Chapter Text
“Huh,” Jason said.
There was a body in his dumpster. This wasn’t a complete novelty. Over the course of Jason’s life, then death, and then second, much more gruesome life, he had seen plenty of bodies. A decent number of them he had personally rendered that way even. Sure, it wasn’t what he expected to see when he went to toss his post-patrol gas station coffee in the trash, but it wasn’t the first body ever thrown into a Crime Ally dumpster nor would it be the last. This was, however, the first time that he had seen a body left like this.
The head had been crunched through by something with very large teeth and large swathes of the body had been melted, red hoodie melding with flesh. Technicolor bruising covered every non-melted patch of skin, and all over what was left of the legs were pitted with tiny circular holes. Jason’s helmet scanned and recorded the body, making an electronic record of what Jason had already noticed. There was far too little blood for a kill this messy.
Jason turned slowly, looking for any sign of blood or viscera that might point to where the body came from, or its killer went. At the mouth of the alley there was a small spatter of gore but nothing else around. For the first time, Jason felt a small surge of dismay for the lack of cameras around his building. While it had been an asset in avoiding both Mask’s people and Batman’s cadre, it did mean that figuring out what the hell was going on would be much more difficult.
To make matters worse, when Jason turned back to the body, he noticed the melted areas had progressed further, the body slowly liquefying. Moving with speed and precision, Jason pulled several sample bags from his jacket and gathered some hair, blood, and fingerprints before all his evidence disappeared.
By the time he finished the body was half gone.
“Is very strange you know.” Came a heavily accented voice from behind him. Slavic. Jason whipped around, glad he still had his helmet on. Standing at the mouth of the alley was a tiny old woman in a massive padded pink coat and tevas. It unsettled Jason that he hadn’t noticed her walking up.
“Something is a bit…not right, tonight. You going to do something about it Helmet Boy?” She croaked at him, wrinkles around her eyes scrunching dubiously.
“Well ma’am, can’t say I know exactly what’s wrong, but I do know for sure I don’t let people who dump bodies like that one walk around in my alley. Do you know something about this whole situation?” Jason asked.
“It depends. Do I know what happened to that poor person? No. Do I know more than you do about why he’s there? Maybe. It’s all a matter of perspective.” Her lips curled into a smile at Jason as she finished talking.
“Care to share your perspective then?” Jason pressed, and the small old woman laughed.
“Nie. Maybe some other time, helmet boy. The cards will weigh in and I will wait for them.” There was a long pause as she eyed him, and then said unprompted, “You are practical Mr. Hood, but too messy. If you intend to get everything you want in this life of yours, you will have to take more care.” Her stare seemed to cut through Jason in spite of the mask and body armor, and he wasn’t sure how to react to this strange pronouncement.
She gave him a final nod before making her slow and certain way back into the building. Jason wanted to follow, but a feeling in his gut kept him rooted to the ground. It was a familiar sensation, but in the moment, Jason couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
There was a strange tension in the air. A humming in the back of his mind that had subsided when the woman had appeared but reawakened as soon as she left. It took a moment before it clicked for Jason; he was being watched. He waited for a long while, but nothing moved or ambushed him. Slowly the tension in the air faded. When it was gone, so was the body in the dumpster. All that was left was goo.
With a quick curse Jason checked his evidence baggies. While the fingerprint scans and the crime scene photos were fine, the blood and hair had melted into viscous technicolor ooze.
Abruptly exhausted, Jason used his grapple gun to make his way to the roof of his building. He was tired of being Red Hood tonight. More than anything he wanted to go to sleep. Even the big Bat had finished his patrol an hour earlier. If all of Jason’s physical evidence had turned to mush, then his best bet for figuring this out was databases, cameras, and potential witnesses. All stuff that would wait for Jason to get some sleep.
Jason took off his hood and shucked it in his gear bag that he kept by the roof door. The image of the body in the dumpster wouldn’t leave his mind. It was unlike anything he had seen before, and in Gotham that wasn’t a good thing.
His usual type of case in Gotham tended towards human trafficking or organized crime control. When Jason really wanted to piss off the Falcones or Black Mask, he focused on dismantling heroin shipments and disrupting supply. When it came to busting drug or human trafficking cartels, Jason was a standard consult for the caped crusaders in Gotham. Tim would almost always ask Jason for help on those kinds of cases cases. Serial killers and bizzare deaths Jason usually handed right back to Tim.
