"Get the results back?" Jason asked, chewing distractedly on a mouthful of peanuts while he watched the brawl she'd had to maneuver her way around to get to the booth.

"No." She dropped sullenly into her seat, fixing him with the harshest glare she could muster. He seemed impervious for the few seconds it took him to realize she hadn't started up her usual string of chatter, then he still looked impervious, but it was at her and not the chaos at her back.

"What?"

"You could have helped me you know." She most definitely did not pout.

"With your nightlife? I woulda thought you'd be insulted." A bottle flew towards them and his arm shot out, knocking away from them to shatter against the ground some distance away.

"Some people can't afford to get arrested for brawling in seedy bars." She slammed her schoolbooks down on the table. The idea that there was at least one person who didn't think he had to jump to her rescue was nice, but she'd gotten beer spilled on her sneakers damnit,

Jason raised two fingers to the sides of his head with a pointedly blank expression. "Yeah, like fugitives."

"Jay, they think you're dead, you 'can't' be that paranoid."

"They've thought I was dead before." He wagged the 'bat ear' fingers, and then grabbed another handful of peanuts. "Twice."

"Yeah, hey I wanted to show you something." She didn't need to flick through the pictures on her phone, having saved the one she'd taken earlier the previous night in a separate folder. "If you're looking for a reason to come back to life again and wreak your undead fury, Dick vandalized your memorial."

Jason's disinterest quickly turned to what she might have called mild shock when she showed him the picture of his newly redecorated memorial, teal eyes widening while his mouth parted just a little. "Why?"

"He saw the little show you put on with the skittles you cheated me out of and, I don't know, thought you'd find it funny." She released the phone into his hands so he could get a better look at it.

He muttered something under his breath, and she watched his face settle into something like confusion, but softer. The same something that made it so hard to believe and the Jason Todd described on the batcomputer were one in the same.

"Dick and Bruce had one of those big fights about it that they think no one else notices." She awkwardly tapped her pencil against the tabletop while he continued to sit in silence and she thought that maybe showing him had been a bad idea. "I get you don't like them and whatever, but I guess maybe 'I' thought you'd think it's a little funny too?"

"Huh, preciate the irony." He gave a jerky shrug and slid her phone back to her side of the table. "Surprised they haven't burned that fucking thing to the ground after all the shit that went down last year."

"I told you they feel…" A pool stick came from her side, and she threw herself up against the tinted window to avoid. Not that there was any need, Jason was on his feet hand wrapped around the stick before it would have hit her anyway.

"Guys, seriously, keep the fight away from the lady so she can get her fucking homework done." He seemed more amused than anything, even as he flung the stick and it's holder the few meters to the bar.

"The 'lady' chipped ma tooth when I mistook her for Gleeson!" Someone yelled from the bar entrance where the brawl was still in full swing.

"She aint a four foot beatnick ya blind fucktard!" Jason yelled back, leaning over their table.

"Hey, Ima four foot beatnick with a pretty face!" Another higher pitched voice called and Steph peeked over the back of the booth to find the speaker, a short, scrawny man standing on top of the pool table, kicking at some guy who was trying to grab him around his ankles.

"Gonna be half as pretty if ya throw another bottle this way!" Jason jabbed a finger in his direction.

"N'aw, don't be jealous kid, we can't all look like this."

"Thank god for that." Jason snorted, and then turned his irate frown on Steph. "You had to come here on a Saturday night didn't you?"

"You're here, and it's so nice to see you making friends." She pressed a hand against her chest and sniffled loudly. "I never thought this day would come."

Another bottle crashed near there table, startling Steph onto a fit of giggles that almost had her tearing the papers she was writing on.

Jason shut his eyes, and took a breath as if to calm himself, then flipped the bird at the jeering brawlers behind her and shook his head, throwing his other arm across his eyes.

"Can't you bother you're boyfriend at his bar?" He groaned loudly.

"I don't have a boyfriend, and I like your bar, you gotta learn to share Jay."

"Huh." He filled his mouth with the last of the peanuts and stared at her cheeks bulging like a chipmunk. She stifled her laughter, doubting that even less angry Jason would like the comparison. "What're you doing?"

He snagged one of the papers without waiting for an answer. "Goodness fucking gracious, the fuck are you letting em cram into your skull there?"

