Chapter Text
Huh, Jason thinks, pulling Menagerie’s drug-tipped dart from his leg. This one may have been a mistake.
“Boss!” one of his goons, Charlie, cries. “You alright?”
“Oh, shit, she got you!” another goon, Sarah, yelps.
“Yeah, yeah, can it.” Jason waves off their concern, tucking the dart into his pocket. He can take it back to headquarters with him and analyze the chemical compounds there. If he’s lucky, he’ll find some way to reverse it before it kicks in. If not—well, he’d rather not indulge the thought. He’s seen what happened to the civilians Menagerie darted. “I’m fine.”
Above them, Menagerie cackles. “Oh, what will you be? I’ve always wondered, you know. A snake? A rat? A spider?”
Jason raises his gun and fires. The bullets ding off of the metal behind Menagerie as she ducks around a nearby vent stack. He takes a step to the side to follow her and nearly goes down as pain chews through his joints. Charlie catches him, keeping him upright through sheer force of will.
“Boss,” he gasps. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Go after her,” Jason snarls, glaring at both of his goons. He shoves a small black box into Charlie’s hand. The only reason Menagerie had been able to dart him was distraction: Jason had crouched to fire a tracker into the underside of her vehicle, and she’d lodged a dart through the tiny gaps in Kevlar near his knees. They’d both gotten what they wanted—her, tracked; him, drugged. “Follow this. Hurry up!”
“Hood,” Sarah says, hesitant.
Jason shoves Charlie towards her and locks his knees to stay upright. “An order is an order,” he says, his voice harsh and grating through the mask. “Or have you forgotten that? Go find her and stop her. I’m heading back to base with the dart.”
Charlie and Sarah trade a look, and Charlie finally nods. “Right,” he says. “You know where we’ll be if—if something happens.”
Jason watches as the two of them clamber into their getaway car, tires screeching against the pavement as they peel out after Menagerie. As soon as they’re gone, he lets himself drop to his knees. Pain blazes through him, so fast and forceful he’s nauseous with it. He drags himself towards the wall, breathing hard. Involuntarily shakes roll through him. His hands spasm. The drug is already working—Menagerie must have upgraded the formula, damn her to hell.
Another wash of pain ripples down his spine, and he turns his face against the wall. The metal of his mask scrapes hard against brick. His skin itches and crawls, and he digs his fingers into the asphalt beneath him. Warm, brackish water seeps into the gap between his boots and the armor plating of his legs. A second spasm seizes his hands, and he tries desperately to press his palms flat. It doesn’t work. His fingers contort.
When the first bone breaks, he bites his tongue until it bleeds.
Then breaks the second, and the third, and the fourth, and he thinks of—
—a crowbar, a cackling clown, A or B or C or D—
No one came then.
No one comes now.
Jason Todd reshapes himself alone, as he always has.
When he regains consciousness, the world has lost color.
His mask, which sits beside him, is a murky brown color. The nearby weeds sprouting through cracks in the pavement are dull gray instead of green. He squints, to no avail. The world remains bleaker than usual—which, for Gotham, is truly saying something. The place barely has any color to begin with. Robin had been a burst of rare brightness against its skyline. So had Red Hood.
Jason lifts his head, the muscles of neck and shoulders and back and—well, his everywhere, really—aching as he does so. He looks down and sees a pair of paws. They’re black, big, with short dark nails and rough pads. He blinks at them. They do not disappear. When he tries to twitch his fingers, the paws move. They’re his. The paws are his.
Jason considers losing his mind, but dismisses it as a waste of time.
This is what Menagerie does, after all: she turns people into animals and whisks them away to what can only be the world’s weirdest zoo. Jason had expected it the moment her dart struck him. He’s not surprised. It’s just an adjustment, that’s all, and it’s an adjustment that is certainly going to make finding a cure more difficult. Not that it matters—Jason is used to doing difficult things.
With a groan, he heaves himself to his feet—paws?—and stumbles a few steps forward as he adjusts to his new center of gravity. He glances back at his body: black fur on a long, sloping spine that ends in a drooping tail. A dog, undoubtedly. He’s not sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t something so mundane. He would have liked to be something revered and dangerous (a tiger, maybe?) but had expected to be something lowly and street-smart like a rat. A dog had never once crossed his mind.
Jason Todd is no one’s dog.
