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Jason curls his finger around the trigger of his Jericho 941 and kicks open the front door to the single-storey, where the head honcho of the traffickers, Rowan Sanders, awaits a confirmation of an exchange that never happened. Jason had disposed of the drivers and made an encrypted call to Jim Gordon to personally attend to the kids.
Three years, and the shield Batman and his brood provide to Gotham is still made of balsa wood. Jason has to be the one to lug the graphene.
He barges into the sitting area to the right of the foyer and jerks the gun away so fast he almost pulls the trigger. “What the hell?”
Green light shatters over Sanders from a Tiffany lamp. He squirms, hog tied and gagged, on the wooden floor. A child with a periwinkle scarf wrapped around his head, covering everything but the eyes, is securing the knot. “You’re not one of them,” the child tells Jason, but their hand twitches towards the dive knife by their grimed double-knotted sneaker.
All ideas of scouting the house for other members of the trafficking ring pinball into nothingness. Jason keeps the gun pointed away from the child and clicks on the safety. He had plans for Rowan Sanders’ position on the census, but doesn’t want to splatter his brains on the wall in front of some ten-year-old. “This guy is dangerous, kid. Get out of here and I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”
Why had this child been alone with Rowan Sanders? Are they a victim? All the other children had been Gotham locals, but this one’s accent zigzags across the East Coast and takes a detour around France.
Whatever Rowan tries to yell is muffled beneath his cloth gag. A bruise is blooming on his jaw. Jason trains his gun on him. “You know, you’re really not in a position to bargain.”
The child fixes their eyes on Jason’s gun. “Are you going to kill him if I go?”
Jason blinks away the balsa-wood shield from the backs of his eyelids.
“If you are, I’m afraid I can’t leave.” They sound like they are asking Jason if he can please hop off the playground swing because it’s their turn now.
“I won’t kill him.” Jason holsters the gun at his thigh to seem sincere. “What’s your name?”
“Freddy.”
Handed over like a pebble from the wayside. Probably an alias. Jason is not going to pry. “Okay, Freddy, I’ll call the police. Go outside and I’ll help you find your family.”
“Don’t have one.”
Jason does not lower his head, does not say sorry. It is the last thing Freddy would want. It is the last thing Jason had wanted.
“Call the GCPD in front of me,” Freddy says. He’s using the airtight tone of someone who believes nothing can go wrong.
Something rips inside Jason, like a scab being pulled apart. Freddy is gifted – has to be to pull off this stunt with Rowan without even seriously hurting him – but the worst candidate for a hero. He thinks of sand nipping his heels, cigarette smoke mingling with blood in his throat, a rattling padlock.
He digs his boot into the flesh above Sanders’ knee. “Why do you want him alive this badly?”
Freddy twists the front of his sweatshirt in his hands. Jason squints; the sweatshirt looks new, if streaked with dirt, but the logo printed on the breast belongs to a brand that went defunct a decade ago. “I don’t know,” Freddy warbles. “He makes the world worse. He deserves to die. But I…I still don't want him to – ” His eyes fly wide. “Look out!”
Jason is already rolling out of the way and yanking out his Jericho as bullets tear through the room. Freddy’s yelp is almost lost in the gunfire. Before Jason finishes springing to his feet, the firing dies.
A Glock has been dropped by an accent table. The hilt of Freddy’s knife sticks out from the shoulder of a man hunched over in the doorway, missing his subclavian artery.
Jason gets the feeling it wasn’t an accident. Too bad he can’t indulge Freddy any longer – the man might have another gun.
He shoots the stranger in the center of the forehead and dives to disassemble the Glock. With his finger on the trigger of his own gun in case more backup charges in, Jason glances behind him. Rowan, pink-faced, kicking and grunting. Freddy, curled on the floor beneath the shuttered window, pressing a reddened hand into his upper arm.
Jason folds his anger away for later. He switches on his gun's safety, hurries to Freddy, and drops to his knees. “Hey, hey, let me see that.” He pries Freddy’s hand away to reveal a graze, bleeding profusely.
