Decided there was enough interest to make a story of it. 'Uncertainty' should be five or six chapters in all; sorry for the delay.
Thank you so much to those who reviewed! I love all readers, but reviewers are in a special category. About half of you were anons, which has not happened to me before—I couldn't respond, but if you guys are back, feel the love.
Warning that Jason is not the most reliable narrator. This story is going to reference a certain amount of DCU trivia, but there won't be a test. The only vaguely important bit that some of you Bat fans might not have in your indexes is that Wally West and his wife had twins sometime around Infinite Crisis, which are the kids Dick mentioned last chapter.
Chapter Two: So Wrong for You
The sound of Jason's own humming covered up a lot of the fainter calls and crashes from away over the hill.
Closer at hand, it did a little less against the occasional crumbling of broken stone and the ongoing collapse of what had once been a red-brick elementary school, evacuated in plenty of time but still rather forlorn, and the grumbling of sullen crimson fires in the bellies of demolished alien craft. It didn't matter. No one was listening.
Jason was patient. When he wanted to be he was goddamn methodical. He could scheme. For all he was known for recklessness and rush, he could hold a stakeout position longer than Nightwing, or any of the replacements. If he decided he wanted to. There was no way Dickiebird's body was going to hold out longer than Jason's ability to focus.
If this bird was going to die in a hole, Jason was going to be there the whole time.
He caught himself working out how to convince Grayson's family that he hadn't been in much pain, and growled to himself, and kept humming, because fuck that. Where was backup? Was his stupid communicator not working, or something? Was there anything more useless than the Justice League? Maybe he should have tried to get a tourniquet to work from the beginning. Though if Nightwing lived through this but had one leg amputated, he sure wouldn't be thanking Jason for his role in it. On the whole, he'd take angry Batman over watching Grayson self-destruct because of clipped wings.
Idiot.
(And did you know…?)
Dick was still breathing when the tiny speedster from earlier reappeared over the crest of the hill and came to a dead stop, staring down at them. No longer in motion, this little Flash in red and white was the smallest sidekick Jason had ever seen, with a tousled mane of orange hair. Little lips shaped the word Nightwing, and actually, that was clearly a little girl.
"Get someone down here, kid," Jason shouted up at her, voice even more gravelly than usual. He was never humming again for the rest of his life. "Preferably a medic."
Kid Flash disappeared.
A few seconds later, Jason looked up from the acrobat's inner thigh to find himself loomed over by an adult Flash—he couldn't tell which one, though unless there'd been another freak aging accident or something, it was either West or the older Allen—and Superman. Of all people.
At least neither of them had jumped to stupid conclusions and punched him. Being punched to death by Superman for a misunderstanding would be a real capper to a messed-up life.
"Is either of you a medic?" he asked dryly. Didn't wait for them to answer. "Get something for a pressure bandage," he ordered. He'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy having a good excuse to tell Superman what to do.
It was Flash who disappeared, and came back a second later with an actual pressure bandage, so Jason nodded at Superman. "Get over here, I need a second pair of hands."
Neither hero argued. Jason and Superman got the dressing fixed tightly around Nightwing's thigh with minimal extra bleed, super-strength and super-speed coming in very handy there, while Flash investigated the mess of blood that was the belly wound.
"Some serious organ damage here," he declared heavily, and vanished again.
Probably West, then. Allen wouldn't have ignored Superman that completely. The younger speedster had never had his uncle's confidence, far as Jason could tell, but he wasn't great at hierarchies and got rude when he was focused on something, and he and Nightwing were friends. Nightwing had worked 'Wally and his kids' into his dying diatribe, even. Jason hadn't known either Flash well enough to tell by voice, but he decided that analysis was pretty solid.
He had time to stand up, rubbing disgustedly at the tacky blood on his sore hands and trying to dismiss the phantom sensation of a flagging pulse against his fingertips, before the Flash zipped back into view with an ungainly pair of canvass-wrapped poles swinging over his shoulder.
