sprawled across the couch in the small hours of the night, the TV lit up with scenes of ocean creatures and calming voices, when the idea hits him. He sits up and grabs for his phone. For a long second all he does is stare at it, press a hand to the soreness of his chest. He hits call and raises the phone to his ear.
“Paulie,” he says when the call connects. “It’s me.”
“Red,” says the voice on the other line, and Jason can almost hear his lips drawing back, see his teeth lit up, the dark sheen of saliva. “Have we got something special for you...”
Thursday, Jason wakes to a 7:30 alarm and does a hundred pushups before breakfast. Thursday is fight night, and Jason isn’t going to miss it.
The first memory Jason has is waking up on the operating table, his dose of anesthesia half what it should have been, and looking down his body at his cracked open chest. What comes after is a mess of hospital rooms and surgical masks and coming to in the dark, alone. He’s lucky to be alive, they tell him; he can’t remember his last name. Next came physical therapy, discharge, a temporary Wayne Fund subsidized apartment. His GED, his undergrad, and med school. A life.
Still, Jason has never managed to shake the memory of where he started: bright lights, the warm insides of his own body, and the iron-cauterized scent of blood. Jason believes in Heaven and Hell. Yeah, Jason believes in punishment, and the afterlife.
Thursday fight nights show him flashes of that operating theater: A dark room hemmed with darker shapes, the movement of bodies, and the main ring lit up luminant like the center of a universe. Jason is never more real than he is in its lights, blood pounding in his ears and his knuckles and pouring down the side of his face.
Last fight, Jason won two and a half thousand and two cracked ribs. It barely covered the interest on his student loans. Tonight, though, the pot is bigger, and Jason isn’t fighting for himself.
“Red,” a voice calls from behind him, because that is who he is here: Red for the color of his sweats and mouthguard. The room around him comes back into focus. Cinderblock walls, graffiti tags. Jason shadowboxes, imagining a shape in the empty air, an explosion in his ears, some kind of laughter. He shakes his fists out and only then he turns to the entrance.
“They ready for me?” He asks, hopping twice, rolling his head on his shoulders.
“Five on the clock,” the official says, and grins, leaning in. “Knock ‘em dead.”
He’s mostly kidding.
Through the walls Jason can already hear the crowd. This deep in Crime Alley, a building this big, they can be as loud as they want. It melds together into a thrum. Jason jolts himself a few times and opens his eyes, beating a taped hand to the side of his head. Everything in the world is the half-circle of his vision, the ring in his ears, and the pounding of watchers and betters, big money bosses and the rats of Gotham’s underground.
Most of these people, Jason learned early on, aren’t like him. They don’t fight for a living, aren't stealing for their families, aren’t killing for protection. Most of these people are the kind that cheat and lie and kill because it’s good for them, and because they can, and because they like it. Whoever Jason’s fighting in that ring, he knows he’s really only up against himself.
This fight, he’s the first one called out, and that’s how he knows he’s not the main attraction. A man with no name and no past and strange scars across his arms and his chest, Jason is rarely ever that strangest thing in the ring. Someone’s playing music, his walk-out song, but he can never really hear it. He gets out onto the red padding, shaking out his arms, pacing his corner and testing against the ropes. There's a cut man on the other side and a ref in black-white stripes.
The lights dim on the other side of the club. It casts the whole left half of the ring, up to the ends of Jason’s feet, in dark, murky shadow.
Sometimes Jason fights guys like himself. They’re usually as scarred as him, sometimes twice as built as him. He wins a lot of fights with two black eyes. He has a lot of wins that don’t feel like a victory. Sometimes, though, they have him fight other things. Things for which Jason has no name. Humanoid enough — enough to go down with a hard enough hook — but not fully human: something wrong around the eyes, something not right in the head.
Blue skin. Black needle teeth. Gills on their chests, spikes on the knuckles. Jason knows that half the things he was told were fairy tales are really as true as the dead. There are aliens and metas and atlanteans, and he’s fought some of them, too.
Still, Jason has seen a lot of things he can’t explain.
There’s a growl from the creature on the other side of the ring and the crowd goes silent. The cut man taps Jason’s shoulder just as he starts towards the center. In his hands: a pair of spike-brass knuckles, polished to shine. Jason grimaces and slips them on. It’s one of those fights.
All at once the lights roll back, and the thing they reveal isn’t human.
