Chapter Text
The first Jason hears of the new arrival on the scene is predictably ridiculous. He is in one of his cosier safehouses, healing off the consequences from a particularly nasty encounter with the Kingpin when Dick fucking Grayson of all clowns swings by.
The shock value of him coming in person, of breaking boundaries he so far hasn’t even stepped close to is the only thing that saves him from two bullets to centre mass.
“Oh, good,” Dick says, strangely relieved to have found him bed-bound. “That’s good. Looks old, too—Jaybird, I can’t tell you how glad I am to find you with—what, two broken legs and an injured spine?”
Jason—stupidly—barks a laugh. Dick is, appropriately, a dick, but he usually keeps it more or less contained. The amusement is quickly soured by concern. He does like to keep it contained, which means he isn’t now because he’s rattled. Off-balance. Even Jason would admit it takes a lot to rattle Greyson. “Are you—” Is he what? Okay? He’s an ex-Robin nutcase. He’s a pack of rabid weasels in a trench coat the same way Jason is, psychopathic tendencies excluded. “Shit, fuck, you knocked someone up, didn’t you? The world isn’t ready—How are you even fertile, who allowed that to happen—”
“I didn’t knock anybody up.” Yeah, okay, maybe look less deranged, then. Maybe don’t look as if you came here expecting to find—something bad, whatever that might be. There are many bad things Jason could become at any given point, a corpse being the least terrible one all things considered. “I was just—Fuck, it really is convenient you physically can’t move.”
A cold fear stabs into his spine at the same moment as insane wrath lights up his heart. “He didn’t—The Replacement is a hideous little brat but he can’t have killed him off so soon; he just got him—”
“Drake is fine,” Dick says, closing his eyes. “All—everybody is fine. Everybody you want fine is fine.”
Jason takes a moment to give his body space to chew through the sudden influx of crazy-making brain chemicals. “Fuck you,” he says with a hazy, dreamy voice. “I can’t take this. I am a gentle soul.”
Normally, this would instigate a nice, emotion-free banter. Normally, Dick would be a good sport about the fact Jason can’t handle life often and needs the outlet of bullshit and blood to syphon off the accumulated Pit-rot. Now, because something has happened and it’s big and personal, Dick flinches, eyes darkening with his version of crazy. “Someone killed the Joker,” he says, blunt and straightforward and pleased around the edges in a way he usually knows better than to acknowledge much less show. “Massacred him and his goons. Nobody was left alive. Nothing. No clues, no blood, no forensics. No guns, nerve-gas or poison either. Someone wanted it done up-close and personal.”
A strange but familiar static fills his ears, possibly to make up for the lack of crazy laughter that never really stopped rattling around his mind. Someone—
“You thought it was me?”
Dick shrugs. “Everybody thinks it was you,” he says. “I hoped it was you, even though smuggling you out of Gotham would be a nightmare. Hoped, except, you know, absolutely didn’t hope and was, in fact, dreading it with every fibre of my being. Yeah.”
Jason doesn’t laugh because he’s learned after repeated and never-ending panic attacks that mad laughter is off-limits to him, but he thinks this would be a perfect time for it. “Kingpin got his paws on me the other week,” he says, tongue slow and stupid in his mouth. “I barely crawled to Gotham and Ivy had to carry me here. I don’t even follow the gossip.”
“Well, that’s—Good. Maybe,” Dick says. “Probably. Nobody is mad about it, of course, even Bats, as frantic as he had been. It helps he was cutting up a cart of children to send back to their parents at the time, so. You know.”
Jason nods. He does know.
“I could try to get them to stay away,” Dick continues. “I won’t succeed, but—You don’t need to run, is all. I know Bats is—I know Bats, but he was very worried about you, underneath all the moralisin’.”
Jason nods again. He is still reeling from the idea of a Joker-less word far too much to worry about Bruce.
“You’re in shock, hey? Good, that’s good. You need all the help you can get because they are probably going to be here in minutes. So—don’t work through it any time soon.”
Other than the Bats, nobody quite believes that Jason wasn’t the one who finally had enough of whatever messed up courtship thing Bruce and the Joker had for each other. That’s fine, Jason doesn’t care—
Except he does care because lying is one sin he doesn’t enjoy. Typically, he doesn’t need to resort to such things. Who would he lie to? Who does Jason even talk to except bad guys he’s not allowed to kill?
Putting the word out doesn’t do much, and Jason is beginning to accept that this is simply how it’s going to go and resigns himself to more travelling. Ironically, this helps him out, because he’s not even on East Coast when the next exceedingly professional execution takes place. This time it’s Deathstroke, carefully dismembered, body-parts set in formaldehyde, possibly for identification purposes.