The patient's breath hitched slightly. Jason should probably leave.
"He should lie flat," Flash told Superman, unrolling the stretcher. "Transport's coming."
Superman nodded, and without need of further discussion the two of them lifted Grayson ever so carefully out of the small lake of his own blood, swung him a foot and a half to the left, and laid him out belly-up. Jason let them handle it, stood back keeping an eye out for the promised transport, and noticed the little speedster, who'd fetched such serious firepower when what he'd asked for was a medic.
She was standing even further back, halfway up a heap of brick rubble, staring at the slack way Grayson's head lolled against the stretcher. She was white as a sheet, almost as white as Count Bloodloss himself, and biting at her lip fretfully.
"Hey, kiddie Flash."
The little girl—was she even ten?—scowled at him with half her attention. "Nobody gets it right. Kid Flash is my second cousin. I'm Impulse."
"Whatever." That might explain the dearth of yellow in her gear. He'd never really paid much attention to the Flashes. "You're one of the West kids?"
He had all her attention, suddenly, as well as most of Flash's and a lot of Superman's, the former with that furious protective crouch that only parents got, which was the last word in hypocrisy, if the asshole was letting his little daughter flash around battlefields in spandex. Couldn't the warning Jason had given the world by dying in costume have been remembered a little longer? But no, Batman had gone and gotten another Robin in the saddle within the year, and everyone had done their best to forget.
Jason would love to pick a fight, but he didn't have the supplies or the groundwork laid to take on even one of these guys head-to-head, so his options if he tried would reduce to running away and hoping no one chased him, or managing to take the dying guy hostage. (He wasn't above taking child hostages, but kids that could move faster than a bullet and vibrate through solid objects weren't viable prisoners. Not without actually hurting them, and he had some standards.)
And then he'd be the bad guy again, and he wanted what he'd done today acknowledged, dammit, not just swept under the rug like everything else about him.
So he just looked from father to daughter, and jerked his chin toward Nightwing. "He said 'sorry about the birthday thing.'"
Impulse burst into tears.
In a literal instant, her father was at her side, leaving Superman to stand guard alone. Babbling in superspeed was apparently a thing Flashes did when upset, but Jason did catch a choked: "Like we care about getting to go to the circus if he—!"
"He's gonna be okay, Irey," Flash was promising, like an idiot, and Jason rolled his eyes and strolled back over toward Superman, who nodded an acknowledgement. Apparently that was what the cool superheroes did now.
There was a hint of wariness in his expression, which was pretty funny because Jason had no superpowers and had just gone to a good bit of trouble to save the same life the Man of Steel was currently guarding. Sure, he'd also just made a little girl cry, but it wasn't like he'd even been mean. Wasn't his fault she was worried about Nightwing. Was the boy scout expecting a sudden onslaught of Kryptonite?
"Jason," Superman greeted. Jason jumped a little. Almost invisibly, but he'd have seen. Dammit.
Shouldn't be surprised, really. Superman might not be the control freak Batman was, but he was a snoopy reporter with super-senses, and was on fairly good terms with the Bats. Dickiebird might have told him all about it, upfront. Or it could have been some aggregation of gossip; his resurrection wasn't exactly a secret Jason'd gone to any real trouble to keep, not for a while now.
"Clark," he returned drily. Addressing Jason that directly might have been intended to make any of several points, including a reprimand about mentioning the Flash's family name like he just had, but if Superman could call him by his first name, he could damn well reply in kind.
It took the big, calm man by surprise, a tiny recoil, and Jason felt a thrill of spiteful satisfaction at that. Hah. He'd never really weaponized all the insider information from his Robin days half as much as he could have, but he'd been one of them, once. He knew things like Superman's real name. Blackmailing him would obviously not go well, especially when you were already an escaped felon, and Jason wasn't evil enough to out Superman's secret ID just for the hell of it, but making him squirm could be fun.
