Tim brining Jason into the cave had been kind of crazy and, depending on who you were talking to, more than just kind of. If Steph hadn't wandered down there looking for Cass, she would have never known about it. Jason must have known when she followed him out, just to make sure he wasn't going to set off some secret kill everyone command on the path.
When he went right for a rundown motel smack between Gotham proper and the suburbs, Steph willing to leave it alone. She had bad experiences with crimelords, as she was not going to be repeating that mistake again by trying to take Jason Todd on alone when all he was doing was breaking some already mostly broken furniture.
The he'd gone and bought a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and she wasn't going to be responsible for a bomb going off in Wayne Enterprises either.
And that was how she'd ended up in the ruins of the motel room with definitely bruised ribs, her staff held out before her like a shield, with a pissed off, bloody nosed Red Hood three feet away from tuning those into broken ribs.
She would have preferred her second 'death' hadn't been over cosmetics, all she could hope for was that something of the experience would carry over to her next life and she'd be all the wiser for it.
Figured that just two seconds after she'd resigned herself to her fate, Jason went and did the last thing – barring dressing up in a panda onesie and fighting crime as Pandaman, but he was crazy so that wasn't all that out of the question, now was it? – that she would have expected from him.
Jason sighed, his shoulders losing all their mid fight tension and sagging down. He dropped the knife he'd been twirling menacingly at her only seconds before to embed itself in the stained floorboards with a hollow thunk, then wiped the blood off his face and waved a dismissive hand at her as he walked by.
Not towards her as she'd thought he would when she readied to strike out again, but past her, for the only piece of furniture in the room that was still standing; a couch covered in glittering glass from Steph's very impressive window entry.
"Um, hello. Bat in your motel room here." Steph waved a hand at herself when he brushed the glass away and sat down. "Arentya s'posed to try and crush my skull or something?"
"Fun as that would be." What she could see of his smile past the arms he had obscuring his face was bitter, just the barest upturn of his lips, a sliver of his teeth showing through. "No. Arrest me if you want, I'm done."
"Done?" Steph blinked at him and slipped out of her fighting stance, brining her feet together with a crunch of glass, as she hugged her staff to her chest.
"Need a hearing aid there Blondielocks?" His voice was a little tight, tired, and she couldn't tell if that was because he was putting on an act, or because the act was what he'd given up on.
"Uh…" She waited for him to move, to laugh diabolically and slice at her with another hidden knife.
All he did was sit there, hunched over with his hands fisted in his badly bleached blonde-red-black hair, looking a whole lot smaller than he was.
Steph didn't arrest him
000
"What do you mean you didn't arrest him?" Oracle didn't so much as tilt her head in Steph's direction, too busy monitoring the various feeds scrolling by on her many screens.
Steph could have said it was because she hadn't had back up and being torn to pieces hadn't been on the day's agenda. She could have said it was because he could have changed his mind halfway through and wouldn't that have put any cops involved in danger? Hell, she could have even been petty and said if they wanted him in prison so badly, they should have given Tim the job since, when all was said and done, he was the one who'd broken Jason out of prison.
"'Cause he was just, it's not like he was doing anything." Steph said instead. Well, vandalism was something, but the motel could have probably used the insurance or whatever. That, and the abomination he'd made of his hair, she could have arrested him for that.
Oracle sighed and spun her chair around to where Nightwing was leaning near the single window in the room, looking out at the brightly lit city. "Dick, could you…? She trailed off, making a circular motion with her hand.
"I know you haven't forgotten that I'm in charge of an assassin child who may or may not try playing right of succession with Tim, who's talking about picking up the cowl, right?" He pressed the back of his head against the wall, and Steph began to wonder if there was any vigilante left in Gotham who wasn't just plain tired anymore.
"Well, someone has to do something about him before we have even more to worry about." Oracle said. "What, you're going to sic Tim on him?"
"I'm going to get Tim out of that suit, you have your own birds, why don't you…"
"Uhm, did none of you just hear me?" Steph asked, if they were going to call her in for some kind of meeting, she would have hoped they could have at least listened to her instead of having their little game of hot potato right here.
