Chapter Text
Jason did not make a habit of sleeping at his operational headquarters, no matter where they were currently located.
That was only a little bit about separating business and personal matters. Everything and nothing was personal for him these days. He didn't have much of a life outside the mask, even now that he'd—let's call it deprioritized the whole revenge thing.
He and the Bats could work together civilly when their interests aligned (which was more often than he liked to think about these days). Didn't mean he was part of a team. He had his own operations they knew nothing about.
Case in point: the piece of action he’d taken care of tonight. Intercepting that particular weapons shipment was a good way to get some exercise for those of his men who were getting restless at too much mundane business and not enough big action—without getting the Bats on his case. They wouldn't want that kind of firepower loose in Gotham any more than he did.
There had been a bit of grumbling among the men afterward. Not about the action itself—that had gone smoothly to plan—but about the buyer he'd arranged to offload the goods to. Several of his people had suggested local buyers who might offer a higher price, given the chance. Jason had pointed out that he wasn't going to risk handing over that kind of weaponry to potential competition, just to have it pointed right back at him next month. That had sparked questions as to why they didn't just keep the weapons to upgrade their own arsenal. Jason had told them that when they were running their own organizations they could decide how to balance long-term preparation against immediate cash flow, but until then he was calling the shots.
Not exactly proud of stooping to the crime lord equivalent of “because I'm the dad and I said so,” but it did effectively end the conversation. It also avoided getting any nearer to the truth that a major factor in the specific buyers he'd arranged was also the fact that he could live with that particular cause actually making use of them. No regrets on this one.
Anyway, that was how he'd ended up in a warehouse’s dingy upstairs office, trying to snatch a few hours of sleep on a too-small, tattered couch. He was keeping a close personal eye on this one until it was settled and done with.
His men thought that he'd missed the quiet murmurs, meant to be out of his earshot, that cooperating with the Bats was making him soft. Not just a good business decision to keep them off his back and use them to help eliminate more of his rivals with less trouble. He was risking becoming one of them, they thought.
He'd have to find some opportunities to remind them in the near future that there was a reason Red Hood had the reputation he did. He'd earned it. Repeatedly.
Harder to reinforce it now, though, when no killing was more than just the baseline rule for joint Bat operations. The rest of Gotham hadn't quite gotten the memo on where exactly those new boundary lines lay yet for Hood, but he couldn’t quite fool himself anymore into thinking nothing had really changed. It wasn't that he wouldn't kill now. He just… weighed it differently.
His sleep was shallow and restless enough that he heard the faint click of the lock being picked an instant before the door swung open. It wasn't the first time a background itch of paranoia saved his life.
No pause to transition from sleep to action. He rolled to the ground to take cover behind the corner of the desk just as a spray of bullets tore through the back of the couch where he'd been sleeping.
Good thing he still slept with a gun in his hand. In the brief quiet as the gunman paused to see if his initial attack had been effective, Jason popped his head up to snap off a couple of shots.
Dead center of his chest, right on target. They made him stagger back, but didn't drop him. Body armor.
Jason's next shot caught him between the eyes.
That put him down, safely outside the threshold of the door. There was shouting in the hallway, cries of anger and alarm as the man's co-conspirators realized that the first rush had failed and they'd lost the element of surprise.
Jason leaped back to the couch, shoving it across the room and into the door, slamming it shut and barricading the entrance in one move as it jammed the handle.
It wouldn't hold long against the pounding from the other side of the door.
Jason sent a couple more bullets through the wood to give them a moment’s pause and grabbed his helmet from where he'd left it on the desk when he went to lie down. He slipped over to the room's solitary window and pressed himself against the wall, careful not to silhouette himself against the glass as he peered down into the alleyway below.
As he'd thought, they had a couple of men posted down there, waiting to see if he came out. Two that he could spot, at least. There might be more out of his line of vision. No good as an exit.
He stepped away from the window. Buckling his gun belt back on required two hands. The scant seconds he had to set the gun down on the desk beside him felt like ages. Difficult not to rush himself to the point of fumbling with adrenaline pounding the alarm of urgency for every instant he didn't have a weapon in his hand.