Rather than answer, though, the alien abruptly lost interest in Jason and looked sharply down at Nightwing, features tightening. "Flash, are you sure about that medical transport? I can carry him."
Still cradling his little girl against his chest even though she'd dropped to a furious sniffing, clearly one of those kids who hated to cry, let alone be seen doing it, West looked over at Superman and then Nightwing, and bit his lip. "She said she'd be right here." His hand flashed up to his comm, and then apparently he heard something reassuring, as his expression cleared and he stood up, keeping only one hand on his daughter's back. Superman heard it, too, whatever it was, and his shoulders unbent very slightly, even as he returned worried eyes to Nightwing's chest.
"His heart?" guessed Jason flatly, watching the still, battered face. He knew Superman had no trouble distinguishing individual heartbeats, because Batman had once warned him not to try lying to Superman until he'd gotten better at biofeedback; it made sense the man was monitoring his loyal fanboy's heart at a time like this.
Dick continued to look pale and unconscious, but the pressure bandage seemed to be holding. There was no spreading stain on the stretcher. His breathing sounded…fine. No worse, at least. Shallow, but it had been like that for a while. Jason didn't have super-hearing, though. "Is it going?"
"Slowing," Superman replied curtly. Looked up, and that was all the warning there was before a sleek, triangular black vehicle rippled into view as it dropped some kind of cloaking device, sank out of the sky and settled onto the nearest moderately-flat piece of ground. Jason knew for a fact that there was an alien corpse being crushed under the landing gear, but it wasn't like that mattered.
The back-hooked shape of the wings were as clear as a signature. This would be the latest Batwing, apparently. Or some kind of cargo-hauling variant. Last he'd seen they were still using a tricked-out conventional jet. Big improvement on the old one-man minicopter, that was for sure.
By the time the hatch on the back had folded down, revealing a total stranger in bright purple scrubs maneuvering a gurney down the newly-created ramp, Superman and Flash had carefully raised the stretcher between them. The medic, a burly blond guy of maybe thirty, rolled his eyes when he saw that, and manhandled his gurney up into the ship again, where he bent over and locked the wheels into some kind of mechanism in the floor. Maybe this had been designed as a medical transport after all. Bat-medevac.
Flash and Superman kept Dickiebird very level as they got him up the ramp, and then laid him down on blond-in-purple's gurney with the kind of exaggerated care associated with ancient artifacts and newborn babies. Jason rolled his eyes. It might be justified, but seriously, Nightwing was injured, not made of china, and he was way too unconscious to feel pain. The blond medic and another, a skinny redheaded woman with a dark, solemn face, closed in immediately for a second, more professional round of triage. They did not look happy with his heart rate.
Superman hovered, both literally and figuratively. "I can't stay," he told Flash.
Of course not. Alien invasion was still in the process of being repulsed; of course Superman couldn't follow one hero to the hospital. That he even bothered looking apologetic about it was kind of ridiculous. "If anything changes…"
"I'll make sure someone keeps you informed," Flash promised. Superman nodded gratefully, tore his eyes off Nightwing, and jetted off to save somebody's day, with another nod toward Jason that he didn't bother to return. He could see why every tourist trap in Metropolis sold Superman bobbleheads.
Once the alien was gone, Flash stood on the ramp, at Nightwing's feet, for a second, fists as tight as his tiny sidekick's, who was now sporting a red nose and square-jawed mulish expression. He reached out a little, then seemed to feel the ridiculousness of trying to reassure someone who was completely unaware of you, and let it drop.
"I'll meet you there," he announced after a second, though it was unclear whether he was addressing the unconscious Nightwing, the medics, or possibly the Bat-hoverambulance. "I have some errands to run on the way." He grasped his daughter's hand and they disappeared in a blur. He'd probably beat the flying ambulance to wherever it was going.
"You coming?" growled the blond medic, without looking up from cutting Nightwing out of his Kevlar. He managed a startling resemblance to Batman in the delivery, and Jason realized he was the only one left the guy could be asking.