They are on the fringes of Gotham. Jason does not want to risk swinging Freddy around with a grapnel, but the nearest clinic is a forty-five minute motorcycle ride in Wednesday afternoon traffic. His nearest safehouse is ten minutes away. He does not want to bring anyone to his safehouse, but Freddy needs first aid and Jason is going to give him that, even if he will have to strip and abandon the safehouse later. “You’re gonna be okay.”
“You.” Freddy pants. “You killed him.”
In Jason’s head, Bruce says, You shattered his collarbone. Jason keeps his posture loose so he doesn’t frighten Freddy. He whips out a patch of the field dressing Talia had gifted him from his inner jacket pocket and presses it to Freddy’s wound to staunch the bleeding.
Freddy whines and scrabbles at Jason’s forearms, but does not pull away. He is far too well trained for his age; if he is about ten, he must have been groomed since at most the age of five.
Jason would love to carve the eyes out of Freddy’s masters with his kris. He’s held out on the League for pumping out child soldiers out of respect for Talia, but he’s not made any promises to her. It’s not like she keeps him around so they can gas about celebrity breakups over ma'amoul and tea. “Just breathe, kid. I’ll fix you up.”
“You don’t gotta worry,” Freddy grits out. His eyes – hickory-brown, hazy – crinkle through the sweat; he’s smiling. Jason stops himself from rearing back. “Been shot before.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me? Something’s wrong with you. Come on, up you – woah!” Jason teeters as Freddy goes limp in his arms; he’s heavier than he looks.
Rowan rambles something through his gag. The full-grain calfskin belt obscured by his sagging belly is worth more than most people’s rent in Burnley.
Jason raises his gun and strokes his index finger along the trigger guard. “Looks like you won’t be spending the rest of your life in a stinking jail cell, Sanders.”
He had planned to torch this place to destroy any evidence linking him to the scene, but the clock’s ticking for Freddy. Jason will have to ping Talia for assistance and deal with her men bitching at him even more; they already give him the stink eye for his preferential treatment.
Whatever. He’ll be off their radar as soon as the money from Gotham’s illegal drug trade starts lining his pockets.
***
Freddy stirs and coughs as Jason snips off the thread to his sutures – clean and tight, the way Alfred taught him on a sweltering afternoon the moment he came back from school, Jason’s new shorts still debossing bars into his hips.
Jason gives Freddy the tall glass of water he’d kept handy and turns away till the boy finishes drinking and thumps the glass on the table.
Freddy feels along the cloth around his head. His fingernails are trimmed, but blue-green with dirt. “You didn’t remove my scarf?”
Jason snaps shut the first-aid kit. “Figured you wouldn’t appreciate it.” And there wouldn’t be much Jason could tell from Freddy’s face alone.
Freddy hauls himself into a straighter sitting position. “That’s weirdly polite of you.”
“Why is it weird?”
“‘Cause you’re a murderer.” He speaks without rancour. Might be he’s wiped from the pain and blood loss. Might be he’s parroting some doctrine he doesn’t believe in.
“You can only murder people. I put down a mad dog.”
Freddy rotates his ankles, one by one. “You’re not like the other murderers I’ve met.”
“Other mur – you know what, my surprise has reached its quota for the week. Forget it. You got anywhere to go?” If Freddy has a pad, Jason can forego the anonymous request to Leslie to find Freddy a stable group home or foster him herself; he himself had taken his chances with Crime Alley over state custody.
“I can take care of myself.”
Homeless, then. Jason prays to a god he isn’t sure exists, fishes his burner phone from his trouser pocket, and calls one of Talia’s operatives to bring a car and cart Freddy to Leslie’s clinic. For once, he wishes he could call in a favour as Jason Todd. He texts the instructions for the request; he does not want to send Freddy into a panic, but he also does not want to waste time arguing with him. The driver can fill him in after Leslie treats him properly.
When he’s done, he tells Freddy, “Your ride will be here in twenty minutes.”
“How come you won’t drive me yourself? You already patched me up and compromised your location for me.”
“Miss me already?”
“Puh-lease.”
“Can’t grace the public too often with my sparkling personality. They might think it comes cheap.” He decides to give in to his curiosity. “I hate to bring it up, but how did you catch Sanders?” If Jason had missed a cog in the machine, he wants to know.
