'Always the Merry'

A/N: Sorry folks, this weekend was frenetic. Thanks very much for being around for the fic's birthday! Have a holiday chapter in recompense! (Note that opinions expressed by characters are not necessarily those of the author.)

Major party holidays were heavy work days for the street-level vigilante.

In Gotham, March seventeenth qualified.

"Now, Johnny, we've talked about this," Jokester sighed, keeping one foot on the mugger's forearm as he shattered the end of the confiscated wooden bat against the alley wall. "You can't just go around jumping vulnerable fellow citizens in dark alleys, no matter how easy they make it."

"Fuck you," Johnny Maltos gasped, going for what had to be a concealed knife, and Jokester shook his head in disappointment and shifted the angle of his heel enough to cause a stabbing pain.

"Listen," he said, when the startled shout faded. "You're not alone in the world, yet. Yer sister's still willing to put you up, and even a job with the Penguin is better than this—he's got a dental plan now, didja know?" Jokester gave a little chuckle, at Cobblepot's stubborn blurring of the line between benevolent crime lord and honest businessman, and then sobered, smiling crookedly at his captive. Who was twenty, with short blondish-brown hair, still showing a scattering of pimples near his hairline.

"I get that you're mad," he added, easing up with his foot and casting the broken bat aside, "the system's broken, yeah. But this lady never did anything to you. Just cuz she's dressed nice doesn't make her the bad guy, ya know? Don't we got enemies enough, son?"

For a second, Johnny bit his lip, his eyebrows twisting with an uncertain, internal kind of pain instead of the physical one. Then anger lashed over his face, instead, bare-toothed and narrow-eyed, and he grabbed under his shirt with his free arm, got the knife out, and went for the nearest ankle.

Jokester jumped out of the way of that, swept Johnny's arm out as he tried to roll to his feet, and hit a pressure point in his neck that made the kid collapse into unconsciousness. (He so loved being able to do that. Concussions could kill people.)

"Whew," he said, wiping at his forehead to acknowledge and dismiss the sudden burst and release of tension, and looked up at the fifty-something lady in the fur-trimmed coat who'd been backed up against the dead-end of the alley, obediently unhooking her earrings in terror, when he arrived, and smiled. She still looked petrified. "It's okay."

This reassurance seemed to have little effect.

"On your way then, ma'am," Jokester said politely, with a little bow that made his leaf-green coattails sway, offering her a hand over the unconscious form blocking her passage.

She clutched her purse to her chest and huddled in place until he sighed and cleared out of her path, into the recess of the side door in the left-hand building, so she could scurry over Johnny's feet and back to the sidewalk while giving him a wide berth. He sighed, and didn't bother to call anything after her.

"Tourists," said a disgusted voice from the blackness on top of the closed dumpster.

J regained his grin and turned his bright little flashlight on the place, illuminating a confidently slouching figure against the brick, brown leather coat and red fiberglass mask and a well-battered pair of boots.

"A local wouldn't've gotten grabbed that easy," the young Red Hood stated, shrugging away from his wall and strolling to the near edge, hands shoving deep into his pockets. He could pass for a smallish grown man now, in that getup, though he still had several growing years ahead of him. It was looking like he was going to end up big. "And sure as shit wouldn't've been afraid of you."

"She could be suburban," Jokester argued brightly, tucking away that last remark as the comfort it was meant to be—though really, if he got sad every time someone reacted badly to his face, he'd turn into one of those droopy clowns with the little black tear. "She was dolled up nice, maybe came down from Bristol."

The boy behind the helmet snorted. "Just as bad. I had a pair of morons earlier think Red Hood was some kind of gang. Didn't even try to get their wallets back. Kept them alive, that's more than they should expect, getting drunk in a bad neighborhood they don't know, looking that flashy."

"Aw, nobody deserves to get killed just for being stupid, Jay lad."

Jason snorted again, but nodded, conceding the point, and hopped down from his perch, landing just the far side of Johnny. "Pisses me off, though."

Jokester shrugged, and chuckled, and bent down to grab Johnny under one arm, to drag him over into the hidden corner between the dumpster and the end of the alley, where his unconsciousness wouldn't make him such an obvious target. Jason, without discussion, helped. He did kick the unconscious young man in the bottom of the foot once they'd moved him, though, presumably to take out a little of his worse-than-usual mood.

"So what's eating you, Junior?" Jokester inquired as they strolled out of the alleyway together, casual as could be.

Jason's face was hidden, but he still managed to look like he was considering whether to answer. Which was his right, hey. They detoured around an unwise partier puking up his guts and got a block away on Beacon street with Jason still thinking about whether he wanted to discuss his feelings. Finally, he shrugged. "I hate Saint Patrick's Day."