The Pit that had lain quiet through all the action earlier in the night was prickling under his skin, waking with a snarl at the need to act now. He gripped the reins of that mental control more tightly, wrestling back into focus.
Second gun secured to his side, extra ammunition in easy reach on the belt. He could move.
The door was rattling on its hinges. He could hear the feet of the couch scrape as it shifted.
There were only two visible exits to the room, door and window. Didn't mean there were only two possible ways out.
He crossed to the far side of the office. The other side of that wall was a small storage room. The wall looked finished enough on the office side, but inside that storage space whoever had built the place hadn't bothered with insulation on those inner walls, much less finishing it out properly. All he had to do was get through the one layer of drywall and he could slide between the studs that made up that minimal framing.
He planted himself for a solid kick and broke through easily with the first blow. Two more and the hole was big enough to push his way through, tearing more of the material away with his hands to clear a bigger gap. The racket at the door was easily enough to cover the sound.
He eased open the door to the storage room just a crack to get the lay of the land outside. There were more of them than he'd thought. They were still between him and the stairwell, but now he was the one with the element of surprise.
He drew his other gun.
“Hood!” one of the men outside the office door shouted. “You can't hole up in there forever. Save us all some trouble. It's nothing personal, no reason to make it worse than it has to be.”
“I don't know.” The helmet’s modulator left his voice nothing but flat menace as he stepped into the hall. “I tend to take it pretty personally when people try to kill me.”
The men who'd been so eager to convince him to come out a moment ago spun toward him, their sense of strength in numbers wavering with surprise. Jason tipped his head a bit to one side, thoughtful, letting the helmet’s glowing gaze scan over them in a slow sweep.
The first man who’d come through the door had been familiar, but a relative newcomer whose name Jason couldn’t immediately place. There were several much more familiar faces here.
“I'm out,” he said. “You want to talk or you want to die?”
A moment of frozen hesitation. Then a gun cracked, like the starting signal at a race, and the scene exploded into motion. Jason barely noticed the flare of fire as the bullet skimmed his arm. The green that had hovered at the edges of his vision was burning too hotly to care.
So, dying it was. They’d see which of them finished with it first.
Close quarters was his only hope. They had more guns than he did and even the worst shots would get lucky before he could take them all out. Hand to hand, his odds were better.
Not good. Better.
He batted aside a gun and smashed the man’s nose in with the butt of his pistol.
The Lazarus green swirled and hissed, filling his veins with something wilder and stronger than any adrenaline.
Elbow to a man’s neck. Kick to a knee. Cracks of gunfire and screams of pain and fear and defiance that swelled in the confined space to a deafening pitch around him.
A strike to his kidney from behind stole his breath. He barely blocked the next knife swipe toward his neck. Caught the wrist and snapped it. Staggered as a man leaped on his back. An arm wrapped around his throat and tightened. Someone had grabbed his arm, was trying to wrestle the gun from his grasp.
The Pit’s shriek rose to drown out even the ringing in his ears. Pain and desperation and fury.
Jason would not die again tonight.
He stopped trying to smother it. The banked embers inside roared into green flame.
The next thing he was truly aware of was the harsh sound of his own breathing, echoed by the pathetic whines of the man he held pinned against the wall, a bloody knife pressed against his neck. The rest of the hallway had gone still. Dead still.
Everything in between was a smear of Lazarus green and blood red.
His mind was reeling in the sudden stillness, like stumbling out of a tornado into the total silence of a bombproof building.
“Please,” the man he held whimpered. “Please…”
Jason yanked him forward and slammed him back against the wall again. The pleading cut off with a yelp.
The hissing remnants in his mind urged him to do it, do it, make him quiet, finish it.
His rational mind, slow and bleary after the rush of fast, strong, unstoppable, remembered that this would be his only chance to ask questions. What did he need to know?
“Whose idea was this?” Even to his own ears, without the harsher filter of voice modulation, the snarling rasp of his voice was all but unrecognizable.
“Big Tommy,” the man said. Gino. That was the name of the man in front of him.
It took a moment of—not even disbelief, the words just held no rational meaning—as he processed that claim. Gino couldn’t see his expression, but there must have been some shift in his body language.