"That the king of being emotionally compromised is even more compromised that usual. We heard you just fine Stephanie."
Oracle pressed a thumb and forefinger against her eyelids, tipping her glasses from the bridge of her nose.
"Yeah well, how's he s'posed to be?" Steph asked looking between the two most senior members of the vigilante family she hadn't been allowed to be a part of for the longest time. "Didn't his dad die too?" Both turned their heads from her as though she'd lit a flare in their faces. They were supposed to be the ones who knew what they were doing, but they didn't seem particularly uncompromised either. "Would it be better if he didn't care?"
"I just don't have the time." Nightwing found a way to lock eyes with Steph, through both of their masks. "We just need him out of the way until someone does, so he doesn't do anything we can't overlook, we'll help him too, just..." he let out a deep breath, puffing out his cheeks like a blowfish as he did so, "not now."
"So can't someone just, like, watch him and make sure he's not stocking up on explosives or whatever?" Steph asked. "It's better than risking pissing him off by trying to lock him up, right?" Steph cocked her head at Oracle. "I really don't think he's gonna be all, 'you can arrest me', again."
"And that's why you should have done it the first time, we have too much on out plates to deal with this too." Oracle said, frowning at Steph. "There's no way we could do it via surveillance equipment or we'd be monitoring him already, and there is no one in Gotham who'd be willing to do it in person. Even with the risks, prison…"
"What if I did it?" Steph spat it out before she had the time to consider either what it was she was saying, or the consequences of cutting off the almighty Oracle.
"No." Nightwing said, just that, not even a second's hesitation to hint that he'd considered it at all.
"Why not?" Steph wasn't a kid, she didn't stamp her foot, but she did stand up a little taller and cross her arms.
"Because you've made it pretty clear you wouldn't be able to handle him." Oracle put her glasses back on and twirled back to her computers. "You can go home for now and…"
"Well you've all made it pretty clear you can't handle him either." Steph looked up to the lights set in the ceiling so she didn't have to look at their reactions. Damn, Cass was going to toss her out of a window. How rarely Steph saw Cass lately, that might actually have counted as a desirable interaction at that point. She thought she saw Nightwing quirk his lips, but it came and went too fast for her to be sure. "I mean, I did get him to surrender once, but t's not like that counts for anything."
"Fine." Oracle said, and Steph's eyes snapped back to her, Nightwing opened his mouth, whether to object or add something, but Oracle gestured for him to stop before he got it out. "You watch him, and whatever he does from now until we can deal with him, it's on you."
"Fine." Steph said, uncrossing her arms and refusing to turn her head from the woman's steely glare. Too deep in to back out now, not an unfamiliar position for her at all, she could handle watching someone just fine.
"Now go home, and get some rest." Oracle said. "While you can."
Almost as soon as Steph turned to leave, Nightwing closed the distance between him and Oracle, and their burst of indecipherable harried whispering followed her out.
Yeah, Steph thought, pulling up her hood and stamping down the relentless burning in her chest with every step, she'd handle this just fine.
000
The laundromat wasn't very quiet that time of week, Jason wasn't sure he could handle crowded right then, wasn't sure what he'd do if there were other people around him right then. Other people like the girl who thought she was in any way hard to spot in the café across the street and a pawnshop over.
She'd been following him for a couple days now. He'd been wryly amused at first, had thought, would Bruce take full responsibility if Jason bled them both dry right then, if he'd hidden their corpses in the dust of one of the deeper recesses of the cave?
Then he'd realized what he'd been thinking, and he was almost afraid that Bruce actually might have, him and his stupid self-righteous fucking…
After that, the girls attempt at being covert in trailing him wasn't amusing anymore, not at all. Every time she closed the distance between them by even a little, he'd seize up. Every glimpse of purple around the corner made him almost glad to not have a gun on him.
Wayward and self-destructive path… Jason had never thought of himself as self-destructive, he'd never been wayward, he'd known what he was doing, he'd so carefully planned it out, all of it. He'd set thing's in motion that Bruce would have never allowed himself to dream of, he'd been focused on the path he'd set for himself, and he'd been determined to see it through. How did that meet any definition of wayward?