He opened his mouth to say no, then paused. Ground his teeth. Going over the hill and finding a few more aliens to kill sounded kind of appealing, but there were almost no sounds of violence left, and neither Superman or the Flash had thought this battle was worth their time. And if he left now, no one was going to bother to tell him if the asshole went and died.
You can have Nightwing, though. If you want.
Needed to make sure to press his claim, if it came to that. Though he was really perfectly happy with his helmet.
"Yeah."
The ramp folded up while he was still walking on it, and then the transport lifted off with barely a jolt.
"Blood type?" the redheaded medic demanded. She at least cut her eyes sharply toward him as she asked. There was already a thick needle in Grayson's arm, ready to feed fluids into him.
"Uh, O. Positive," Jason added, more than a little taken aback that she thought he would know. He did know, but only because he'd had a phase of trying to be just like Dick Grayson, and with the man making himself scarce in those days, his profile in the Bat-computer had been the most easily accessed source, with blood type listed right at the top with the other basic data. He'd discretely pumped Alfred and, occasionally, Bruce for stories and tips, but he'd been trying to be subtle. It wouldn't do him much good to pull off the resemblance if Bruce knew he was trying for it, he'd thought at the time. He probably had known, though.
And when Jason finally had stopped trying so hard, pretty soon he'd gotten himself suspended, and then killed.
"You sure?" the woman confirmed sharply, to her credit, even as she was opening a cooler compartment in the outer wall full of blood bags.
"Yes."
"Family?"
"Yeah," Jason confirmed, as he drifted around, off the patch of floor that opened into a ramp, behind the woman, where he could get his back to a wall. He had no idea what kind of medical establishment he'd just walked into the open arms of, but he knew the usual rules. Only family allowed to visit. Secret identities probably made that pretty hard to enforce. "He's my brother."
"Blood supply is limited," said the blond guy, who seemed to be packing chemical heat-packs around his patient's sides and limbs. (If they were worried about heat, they probably shouldn't have taken all his clothes, but access to injuries was probably important. Sadly, Nightwing's briefs were not patterned with anything hilarious; they were just blue. Jason could probably get about one dig out of 'blue.') The industrious medic didn't look up across the gurney as he asked, "Can you spare him some?"
"Sorry," Jason demurred. There was a sort of bench-shelf thing running up the side of the ship, only half filled with medical gear, and he took a seat on it, crossed his ankles. "AB-plus."
Redheaded medic grunted at him disapprovingly, as though he should have arranged events around his own conception to match the protein markers in his blood to Grayson's, and got the transfusion running. The gurney had a handy little IV stand that folded up out of the side to hold the blood bag and the blood-dark tube snaking down from it, along with the same kind of hand-pump bulb you saw on a blood-pressure cuff, which she squeezed several times both before and after she connected the lines to the arterial catheter. She then watched arm and bag intently, prodding the latter with a finger, which Jason guessed was a super scientific way to see how fast it was emptying.
Her colleague meanwhile bent over the gut-wound with a look of furious concentration, which didn't falter as the woman's sharp dark features snapped to the far side of the little ship at a sudden thrashing motion.
Jason watched with interest as she apparently deemed Dick adequately stabilized and hurried over to the other gurney, to convince a newly semi-conscious black kid in a blue mask not to try to move any of his three broken limbs, or aggravate the crushed ribs, and that being strapped down really was a medical necessity, and no, he was not being kidnapped. Really.
He could see why they'd wanted a ride-along passenger who knew their other patient, now. Superheroes were the paranoid type, and sedating them wasn't the safest, when so many had abnormal physiology.
Nightwing's breathing skipped a little as blondie tugged scraps of shredded Kevlar out of his gut with tweezers, but in a my-body-hates-pain way, not an I'm-dying way. Jason had heard a lot of dying breaths.
"Which hospital are we heading for?" he asked, over the argument from across the jet. (The kid had started coughing, kept trying to gesticulate with his bad arm, well-maintained dreadlocks lashing.)