“It’s true!” The desperate insistence shot up an octave. “I swear, it’s true, he’s right over there, see?”
Jason followed Gino’s frantic, darting glance. Yes. There on the floor, amid the tumble of bodies, he could see the blood-covered face well enough to recognize him.
The physical reaction was too numb to be grief, to be anger, to be even indignant betrayal. Just a brief, wordless pang and then a lurching drop into dazed exhaustion.
He had to finish this.
A faint tug at his peripheral awareness. He slammed his knife into Gino’s upper arm hilt-deep before his conscious mind finished catching up with the danger. Gino screamed and his fingers dropped away from the knife he’d been reaching for.
Jason left his knife buried where it was and snatched Gino’s knife from its sheath, pressing it against his neck to pick up where the previous threat had left off.
“You have two arms. For now. Want to try again with the other one and see how that goes for you?”
“No,” Gino whined, squirming at the pain but not daring to move enough to clutch at his injured arm. “Please—I won’t—no…”
“No?” Jason cocked his head a little to one side, and had to brace himself to keep his balance from tipping with it. He leaned in closer to cover the waver. “Then maybe you can do me a little favor and give me a reason to let you live.”
“Anything. Whatever you say—anything.”
“Go tell your friends in the alley that I won’t be forgetting this. I’ll give them a head start. They’ll want to use it. If I ever see their faces again—or yours—I’m gonna start removing heads. Got it?”
“Yes.” He nodded frantically. “Got it. I’ll tell them. You won’t see me again. I’ll go.”
Yeah, he didn’t doubt that now. Jason released his hold. Gino barely waited until Jason was far enough back that he wouldn’t impale himself on the knife Jason held before sliding away, clutching at his stabbed arm as he stumbled down the hall.
Jason watched until he disappeared down the stairs before turning his attention to the hallway around him. If anyone else was still alive, there were no signs of it. No sounds, not the faintest stir of movement.
He’d lost his guns at some point in the fight. Well. “Lost.” He had a snapshot among his fragmentary memories of throwing them at someone, one after another, but that could just be an educated guess. It was the kind of thing he did, when magazines clicked on empty and he had a split-second need for a projectile weapon.
They couldn’t have gone far. There wasn’t far to go in the cramped space. The question was just how much he’d have to look under to find them.
The first one only took a few seconds of searching to find. The second turned up at last near Big Tommy’s feet. He bent to pick it up, stiff and slow as his body’s signals slowly started to leak through again, catching up on its injury assessments. His chest plate had definitely caught a few bullets. He'd be feeling that for a while. Not as long as he would’ve if he hadn't been wearing it.
He looked down at where Big Tommy lay, then shifted closer, nudging the body with a foot until it rolled and he had a clearer view of the face.
Yeah, definitely him, and he was definitely involved. Whether he was actually the ringleader, as Gino claimed…
He probably hadn’t been lying. Not a chance Gino was the ringleader himself, and with his own neck on the line Jason didn’t think it was likely there was anyone he was more scared of than Hood in that moment.
If there was some other player with that kind of clout involved who hadn’t been physically present tonight… Well, he’d keep his guard up either way.
He thought he’d had his guard up. Apparently not, because this…
It shouldn’t be surprising enough to hurt.
Jason recognized all of them, every face he saw now, some better than others. But Big Tommy he’d had plans for. Not the most physically intimidating guy, but he was scrappy and smart, had a good logistical sense and a charismatic way with words. Jason had planned to talk to him tomorrow about a broader leadership position, start easing him into more of the roles Jason usually filled himself.
It’d taken him a while to feel sure enough to move forward with the transition plan.
He couldn’t risk the power vacuum that would come from dismantling his own organization once it no longer served his purposes as it once had, but he was convinced he could shift it into something more self-sustaining as a source of information and a check on more egregious forms of crime. It just needed the right combination of leaders who could balance each other out and keep everything on the course he’d set, even when he wasn’t physically present as frequently.
Big Tommy was a cornerstone of his confidence in that plan.
Had been. Seemed Jason had misjudged the strength of his ambition and the lengths he was willing to go to satisfy it.
He was going to have to rethink… all of it. Who he could trust.