On one hand, this helps rehabilitate Jason’s image, as he was at that time more or less publicly dealing with a nasty clutch-cartel type thing in Louisiana. In the other hand, this upsets a lot of people, most of them being filthy hypocrites. Bruce, of course, has his usual hysterics about the sanctity of human life or whatever. The bad guys are swiftly getting reacquainted with the idea of mortality. Instead of a short trip to Arkham which more or less serves as a B&B for the criminally minded, terrorists can and could get summarily executed with no-one being the wiser.
Gotham spends a month in an unprecedented state of peace, while both the heroes and the villains do their best to comb through the city to find the new threat. Jason, who doesn’t concern himself with petty crime, catches up on a lot of missed sleep and training. He reads a few books. He goes for runs. He has a list of bakeries to visit, as recommended by Ms Svetlana who does the jam-filled buns near his safe house. It’s great.
It’s precisely during one of the walks that he comes across a most unusual scene.
“What—” How many of them are they? And how is the guy in front keeping them tame? Jason knows the types of strays that can survive a month in Gotham. How is a single man organising what looks to be a carpentry class out in a particularly fucked up courtyard-type thing in the middle of a city block, with thirty urchins giving him their full attention?
“—pay attention to the grain of the wood—”
Real attention too, he notes. Not the type you give to placate a toff that will later be giving you money or food or whatever. Somehow, the strange man in the centre of the half circle, standing in front of a makeshift blackboard, has inspired respect in a bunch of street kids that would tear a man’s heart out just to watch it stop wiggling.
“—The type of blade is important here. We’re still in the beginning stages, so we won’t do much decorative carving. For now—”
Huh. Jason is, yeah, a little hooked, to be frank. There is something about the man’s deep, confident voice, accented while still decently clear. It makes him want to simultaneously sit down and pretend he’s a good boy and act up so he would get disciplined. Looking at the improbably large, calloused hands, he can’t say which he would prefer. Jason is a big guy, and the Pit made him bigger, but this hulking giant of a man makes him look slender. Delicate, even.
Somehow, he’s wandered into the crowd, near where the older teenagers watch. Like calls to like; they take one look at him and quietly make space. Judging how their eyes are lingering on similar areas of interest as Jason’s are, he’s not the only one whose daddy issues are writing out their opinions in big neon letters.
“—practical, but we will still need to work up to building a proper workshop. For now, we make do with recycling. So, we talked about this yesterday, but what is the first thing we do when choosing a bed frame to repurpose?”
“Locating any potential blood-stains,” the kids chorus.
“Very good! Why—Jack.”
The boy can’t be more than seven, and he already has several scars down his tiny face. To say nothing of the thick ropes of scar tissue around his neck that Jason can’t bring himself to think about. “Pa-tho-gens,” the boy carefully pronounces. “Human blood makes you sick, sometimes.”
“Exactly,” the stranger says, reaching into his pocket and throwing a—wooden token? At the boy? “What else—Iris?”
“Needles and such,” the girl says, through an audible lisp. “Adults who sleep in the junkyard sometimes hide things in the frame.”
Good Lord.
“Very good.” Another token flies through the air, landing in the girl’s arm with such precision, Jason is vaguely impressed. “Junkyards are a valuable source of goods, but come with downsides. Setting aside the fact they are located at inconvenient places, they are valuable for other people, too.”
“And people are the biggest danger,” the kids sing-song.
“Precisely. Alright, moving on, say we did find a bed-frame—As luck would have it, I have brought one along to serve as a teaching tool—”
Jason sits in the lecture for a full hour and a half, wondering at himself, the man and the world in general. During this time, the strange man only makes himself more bizarrely appealing, first by displaying his improbable strength—enhanced, he has to be—then by walking the children through the process of recycling the damn thing into a more or less useable piece of furniture—past the matters, of course.
“Lunch is waiting in the Den for any who would like to join me,” the stranger says, which is finally where alarm bells start ringing. He’s offering them food? He’s luring them to a secondary location with the promise of food? “Afterwards, we will continue the lesson.”
Well, now. That seems like something more his speed. Good thing he stayed—
“It’s legit,” says one of the teenagers next to him. “Whole deal. Sakumo—” What an odd name. Sah-koo-mooh. Sounds vaguely Japanese, only twisted in the boy’s Gothamite mouth. “—bought a couple of old warehouses and fixed ‘em up. Homeless folk stay there and he enforces the peace. It’s safe as anything.”
