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“Back the fuck up, ‘Wing. I've got fear toxin in me and I don't wanna kill you if I don' gotta.”
Here's the thing: Scarecrow's fear toxin is a pain to deal with.
It took years for Dick to learn how to fight through the paralytic terror and the vivid hallucinations when he was Robin, and he thinks it took Bruce almost as long. Most Gothamites who could afford it kept portable gas masks made by Wayne Industries in their backpacks and purses and bought filters for when Crane decided it would be fun to dump it into the city’s water supply.
But again, here's the thing: it's a freaking pain to deal with, because of how it target's your glucocorticoid receptors.
Fear toxin renders almost everybody useless, whether by stripping them of their ability to move, or by causing them to break down screaming, because it triggers your nervous system and causes excess cortisol to absolutely flood your bloodstream. Most everyone can do nothing but run from things that aren't there or curl up in a corner, and on rare occasions, the occasional person will try to fight anything that moves. Next to nobody is capable of proper speech, let alone communication with someone outside their hallucinations.
So, the question Dick has right now, is what the fuck has the Red Hood gone through to be able to talk to me despite being gassed?
Red Hood is standing there, clutching his hand to his chest with the other arm up to block a blow to his head that isn't coming, because nobody is there except Dick. Dick, who had been minding his damn business on patrol (slightly contradictory, but whatever), had heard a yelp. It was from Crime Alley, which was Hood's territory, but he couldn't just not help somebody who needed it.
And then, the person who needed it had been the neighborhood's resident crime lord and Dick had needed to make a choice. He was sort of regretting his choice, at the moment, with an antsy serial killer not twenty feet away.
“I'm not gonna hurt you,” Dick swears.
There's a sort of growl that comes from Hood's mouth that quickly boils up and over into a raw, angry scream. His posture reminds Dick of a cornered, wounded animal that wants to snap out at something with its teeth – frustrated, indignant, and scared. Hurt.
Further leaning into the impression of a dangerous creature, Hood leans forward like a predatory cat. The way he moves is slow and dangerous, but there's a jagged unsteadiness about his movements that makes him seem more unhinged than calculating. Whatever he's hung up on, it has him really twitchy, and Dick takes a step backwards. He wants to figure out what's wrong, obviously, but he also doesn't want to be on the receiving end of whatever rage bubbles beneath Red Hood's skin. Nightwing has seen the remains of child traffickers caught working in the Alley, and he'd like to keep all his limbs where they are, thanks.
“Hood?”
The Red Hood fucking flinches. “I said don't come any fucking closer to me! I'll kill you!”
Dick raises his hands, aiming to look passive. “I'm staying right here. Can you tell me what's wrong?”
“I can fuckin’ hear him. Mama said she had him killed for me, but I can fuckin’ hear ‘im anyways. He's back. It didn’t stick, or she messed up somehow, or- or I dunno, but I can hear him laughin’ right now and he's gonna come for you all next. I- I can't let ‘im take anybody else. My body won' move and I can't breathe and fuck Dick, I don't know what's wrong w'me right now.”
Hood was rambling, short of breath and visibly terrified, shaking where he stood with rage and a fear so base that Dick can't understand how he’s even standing at all. Dick stares. This is… bad. Fear toxin wouldn't explain how Red Hood knew Dick's secret identity, which was a whole other can of worms, but… God, he looks so scared.
“Hood, can you look at me?”
Hood snaps his head up to look Dick in the eyes, and Dick catches a dim green emitting from the white lenses of the helmet. Normally they were bright white, like printer paper, but a faint green glow came from them now, and Dick files that away for later. Maybe it's not fear toxin. Magic?
Hood keeps rambling, seemingly almost desperate to make Dick understand. “Tim next. Tim, and then Stephanie, and then Damian, and then you. One down, four to go. Two, then three, then four, then five, then one. Five birds with one crowbar.” The last sentence ends with a hysterical laugh-sob that wracks his shoulders.
Oh God. Red Hood knows everybody’s identities. If he knew the four of them, he almost certainly knows about Bruce, too, and this is really, really bad.
Dick nearly jumps out of his own skin when Hood let out another deranged laugh before he cradles his head in his hands. “Five suits and five bombs and five coffins and four new little nestlings to be pinned up in glass tubes like butterflies,” he rasps, and Dick has to wonder again how Hood is even half lucid.