Not tonight, not now. His leg was burning with a throbbing intensity that was rapidly moving from distracting to all-consuming. The cause was immediately obvious when he shifted his focus to examine it: a deep gash, wrapping from the front of his thigh down and around the outer side of it. Someone had caught him good with a knife.
He was going to have to do something about that. Temporarily, for the moment. A better solution would have to wait until he was somewhere safe.
Jason tore several long strips from his shirt, then slid down the wall to sit on a clear patch of floor and dug several gauze packs from a first aid pouch. He ripped them open and slapped them on top of the cut, then tied them more tightly in place with the strips of shirt. By the time he was through, the black of the shirt blended against his dark pants well enough to obscure blood and white gauze alike. He zipped up his jacket to hide the evidence of the torn shirt.
No visible weakness. At least in dim lighting, if no one looked too closely. He meant to make sure no one would.
He breathed for a few seconds, mentally arranging the things that had to happen next and in what priority. It was harder than it should be, every part of him sluggish with exhaustion. He couldn’t stay here. Had to move. Now. The urgency of that thought just couldn’t quite communicate itself to the rest of his body.
Yeah, he was gonna have to dig into the real emergency supplies, wasn't he.
He pulled one of the small tubes from the depths of a little-used pocket and turned it to scrutinize the Cyrillic text on the side. Amid terse instructions and dire warnings were no mention of the stimulant's actual contents, of course. His small stash had been acquired from one of his Russian instructors and they were intended for the kind of situations where immediate survival took precedence over concerns like that.
The crash after wouldn't do him any favors, especially on top of the letdown from a Pit episode, but he'd have some time until then. He'd need it if he wanted any chance at stopping this from spiraling into all-out chaos that stood a good chance of killing more than just him. He had to put in an appearance—no, not just an appearance, a demonstration—and he had to be on his feet and functional for it.
He jammed the end of the tube against his uninjured leg, the sting not even worth hissing at, then let his head drop back against the wall. It wouldn't take long.
A slow tidal wave of shaky nausea rolled over him, and he breathed slowly through his nose, in and out. Clean, filtered air, no tang of cordite and blood and death. One hand hovered over his helmet's emergency release, in case it wasn’t enough.
Gradually, the nausea drained away and receded to an ignorable distance. It was harder to control his breathing as it kicked up in time with his heart rate, the buzzy need to move, move, move pushing him back to his feet. It was hard now to differentiate the awareness of very real danger, that this might not be over yet, from the effects of the drug itself, kicking everything to high alert and sinking his awareness of the pain back into insignificance.
Jason hated the stuff, and not just for the less-than-pleasant side effects. The (very) few times he’d been forced to resort to it, it’d felt too much like a metallic, artificial version of the Pit, sending his mind and body reeling into reactions he had to wrestle for control. Yet another thing vying to break down any semblance of restraint or strategy and leave him acting on nothing but desperate instinct.
But tonight it would keep him alive long enough. He’d just have to make sure he stayed that way.
“Sorry, Tommy,” he muttered. “Looks like you'll be helping me out with people management after all.”
He shifted into a crouch and hefted Big Tommy's body, slinging it into a fireman's carry. The weight drove a grunt from him as his body attempted to remind him that all the injuries that had been blaring with pain a moment ago hadn't ceased to exist, but the warning faded again to background noise as he caught his balance.
He descended the first half-flight of stairs and exited the door there to step out onto the catwalk balcony overlooking the floor of the warehouse. The muffled thumping that he’d heard even through the closed door ratcheted into beat-driven music that echoed through the space as he stepped through the door. Someone’s phone was connected to a cobbled-together speaker system as it sat on one of the tables where a group of men lounged. Might explain why no one had come running at the gunfire. Then again, there might be other reasons for that, too.
Some of the men were sitting, some standing, some playing cards, smoking, drinking, laughing, chewing on slices of pizza. None of them actually expecting trouble, even if they were nominally the night shift designated to keep an eye out for it. The actual sentries at the doors would give them plenty of notice.
Jason stopped in the middle of the catwalk overlook. He wasn't more than a single story off the ground, but none of them looked up to see him. People so rarely did.