From the comm-chatter he'd heard last time he'd been paying attention, civilian casualties had been kept very low, so there shouldn't be a massive run on medical facilities, but hospitals were a nightmare to secure, and anywhere multiple capes were laid out helpless might be a target for any number of hostile parties. He should maybe hang around just as a guard, because there was no way he was saving Grayson's life and then letting someone else kill him before he could cash in the favor.
"Caldera Epsilon," replied the blond man, which sounded like the name of no hospital Jason had ever heard of.
He settled back against the wall, propping his elbow on a defibrillator. "How long?"
The medic grinned to himself under his surgical mask, like there was a joke Jason wasn't in on. "Five, ten minutes."
Apparently he'd now done everything he could do for Nightwing's mashed organs, because he broke out some sheets of sterile gauze and began layering them over the wound, presumably to keep any more nastiness from getting into it than was already there.
Across the ship, the female medic gave up and sedated her teenaged patient before he put a bone splinter through a lung. "That was half his preoperative secobarbital," she growled, noting this on a tablet with a beep-boop, presumably for the benefit of a hospital anaesthetist. "One-fifty mil. If he's allergic, I take full responsibility."
The other medic had only just acknowledged this with a sharp nod when a hiss arose from the nearer gurney, and before Jason could stand up to see whether Nightwing had opened his eyes, a bruised hand, stripped of its glove, had jerked up in a clumsy grab at the front of the blond medic's scrubs, just missing as the man shied back.
"Where," Nightwing gasped. His hand dropped, its resources exhausted. At least it had been the one without the IV, although it now seemed to be trying to crawl across his chest to investigate the sharp pain in his far elbow, or possibly with the fully-formed intention of pulling the needle out. Waking up to confusion and pain, with no mask, no clothes, and a stranger in a surgical mask looming over him had not gone over well. If he'd had the strength, hero-boy would already have bolted. Not far, with the whole moving-aircraft thing, but the point stood.
"Justice League ambulance," the medic told him, round-eyed and well out of reach. "You need to stay still. Your brother is right here, he can tell you, everything's in order."
He motioned urgently to Jason, who grimaced to himself, but stood. Gotta maintain the cover story. Just before he leaned into Nightwing's range of vision he realized that there was no way his helmet was ever going to be a reassuring sight. Would the medics think it was weird if their patient thought his 'brother' was here to kill him? He didn't want today to end in his being shipped back to Arkham.
"Hey, Dickiebird," he opened instead, as soothing as he knew how to be, which wasn't very, putting a little pressure on a relatively unbruised spot on Grayson's left shoulder. No way the moron should try to sit up. "Don't freak out there, bro. You're okay."
Which, okay, blatant lies, but with no idea whether Dick remembered Jason being there when he passed out, or the way he'd seemed so sure he was going to die…yeah, popping up to calm down a guy you had a history of ambushing was a great plan.
Nightwing's face wrinkled in confusion, but the panic responses fell a little. "Jay…?" he hazarded at last.
"Yeah, that's me. Your pal Superman and your favorite Flash handed you over to these nice people that wear too much purple, so just relax before you start bleeding to death again or something."
"You were dead," Nightwing protested, apparently failing to absorb most of that. Which, seriously? Jason's voice had fallen like three octaves since he was fifteen, and they'd probably seen each other more since he'd come back than they had before, and the guy wasn't even on good drugs yet, unless there was something in the bloodpack. Which, unlikely. It was convenient, this confusion, but Jason was still a little…miffed. The space cadet tried to turn his head to get a look at Jason, but couldn't quite manage it.
Jason let go of his shoulder in favor of nudging Dick's face back into position with his knuckles. "Yeah, yeah. But I came back, remember? Don't move, dumbass."
"Oh," said Nightwing intelligently. His eyelids fluttered, those stupid girly lashes failing to manage their usual ladykiller routine with the swollen and blackening right cheek and eye. "Good."