“Right, yeah, of course,” he says, not buying it for a Goddamn minute. “Sounds like just the thing. A legit homeless shelter in Gotham. Soup kitchen too, or what?”
“All the little ones get food, yes,” says the boy. “Everybody under twelve, and leftovers go for us older ones. The adults have to work.”
Huh. “Bullshit,” he says, a bit less certain somehow. Realities of living on the street in Gotham mean that the kids who live through the initial month get a good nose for the crazies. The kid looks sincere. He looks certain, too. That doesn’t mean the freak isn’t doing something shady, though, or that he hasn’t already mind-fucked the kids into going along with it.
“See for yourself,” shrugs the boy. “Anyone can come, as long as they play by the rules.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Cool, yeah. Be seeing you, then, Red Hood.”
Hold on—
“How the fuck,” Jason calls, outraged, but the kid has already scampered away with the rest of the cohort. “Perceptive little monsters—”
He does come and brings Dick along just in case. His nose isn’t as good as the kids possibly need him to be. The man—Sakumo—is obviously an enhanced of some sort. If he is messing with kids—
Only it’s not just kids. The group he saw, yeah, but hundreds of people are milling in and out of a building that looks to have been a warehouse once and is now the world’s ugliest palace.
No, really, he thinks, a little bit in love. It’s like a palace made from garbage. Most of this looks to be hand-made, but it would have taken a long fucking time? It would have to?
The walls are primarily made out of wood and metal, but there is enough fucked up glass there to make him think of those spiffy coloured glass cathedrals. In fact, the whole thing kind of made him think of a coked-up renaissance artist whose materials came exclusively from the junkyard. Jason isn’t an artsy guy, he doesn’t think, but the actual lines of the building are elegant if you look past the patchwork aspect of it and the overall lack of uniformity.
“What the fuck is this, Jaybird,” Dick says, looking about as dazed about the whole thing as he feels.
“Can’t say.” He doesn’t know where to look, honestly. It’s not the question of it being unfinished—how could you even finish something like this? “It’s apparently a homeless shelter.”
“Bet you a thousand bucks some pretentious asshole buys it and turns it into a hotel or a restaurant—”
“I have received offers,” comes the vaguely amused, deep voice of the teacher guy. Sakumo. “But I have not thus far been swayed by money.”
“How about a bullet to the head,” Jason thinks, fascinated. “That is a common method of property acquisition in this part of the world.”
“Similar methods have been tried,” Sakumo allows. “Again, without much success thus far. I suppose we will have to wait and see. Now, gentlemen—” The way he speaks is cute, Jason thinks, horrified. He is charming. The word gentlemen sounds a bit like genoh-teru-menu, but softer. Rounder. “—I suppose you are what passes for an inspection?”
Uh.
“Sorry, uh, Sir,” says Dick, who looks as confused about his shame as Jason feels. “We just heard there were homeless children here and thought to take a look around. You know how it is.”
“I do.” The clear grey eyes are friendly and calm and for some reason, the monster in Jason’s head shrieks danger. The feeling passes after a few moments, but he doesn’t think it was pure paranoia talking. “I am Sakumo Hatake. Please, come in. All are welcome in the Den, and there are no closed doors.” He shrugs. “Except to provide basic human privacy, even if we are working on that aspect. Communal living comes with its drawbacks. I will give you a quick tour, and then I’m off to teach my class on metallurgy one-oh-one.”
One oh one. Good Lord.
“Metallurgy,” Jason says weakly. “I see. I caught a little of the carpentry lesson.”
“I know,” Sakumo says, in that tone of voice Bruce has when he’s deep in his turf and at his most confident. “I hope you enjoyed it. This way, gentlemen, I do not have a lot of time.”
Nobody is surprised when the building checks out. Jason, a little belligerently, jacks up his paranoia and tears through the place. Between him and Dick, they turn over every stone, poke their nose into every nook and cranny and Dick even digs out a basic scanner to check for cameras.
It’s really only the fact that they’re locals that saves them from outright rebellion by the people living in and around the property. Them being who they are, however, means being around that many people chases them out as soon as they know for certain nobody is cooking meth or selling sex anywhere on the premises.
“Talk to me,” Jason squawks into the phone, so aggravated about everything he isn’t even upset about having to resort to Oracle for intel. “He is shady, yes? He has to be. Nobody is—Nobody is that.”
“I don’t know about shady,” Oracle says, sympathy coming across even through the tinny sound of the phone speaker. “A feel-good story. Hatake Sakumo, age forty. He is something of a celebrity. Not your circle, so I’m not surprised you don’t know.”
Celebrity?!