He shrugged the body off his shoulder and gave it a good shove over the railing.
The crunching thud as it impacted concrete sent men stumbling back, tripping over chairs, drinks spilling as tables were jostled. The phone tipped off the edge of the table and yanked free of its cord as it cracked against the concrete, the pulsing music cutting out to a faint, tinny echo of its former enthusiasm. Shouts of fear and surprise died into confusion as they stared at the bloody body.
Realization broke through the dazed stupor of shock and alcohol and eyes slowly drifted up to fix on Jason as he stood staring down at them.
“Anyone else think this outfit’s in need of new management?” One hand dropped to rest meaningfully on the gun at his side. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
No one spoke. Or moved.
“No? Then you can find somewhere to get rid of that without drawing attention.” He indicated the body with a jerk of his head. “Sparky.”
The man in question, Burnes, aka Sparky, jerked to attention, wide-eyed and alarmed at being singled out of the crowd.
“You're in charge of getting rid of the mess in front of my office. Take as many as you need, but I want it dealt with before morning. Understood?”
“Yes, boss.”
Jason swept a look over the group with a slow, deliberate turn of his head. It was like acting for the stage, making a point in the helmet, especially at a distance. Subtler body language tended to get lost, so it took some projection.
“I've got half a mind to clear the board and start over. Lucky for you, I've got better things to do tonight.”
There was a general nervous, confused shuffling. They'd figure out what had happened soon enough. For now, uncertainty was good.
Unlikely that the men at his office and in the alley had been the only ones to know about the planned attack. No way to determine just how guarded they’d been with their plans. Who else had known and looked the other way. Who might have joined in if the conspirators had trusted them enough to give them a chance to.
Jason had always prided himself on his men's loyalty. The first ones might have come out of desperation and the lure of good pay, despite the risks of working for a relative newcomer who was busy kicking hornet's nests in the back yards of much more established players. They'd stayed because he took care of his own. They were wary of him, yes, but those who'd later turned to him for help in a desperate corner—bad debts to dangerous people, family members in trouble, landlords trying to force them out—had found him willing to do far more than extend a loan they'd pay for in blood later. He had a strict code of justice, but it didn't only cut in the direction of punishment. That meant something, to people used to being seen as little more than cannon fodder in Gotham’s endless power struggles.
Or he'd thought it did. Maybe the joke was on him after all. Maybe that, even more than the work with the Bats, had convinced them he was too soft to be worth respecting, much less fearing.
It hadn't just been the power vacuum that'd concerned him, when he considered dismantling what he'd built here. He'd thought their loyalty deserved something in return. That he couldn't give them something that looked like a future, only to pull it away and leave them to crawl back to whatever lowlife would take them, just to feed themselves and their families.
Maybe none of it really mattered. Maybe letting anyone get close enough to think they knew you was just handing them the knife they needed to stab you with.
“We’ll see if any of you seem worth keeping around when I get back,” Jason told them, low and growling. “Anyone who doesn't want to be here should take the chance to reconsider his long-term plans and get out before he loses his options altogether.”
A chorus of subdued yes bosses answered. Jason turned on his heel and headed back toward the stairs, leaving quiet murmurs of unease in his wake.
He didn't stop until he got to the roof, though climbing the stairs was murder on his leg and halfway there he had to lean heavily against the wall for support before he could keep on dragging himself upward with the help of the railing. He didn't dare risk anything more for the pain, not when he still had to get himself to a safehouse. Not when he had to be alert enough to make certain he wasn't followed in the process. Grappling would be the best shot of shaking any would-be tails.
The little performance should be enough of a show of force to discourage any other attempts for the time being. Having seen him alive and well and on his feet, no one was likely to speculate that a temporary disappearance might mean he'd dragged himself off badly wounded, leaving a perfect opening to finish the job if someone could just track him down to his hiding spot. They were more likely to assume he was busy hunting down anyone else who might have been involved and teaching them a lesson no one who saw the aftermath was ever likely to forget.
Let them look over their shoulders and sweat a while, wondering what he might know and what he planned to do about it. At least he'd bought himself some breathing space.
He had a feeling once the stimulant wore off he was going to need it.