Still, this form does make things a bit easier. He won’t draw any suspicion traveling across the city—there are plenty of strays in Gotham, after all. He would know. He feeds enough of them, and funds a local shelter in Crime Alley that’s always full to bursting. He just has to avoid the dogcatchers (the unfortunately well-funded dogcatchers) and he’ll be fine.
Turning back towards his pile of abandoned clothing, he paws through it until he can find the dart that struck him. He picks it up in his mouth and sets it aside, then carries the rest of his clothing to a nearby dumpster. He stands on his hind legs—a ridiculous feat of balance, now—and shoves them inside, followed closely by his helmet. He’ll come back for them if he can, but the last thing he wants is someone stumbling across his tech and getting ideas. Once his uniform is hidden, he picks up the dart and trots towards the alley’s exit—only to freeze, hackles raising, when Menagerie waves at him from her place next to an overturned trashcan.
“Hello, Hood,” she says, grinning widely. “A doggy, huh? How unexpected. I would be disappointed, but—my god, it’s you. Do you know how long I’ve wanted a hero in my hoard?”
Joke’s on her—Jason’s no hero, and never has been.
His lips peel away from his teeth. A growl starts deep in his chest and rolls up his throat into the warm, humid air between them. He keeps his grip gentle on the dart, careful not to shatter it with the instinctive urge to clench his jaws.
“Tsk,” Menagerie says, lifting her dart gun and taking aim at him. “Good dogs don’t growl.”
When she pulls the trigger, Jason lunges to the side. The dart shatters against the pavement behind him, and he races past her legs. But he’s slow, clumsy in his new body, unused to the way these muscles wrap around these bones—she sweeps a leg out and trips him. He goes tumbling over his own paws, crashing into the ground and yelping as his nose strikes the pavement. Her hand sinks into his scruff and hauls him backwards, and he drops the dart to whirl around and bite her wrist. Blood bursts, hot and bright, over his tongue.
Menagerie shouts and strikes him across the face.
Jason recoils, slinging his head. Blood flies from his teeth. He crouches low against the ground, muscles bunching as he prepares to lunge for her throat. He’ll rip it out. He’ll tear her head off. He’ll embody Barghest, the Black Shuck, the Grim. It would not be the first time he reached up from hell and dragged someone down with him.
Menagerie lifts a gun.
It is not a dart gun.
“Do you know,” she hisses, “what happens to dogs that bite?”
Jason knows it well.
He will not let it happen again.
To run would be to die—he’s too close to her, and she’s too good of a shot. So he does the only thing he can think to do and leaps towards her once again. She pulls the trigger. The crack! of the bullet shatters between them, making Jason’s ears flinch back against his head. He feels the force of the bullet as it bites into his shoulder, first. The pain doesn’t register until a second later, when he bulls through Menagerie’s legs and knocks her to the ground. Then he splays his jaws, sets his teeth around the heel of her dominant hand, and rips it off of her wrist.
Menagerie screams, and Jason lunges for the dart gun. If he can steal the entire thing, with full darts still inside of it, he can take it back to base and have his goons analyze it. That would surely be better than the empty dart he'd dropped. His goons are bumbling fools, most of them, but Tonya might be able to figure it out. The computer is already set up. It just needs a sample and someone to run the proper program.
As he stretches for it, something hard slams into his side.
Jason yelps and skids across the pavement, leaving a streak of blood in his wake. His shoulder burns fiercely. The bullet is a hot pain lodged deep inside. He twists his head to look at his assailant, and he sees one of Menagerie’s own goons sneering at him. The man scoops up the dart gun, propping it on his shoulder, and pulls a Glock from his belt.
Fuck this shit.
Jason bolts, racing up the nearby stairs of a rickety fire escape. He bursts onto the roof of a ramshackle apartment building, running across it as quickly as he can with his injured shoulder searing pain through him on every stride. He springs from one roof onto another, and slides down the slope of it to the gutter. He crouches, braces himself, and jumps down into the street. When his paws hit the ground, agony bursts from his shoulder into his neck and spine. He staggers several steps and uses the momentum to force himself into a run again. He weaves through several allies and side streets, intent on losing Menagerie and her goon, and only slows when his straining lungs demand it. He’s fairly certain one of them collapsed when the bullet struck.
Panting hard, he slouches onto his haunches in a dim alleyway between two piles of reeking garbage. His legs tremble beneath him. Blood darkens the fur of his shoulder and leaks steadily down his elbow towards his paw. White froth edges at the corners of his mouth as he fights to catch his breath. Rather involuntarily, his front legs slide out from under him and he lays sprawled on his stomach.