Jason didn’t have any illusions about his skillset. He was an excellent fighter and information gatherer. His contacts on the street, reputation for violence, and practical nature made him the best the Bats had at dealing with the petty criminal underground. None of the other capes in Gotham had his feel for her criminal rhythms. It made sense. Practice bred improvement after all.
When it came to mangled bodies and sadistic murders however, Jason had trouble being objective. He could follow the clues as well as any one of the caped crusaders, but Tim or Bruce would almost always find the killer faster, and when they did there wasn’t the possibility of a body on the ground at the end.
It just never computed in Jason’s mind how one person could do that to another. He just didn’t understand the joy of desecrating someone just to feel their pain. Money, anger, or desire betraying the better conscience, those things Jason understood all too well. He just couldn’t imagine not having a conscience at all.
Jason knew what the current protocol dictated he should do. Rouges Gallery were Bruce’s, serial killers were Tim’s, Dick was the best consult on cults, Barbra was a must have for police investigations and looking into seemingly above-board organizations, Stephanie had a knack for resolving child abuse issues, and Cassandra was essential in League cases because they all looked like they wanted to cry when they saw her.
This was a weird body, probably serial killer, but no calling cards marking it as one of the Rogues. That meant either Tim or Dick could be the expert, but Jason had yet to see any evidence of it being connected to a cult. That left Tim. After all, strange bodies and mysterious deaths were Red Robin’s specialty.
When Jason thought about calling in Tim on this though, something stopped him. There was an instinct in the back of his mind telling him that it was a bad idea to give this case over to the Bats. It was the same feeling that had stopped him from going after the old woman while she made her way inside, and let him sense that there was something watching that alley, ensuring the body was gone, and waiting to pounce on him if he ran.
As Jason made his way down to his apartment, he abruptly recognized why the body had filled him with such unease. Like a half-forgotten dream, humming in the back of his mind and spirit, was the power that he had learned to channel with the All-Caste. He felt it when he looked at something that simply should not be, and the All-Blades longed to leap into his hands. It was his sense of magic. In Gotham it didn't tend to come up.
Jason wasn’t sure what it meant that something magical was haunting his streets, but he wasn’t going to hand it off to the Bats just yet. As far as he knew, not one of them was better equipped to handle something otherworldly than him. When it came to magic, none of them were specialists. Bruce usually outsourced the few cases that touched the otherworldly. Given his history with the All-Caste, Jason probably was the closest that any vigilante in Gotham got to a magical practitioner.
When he had finally made his way down the three flights of stairs and long hallway to his apartment, Jason saw a flash of color. Stuck to his door with a dirty piece of scotch tape was a flyer announcing one free reading from the Marvelous Madame Mishka.
On the flyer was an address for a parlor that Jason distantly registered as being the basement unit below a Cantonese bakery on Park Avenue, but it was crossed out. Instead there was a note scribbled in pen reading “For you helmet boy, come to apartment 26 B tomorrow. Cards say we talk.”
Even though it set Jason’s skin crawling that the old woman might have done what Gotham’s entire criminal underworld had failed to do and connect Jason’s burner identity with his vigilante one, he made sure to carefully fold the flyer and tuck it in his pocket. His Bat-honed and League-polished paranoia said that he should move to a different safe-house. His gut said that, in the moment, this wasn't a threat.
In the end what settled it was that Jason was too tired to be paranoid. Besides this apartment actually had the slightest bit of personality. It would be a shame to move now. In light of that it only raised Jason’s heart rate a little to go inside and get ready for long needed sleep.
Jason had barely touched his bed before he immediately passed out. He dreamed of bronze swords wreathed in fire and monsters from a different world. He dreamed of Bruce riding a dinosaur in his gala tuxedo, and shouting furiously when Jason lopped off a monster tentacle. He remembered only fractured images when he awoke around noon to the sound of incessant buzzing.
Jason hated the bat-phone. Red Robin had given it to him after they had collaborated on a case that Jason had been running with Roy and Kori. Roy was the first to call it that, and the name had stuck. The stupid communicator was even shaped like a bat. Roy hadn’t had to reach far for inspiration.