"Not so much," Jason grumbled, but the bird seemed to have drifted off again. His color was looking a little less pasty, maybe. He wasn't quite as pale as gauze.
The blond medic was already checking both injuries for new bleeding. Probably heard patients be confused about stranger things than dead relatives all the time.
"He'll be fine," Jason said. "He woke up." The medic grimaced. Jason raised his eyebrows. (Not that they could see it, but just because it wasn't useful was no reason not to do something.) "That bad?"
"Talk to his doctor," was all the answer he got. "It's going to come down to surgery."
"For both of them," the woman added from across the ship. "Get a blanket over him," she ordered her colleague, irritated. "And watch the pressure bag, he'll need a new unit soon."
"That's a sixteen-gauge needle, isn't it?" demanded blondie, even as he rushed slightly guiltily to pull a blue fleece blanket out of another cupboard and lay it over Nightwing. His colleague confirmed that it was, while he pumped the squeezy-thing one more time and added some more chem-packs under the blanket. The redhead came over to get some blood out of cold storage for dreadlock-boy, who must have internal bleeding, and they argued briefly about rapid infusers, whatever those were.
Jason stayed out of the way.
Just as they had begun to subside to monitoring pulses and cleaning blood off skin with sterile wipes, a loud tone sounded, two disconcertingly cheerful notes. "Landing," the burly medic announced, clearly for Jason's benefit.
"Can we get a visual?" the redhead asked the ceiling. Apparently in response, the floor under their feet became transparent. Jason instinctively grabbed the nearest piece of furniture, which happened to be Nightwing's gurney. Well, that would have been really useful if the floor had actually disappeared.
He pretended not to see the medics smirking, and took advantage of the giant underfoot window to take in their destination.
They had hovered down into a massive cave complex, open only at the very top—limestone erosion caverns, had to be, although he didn't see any stalagmites. The geology was right for limestone caves, in these old hills, and totally wrong for volcanic activity, so maybe the name was meant to be simultaneously descriptive and misleading. The place was much smaller than any real caldera Jason knew of, given those generally formed when mountains exploded, but it completely dwarfed the Batcave.
Eh. He'd seen bigger.
Across the middle of the floor were spread a network of white cubes—a modular base, the fancy kind. Clusters of prefabbed rooms were linked by semitransparent tunnels that were probably airtight, and the vague forms of people scurried up and down them and across open stone, mostly toward the helipad directly below them.
"Like I said," grinned the blond medic as he did something to the tubing in Nightwing's arm with a tool that looked like a pair of wire-cutters. "Caldera Epsilon."
-The medics didn't pay much more attention to him as they prepped their patients to be rolled out of the vehicle—Dickiebird got a new blood bag—but did confirm that they'd been called in and the facility assembled stat about seven hours ago, as part of a League support protocol that now activated whenever the reserve members like Nightwing were called up. This might not be a planetary crisis by modern standards, but that meant that it could be handled without going into panic mode and letting the collateral pile up.
Jason figured he approved. Cape morale was still recovering from the massive one-two punch of Darkseid's final offensive followed by the super-zombie uprising. The spandex game was for suckers, but he was pretty sure the world would end if the supply of suckers ran out.
Plus dead heroes were actually really depressing.
(As zombies and not as zombies. He was the only resurrected person he knew of that hadn't been turned into a zombie, actually. Not sure whether he'd been beneath the Black Lantern's notice, or whether whatever had brought him back had left him outside their sphere of influence. Probably the first one. It wasn't like it took a magic ring to make him attack the Bats, after all, and they wouldn't be shocked if zombie-Jason did.)
As they set down, the support team he'd seen below closed in, dividing in two and dragging the two insensible patients off along with their charts. Jason stalked after Grayson.