"Rude!" She huffed, and tried to retrieve the paper, he just leaned back, his longer arms carrying her scribbly paper out of reach while he snatched up a pencil. "Jason."

"This whole fucking paragraph is just a string of conjunctions." He scowled, pencil moving across her page. "And, and, and, but, and…"

"I'm not taking grammar lessons from someone who says 'goodness fucking gracious.'" She mimicked his voice. "Give it back!"

"Oh my god, please tell me you run this through spell-check before you hand it in." He scratched out a whole paragraph. "And grammar check, and fucking English check."

She almost leaped across the table but, he just caught her head in one of his big hands and held her at bay.

"Jason!"

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.

The clacking made by Steph's typing was the by far the loudest sound in the clocktower, it's only competition the soft whirring of the any computers set up in the room and Barbara's comparatively quiet tapping on her own keyboard.

The older woman seemed absorbed as ever in her work, scouring the Arkham databases for Dick, pulling up months old satellite images of far off islands for Tim, and feeding who knew what information to Bruce. She'd been so busy lately that the ever present circles under her eyes had become her most prominent feature.

Steph felt kind of bad for asking for help with her own case – namely getting that freaking drug analyzed – that she was trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible while borrowing one of Bab's laptops to type up her various force-edited school assignments.

"What's got you so worked up today?" Bab's asked, sipping from a mug of coffee darker than Batman's soul.

Apparently she was doing as good a job of that as she'd hoped.

"Nothing." Steph replied, making a conscious effort to ease up on the poor keyboard. "Just school stuff y'know."

"Need some help?"

"What?" Steph blinked a few times. Looking up she expected to see the tired, barely there frown that had become commonplace on her mentors face over the past few weeks. Instead Babs smiled lightly, pressing her glasses a little higher on the bridge of her nose.

"I'm serious. I they can do without me for a while, and I could do with a break from all of this…" She waved her hand at the impressive work station, "… assassin, asylum stuff."

Most other people, Steph would have told to take a nap if they had the time for a break, but none of the bats were most people.

"If you want, but I already got a friend look em over and they're not due till next week." She moved her arm so Babs could have access to the loose pages. "Kinda having a hard time figuring out the order though."

Barbara arched an eye at the chaotic notes written all on top of Steph's original work and filling up every inch of the margins. Jason hadn't so much edited the paper, as he'd tried to rewrite the whole thing. There were even more notes she'd written over his, with much complaining on both ends that had culminated in her telling him to get his own homework.

Steph smiled at both the memory and her mentor's half amused huff.

They worked on the papers for little more than half an hour, Bab's only speaking to ask Steph about the parts that were too messed up for even her to read. Steph didn't have much more luck in decoding those parts herself, but she kind of remembered what she would have written and filled went with that.

Then the computer beeped, Dick's tracker reminding them that he was still in Arkham, still looking for even the slightest sign of what wasn't even there anymore.

"Did you know he stopped Bruce from killing The Joker once?"

Steph hummed, nothing surprising about that, then she glanced up and that was all it took to realize the woman wasn't talking about the little dot blinking on the screen off to the side.

"Jason. Something happened with Catwoman. It was when I was out of the game, so I never got the full story." She kept on typing, her voice maintaining that same clinical tone that Steph trusted so much when on patrol. "I just know he came really close, and Jason was the one who pulled Bruce off him."

"Oh, wow uh." Steph pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, not sure how to respond. Since when had 'she' been the one they dropped those kinds of bombs on? "Sure you're not mixing him up with someone else?"

"I don't know, maybe we've always been mixing him up with someone else."

Steph's chest felt tight, and she wished more than anything that she had something other than notes Jason had written to occupy her mind with. Words stuck to the back of her throat, even as her hands typed out gibberish and Bab's kept on working as though she hadn't just turned up the dial on Steph's already high octane guilt.

"Do you want him to come back?" Steph swallowed. "I guess Dick does, cause he's still looking and we know there's nothing left."

"That didn't stop you going back."

"But I never wanted him gone." The computer beeped a few times, signaling the completion of the drug's analysis, but neither of them paid it any mind.

"We didn't want him…" Bab's sighed, her fingers stalling above the keys. "It's more complicated than wanting him gone Steph. No one wanted 'that' for him, but…" She pulled off her glasses and pressed her palms into her eyes. "You were never around him before. It was…"

'You kiss your mother with that mouth? Cause I can mail it to her in a box.' 'You know you want a bouncy house.'