(He ignored the part of his brain that snagged on the fact that Hood was talking about Robins up in memorial cases, the part of his brain that had looked over the autopsy report and noticed the blunt force trauma done with some sort of stick before the bomb went off. He ignored the part that asked how the hell Red Hood knew about the Cave's memorial in the first place.)
“Hood,” he murmurs carefully. “I don't know who you're hearing right now, but if someone is coming for us, I need to know their name.”
“I can't say it,” Hood croaks. “I can't say his name. I couldn't kill ‘im before even though I was holdin’ the lighter, and right now I couldn't stop ‘im if I tried, and he's coming for you, ‘Wing. He's comin’ and I can't stop ‘im.”
Hood's Crime Alley accent was significantly thicker than usual. Apparently, whoever he had this level of beef with was causing, like, every wall possible to crumble.
…Wait. If that was the case, maybe he could wheedle out some information unrelated to this. The voice in his head that sounded like Bruce was telling him to take advantage of the drop of defenses even though one wrong move could get him murdered here, but Dick never claimed to be the smartest person.
“Uh, Hood?”
“What?”
Best to start with a peace offering. “I know you're not likely to take it, but I have the most recent antidote for fear toxin, if you want it.”
“I'm not fucking stupid; I'm not injecting shit into my system from anybody who wants me in Arkham. Not- Not where that sadistic fuckin’ freak can get t’me. Besides, I took the antidote already. Shit jus’ takes longer t'kick in ‘cuz I ain't got Bat tech to synthesize the perfect formula.”
“I don't want you in Arkham,” Dick replied, appalled. That description, though… Hm. “I want you in Blackgate, or Belle Reve, but not- not Arkham. Arkham is for people like Joker-”
Red Hood twitches backwards as if moving out of the way of somebody taking a swing at him. Interesting. “Shut the fuck up,” he hisses.
Dick feels his eyebrows furrow. “For someone who took the guy's name, you don't seem to like him very much.”
“I took it as a fucking reminder, you moron. As a promise.”
Thank god this was working. “To who?”
“To the bleeding ghost of a fifteen-year-old boy who died begging for his dad's forgiveness in his last damn moments, Dick!” Red Hood hunches in on himself again and grips at his chest like he's trying to grab his heart to calm it down. “A promise to a dead child that nobody would follow in his fuckin’ footsteps, that- that there would be no more dead Robins.”
Distantly, beyond his hysterical internal screaming, Dick decides that commenting on Stephanie's unfortunate passing wouldn't be a stellar idea.
“You… You've seen him?” he whispers. He's not even really probing for information anymore, because- because if Jason is a spirit of some kind-
Fuck. He needs to focus.
“Regularly,” Red Hood answers, sounding defeated. “Sometimes he begs for help. Sometimes he asks me if I think any of what I do is worth what it does to me. Sometimes, he looks at me an’ I- God, ‘an I wish I could join ‘im.”
Dick blinks. That took a turn. “You what?”
Red Hood rests his back against the wall, looking wrung out and hollow. His adrenaline and terror look to have subsided, and, interestingly, his helmet lenses are their normal white again. “I wish I could lay down in the dirt and sink beneath it permanently. He deserves that much, at least.”
Dick is unsure if Red Hood was in some way accidentally part of why Jason died, or if he was just there that day, and survived the blast, after which survivor's guilt dug its claws into him, but… either way, he feels compelled to comfort the fucking serial killer, which means he needs to go home and sleep.
“Your antidote seems to have worked,” he says awkwardly.
“...Yeah,” Hood replies, sounding tired.
“Are you… Um.” God this was uncomfortable. “You doing better?”
“I'll get over it,” Red Hood dismisses. “Always do.”
Get over what? Fear toxin? Or a panic attack? Either way, that sentence… isn't reassuring, but Dick feels like he's pressed enough tonight. “I…”
Hood pushes off the wall and unruffles his feathers, straightening his jacket and holstering a knife Dick hadn't even noticed he'd been holding. “If it makes you feel better, he doesn't blame you.”
Dick snaps his eyes up. “What.”
“Nobody’s at fault ‘cept Joker and Batman,” Hood spits. “Even dumb dead little boys know that.”
Fucking hell. “He wasn't stupid,” Dick hears himself saying.
“He got himself killed. Ain't that what Bats tells all'a you?”