To follow one's own capricious, wanton or depraved inclinations.
The other Bruce hadn't done that. Hadn't called wayward, hadn't called him broken, or told him he'd needed therapy. He would have understood, he had understood what kinds of sacrifices that needed to be made, and he'd made them. His earth had been a fucking paradise. Jason can still remember the rush that had come from crushing that Joker's fucking skull with a concrete block, he can hear the crunching, can feel the shallow vibrations it had sent up through his arm. The other Bruce would have understood, but that Bruce had been dead by then, because the Joker…
Jason took a handful of his clothes and jammed them into the washer with a lot more force than was necessary. He didn't need to have hours of his life wasted with one of Alfred's old war buddies, talking about shit that didn't matter anymore. Just because Bruce thought every decision Jason had made in his life had sprung forth from one thing that happened before he'd even…
He didn't need it. What he needed was to get out there and prove that, that he knew what he was doing and why he was doing it.
The girl was still there.
Jason bit back a curse and tried to focus or the rhythmic turning on the machine, the colorful blurs that were his clothes turning clockwise then counter-clockwise, then clockwise, then counter…
"Shit." He bit out the curse under his breath, slipped in a coin to start up the next machine, then stomped outside. Next time he needed a laundromat he was going to one with no loiter worthy spots within seeing distance.
She didn't react overly when she spotted his approach, didn't jump up or pull out a weapon when he planted his hands on her table.
"The fuck are you trying to do here?" He growled down at her.
"I'm s'posed to watch that you don't destroy any more private property, or public property, or just y'know, preferable don't destroy any property at all?" She looked at him over the top of her newspaper, bright blue eyes peeking at him above a headline detailing the hijacking of a bus that had left half the passengers at the mercy of Gotham's medical system.
"Watch." Jason sneered. "And what would you do if I did? You gonna poke at me with your stick again, call for backup? Think they'll get here before you're another smear on the sidewalk?"
"Rude, I got lots more'n a stick." Her voice was more or less even, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the paper, and he could feel her scanning him for potential weapons. As though he'd need any for something like this. Just more proof that they didn't know what they were doing, didn't see these kids as anything but expendable cannon fodder. "Your hair looks kinda awful just by the way."
"Yeah, you got a stick and your sparkling personality." He said, keeping his voice low and refusing to acknowledge her jibe. "Dick send you cause they run out of sidekicks they care about? What, you get a nice pat on the head for following you fucking orders? A fucking funeral package? Or maybe you just never had a damned choice in what they send you to die for."
There was a couple at the table barely a couple of meters away, watching them, not close enough to hear what they were saying, but close enough that they could tell the interaction was less than friendly. They probably though that the worst thing that could happen here was a mugging, that of they were unlucky enough, there might be a kidnapping or something. Not that if Jason had a weapon on him, he might have done something much, much worse, because those fucking bats couldn't deal with their paranoia themselves.
Jason pushed of the table, and pushed the images of blood and the smell of ash and the hollow, wet sound the Joker's head had made when Jason had caved it in with a cinderblock out of his head. He didn't need therapy.
"In case you're wondering." There was the scraping of her chair and Jason froze. "No one told me to do this, I volunteered."
He swallowed the dry feeling in his throat, and went back to the laundromat. He didn't need… He needed to get away from everything.
000
She lost him. Steph took a few hours off from watching him to give him time to cool off and maybe not look at her like he wanted to shove her into a meat grinder, and she lost him. Every place she'd seen him head to, every security feed that could have picked his departure up. He'd even left his damned laundry in the washer, and the owner had made Steph take the stuff when she'd tried to search it.
She couldn't find Jason anywhere. Maybe she shouldn't have insulted his hair, or maybe she should have tried a better fucking hiding place.
"Monitor the Red Hood." She groaned and pressed her head against the cool glass of the laundromat. Damnit, Oracle was going to tear her apart when she found out about this.