Tall, is the first thing he thinks. Seven, eight-foot, just out of his range standing straight. Hunched, is the next, spine curved almost painfully, head low and tucked against its chest. On its back, Jason can see two rot-black stumps, remains of what might have been wings, hacked off at the root the way they do to dogs with twisted tails or birds expected to live in cages. Its limbs are long and muscled, and where claws would probably be are nails trimmed and rounded nice and neat. It has no eyes, just flat, glassy pockmarks, and Jason can’t tell from where he’s standing if it’s supposed to.
Not human, Jason thinks. He steps forward with his weight behind it and throws a fist into its jaw. But alive enough to bruise.
Some of the guys Jason fights have practiced forms and elegant lines. They don’t fight so much as dance, and it’s showy and beautiful. Jason doesn’t know how to dance: he only knows how to hurt. The creature’s head snaps to the side and it swings wildly, blindly. Jason ducks and slides out of the way, around to the side and out of reach from its fists. There’s blood on the brass and in his eyes.
As he skirts around to the edge of the ring, spotlights from the rafters flash beams of light and shadow. The monster turns to face him and Jason goes to duck away when someone in the crowd reaches into the ring and grabs him by the ankle. Jason draws short and gets backhanded into the ropes. After that, the arms are everywhere, reaching through the ropes, grabbing for him or the monster — whoever’s loss would make them the most. The crowd is shouting, jeering, spilling drinks onto the mats. A good fight isn’t always a fair one. The ref looks on impassive from his corner.
Jason twists from the grip and moves to the middle of the ring; the monster follows the sound of his steps. It swings and connects, a sharp, hard pressure on his still-sore ribs. Jason moves with the momentum, coming around its side and throwing another hook right into the slits where it’s nose should be, splattering him to his elbow in spots of black-dry blood. The crowd roars in the darkness and the anonymous hands retreat, flinching from the gore.
Jason and the monster pull apart and circle the middle, padded steps against the vinyl. Steam wafts from the creature's mouth and up into the smoky room. When he goes to move in, the beast does, too.
Jason’s never been a lucky kind of guy; he doesn’t win most of his fights by knockout. They trade blows: Jason takes a hit to his left eye that swells and splits the skin of his brow, another that probably recracks his ribs. The monster is strong, but its body is still flesh and bone — all along its torso are bloody gashes, four in line from the metal on Jason’s knuckles.
By the end of the first round, the floor is slick with sweat and red. Jason retreats to his corner. The cut man ices his face and staples his skin, slathers on vaseline help the blood coagulate. The monster’s handlers pull it back with twisted wire loops, spur it on with stabs from a cattle prod to its sides. It screams. The sound curdles the blood in Jason’s veins.
They lock eyes across the ring, as much as the monster has any. The world fades into the twitch of its nostrils, the slack, desperate droop of its mouth. Raw and otherworldly, in all its panting, hulking animality, Jason thinks it's more human than anyone else in the room.
He doesn’t really want to hurt it, but Jason isn’t really fighting it. Jason’s only ever up against himself, and here, he’s not really Jason. They call him Red for the color of his sweats and his mouthguard, but really, he has no name at all.
The bell rings, and the cut man slaps him on the shoulder, and the hands of the crowd push and pull at his clothes, his skin, and the man who isn’t a monster socks him in the gut. Jason reels back, steadies himself, starts forward again.
For every hit the monster lands, Jason gets in three. He’s fast and smaller: he gets into its reach and ties its arms up, useless and slow in close quarters. He jabs at the singed skin left by the prods.
Shoved into the corner, the monster fights for freedom from the reaching arms, fights for shelter from the crack of Jason’s fists. Jason finds a spot and keeps hammering, skin broken open, taking kidney hits for his efforts, skipping back to recover.
When it advances on him, reeling from pain and disorientation, it only takes one more hit to get its back on the ground. There’s a ten count, but for all the shocks they give it, the monster isn’t getting back up.
Jason looks into the sockets where the creature's eyes should be and sees a mirror glaze version of himself looking back. On the ground, Jason registers for the first time the size of its ears, the specific shape of its mouth and snout.
It’s a bat. A man. The fight ends in Gotham and the Earth circles its star.
And sure, Jason fights for the money, but he can’t deny he loves the feel of adrenaline in his veins. The crowd is loud enough to split open his skull. Red bleeds through the tape on his hands and for a second, everything falls away again. The other guy is down and Jason is still standing. He hears the click of a film camera and turns to smile down the lens, raw and victorious, with blood seeping in between the creases of his teeth.