Nobody objected all the way across the cave floor, or as they entered the nearest and largest cluster of prefabbed polymer blocks, which bore a discrete plate designating them 'Surgery,' or in the first interior room, which was small and empty and seemed to serve no purpose besides connecting the entrance to a long hallway-like chamber with doors studding one wall and a pair of swinging ones at the far end. Only as he tried to follow the gurney through the swinging doors did one particularly faceless member of the crew free himself from the diagnostic gabble to bar the way.
"I'm sorry," stated the weary man in the surgical mask and goggles, who clearly wasn't, as Nightwing vanished into the depths of the trauma facility and the masked kid rolled after him. "Only medical staff are permitted past this point. For the patients' safety. That's final."
Jason growled to himself. He would dearly love to punch this asshole, who clearly thought medicine was the only exhausting profession in the world, but he couldn't really afford to cause a scene, and he did actually grasp the concept of a sterile environment. Although this particular door clearly wasn't the boundary of that, and stopping him here was probably just a procedural thing. "Fine," he snapped, and the orderly-or-whatever was already disappearing through the double doors before the word was all the way out.
Jason folded his arms and leaned back against the wall, which took his weight without sagging. Back to the waiting game, apparently. Well, that was fine. He was good at waiting.
He hadn't been there five minutes before the same man hurried out the doors again, and did a double take at him. "What, you're still here? Get cleaned up a little, at least. The facilities are clearly marked over beside Operations. There are vending machines around the back," he added, looking sidelong at Jason, as he ducked through one of the four unmarked doors.
Jason slightly downgraded his mental asshole rating and went to find these 'facilities.' They were indeed clearly marked, a small huddle of white plastic rooms with the 'male' symbol on the left entrance and 'female' on the right. There turned out to be shower stalls, which Jason did not use, and toilets, which he did.
He stripped off his gloves and dropped them in the steel sink with the water running over them and coming away red-brown, and reached up to unclasp his helmet. He set it aside, splashed some water on his face, and only then took a moment to meet his own eyes in the strip of mirror set above the taps. It had been years since the green of the Lazarus pit had startled him looking back, but he looked more tired than he liked. Yay helmets.
He washed his face and hands, wrung his gloves out, and went around behind the bathrooms to find out that the vending machines were not so much vending as dispensing, free basic refreshment for the hard-working doctors and nurses.
Choosing between lemonade and coffee took a minute, but he'd last had a break right after League air support had come in a couple hours back—most of his allies had been avoiding killing anyone, which was sort of like voluntarily multiplying the total number of enemies, since a lot of them eventually got up again; lucky the invasion force had been like eighty percent robots—and hadn't slept since yesterday morning. He could go longer on less, but caffeine would help. There was something innately unimpressive about a man with a bottle of Snapple lemonade, anyway.
Not that black coffee in a paper vending-machine cup was exactly intimidating. He added a pack of peanuts and a very dry cinnamon roll, and leaned back against the whirring coffee machine to fuel up.
None of the several people who came through while he ate tried to engage him in conversation; he just copied Superman and nodded at them. Three nurses came together and huddled together a little closer to the cave wall, nursing coffees. Jason had a bad moment when a chrome-colored woman in a red bustier and incredibly shiny pointed helmet drifted through and gave him a funny look, like she was trying to place him. He played it cool and ate peanuts until she got her Coke and went away. Man, the Justice League was full of freaks. He put his helmet back on when he was done, but shoved his gloves through his belt to dry. It wasn't like this was a crime scene where he needed to avoid leaving fingerprints.
A very pretty brunette nurse in a hairnet cut across his path as he crossed back toward the surgery complex, and stuck her hands out with a challenging, expectant pair of raised eyebrows. "Guns."
"What, Superhero Hospital is robbing me now?"
"You can retrieve your weapons over there at Operations," the nurse replied curtly, not putting any particular twist on weapons to indicate she shared the Bat prejudice against firearms, "when you leave. In the interests of our patients' safety we have a firm weapons-free policy."
