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.