“You promised me five tonight.” Jason slams the money into the table. He’s rinsed off since the fight, but there is still red beneath his fingernails. “That was a fucking mutant-man. We’re not doing this hardball shit.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Paulie says, raising his palms out in supplication. His eyes, red and shadowed, dart a glance towards the shadows of the VIP section, the men in suits, golden rings, coats out of a 60s noir. “Boss is bearing down this week, took a bigger cut than usual. Means there’s less money tricklin’ down to the rest of us.”
“Us?” Jason asks. “That was my fight. That’s my money.”
“And if you wanna keep your life, you better keep your fuckin’ voice down. What’re you, green?” Paulie demands. He leans closer, rubbing two fingers together, and pitches his voice low. “This work is a machine: it demands to be fed. I’m not trying to fuck you over, okay, Moneymaker?”
Jason scowls, fingers curling into fists around the cash. Paulie presses his lips together, casts another glance to the shadows, and takes a breath. “Listen, it’s nothing personal. I’ll tell you what, next week, you put in a fight like that, and maybe a little more falls into your pocket. Think of it like an IOU.”
Jason grits his teeth. “I don’t have until next week. I need this money now.” Jason thinks he’s just angry, but something desperate in his voice must leak through. The look on Paulie’s face turns pained.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “Really. Look, I know you got a day job, but if quick cash is what you need,” he side-eyes the VIPs again—bosses, ringleaders, rich fucks with a thing for bloodsport. “I can get you connected. You didn’t hear this shit from me, but there’s a hit soon, a big one—think Saturday night on the docks. It’s on the low because of the price tag and quiet because it’s almost suicide. But it’ll get you the money. That’s all I can do for you pal.”
“I don’t need to get killed, Paul, I need to get paid,” Jason says. He tilts his head back and lets out a heavy breath. He wants to argue more, but he knows it’s useless.
“That’s all I can do for you,” Paulie says again. “Take the money, get something to eat. You earned it.” He slaps a hand on Jason’s shoulder, still tacky from the shower and sore from the fight, and turns to disappear into the crowd. Jason lets him and for a long minute, stands in the crowd, streams of people passing by him, trickling in or out for bets on the next guys in the ring.
At the door, Jason hazards a glance toward the bosses, and he almost stops short. There’s a man there he’s only ever heard of in whispers. White hands and bespoke suit and above those, shrink wrapped skin across a char-black skull: the man that runs Gotham’s underground. He’s laughing at something an aide tells him and reaching for his hip, the dull shine of an oil-polished pistol.
Big money, Jason thinks, connecting the dots. Almost suicide.
He’s outside, walking quickly through the alleyways in the direction of home, before Black Mask can turn to the crowd again.
Jason has a lot of good things in his life. He has his job and his apartment and people he cares enough about to lie to. He has a second shot at life with nothing to tie him down. From the perfect angle with the perfect squint, Jason is whole and lucky and complete. He doesn’t know anything about the man he was before. It’s possible he never even used to smoke.
“Missed a spot, Jay,” one of the other interns says when Jason walks into the on-call lockers the next day.
Jason touches the skin beneath his eyes like he’ll be able to tell by touch where the bruising shines through the concealer. “Fuck,” he says. “I really thought I had it this time.”
Lina, first-year intern just like Jason, casts her eyes up like a prayer to God and pulls out a concealer stick of her own. Jason shuffles over reluctantly and takes a seat on one of the benches in front of her.
“They did a number on you,” she says, placing a finger on his split eyebrow to pull the skin taut. “What’s your story this time?”
“Mugged in my own driveway, Lina,” Jason rattles out. “It’s Gotham, you know.”
Lina gives him a flat look and doesn’t respond. She smears product across his cheekbones, pressing against the swelling. Jason barely flinches at the pain from the pressure.
“It’s your blending,” she tells him. “It’s always shoddy. Too thick in some places and transparent in others.” She dabs two fingers gently along the lines of pigment. When she steps back to consider her work, Jason turns to the wall mirror to get a look himself: he looks like he’s been crying, but from far off, no one would even know.
“I owe you one,” Jason says, like he always does.
“Buy me a coffee?” She asks. “I’m on hour eleven.”
“I got you,” he says, turning to his locker to change into his scrubs.
“Rested from your day off, Doctor?” Johnson asks when Jason jogs up to him minutes later, his own cup of coffee burning his hands through the cardboard sleeve. Johnson finishes the note he’s writing with an incomprehensible signature.