"We let ourselves blame a sweet boy for his own death, that's on us." Bab's hands went back to typing. "But, the Jason who came back, he was, like a nightmare, we didn't think there was any of that boy left until... God, you're so lucky you didn't see what they did to him in those tapes."

Steph was still kind of pissed they'd all watched those things like that, but bringing it up again wasn't worth the fight, and Steph didn't want to keep with the line of conversation anyway.

She ripped the paper out of the printer and scanned the contents. Lists of letters and numbers representing chemicals her eyes should have glided over uncomprehendingly. Only they were familiar somehow, so so familiar…

"Oh my god!" It almost felt like the paper was physically burning her hands, but she was powerless to drop it.

Bab's read the same thing on her computer screen, her face turning a chalky white as she called Dick up.

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Rain again, another of the violent storms that were so common in Gotham. He should have been inside, where it was dry and he wasn't putting even more strain on his compromised immune system, but lately only exhaustion and\or the thirty minutes he spent at the Dive most nights really kept him inside for any length of time.

Now that he knew the Bats weren't actively searching for him, he could afford to be a little lax when going about his day to day business.

Truth was he'd actually missed the rain, not in the way he'd missed the sunshine, but scent of water hitting the asphalt, the sensation of a chill wind seeping through his clothes and across his face, the sound of a thousand pattering raindrops and the violence of the thunder and lightning that cracked above his head.

He pulled the padded coat closer around him anyway, lifting his scarf to cover the lower part of his face a little more securely. Like it or not, a guy walking about grinning in a thunderstorm would turn at least a few heads and he didn't want any attention brought on him just yet.

There'd be enough of that when he finished his little errand.

A year ago, after his ill-fated trip through the multiverse he'd made the hasty decision to leave the world of shadows and secrecy behind, thinking he'd be content to let it all fall away. Then he'd just had to mess with his replacement one last time, and Bruce's message had happened…

Not thoughts he wanted to dwell on, and Talia'd had a point when she'd called him out on the fool hardiness of trying to sever all his ties to his part of that world and attempting to mold himself into another.

Under his coat, he could feel the corners of the envelope poking him through the thinner fabric of his shirt.

The store was in what could be called the middle class of Gotham. Not as high profile as something in the Diamond District or the CBD, but not quite as obvious as setting up in the Narrows or Coventry would have been.

Plain brownish paint, sticker covered windows just grimy enough to conceal what was inside while looking clean enough to make outsiders believe the owners gave a damn about making some money off the average Joe on the street.

There were plenty like it, not just in Gotham but all over the world, and Jason could say he'd visited a fair amount. He knew what to expect even though he'd never been in that particular one.

A derelict looking thrift store 'Old 'n Loved' written in chipped paint on the yellowing sign hanging above the entrance.

Inside it didn't look any different from the places he'd visited with his parents as a child on the few occasions they'd had the money. Bins filled with musty smelling clothes, trays of cheap old jewelry, shoes with blackened souls lined up like prisoners to execution.

A gaudily dressed old woman watched him warily from behind the counter and he smirked, making a show of inspecting the wares. He circled round, bending as though to inspect a pair of boots that smelled like their last owner had had a serious case of athletes foot.

Fuck, he was surprised Ras didn't bottle the stuff and use it as a WMD. He brought his hand up to cover his nose despite the scarf and turned to look at the winter coats. The coldest season was still a few month away, but with a glance at the cluttered alley he grabbed the largest one off the rack anyway.

In slow strides he wandered over to the jewelry display too, and felt a small, fond smile tugging at his lips. Cheap though they were, he remembered a time he would have been thrilled at scratching together enough money to buy one of the ugly baubles.

Plastic stones and soft, fragile tin, nothing special, but he stood there long enough to finally draw the woman's ire.

"Hurry up or get out." She ordered, jolting Jason out of his revelry and drawing his attention back to the envelope. He likely wouldn't need the papers with her, but he fished them out as he stomped over to the counter anyway.

-This and a pickup-

His Arabic should have been rusty after so long without use, but it came as easily as it had since his monthly check ups with Talia had still been a regular thing. He pulled down the scarf and dropped set the neatly scripted paper besides the coat.

Her scowl dropped instantly, replaced by the same welcoming smile a customer could expect at an old mom and pop diner.

She took the read through the letter and handed it back to him with a friendly. "Of course, right over here son."