He scowls. “B is an idiot,” he replies. “No child who gets betrayed and murdered is at fault.”
Red Hood stills. “Betrayed?” he asks, voice low. He's back to sounding dangerous.
Dick hesitates. He feels like his reply here is important- like he's being heard and analyzed and his answer is worth something. Despite the context and the guy who might kill him if he answers wrong, it's sort of a new feeling.
“He left me a voicemail that I didn't hear until I got back. He didn't know Joker was there, and he might have been headstrong and opposed to feedback but he would never run into a Rogue fight by himself. Somebody there ambushed him or baited him or Joker got lucky or something but my little brother didn't ‘get himself’ killed, he was fucking murdered, and I- I was willing to-”
He stops. That's not something he can say.
“You what, ‘Wing?”
He can't. He can't. He can't give this information to someone so volatile.
He shakes his head. “It's not for you to know. Nor is it important.”
“Is it something the old man was bein’ an asshole about? You fuck up a protocol?”
That wording tingles something in the back of Dick's brain, but he ignores it. “I made a mistake. That's all.”
Red Hood freezes. “You-”
Dick blinks. “...Yeah?”
“You fuckin- You killed somebody? You?”
Crap. “How did you-”
“No, fuck that!” Hood cuts him off. “Fuck. That. Who was it? The hell happened?”
Well, he was screwed.
Counterpoint, his brain whispers. You were screwed already. He knew your IDs. He knew everybody’s IDs, but hasn't used them for anything.
Yet, Dick tells his brain.
But consider this: He put that together somehow. Maybe Jason told him, but more likely he put it together, and he'll put this together too. Better to hear it from the source.
Dick frowns. Hesitates again. Folds his arms and looks away. “When current Robin was captured by Joker, he… Joker started talking, once we caught up to him. Comparing how the two of them screamed, who struggled more. Said he had two down, one to go, and how he wondered if I could top the first one because the second didn't last as long before dying, and I- I snapped. I kept- I kept- just, kept hitting him, even after he stopped moving, after he stopped breathing, after his face stopped having a shape. I kept going.”
The air goes still.
Traffic sounds in the distance, honking of horns and skidding of wheels, but it feels distant.
Red Hood speaks quietly, and even through his disturbing voice modulator, he sounds… something in between angry and heartbroken. Scared. “Bruce did CPR.”
Dick just clutches his arms and hitches his shoulders higher.
Hood chuckles weakly, and the lenses of his helmet flash a brighter green than before.
Is Red Hood a meta?
“Of course," Red Hood rasps. "Of fucking course he did. Just when I think he can't get worse.”
“We aren't supposed to kill. He worried about my conscience, and I'm pretty sure he thought Superman would kill me.”
“No offense, but who fucking cares?” Hood asks. “Taking Joker out is worth Superman’s image. It's worth your one life. Fuck, it's worth as many as it takes, because once he's down, literally everyone else on the planet is no longer on a timer!” He throws his hands up in exasperation. “Fuck's sake!”
Dick snorts. “That isn't how B sees it.”
“Fuck B!” Hood counters. He sounds pissed, but unless Dick is mistaken, he's also on the verge of vaguely hysterical laughter. “That motherfucker! Somebody finally fucking avenges his dead son and he actively dooms literally the entire planet by undoing it? So much for fucking conscience!”
Dick snorts again. “I hate that I agree with you.”
Hood stops. Considers him. Deflates. “But not about anything else, huh? Not the drug lords or the way I manage my turf.”
“Well, yeah, no,” Dick replies, “but I see where you're coming from.”
“That's better than B's dumb ass can offer,” Hood murmurs. “Look, I can't stick around for long, but… it was nice talking to you.”
Dick stares. “What?”
“It's nice being reminded by somebody good that I'm not completely fucking insane.”
Hood stalls there for a second, but then in the blink of an eye he's way closer than should be possible and he's crushing Dick into a hug.
Whatthefuck-
“Um!” he asks, arms twitching upwards.
“Thanks,” Red Hood whispers.
“Uh- For what?” Dick asks, mildly uncomfortable and incredibly confused. “Killing Joker? Talking you through the fear toxin?”
“For being the way you are.” And then he lets go.
"Uh. Yeah."
He lets go, and starts walking towards the exit to the alley. His posture implies he's smiling when he turns around. It's weird. "Stay safe."
And then he's gone, leaving Dick to reevaluate reality.