“More or less,” Jason replies, shrugging. Johnson turns to look at him and squints his eyes. Under scrutiny, the illusion of the makeup fails, but Johnson has learned to not look very hard.
“Let's hope for more,” he says instead of pressing, and straightens the fall of his coat. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us. Four stabbings in the last forty-five minutes. Let’s get going.”
Jason nods and follows, trailing only slightly behind.
For the first half of his shift, Jason is running everywhere. There are three codes in the first hour and an all-hands-on-deck in the wake of a gang shootout over a territory dispute. By the time it slows down enough to start on rounds, Jason’s feet are aching, his head pounding drum-like in his skull, and he regrets forgoing tape on his ribs again. He feels hounded, too, like he can feel two-thousand-dollars short burning a hole in the pocket of his scrubs.
Room 217 arrives quicker than Jason thinks it ought to, before he can even catch his breath. He’s trailing behind Johnson, sore and reluctant, and he misses half of what the charge nurse tells them.
“--incident last night.” Jason manages to catch the end of the sentence as he focuses in. The nurse's face is drawn and solemn. She keeps her voice low. “He hasn’t spoken since.”
“An incident?” Jason asks, stepping in line with Johnson, eyebrows creased. She pulls in her lips and nods.
Incident is code for what Jason calls fear toxin flashback. It comes on in fits, something like a seizure and a little like a heart attack. Elevated blood pressure, increased respiration, something about it triggers the residual toxin in the patient's bloodstream. Jason had thought they’d been getting less frequent and less intense with time, but the look on the nurses face says different. Niko isn’t getting better. Nothing they’ve done has helped. The trial starts in six days, and Jason only has half the money.
“How you holding up, Niko?” Jason asks, leaning into the doorway, but Niko doesn’t even look his way.
Jason takes his vitals, scribbling numbers onto his clipboard. He checks the IV line, takes blood pressure, ties a tourniquet and draws blood from Niko’s arm without any kind of reaction. Niko just sits there, offers out his arm when he’s asked, and stares forward into the far wall. Jason kneels down to eye level; Niko doesn’t seem like he sees him at all.
The TV is on, as always, with the news. It’s muted but seems loud in the still, silent room. The headlines scroll across the bottom: theft is up, so is homicide. Earlier that night, the GCPD raided a meth lab in Crime Alley, the address only four blocks away from Jason’s apartment.
“Looks like they got another one,” Anita, the charge nurse from before, says, poking her head into the room and motioning to the TV.
“They did,” Jason says, distracted by the details of the report. There’s a picture from the raid, and they enhance it, zooming into the rooftops, silhouettes in the upper right corner. In the foreground, two officers batter down the front door, and behind them, across the gap between buildings, a figure leaps, cape trailing behind. It gives Jason an idea. He doesn’t know if he likes it.
The anchor keeps speaking, mouth shaping silent words. Jason turns away, back towards the bed and his patient.
Against the pillows, Niko’s face is withdrawn. He’s mostly bone, folded neatly into pale grey sheets. Jason’s head throbs to the rhythm of the heart monitor. He needs something, and he sees a way to get it.
Jason scratches his chin: there’s a scar there that he thinks he must have gotten before, during a childhood he doesn’t remember. It’s a small, faded-pale mark, and time has blurred its edges enough he can’t even guess at the shape of the wound.
At the end of his shift, a full day later, Jason stands again just outside the ambulance bay. Night falls around him, light falls across his face, and Jason is a stranger to everyone, and to himself.
There’s a lot of wind, this high up. Jason grips the ledge of the rooftop and pulls himself up from the fire escape, muscles straining from use, body shoved this way and that by gusts of wind. He steadies himself further away from the edge, pulls his leather jacket tighter over where he’s still in his scrubs. He thinks this building used to be an office, once, before the depression when half of all Gotham businesses went under. It could have been years before it was turned into apartments. Jason knows nothing about them except that they’re dirt-cheap, courtesy of the noise pollution from the police precinct on the adjoining wall.
Jason’s face lights up in red and blue as a cruiser below speeds away. His makeup wore off hours ago, and he amuses himself thinking about the colors: red and blue dancing over purple-swelling skin. He flexes his knuckles, still taped, and spits. Jason doesn’t know who he was before, but in this life, he’s Gotham born and bred: he doesn’t particularly like the cops that patrol the dark city.