“A suspected victim of human trafficking,” she continues. “He was found in Chicago, a bit over five years ago. No memories, didn’t speak any English, no records of him anywhere. It was a bit of a mess, but in the end, he was granted asylum, when no outstanding warrants were found anywhere around the world.”
“Hah! Shady! I knew it!”
“Calm down. He cooperated with the police, stayed in lock-up as long as they asked and didn’t put a foot wrong. Stark personally ran his prints and ID and got nothing. They were thorough, what with the mutation.”
Dick perks up, a similar blend of vindictive pleasure the man was suspicious and shame they’re so eager about it. Yeah. Jason sure as fuck doesn’t know why this is all hitting him so personally.
“I checked too, at the time. Nothing. Stark thought he was legitimately trafficked. You know what happens to mutants in some places? We suspect he was from, say, rural China or Russia, and lived quiet. Doesn’t matter, in the end, or are you going to blame a man for not having an updated birth certificate, Jay?”
“Get fucked,” he says defensively. “It’s shady, alright. It has to be. He’s making a homeless shelter. In Gotham.”
“He also spent two years jumping through every free mental health program in America, became an internationally acclaimed artist, sold all his sculptures for a ludicrous sum of money and moved to Gotham to build what he calls the Den. He has the permits, Jay. He even has qualifications to be a counsellor.”
He has—“Permits? Like, what, construction permits?”
“Among other things. You can’t just build a homeless shelter—Never mind. Point is, he checks out.”
“They don’t even have electricity,” Dick says, voice dead. “Much less spyware. Any notes about his mutation?”
“Interestingly, he tried to register them, and the closest the government could do was to refer him to Stark. I watched some of his interviews. He is stronger and faster than the average human. Not a very impressive mutation, but useful for an artist I suppose.”
Right, yeah.
“Like fuck that is all he is,” Jason says and means it. “Gotham would have ground him into so much glittery dust.”
“I don’t see why you’re so fixated. He’s just a guy. Naive, maybe, but seems to be doing a good thing, or trying to, at least.”
“You’ll have to forgive us,” Dick says. “We’re still reeling. Swear to Jesus, if he put on a pair of glasses and rolled up his sleeves, I’d have probably swooned.”
“Well, I can tell you he swings both ways and is the free-thinking type, so shoot your shot I guess. Just try not to make a bigger target out of him than he already is.”
Umm. “How, exactly do you know this?”
“Excuse you, I know everything. Now stop wasting my time, if you would? Ta’.”
Because Jason is Jason and he never once learned to leave a thing alone, he went back. Because Bruce is Bruce, he found him lurking around the neighbourhood, setting up monitoring equipment.
“You too, huh?”
“Red Hood,” Batman says in that stupid growl of his that sounded so cool when he was twelve and now just made him roll his eyes. What a theatre kid, honestly. Jason never even went to high school and he is getting flashbacks.
“I understand he is legit,” he preservers because Bruce is annoying, but he has good intel. If he’s suspecting Sakumo—
“He is. I am setting up equipment for when he inevitably gets kidnapped.”
Right. Yes. That’s—a thing that will happen.
“How come it hadn’t happened yet?”
“I understand he has a licensed firearm and some martial arts training.”
Good God. “What, like, capouera?”
Batman doesn’t reply. Judging by the fact Jason turned his back on him for longer than two seconds probably means—Yep. He’s gone.
“What a fucking asshole,” he sighs. “You hear me,” he repeats, louder and more obnoxious because he knows Bruce is well within hearing range. “I hope it rains. I hope your stupid cape gets soggy and unpleasant and doesn’t swish at all, just sticks to the back of your thighs and twists around your ankles.”
It’s welding today, Jason thinks, this time armed with a giant paper bag full of piroshki because he’s not a fucking animal. He has a little blow-torch and has braided his long ash-blonde hair back and looks like every authority figure that Jason never managed to impress.
“Well shit,” he says to the group of teenagers sitting in the back, oogling the teacher.
“You should have seen him on Sunday,” says the teenager after having snagged a pastry. “He set up a forge. Proper forge. He had a leather apron on. His hair got damp with sweat. I thought I was having a stroke.”
“Is somebody filming this?” They have to be. “Surely, someone is making money selling all this to competence kink monthly or whatever.”
“Step on my throat daddy dot com would pay a lot,” hums another teenager. “Christ.”
Because Jason has stepped into some version of a teenage flick, the group around him starts giggling which earns them a patient look from teacher that makes Jason want to bite.
“This is too much,” he declares. “I am but a weak mortal man. Good luck, kids.”