Freddy shrugs. “He found me sitting alone on a bench and asked where my parents were and why I wasn’t playing with my friends. Gave me a card for some kids’ modeling gig and a bunch of Hershey’s Kisses. Obviously I tossed ‘em in a trash can.”
Jason recalls the pleasant moment earlier in the day, when he shoved the barrel of his Jericho into Rowan Sanders’ mouth. If only he could have blown up the single-storey himself.
“I waited for him to leave and tailed him. I didn’t get a better picture till he took a phone call and started talking about – ” Freddy looks like he is about to spit. “I couldn’t let him keep playing his gross games.”
“You did good, kid,” Jason says. “I saved your knife for you, by the way. You’re welcome.” He gestures to where it rests on the table.
“It’s not mine, I stole it from that Rowan guy’s drawer. What happened to him?”
“He’s back in the house.” Pushing daisies through a pile of burning debris, if Talia’s operatives have done their job. Jason will go back later and check. “The police should be on their way there.”
Freddy’s gaze is a disquieting weight. Jason had felt out fear's slick form at an age when he could still not balance on one foot, had skated along it to avoid heavy fists and wandering hands. But this unsettlement is different, and it feels like fog, like condensation on bare skin. “You’re lying," says Freddy. "Or you’re not telling the whole truth.”
“Believe what you want. You’re still here, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you afraid that I could report you to the GCPD?”
“What are you gonna say? Scary man in red helmet shot sex offender? You’ll just make my job easier.” Jason’s alias will be whispered around Gotham soon enough; if he becomes a bogeyman to scum beforehand, he can leverage that to his advantage.
Freddy stares down at the dive knife glinting by the first-aid kit. He jerks open the knot in his scarf and starts to uncoil it.
Jason does not pretend to occupy himself. Friendly faces are in short supply in his life – it will be nice to see who saved his ass today.
The scarf slithers to the couch. Black curls, gleaming with grease. Soft-angled eyebrows. Jason blinks, but the face does not change. That face had peered out of photographs scattered around Wayne Manor. In the earliest one, it frowned, a scrape smeared above an eyebrow. In the latest, it beamed beneath a high school graduation cap. Jason, on an excursion soon after he moved in, stumbled across a drawer full of in-between shots in one of the storage rooms, and thought: Maybe Bruce will take photos of me, too, once we get used to each other.
Jason almost says, “Dick?” and stops himself. There are many possibilities: Dimension travel, time travel, cloning, de-aging. Something else Jason is blanking out on. It is possible the boy is a perfect stranger; but the skills, the stubbornness, the somewhat alarming quality to him – those are all Dick Grayson.
Dick has no idea who Jason or the Red Hood is. Should he admit he knows who Dick is, or play at being clueless?
No, there is no point in pretending. If Dick were older, Jason would have kicked him to the street, but he’s a kid and Jason will have to find a way to get him somewhere safe that isn’t a civilian home. The best place would be Wayne Manor. Alfred will treat the wound, and Bruce has ties to the Justice League and has worked with Zatanna before – they should be able to find a way to fix Dick’s predicament.
Bruce will know of the existence of a man in a red helmet, and will want to hound Jason in between chasing his beloved gallery of lunatics all over Gotham.
Let Bruce try.
Dick fans his face with his hand. “Not to sound ungrateful for what you’ve already done for me, but do you have any food? I haven’t eaten in like, almost a day.”
“You gonna accept food from a big bad murderer?” Now that Jason knows he’s talking to Dick Grayson, something hot and black bubbles in his chest. Dick, the good son. Good, ha. All that brilliance, wasted – Dick would have minced up to Felipe Garzonas and wibbled, “Pretty please, don’t rape again.”
Dick scratches the back of his neck. “Would me not accepting your food change your ways or something?”
Jason wants to loom over Dick and watch him squirm. Wants to shake him like a rabbit and shout, Get over yourself and, You’ll get yourself killed, mouthing off to dangerous men like that. He breathes: four counts in, four counts out. He will never be a man who shouts at children.
He marches to the kitchenette, yanks out two chocolate peanut butter energy bars from a cabinet, and tosses them into Dick’s lap. Dick thanks him and tears a wrapper with his teeth. His legs would not reach the ground if he unfolded them from the couch. Jason wants to burn his urge to roll him in a thermal blanket.