That doesn’t matter. Jason leans over the ledge and sees the precinct roof a story lower, and there, tucked away in the corner, a floodlight covered with a silhouette bat. Save from staging a crime, this is Jason’s surest bet to get their attention. This is his only chance. He rubs his palms together, breathes into them, rubs them again. Then he backpedals to the opposite end of the roof, gets a running start, and leaps.
He drops, almost twists an ankle, rolls head over hands to dissipate the force of the landing.
“Fuck,” he says, and shakes out the wrist he landed on wrong. “Fuck.” His ribs are aching, the wind is bitterly cold. Jason makes his way across the gravel of the precinct roof, hunching a little to avoid being seen. He gets to the flood light and searches the base for the switch. Then, he turns it on.
Like most people from the Bowery, Jason doesn’t quite know what to think about the Bats. They’ve done some good things, no doubt, but nowadays, it seems like most the good they do is just undoing the bad they’ve done. Most of the monsters they put away are the ones they helped create. Jason wonders sometimes if the Batman really is one of them, a man who walks their same streets, works their same jobs. He knows Gotham the way only a native can, but Jason isn't sure he’s ever understood her.
Signal bright in the sky, there's nothing to do but wait. Jason crouches close to the ground. A minute passes, and then two, then a long stretch of time. He gives into the impulse and pats around his pockets, searching.
By the time he hears the sound of footsteps landing on the roof behind him, Jason’s freezing cold, crouched there, fingers shaking around a cigarette he’s trying not to smoke.
“I’m not going to lie,” Jason says, throwing the unlit cigarette to the floor and standing. “I was hoping for the big guy.”
The figure is still in the shadows of the edge of the rooftop. In a faux deep voice, he says, “How do you know I’m not?”
Jason turns. On the second day after the fight, the bruises around his eyes are even more swollen than the first. A light from below strobes across his face and from the roof ledge, Nightwing raises his eyebrows in concern. Jason has never met a Bat before, but from what he can tell, the vigilante is in his usual getup — black with a blue stripe down the arms and across the chest. His face is obscured only by a domino-style mask, but it works to preserve his identity. It turns him into something almost inhuman. Jason is used to dealing with monsters, but he’s not entirely sure how to deal with this.
“Like I said,” Jason says, “he’s a big guy. You land different, much lighter than he would.” He motions to his face. “I'm used to detecting that sort of thing. I'm a boxer.”
“A boxer?” Nightwing says curiously. He steps down onto the gravel of the roof and shuffles forward to a stop. “And what’s a boxer doing breaking onto the roof of the GCPD and lighting the Bat Signal?”
“Everyone knows you people work with Gordon,” Jason says. “This was my best shot.”
Nightwing’s expression, almost amused before, clouds over, the white lenses of his eyes narrowing. “Best shot at what?” He asks, voice conversational and sharp at the edges, a veiled, mild threat.
“Help,” Jason says simply. “A deal.”
A small amount of tension leaves Nightwing’s shoulders; he seems to almost settle into them. His eyebrows lift again, worried, and he asks, “What’s going on?”
Jason rolls his shoulders a little. “I told you, I’m a boxer, but only on the side,” he says. “The gigs I get are not in the most savory of places, and they don’t have the most upstanding clientele. I have information about something big, and it’s happening tonight…” He trails off a bit, then stops.
Nightwing notices his hesitance. He steps closer and hunches himself slightly, going for casual. Jason sees the practiced nature of it, a way to make himself smaller, not so intimidating. A way to get anything out of anybody. “I’m listening,” he says, “Go on.”
“I need something first,” Jason says after a moment of debate. “This is dangerous for me. I don’t do this snitch shit for free.”
“If the info is good, it’s yours,” Nightwing says without hesitation.
“It’s not for me,” Jason says. “Listen, everyone knows you work with Gordon, right? Well, everyone also knows you get money from Wayne.”
Nightwing opens his mouth to protest, but it dies in his throat. He sets his jaw and asks, “How is that relevant?”
“I’m a boxer on the side, but my day job is as a doctor at Gotham General,” Jason says. He fishes around his breast pocket and flashes a glimpse of his ID badge, too quick for Nightwing to read. “It’s not a secret we’re underfunded and overstretched. I’m on Peds rotation for the first time. I’m not used to seeing young people suffer like this. There's this kid, and he’s only eleven. He’s been suffering from antidote-resistant fear toxin for months.”