Jokester pulled sad eyes. He liked it. Everybody wore green, which was obviously an ideal fashion decision, and there were all those fundraiser all-you-can-eat dinners.

Jason did that thing where he emoted rolling his eyes so well you could tell even through the mask, and snorted again. "Don't give me that, you like every holiday. This one is basically just full of dumbasses. Pretending they're celebrating the Irish by getting falling-down drunk on Guinness and putting ugly leprechauns on things."

This grumbling seemed to have a slightly more proprietary tone than you'd expect, and J cocked his head. "You Irish, Jaybird?"

Jason shrugged. "My mom was. Well, not Irish Irish, but Gotham Irish. I was a Crime Alley kid, but she grew up over in the Cauldron. Catherine Keaney, was her original name."

Talking about his mother seemed to get easier the longer he went without being Talon, but it still cost him, and that he'd bothered to say it showed it meant something to him. Jokester came to a decision, and turned them right at the next intersection. "What say we call it a night, then. You want to hit a proper Irish joint that won't be up to its ears in tourists? I've got some friends down the Cauldron."

"Of course you have friends down the Cauldron," Jason muttered.

"Billy's having a bit of a concert in his pub, strictly no tourists."

"We went to the moon I bet you'd say, 'Oh, I've got a friend just over here,' and lead us up the side of Mare Tranquilis to this one particular crater."

J snickered. "So you up for it?"

Jason reached up and unlocked his helmet, shaking his hair back as he pulled it aside and let sharp March-midnight air strike his face. "Anything so long as I don't have to lay eyes on one more glittery green shamrock hat."

"All o' the hard days are gone…."

It was late, of course, and Billy and his band had gotten through the raucous hilarity and stirring nationalist ballads and into some gentler numbers when Jokester and Jason slipped up along the back wall, where the middle-aged lady tending bar glanced over and smiled.

J winked back at Mary Kate. She arched an eyebrow at Jason, who without his helmet was quite visibly sixteen, and J shrugged. He wasn't going to ask her to serve a minor alcohol, but if she felt like it, a little beer wasn't going to do significant harm to a kid who'd been compelled to spill people's guts for them, with a knife, if they resisted interrogation. And Jason definitely wasn't going to get drunk on purpose any time soon. He didn't trust himself enough.

He'd get there.

"We're all safe and warm here my friends; the hard times are gone, sure they won't come again…"

Duncan Finney noticed him skulking and threw a nod. J knew for a fact Duncan didn't think much of Saint Patrick, on the not-unreasonable grounds that he'd been an Englishman, or at least Britannian, and 'what has the Church ever done for Ireland, eh?' (Duncan was an authority on every British incursion into Irish liberty since 1155 AD. They were friends in part because J was willing to listen to him expound on them.) He waved back. Duncan's table was full, but maybe he'd steer Jason around for introductions later if he got into a friendly mood.

"So raise up your glasses and sing, the hard times are gone, sure they don't mean a thing…"

"Water's good," Jason told Mary Kate when they'd slithered near enough the bar for him to talk practically into her ear. She gave him a pint of lemonade, and she and J both laughed at Jason's I-want-to-be-annoyed-but-this-is-exactly-what-I-wanted-anyway face. J got a half—of Guinness, he was pretty sure, because they'd be out of everything else this dark by now, but he wasn't really a beer expert—and he and Jason claimed patches of wall, to sip and take in the show.

"…laugh at the darkness and dance until dawn, all o' the hard days are gone."

J elbowed Jason lightly, and gestured toward the little stage, where Billy and his two bandmates were playing their hearts out, fiddle and flute. Jason rolled his eyes all I'm humoring you, but he joined in the final chorus with the rest of the pub, and was definitely smiling, "All of th' hard days are gooooone!"

You'd never get anywhere, Jokester firmly believed, without a bit of positive attitude.

"For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance."–W.B. Yeats, 'Fiddler of Dooney'

A/N: ^^ The song in the last scene is not a traditional one, but a modern Celtic-folk composition popular with the Northeast Irish-American crowd, which I happen to find warm and fuzzy. 1155 was the Norman Invasion of Ireland, which went less well than their 1066 invasion of England, but did result in replacing the Gaelic Church with the Catholic one. Saint Patrick was a fifth-century Roman Briton; we don't know his actual name. Duncan is based on real people.

Gotham's history and geography generally read like a mashup of New York and Boston, both of which are major Irish-American enclaves, and the Cauldron is a canon neighborhood, appearing in Batman mostly in the context of the Irish mob. 9_9 DC Comics. Jason is of course not actually related to Catherine, but he doesn't know that. (She never had a background before Nu52, and I don't like that one, so behold my headcanon.^^)