When Jason was thirteen, Dick’s presence filled the whole of Wayne Manor, the Cave up to the base of the stalactites, even the pantry, where Alfred stocked Dick’s favourite salted molasses candies in a cabinet with an Oxford-blue bow drooped around a handle. (He had wondered who had tied the bow, but not asked.) It followed, to Jason, that Dick was a large man, even if he was not as tall as Bruce.
But then Jason came back from the dead and watched footage of Nightwing chatting with a group of civilians outside a Blüdhaven casino and he was smaller than some of the women, five-foot-eight with his boots on. And it struck him that he had never seen Bruce and Dick stand close enough to each other to realise the difference in height.
The tubelights lance Jason’s eyes. He needs to say something, even if it lands wrong, just so he can claw out of whichever hell this is. “You got involved in some magical hoo-ha, didn’t you?”
Dick freezes, his mouth full of energy bar. He swallows and crushes the now-empty packet in his chocolate-smudged hands. Jason’s forearms itch, where Dick had clutched them before. “Mister, I think your brains have been scrambled from the sound of all those gunshots.”
“You can think about all my crazy from Bruce Wayne’s manor, where I’m sending you.”
Dick starts to hunch before checking himself. “I don’t even know where that is. Why would you say that?”
“I recognise you from old tabloids. You’re Richard Grayson.” The papers and magazines had never called him Dick. They still refuse. Bruce had swung down his lawyers to at least stop the media tacking “the circus orphan” before Dick’s name, and might have done something similar for Jason, but Jason is not certain.
“That’s a load of baloney, my name’s Freddy Loyd, I ain’t never met someone so important as – ”
“Cut the bullshit.” Jason put his ass on the line for a Bat. For Dick fucking Grayson. He might as well have thrown in a belated welcome party for the new Robin with home-baked rainbow cupcakes and a handwritten note in purple glitter gel.
Dick puts down the packet. His eyes dart from the locked front door to the shuttered window with the closed curtains. “Hypothetically, how far’s the drop?”
“Far enough to end the Grayson bloodline, boy.” He just manages to stop himself from saying “blunder”. Revealing he knows Dick Grayson is Robin would say too much about himself.
Dick lowers himself onto his back with a groan. “Most people don’t look that closely at charity cases. And there’s no reason for you to remember that far back unless you had some connection to me or Bruce. Who are you?”
“A guy who really likes gossip magazines.”
“I think I touched a cursed artefact and ended up in the future or something. What makes you think Bruce Wayne will be able to send me back?”
“Nothing, he’s a goddamn fool. But he is your father and you – ”
Dick bolts up. He winces and his hand flies to his arm. “He’s not my dad,” he grits out.
Jason holds his palms up. Does Dick mean he doesn’t want to consider Bruce his father because the death of his own is too fresh? “Your guardian. I promise you he is losing his mind searching for you.” Assuming that, say, an hour here does not equal a millisecond in this Dick's timeline, or something similar.
Dick scoffs. “He doesn’t want me, so why should I go back?”
Shooting Dick through the clavicle would be wrong. All the fuss Bruce makes about Dick Grayson, and it’s still not enough for him. What does Dick want, a circus to perform tricks in? “What makes you think he doesn’t want you?”
Dick and Bruce had hardly spoken to each other when Jason was Robin, but Bruce sometimes said things like, Dick nailed that manoeuvre on the first try and Dick learned how to isolate radio frequencies at the age of nine, and Dick solved the mystery of the hypnotised girls by himself. Those times, the Robin uniform would sit too loose on Jason despite its tailoring.
Dick’s knuckles are white. “He doesn’t, okay? If he wanted to find me, I’ve no doubt he would have.”
“Across space and time?”
Dick crosses his arms and scowls.
Jason thinks of the state of Dick’s hair and clothes. “Did you run away?” Children flee from foster parents for many reasons, but what could Dick have suffered with Bruce? Did Bruce not give Dick his evening hug? “You thankless little – ”
“You don’t know a single thing about me! Just open the door and I’ll walk out and you’ll never have to think about me again.”
Jason snorts. “I’d love to never think about you again, but letting you out is not on the table. Where would you stay, anyway? I’m willing to bet my Jericho you’ve never spent a night on the streets.”