The bat-phone had been a compromise between Jason refusing to contact any Gotham vigilantes with his actual phone that he used, and Tim’s instance that he needed a way to contact Jason and run comms if they were going to be working together.
Tim’s consults with the outlaws had brought Jason closer to him than any other member of the Batclan. And Jason could admit, so long as Tim wasn’t around to hear it, that the communicator had come in handy a number of times. The issue was not its functionality, the issue was that every fucking vigilante in Gotham had one.
To make matters worse, Tim, the scoundrel, had added Jason’s bat-phone to the main scheduling channels, which meant that every time anyone bat adjacent got so much as a nosebleed, Jason heard about it.
At least Jason’s presence had never been directly acknowledged by anyone in those conversations. If any of the caped crusader crowd had objected to a morally…vague vigilante being privy to their patrol scheduling, they had never done it where he could see.
Stephanie had even seemed kind of grateful the one time Red Hood had showed up to help her finish her patrol route after Tim had to head home early because a mugger had broken one of his ribs.
But now the damn bat-phone was buzzing like crazy, and it’s few positive effects were forgotten in the face of sheer annoyance.
Jason had intended to start his day with a bowl of stale cereal and an attempt to make earl gray tea without over steeping, but the buzzing was driving him crazy. The stupid thing didn’t come with a mute button. It buzzed until it was connected to a comm unit, at which point the alerts would blare directly into his ears until he put it in patrol mode.
Jason manfully tried to ignore it. Instead, he focused on his cereal milk. He wondered if stale lucky charms still bled their colors. He thought his milk was looking a little greyer. His water hadn’t boiled yet. He really needed to go grocery shopping. The bat-phone buzzed again. And again.
Jason let out a growl and stomped over the second-hand coffee table that he had gotten from a very intense woman named Esther who used to live down the hall. The phone had moved almost six inches just from the buzzing.
The biggest myth in the superhero community was that Batman worked alone. Whenever he heard it, it made Jason choke. Batman had worked alone for a few years sure, but ever since Dickie, the man had made a practice of taking every troubled soul who tried to put on a mask and fight for the city under his stupidly bat shaped wing for better or worse.
There were something like eighteen comms units in the main patrol scheduling chat. To be fair not everyone was annoyingly communicative. Nightwing and the Birds of Prey were only in Gotham sporadically, which Jason knew meant they hardly ever took over patrol unless it was a true Arkham Emergency.
Jason was also pretty sure that Harper Row had effectively retired in favor of helping out Leslie at the clinic. He had seen her over there the last time he had been stabbed and needed to get stitched up, and she seemed fine but certainly too busy to destroy his morning talking about patrol routes.
Still, even if Jason was generous in acknowledging a difference in the total amount of vigilantes with communicators and the usual amount of responses, there were still too many damn capes in the scheduling channel. Bruce had a pathological need to mentor, and it meant that every single time there was a scheduling issue, Jason’s phone exploded.
When Jason actually opened the communicator though, he felt his heart sink. The texts weren’t from the scheduling channel. That would have been too easy they were from a secondary group that Tim had labeled Cave Crew. From what Jason had gathered, this channel was for everyone who used the cave to store their equipment and crashed at the manor to sleep when the nights got too long. Why Jason was in it was not clear to him.
It had half the total number of participants and went off twice as often. Jason deeply disliked that he was included in this group.
He made a point of avoiding the cave, and he certainly never stashed gear there or spent the night. The last time he had gone there to get a stab wound treated, he and Bruce had gotten into a screaming match about what Bruce had termed, “his suicidal fighting style”, and when Jason got home, he had found four different trackers distributed across his clothes and gear. Cave Crew member, Jason was not.
Unfortunately, the communicators weren’t like regular messaging services. Once you were in a channel, you were in. You could only get off it when the system administrator kicked you off.
The only thing worse than getting updates about the Batcave lockers and who had left their smelly under-armor in the medbay, was Jason actually having to go to the Batcave and figure out how to boot his communicator from the channel, or god forbid asking Bruce to do it.
Still, the current flood of messages made Jason wish that he had taken the plunge and actually done something about it. Bruce was mapping and assigning new patrol routes. As soon as Jason saw it his heart sank. Even if he didn’t properly consider himself part of the bat brigade, Jason knew that there was no escaping the patrol route curse.