Jason snorted. Most of their patients were potentially lethal, even stripped naked. And how could there be standard policies for a field hospital in a cave? Probably a general Justice League medical-facilities policy, come to think of it. They'd need to select for the extra-ballsy in staff recruitment for that alone. "Do you keep out visitors who are weapons? Oh, did some orderly take a Green Lantern's ring, because I'm really sorry if I missed that."
The nurse rolled her eyes to heaven. "Unless the gun is welded to your hand, turn it in. We are not staffed heavily enough for me to stand here arguing with you."
Jason could actually respect that. Or maybe just the nurse; she seemed cool. Wasn't like he didn't have fairly large weapons stashes to fall back on if he wound up leaving without them. He handed over three guns and the most obvious of his knives, the big SOG he kept in a thigh holster. "Label them 'Red Hood," he directed, and got smirked at for his troubles.
"That is clearly a helmet," the woman told him as she turned away toward the single large cube beside the helipad with a sign reading 'Ops.' She hadn't checked that the safeties were on, but Jason had, so it should be fine.
"Oh, sure, take my guns, make fun of my mask," he called after her. "I see how it is."
"Cry me a river, kid," she retorted, and he laughed. If she'd been closer, he might have engaged her in argument about whether he was a kid or not, because seriously, she was like thirty. Maybe ten years older than him, at the outside. No one was going to peg him for a teen hero these days, seriously.
Actually, he reflected as he came up on the surgical module and kept an eye out for anyone who might try to keep him from loitering, it was pretty interesting that just being here was enough for the staff to consider him trustworthy, and outweighed the costume design, the deadly weapons, and the bloodstained gloves. Well, those actually had a medical origin, but the point was it felt kind of like being inside a termite mound or an ant's nest. You'd gotten in, so therefore you were clearly supposed to be here, and there was no reason to be suspicious.
Infiltration basics, yes, but Jason honestly couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten this much trust from strangers. On the other hand, they'd just taken his weapons, so maybe not that much trust.
Maybe shouldn't have given her that name; it was a matter of public record, after all, that the man known as Red Hood was a convicted murderer who'd escaped from Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and these people had all been vetted by the Justice League; not exactly the picture of moral flexibility, especially for the sake of non-members. He'd just have to count on that in-nest protective camouflage.
He pulled open the door to the surgical complex with an air of confidence that would hopefully outweigh his distinctly nonmedical outfit, took two steps inside, and abruptly recalculated. In the middle of the white vestibule stood a slight figure in a long white coat, whose corona of white hair swayed like thistledown as she turned to face him.
She had been old when he first knew her. She was older now. Not withering away, not yet, not weak, but moving with a certain care for aging bones that hadn't been there before. Thinly, she smiled. "There you are," she said.
I expect most of you know who that is. The rest of you can live in suspense. Or ask me and I'll tell you. ^^ That was meant to be Static earlier, cameoing with all the broken bones. The woman who got a soda and looked at Jason funny is obscure; if you recognize her you get mega-cookies, but she isn't important.
Some liberties taken with the properties of secobarbitals, but the emergency-trauma blood transfusion was pretty much realistic. Little Iris West II taking over the Impulse identity is a real thing from shortly before the reboot. She doesn't usually cry, but she doesn't often feel this helpless, either.
Okay, transfer over; this was by far the most characters you can expect in any chapter. A few of them will be back, but everyone introduced from now should be batfamily. Chapter three is mostly written, much more intense, and I like it best so far. This story will not be abandoned. I swear. Although this is enough of a tone shift from the original one-shot that if the reviews are few, I will totally assume it is hated, and be sad.
In addition to the love it/hate it/wtf? feedback, which is always delightful, would also like your opinions on Jason's zigzagging canon hair color. I have favorite retcons for most Jaybird issues, but are we seeing brunet or redhead under the hood, guys?
Oh, and my favorite thing right now? Reviews mentioning Dick by name get censored by ffdotnet. In my inbox, he is D*** Grayson. :] If you wish he was awake more…sorry. He's not well. Stay tuned for 'The Steel In Your Eyes,' in which Jason, unsurprisingly, has issues.