He followed with a resigned set to his shoulders, if Talia had set him up for another pack of mercenaries he was burning down one of her caches, because he so wasn't in the mood for that kind of bullshit right about then.

The real shop was much more neatly arranged that the front presented to the public. Knives of all kinds lining the walls, some glimmering and others deliberately dulled to make them less noticeable. Weapons of a blunter variety, knuckle busters, staves, he even spotted a pair of escrima sticks.

The baubles displayed on the new counter were polished precious metals and stones that were well beyond what any street kid would ever see outside of mugging someone more fortunate.

She hoisted a duffle bag onto the counter, and slid it towards him. He didn't check the contents, better not to risk pissing her and whatever bodyguards she had lurking about off, but on impulse he did toss a silver hair stick set with an arrangement of bright yellow stones atop the counter as well.

The bag was no heavier than he would have expected it to be, and he threw the coat into the small waiting shadows of the alley where it was quickly snatched up. While he walked he idly inspected the stick, twirling it around so the stones reflected little dots of light against his hands in an almost familiar pattern.

By the time the rain let up he was almost back home and he'd unwound the scarf from around his face to drape loosely across his shoulders.

Only his quick reflexes saved him from being barreled over by someone who was huffing and carrying himself in a very specific way.

Thirty something, scruffy blonde beard, a glimpse of brown eyes when he turned to flip of the guy he'd have knocked to the curb. No recognition flashed across the guy's face, but it was a face Jason remembered instantly.

Scholz. One of the guards that had been stupid enough to steal his candy. Jason would have thought he'd have made some kind of impression on the guy seeing as how he'd nearly made the pervert piss himself for ogling Blondie, but he just brushed past and continued on his way.

Who would have though a losing a couple pounds, shaving properly and changing his hair would have made such a difference, huh?

Jason watched the guy scurry into a dilapidated basement parking lot, and tucked the stick into his duffle bag.

He had promised to get the guy for taking his skittles after all and it wasn't like he had anything else to be doing until he stopped over at the bar.

Making special note of the bulge under Scholz's coat that had attracted his attention in the first place, Jason trailed after the Arkham guard silently, likely former Arkham guard if he was heading where Jason suspected.

With all the hell that was being raised at Arkham since Jason's… release, he wouldn't have been surprised if a lot of personnel had cut their losses and quit while they still could, but joining in on the drug trade had to be hitting a new low for a lot of them.

The stale air carried the metallic rang of blood, decay and a number of things Jason really hoped he wouldn't find himself stepping in. His eyes were good, but in the dark he could easily miss something and he did not want to be scrubbing his boots when he got home.

Sheets had been hung across the pillars supporting the underground structure at regular intervals, turning it into a labyrinth of sectioned off 'rooms' and walkways.

Scholz navigated the place with the ease of one of someone who did so often. When things got too well lit for Jason to follow in the shadows he strapped his duffle bag to his back and took to the rafters.

Really, with all the vigilantes crawling around, you'd expect the criminal element to look up once in a while. Of course he didn't and Jason remained both undetected and with a perfect vantage point from which to watch the scumbag scurrying along.

The small smile lingered on his lips right up until he stepped around another pillar and noticed signs that there had been up until recently quite a few people being kept in the curtained off maze.

People he had very little doubt had not been there by choice. Bloody leather hammered into the ground and stains from the source of smells to-not-be-stepped-in were scattered throughout.

Jason's breathing only picked up for a second before he forced it under control. Not the fucking time for that shit.

The signs that place even existed were being efficiently cleaned up and loaded into waiting trucks by a dozen and a half men, some of which had very familiar faces, none of which he had particularly friendly feelings towards.

Scholz was being given the third degree by someone beyond Jason's line of sight, but the boy held his position, one hand pressed tightly against his mouth.

Within an hour it was like the labyrinth had never existed and the men were all herded into an actual room built towards the edge.

Jason couldn't see what happened inside, but the sudden silence was followed by way more gunshots than would have been needed to deal with that number of men.

Scholz walked out looking a thousand times less haggard than he had going in and climbed into one of the waiting trucks.

Jason let himself breath again after a quarter hour of silence, sagging against one of the pillars high above the filthy floor.

He didn't have the resources to tackle something like that, and no way in hell he'd get them before the whole thing spiraled out of control.

"Shit." He slammed the back of his head against the pillar.