Bruce mapping new patrol routes meant he would want a six-hour meeting with every vigilante who covered territory in Gotham. It meant number crunching patrol length and timing, matching route schedules so that if someone got in trouble another person was near to help, and creating new medical caches for if people got hurt.
Making new patrol routes meant finding fresh spots that were good for grappling, drawing up new schedules for undercover infiltration with informants, and it guaranteed that everyone’s sleep habits would be entirely fucked until all the capes got used to the change.
Bruce planning new patrol routes meant that Batman would be a bitchy, sleep deprived and overcontrolling bastard until someone snapped and killed him, or the new map and schedule got finished and learned. Whichever happened first.
Worst of all, new patrol routes had also historically meant Arkham breakouts, space disasters, and city-wide gang wars. It was as if Gotham herself knew whenever the Bats were trying out something new and decided to give her vigilantes a pop quiz without the chance to study.
In the chat, Tim was trying to present a hopeful front, but Jason knew Tim knew better. In contrast, Robin, Signal, and The Batgirl duo didn’t seem to grasp what a big deal this was, probably because they hadn’t had to do it before. Stephanie was sending memes about meeting the boss, and Cass had sent a long line of emojis that included the thumbs up and a cake.
Signal was asking questions about what he would have to do, and while Robin was filling him in with far too much authority for someone with no experience, Barbra had simply commented, “I’ll get ready then,” which no one else seemed to realize had the delivery of a gunnery sergeant in the trenches preparing for battle.
As if Dick had read Jason’s mind, the golden boy weighed in with a simple, “You guys don’t even know.” Jason couldn’t help a brief moment of commiseration with his older brother. The two of them had both seem some shit in their day. The current Bat-Brats had no idea of what was coming.
Then it happened. Bruce messaged Jason directly. “I’m redoing the patrol routes. You need to put yours on the schedule. Tell me when you are free to discuss.”
At this Jason’s body decided to whip his bat-phone across the room before his brain could weigh in on events. The communicator hit the far wall and dented the plaster before clattering to the ground. The plaster was fucked, but the phone looked fine. Right then, Jason’s brain caught up with his instincts and he sucked in a deep breath, anger warring with a sinister premonition that Gotham was going to be in flames by the end of the week.
Jason’s patrol routes weren’t a part of Bruce’s current route scheduling. He had, in fact, designed his patrols to avoid other Bats and Birds. Up until Bruce’s text his initial dread about the new patrol route mapping had mostly concerned the inevitable disaster that would be unleashed on the world as a result. He hadn’t even considered that Bruce would want to talk to him about the Red Hood routes.
Jason’s stomach felt like it was in free fall and his vision was glowing with green sparks. He breathed in and out, pulling all his anger into a productive little ball in the center of his chest until the green faded from view.
How dare Bruce. Jason wasn’t one of his fucking soldiers. Sure, he was on the scheduling channel, and sure, he and Tim worked together sometimes, and sure, he was the de facto number two for all bats on trafficking cases, but it didn’t make him Bruce’s to boss around. The bats had been running the last patrol map and schedule without his routes and times just fine. If Bruce thought he could use his goddamn over-controlling bullshit to make Jason heel in the name of practicality, he had another think coming.
Jason picked up the bat-phone from the ground and glared at Bruce’s message. He considered telling Bruce to fuck off but decided instead to let him stew. Bruce could just go deal with the other vigilante children and mentees. He certainly had enough of them.
Jason had a case to work on and a psychic to meet. If Bruce wanted to make Jason mind Bruce’s fucking schedules, he could walk his ass down to Crime Alley and just fucking try it.
Jason wrapped the bat-phone in his couch blanket to deaden the buzzing, and then sat down to finish his Lucky Charms. As he sipped his tea, Jason realized that his annoyance with Bruce and Bruce’s stupid patrol maps had caused him to oversteep his earl gray. Just another reason for Bruce to go fuck himself.
Maybe if he could avoid Bruce and company until the new patrol map was done, he would also be able to avoid whatever horrendous fallout Gotham decided to throw at them this time. The foreboding feeling in his gut said no, but a boy could dream.