“What do you care? You saw my face and decided you hated me, which, by the way, just convinces me more that you already know me.”
“Think of me as a good Samaritan. I’m sending you back home in a nice car. The driver will escort you to the door and not leave till someone takes you inside.” He whips out his phone again to tell his unlucky operative about the change in instructions.
The dive knife thuds into the wall, half an inch from Jason’s occupied hand. He turns around, slowly. If he weren’t boggling at Dick’s audacity, he might have admired it.
Dick’s bruised eyes are as steady as his outstretched arm. Sweat rings the collar of his sweatshirt. “I said: I’m not going back to Bruce.”
And for a second, Jason sees a half-starved boy rolling along a tyre and telling Batman, Social workers? Cut me a break! “What,” he finds himself saying, “happened?”
“I – ” Dick looks to the carpet as if he wants to claw at it. “It was my fault. I told him I was sorry. But I’m grateful to him, really, I am. He taught me how to be stro – ” He drops his face in his hand and grimaces like his sutures have been ripped open. He is so still and quiet he might have been calcified, and it takes a few seconds for Jason to realise he is crying.
Jason sweeps up the water glass and stumbles to the kitchenette to thunk it in the sink. This timeline’s Dick would have cried at some point. Must have cried even as a man, after he gave up Robin. He does not picture it. He goes back to sit down at the edge of the couch, leaving a few inches of space between himself and Dick, and refrains from putting a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “He’s a real bastard.”
Dick cradles his fist to his chest. “He’s not,” he croaks. “He’s not.”
His faith in Bruce is a bruise that will not fade. Dick is the kind of child soldier that contorts into a man more zealotry than bone.
Jason does not fidget. “But you don’t want to go back…?”
“There’s no room for me there.” He scrubs his face with his sweatshirt.
Jason hands him a tissue from a side table, and Dick blows his nose. Grey lurks beneath the brown of his skin like stagnant water.
Jason had lived in that house for two years. Once he left his books outside in the hammock and it started to pour, and Bruce made Jason stay indoors and raced to get the books himself; he skidded back in, dripping all over the 19th-century Turkish carpet, the books tucked beneath his cashmere sweater. When Jason fell sick one autumn and nestled in a couch by a fireplace, Bruce tossed Jason’s socks in the dryer and knelt to tug them over his feet, and the whisper of Bruce’s palm cupping his heel lingered for the length of the day. Jason told Bruce he didn’t like eating across from him at that huge dining room table, where Jason could barely hear Bruce’s cutlery clink, so after that they took their meals in the kitchen with the radio on.
Bruce must have done all that for Dick. He must have done more. He would have broken any code for him.
“It’s a big house,” Jason offers. Let Dick find comfort in his tone, or let him not.
His phone pings, and he checks the screen. Relief makes him sag. “Driver’s here. Time to pack up.”
Dick's gaze skitters over Jason's form, rests on the gun in his thigh holster. Jason's stomach lurches, but he does not shift to put the gun out of the boy's sight. Dick grinds a semi circle in the floor with his sneaker and bunches up his scarf. He has no other belongings to gather, not even a backpack to cling to. “I got something to ask before you make me go.”
Jason will answer questions about Dick’s future self or Bruce carefully. “Shoot.”
“When you talked about Sanders or whatever, and the guy you said was a mad dog…you got this tone, like it was personal. Something happened to you.” Dick rubs his arm and averts his eyes. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
I’ve been where you’re at and I’m a good listener, Dick had said that night on the roof. They sat cross-legged and a gust of wind blew oregano into Dick’s face as Jason tipped the packet over a congealing pizza and Dick choked, then laughed. His cheeks bulged and grease glistened on the front of his suit and the corner of his lips. Jason couldn’t look away – Dick seemed in that moment utterly alive, stitched to the world in a way Bruce and Jason were not.
As they tossed the empty cartons in a dumpster, elbows bumping, Jason looked up to Dick and said, “That was the best pizza I’ve ever had,” and Dick beamed like Jason had prepared him a sonnet. He got the restaurant name from Dick and asked Bruce to get more, and Bruce did, but the pizza never tasted as good.