Jason swallows and says what he’s been too afraid to vocalize, “There’s a trial for a new medication that his family can’t afford. He’s going to die without it.”
Nightwing is silent for a second. He tilts his head like he’s listening to another voice in his ear. When he speaks, it’s like he’s trying to be gentle. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I do,” he says. “But I need to know that I can trust you.”
“I’m five stories up on the roof of Gotham PD. You think I’d do this shit if I wasn’t desperate?” Jason says, but it’s not a great argument — this is Gotham, afterall. He lets out breath through his nose and says, “I would tell you my name to look me up, but this is dangerous shit. I doubled back three times on my way here so no one followed.” He lowers his voice and leans closer, intense. “This thing has to do with Mask.”
“Black Mask?” Nightwing asks, surprised and entirely too loud.
“Shut up,” Jason says sharply, and then lower, “Yes.”
“If you’ve gotten yourself into something,” Nightwing says, all boy-scout concern, “I can help you. I’ve got friends in high places.”
Jason looks at him, unimpressed. “Like Superman?”
“Metaphorically,” Nightwing says, and the edge of his face takes on half a smirk. There's something about the motion and the casual attitude that sets Jason's teeth on edge.
“This isn’t about me, I already said. I don’t need metaphors from you. I don’t need vague promises of help. I need money. This kid needs money. This family, and probably a thousand other families in Gotham, need money, ” Jason sighs. He drags a hand down his face and then points it towards Nightwing. “I knew this was a longshot going in, but this is my only shot, okay. Can you help me? This money, for information. Do we have a deal?”
Nightwing takes a second to consider. Across the roof, he holds himself loosely with a fighter's confidence. Jason has seen him fight, in dark, blurry videos on the news, but it’s hard to imagine the brutality of it coming from the man in front of him. From what Jason knows and what he’s seen, Nightwing has a boyish sort of charm to him, dangerous without really looking like it. There's a mask of affability covering bruised fists, and a smile that says you can trust him.
Nightwing puts a hand to his ear again and tilts his head ever so slightly. He taps frustratedly at the center of his domino mask like the way Jason would a stalled computer. To someone on the other line or maybe thin air, he sighs and says, “Face scan is down. I don’t need to know. I trust him.”
Nightwing takes his hand away from his ear. In the distance, a siren screams, and in the sky, the Signal glows yellow-gold. He says, “Yes. We have a deal.”
On bad days, Jason thinks Gotham is evil. That same night, after his shift and the rooftop conversation, Jason lays in bed unsleeping, blackouts drawn, pale slivers of light leaking in and streaking his face in the dark.
He’s not thinking about tomorrow. He’s trying not to think about tomorrow. He’s trying not to worry about money or Niko or whether Nightwing will come through, whether he’ll come through in time. He’s doubly trying not to think about what might happen to himself, if what he’s just done ever comes to light.
It will be worth it, he repeats to himself. After enough times, he even starts to believe it.
In the morning, Jason will clock in for his shift and the world will keep turning. As he lays there, he can only hope, the Bats are crawling the docks. His eyes drift closed, and his mind drifts, too, back to the rooftop and the vigilante.
Sirens. A floodlight. Nightwing turns to go. He gets as far as the north face of the building, one foot on the roof ledge, before he pauses. He turns back slowly and opens his mouth, closes it, opens again, choking on words he can’t get out.
"What?” Jason asks. He’s toeing the edge of the fire escape, testing its stability, and looks over his shoulder to see the Bat still there on the roof. “I gave you everything I had. Aren't we done here?"
"Yeah,” Nightwing says, blinking behind the mask. “Yeah, we are."
He doesn’t move. He tilts his head in that unsettling way and just stands there. Jason's skin crawls. The wind cuts through his jacket and Jason finds himself stripped to the muscle on his bones.
“We’re done here,” Jason says irritably and turns to face Nightwing, who hasn’t moved, who’s standing there frozen and confused, like he’s seen a ghost.
"Right. I’m sorry,” Nightwing manages after a long pause, sounding earnest and too sincere for what the situation calls. Jason goes to say something, to tell him to hurry and get to the docks, but before he can open his mouth, Nightwing is speaking again.
“You just remind me of someone I used to know.”
Then he’s gone. Jason smells the harbor in salt on the wind and the rain starts up again, a drizzle, leaking from the grey-black ceiling of clouds above his head, dripping between his lashes and into his eyes.