Time passes in strange shapes as he slips in and out of consciousness.
Some indeterminable amount of time later, someone says, “Oh.”
Jason’s eyes slide open. A boy stands at the end of the alleyway. The bright colors of his Robin uniform blur together in shades of gray and brown. His eyes are obscured by the domino mask he wears, but his lips purse into a familiar frown.
Damian.
Oh, if that isn’t just Jason’s goddamned luck.
With a grimace, he pushes onto his feet again. Blood, tacky now, sticks unpleasantly between the asphalt and his fur as he peels away from it.
“You’re hurt,” Damian says. His usually brusque voice has gone soft and quiet in a way Jason’s never heard before. He crouches, making himself small. His cape pools behind his heels. “It’s okay. Let me look at you.”
Jason wavers in place, his head low. He’s tired—a feeling undoubtedly compounded by significant blood loss. He needs to get back to base, but who knows if his goons will recognize him? Sarah and Charlie might, if they’ve returned, but the others will only see a stray dog. A few of the softer-hearted among them might whisk him to the shelter, or to a vet. He’d allow it; it beats bleeding out on the streets.
What he will not allow is Damian getting a hold of him.
Damian’s always had a soft spot for animals—something Jason has tried to encourage in him, despite the distance that persists between them. But letting Damian get close to him like this is way too weird. Plus, if he manages to get Jason back to the Manor, there’s—there’s no way Jason can leave, and Jason has to be able to leave that place. It’s a non-negotiable.
“Shh,” Damian says, scooting forward and extending a hand to Jason. “It’s okay, buddy. I’m not gonna hurt you. I can get you some help.”
Jason flattens his ears, drawing his head up. He doesn’t want help from any of the Bats. He won’t allow himself that debt ever again.
Damian fishes in one of his pockets, pulling out a small bone-shaped treat. He tosses it towards Jason, who is surprised to find that he can smell it even from a distance—salty, peanut-y. His stomach clenches hungrily, and he is reminded that he hasn’t eaten since breakfast that morning. He’s never been one to turn down free food, either, but—it’s a dog treat.
Then again, Jason’s currently a dog.
With a huff, he snaps up the treat. It crunches between his teeth, and he’s pleased to find that it tastes like peanut butter with none of the unpleasant stickiness. He swallows. His tail wags until he wills it to stop.
“Good boy,” Damian says, a small smile pulling at his mouth.
Jason scowls, though with this face it is more a baring of teeth and wrinkling of muzzle.
Damian tosses another treat towards him in placation. “Easy,” he says. “It’s okay. C’mere, buddy.”
Eerily silent, a hulking figure appears behind Damian.
Bruce Wayne—the Batman, in all his glory—now stands between Jason and the only way out of this alley. Jason feels the fur along his shoulders and spine begin to lift, his eyes narrowing and his breath shortening. “Robin,” Bruce says, his voice as unreadable as ever. “What are you doing?”
“This dog is hurt, and I’m helping him,” Damian announces, as though this is the most obvious thing in the world. Perhaps, to him, it is. Damian has never been able to see in shades of gray.
Bruce’s eyes flick over Jason, unimpressed. “We have to go. Red Hood isn’t answering his comms.”
Jason’s ear twitches. They’ve been trying to contact him? Why?
“The dog has been shot,” Damian says, his jaw set in the familiar, mulish expression he must have inherited from Bruce. “We can’t simply abandon him. He’ll die.”
“We’ll come back for it,” Bruce says. “We can take it to the emergency vet on Eighth. Right now we need to see to your brother.”
Brother, huh? Jason thinks, surprised to hear Bruce referring to him as such. He’d long thought any familial bonds between them had been broken beyond repair, and that they tolerated him on missions merely because he was a weapon they would be foolish not to use.
Damian straightens with a testy click of his tongue. “Fine, but let us hurry.”
Bruce nods shortly and grapples out of the alley, leaving Damian to follow after him. Before he follows, Damian fishes out a handful of treats and spreads them out on the cleanest, driest patch of pavement he can find.
“Stay here,” Damian commands him. “I’ll be back soon.”
With one last regretful look at Jason, he scales the wall and vanishes.
Jason abandons the alley, but not before scarfing down each treat.