Jason placed the sticky note with Dick’s number on his bedside table at Wayne Manor along with the Irish linen handkerchief Bruce bought him and the copy of The Hobbit that his mother gave him for his ninth birthday. He didn’t throw away the note even though he had memorised the number on sight.
On nights when Bruce’s silence came down like a gavel, Jason would stare at the beetle-black landline on his desk and think of cold pizza. He did not call Dick. He had to learn how to make his problems with Bruce his own.
“Why do you ask?” Jason says.
“It’s nice to talk it out sometimes. Air out the…” Dick waves a hand. “Everything.” There he is again, alive, stitched to the world, and yet Jason feels that if he reached out and tugged gently, the stitches would break apart.
Jason wants to fold him to his chest. Clutch him there for an hour. He makes himself feel the scratchiness of the things Bruce had swaddled him in – dry books and warm socks and knees knocking together beneath a table. “No, kid,” he says. “I’m not much of a talker.”
Dick smiles crookedly. “I know somebody else with that problem.”
Jason could say, I’d rather lose both arms than be compared to him or You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do. He says, “Word of advice: don’t go around trying to mop up the messes of adults. It never works.”
Dick shrugs. “It was worth a shot.”
And perhaps Dick is not trying to build a shield. Perhaps he is trying to weave a net.
It does not take much to cut a net.
Jason unlocks the door and waits for Dick to shuffle closer. “You’re handling being supposedly punted into the future remarkably well.”
Dick flashes a smile, all teeth and dimples. Tilt of the head perfectly angled. The fizz has whiffled out of his eyes. “I am a wonder.”
***
Jason seals the dive knife in cardboard and drops it in the bin. He picks up the water glass; the imprint of Dick’s mouth crescents the rim. There’s a flap of skin from where Dick’s lip had been flaking. Jason sponges the glass clean and the water seeps into his jacket sleeves, but he does not take it off.
***
Five months later, Blüdhaven is nuked.
The fire escape rattles beneath Jason’s boots.
Bruce is transfixed on the still-mushrooming cloud. He looks like, if you shone a light on him, you’d be able to see the building’s brickwork through him. “Dick?”
A thought winks by of a boy who smiled through a gunshot wound. Of Jason’s hand clamped around the boy’s middle as he pushed 90 mph on his bike to his safehouse.
Do you wanna talk about it? the boy had said.
Maybe Dick watched the bomb plummet, in the soundless seconds before the explosion, from a ledge with a spoonful of ice cream halfway to his mouth. Maybe he had just helped a lost little boy find his mother and assured him he was safe now.
The bones of Jason’s hand crack as he grips his gun. “If he’s there, Bruce, you’re too late. Again.”
Bruce lunges towards Blüdhaven, arms reaching out, like he can pull Dick out of the radioactive wreckage from here.
Jason does not think – he smashes down an explosive.
The sleek outline of Bruce’s body collapses into convexity. “Jason. Please. I – ”
Red corrodes the edges of the world. Bruce is willing to let the Joker die so he can – not even save Dick. Just find his corpse.
Jason brandishes the detonator. “I’ll blow up that whole building with that pile of evil, death-worshipping garbage inside it if you leave. This ends here. Tonight.”
Bruce drops his arms. His lips thin. Behind him, a green mist coils around Gotham’s sister city. Shadows pool in the crags of his face and mask. “You won’t kill the Joker.”
“Are you trying to tell me the world wouldn’t be better off – ”
“Dick – the boy – spoke to me about you. He said you were kind to him. That you were not without reason.”
“Does he deserve a cookie for saying I’m not batshit – ”
“The Joker would already be dead if you wanted that. You want something else – something you need me for.”
“Don’t psychoanalyse me!”
Bruce turns around and pulls out his grapnel. His cape and cowl black-hole the light from the streetlamps, from the gibbous moon, from the fires that have sprung up in Blüdhaven. “I’ll find you later.”
“You’re not leaving. Not now. Not this time.” Bruce is so close. Jason could reach out and grab his wrist, his neck.
The planes of Bruce’s body are no longer bent. He shoots out a line. It sounds like a lug plinking onto a road, a belt buckle rasping through a casket cap panel, the final beep of a countdown. “Then,” says Bruce, “kill me.”