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The Lazarus pit. A pool of magical liquid that no one knows the true properties of despite some's claim to the contrary.
Jason Todd. A boy who would have become a man if his life was not cut short and who would have been nothing but a shambling corpse of cosmic probability if he was not stolen away.
Red Hood. A crime lord who keeps to himself, territorial and unafraid to enforce it, he patrols Crime Alley with only the most tangentially cordial relationship with the bats.
All this to say. Who would have seen this coming?
Jason isn't proud of the new instincts the pit put in his head or what it added to his person. He keeps his hair fluffy and clean to cover the folded ears hidden in the curls, he doesn't open his mouth too wide to show fangs and he's unreasonably grateful that the tail itself is only spectral. As it is, it's thrashing behind him as he looks on at the scene.
Tim has just been left bloody and bleeding on the street by the little bird. His line was cut and Jason wasn't fast enough to catch him. He was barely fast enough to see the little Robin flit away into the night. The pit is hissing and spitting about its little kitten, about how it has to step in and take him to safety, take him back to the den where he can be nursed back to health.
Jason, despite his rational mind, is nothing more than instinct and want at the moment. A child is in front of him. A child who was left for dead. So he doesn't fight his instincts to prowl up to the prone body and gently pick them up by the scruff, slowly blinking his eyes at a nearby camera to show his good will, before he leaves back to his den with his kitten.
Tim wakes up slowly. There's a rumbling that he can feel in his bones coming from his back. He cracks open an eye to see a glowing green tail flicking slightly in front of him and now, more awake, he turns to see the unmistakable bulk of Jason. Tim lets out a little squeak and sees something shift in Jason's hair. He gently parts it to find a cat ear that flicks and elicits a grumble from Jason when he touches it before the larger man shuffles to curl around Tim more and continues to purr.
“Jason?” Tim can help but ask.
An eye cracks open slightly, a line of Lazarus green glow meeting Tim's gaze along with a sleepy “mrrup?”
“Jason, are you awake? What happened?” Jason opens his eyes and gives a jaw cracking yawn before he answers.
“Nothing you need to worry about. Just have a nap and you can call B later.”
“I do not know what happened to Drake. He must have disappeared after we parted ways.”
“Little D, why didn't you check in with him at least?”
“I was under the assumption that the Placeholder was able to take care of himself, I see now that I was mistaken. A shame.”
Dick isn't sure what to say to that, especially when Damian turns to leave immediately after. He sighs and turns to the computer to look over the footage of tonight to see if there are any leads on what could have happened to Tim.
Just as he wakes the screens up a message from Babs appears with a request to call. Dick wastes no time in calling.
“Hey Babs, what do you have for me?”
“Good news and bad news bird boy.” She says shortly. “We've got some of Tim's cowl footage from the night so we know who he's with.” She pauses for a moment.
“Babs, come on, that's got to be the good news, what's the bad news?”
She sighs,
“Just, look at the footage I'm sending you.”
Dick does so and his breath catches.
He watches as Tim looks up to see his line snap and the look down to find his back up gone before he makes contact with the ground in a sickening crunch. It goes from bad to worse when glowing green eyes enter the screen. Dick almost thinks that they're going to have to deal with a new creature before the figure enters the dim light of a nearby streetlamp. Dick stops breathing when he sees Jason prowl towards Tim with a sneer on his face. When he reaches the downed bird Dick watches in helpless terror as he reaches out and turns off the cowl footage. It's then Barbara speaks again.
“We have nothing else from his cowl since, but there was a camera there.” She sends another clip.
Jason makes his way to Tim, the same as before, and the footage continues. Jason picks Tim up in his teeth , and Dick can't think of any good reason for his brother to do that, before he blinks slowly and languidly at the camera and disappears out of frame. Dick takes a breath before he speaks.
“Please tell me we have something else. Tim was the one who mapped his safehouses and we don't have access to that map without his permission.”
Babs stays silent and that's all the answer he needs. Dick swears and barely resists the urge to punch the computer.
“Maybe Jason's trying to help?” Dick can't decide which of them she's trying to convince but she's doing a shit job either way.
Tim isn't sure how to feel about this. When he woke up the first time he hadn't properly had time to check the state of his wounds but now he has checked and he's all bandaged up. He really does just need to rest. That's not what has him so unsure though.
What has Tim so unsure is that he's sitting on the back of Jason's couch with a cat toy and playing with Jason . Jason's eyes are tracking the little bit of fluff and his spectral tail twitches before he lunges for it. Tim knows from the last few days that if he calls attention to what Jason's doing his brother will stop immediately and pretend nothing happened but it is quite funny to watch him. He's not bothered to contact Bruce or Dick since he told them about Damian cutting his line and he didn't believe them. He deleted all records of Jason's bases from the servers in revenge.
Dick doesn't want to say it but he's panicking. They went looking for Tim's body and didn't find so much as a trace of him until he got a message the morning after.
Damian cut the line. Recovering.
Tim’s probably alive then. But he must have seen wrong, Dick says as much. He gets a single message in return.
Don't come looking.
Nothing else goes through after that. Tim's clearly been taken hostage and Jason's lied to him. Dick goes to message Babs to see if she's gotten past Tim's encryptions and has access to the map. He gets a call instead.
“It's gone. ”
“What?”
“Tim's map and all of the data. It’s been taken off the servers. I can't access any of it.” Babs’ a little hysterical as she says this.
Damian is confident in his assessment of the situation. Todd was one of Mother's best, his truest sibling from his father's brood that was acknowledged by his grandfather. Obviously he took the Pretender to a safe location for torture.
Damian alights on a roof and waits.
For the first time in a few days the Pit isn't twining around all of Jason's thoughts and he's had a conversation with Tim. It started off with an explanation, yes he is kind of cat like now, no it’s not him, yes the Pit hitched a ride, yes the pit is sentient, no he would not like scritches. Only one of these is a lie. In the end Tim agreed to stay and even agreed to not tell the rest of the bats. So now Jason is back to patrolling Crime Alley. Everything’s fine, no one’s made too much of a fuss in the days that Jason’s been out of commission with the pit. Then he notices something on one of the roofs. The little bird.
The Pit rears its head again and Jason can’t resist the hiss that crawls its way out of his throat even as he moves towards the figure.
“Todd,” Damian greets curtly, “I am glad for your assistance in detaining the Pretender but I would ask for the honour of final strike as I was the one who first downed him.” Jason barely represses the hiss this time in favour of curtly telling Damian to get out of his territory and not return.
By the time Jason gets back Tim, the little menace, has gotten catnip from somewhere and Jason wakes up the next day with a few messages of Roy laughing at him.
Jason looks over at Tim, the Pit’s little kitten, and decides that it could be worse.