Gotham was a city as easy to love as it was to hate. Over the years many people had referred to it as the greatest city in the world and Jason was inclined to agree. It was home to obscene pockets of wealth, amazing tourist attractions, and produced some of the most brilliant minds the world would ever know.
Sounded great to any outsider, but Gotham was great on the flip side of the coin as well. There were areas so poor it was like being in a third world country and crime rates so high trying to climb over them would likely take you past the ruins of Krypton.
It was this dichotomy of rich and poor that created the most twisted, insane monsters that the human mind could conjure up and some that it couldn't.
One thing was for sure, it wasn't the kind of city you took something you wanted protected, and Jason prided himself on never doing things by half.
The news droned on in the background while he cleaned the grit out of the rifle he'd used the night he'd gotten the kid away from the Joker. He had a few teachers who'd have killed him for leaving the care of his weapon for so long, if any of them were alive that was. Watching over a near dead kid was as good a reason for negligence as he'd ever had. But now that he was reasonably sure the kid wouldn't keel over any time soon, there was a lot of work to catch up on.
"Joker's on the news." The kid said from where he was nestled on the sofa in front of the TV.
"Always is." Jason grunted, reaching back to dip his rag in the cleaning oil on the kitchen counter he was leaning against. That soon after a breakout it was more of a surprise when the media and straw psychologists weren't making the local news a circus.
"What are you going to do if he breaks out again?" The kid kept his eyes on the screen as he said it, but the comment suddenly got him Jason's full attention.
"I'll deal with it." Jason set his cleaning supplies aside and put away the equipment he wouldn't be using.
He got made a quick circuit if his safe house, checking that everything was secure twice over before he got his gear together. On his way out he paused at the door meaning to say something that he forgot in the time it took him to open his mouth. The kid caught the motion and cocked is head, waiting.
"Don't forget to take your meds." Jason left, putting the apartment on lockdown. Satisfied that nothing would get in or out he let his mind focus entirely on his work.
Sionis, the colossal pain in the ass that he was had gotten it into his head that the Red Hood was out of commission, that it was the bats who'd taken him out no less. That had messed with Jason's plan in all kinds of ways. Speed was key to getting things back on track, and there were only two things that sped things up in Gotham; money and fear.
Normally both came easy, but no one was scared of a dead guy. Keeping his head low hadn't done much to quell those rumors, so Jason was going to spend all night doing what he did best; putting scumbags in their places. Judging by his monitoring of the police scanners the past week, many of those places would be six feet under.
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The night air wasn't crisp, or fresh by any means, not in that part of Gotham, but he still regretted not being able to breathe it in properly through his helmet as he slunk through the shadows to is next target.
Frank Roux had been a small time crook, the smallest of small time crooks at that. He'd just been getting started clawing his way up the criminal hierarchy the first time the new Red Hood had appeared. Needless to say, Jason's methods had made an impression and Frank hadn't tried terribly hard after that, it didn't make him a decent person though, just a coward who was a little smarter than the other cowards.
Decent people didn't dive into the drug business first chance they got and start lacing their product with hallucinogenics.
He lived in park row, half an hour's drive from Jason's current safe house. It was as dim there as some other parts of Gotham were bright, only a few streetlights flickering in the darkness and no one having the money to waste on nightlights while they were sleeping.
Jason was near silent as he pried open the latched window and slipped into the apartment. It was messy, grunge having seeped into the cracked tiles. He took note of the half-filled cardboard boxes lying around. Frank's product had been popular, earning him enough money to get himself a nicer place and he'd already started moving.
Soft snores filled the air, leading to where the scrawny man slept. The bedroom smelt even worse than the rest of the room, stinking worse of sweat and mold than even some of the places Jason had slept in when he'd been on the street.
Intimidation tactics, as inefficient as they were in the long run, had been Jason's friend in situations like that. Without a word of warning grabbed the front of Frank's ratting shirt and hauled the man out of bed, tossing him onto the cluttered floor.
"What?!" Roux leaped to his feet, ripping open the draw in his nightstand and reaching in for his hidden pistol.
"No need for that Frankie." Jason slammed the drawer shut, the other man's wrist snapping when he didn't move it out fast enough.
"Hood!" He cried, clutching his injured wrist to his chest as he looked up at the imposing figure Jason struck in the dark.
"I thought my rules were clear, you scumbag." Jason picked the man up again, bringing him close enough that he could smell the scent of cheap alcohol even through his helmet. "You know what happens when you break those rules."
"I heard you was dead." Not the smartest thing the guy could have said right then. Jason bashed his helmet against the man's head hard enough to break the skin.
"I look dead to you?" He drew back his fist and added a shiner to the trail of blood dripping off Roux's head.
"No, no, course not!" The man blubbered around the snot and tears running down to his mouth. "I didn't mean no harm, just added…"
"Something that made someone's mother dive off a bridge after buried treasure." Jason really wasn't in the mood to hear whatever story the dealer came up with. If he took a chance like that at the first whispers that Red Hood was dead, how much further would he slip when Jason couldn't get to Gotham for months at a time? Lucky for him Roux was the type of person who could be scared straight with a little effort.
"Was the Mask what told me mix it in the dope, I swear I wasn't gonna keep doing it, just till…" Rpux kept talking, but Jason wasn't listening.
There was a soft beeping at his ear. He'd deactivated the silent alarms in all but two of his safe houses, having locked his equipment in his most secure location.
"Shit." Jason swore and dropped the man, disappearing before Roux had even finished his rambling please for mercy.
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Jason left the apartment for around six hours every second night, and two hours every three days. Tim took his meds three times a day, and Jason's excursions always took place around the time the boy was hazy from the overly strong pain medication.
Tim wasn't stupid enough to believe Jason wouldn't notice if he didn't take the pills, and Tim didn't want to risk an infection cropping up because he skipped the antibiotics. The food didn't taste of any additional drugs, but there were plenty that were tasteless. Up till then, Tim couldn't just not eat the food Jason provided, drugged or not he needed the strength.
That night, however he gave the cooling bowl longing glance and left it balanced on the shoddy table. He was feeling better than he had since he'd woken up in Jason's locked down safe-house, and with Jason's patrol only just starting, it was might have been the last chance he'd get to escape.
Jason's security was good, but it was obvious the part of it that kept Tim inside had been put up in a hurry and didn't quite fit with the ones that kept other people out. It had been frustrating for a while, staying on the sofa all the time, but in his condition his only other option had been the bedroom, and he couldn't observe the rest of the apartment from there like he could the couch, even if the added privacy would have made working out a plan easier.
From his position he'd watched, Jason's comings and goings, where the man went when he got home. Being injured made it hard for him to get much done in the small windows of time where he knew he wouldn't be found out. Hours of work and still, the best plan he could come up with was leaving one of the text books Jason had brought him near a window.
The lock on that window wasn't anywhere near as complex as the others, and though Tim had a niggling doubt that Jason was unaware of the flaw, he didn't have any other feasible plans.
He stood slowly, careful to keep his weight on his good leg, good being a relative term. A wave of dizziness washed over him and he caught hold of the side table, toppling the bowl sitting on top of the rickety piece of furniture. It dropped to the floor with a loud clink, spilling the soup and soaking my thick socks in the stuff.
There went any chance of changing his mind and eating the soup. By the time he'd hobbled over to the kitchen he was on the verge of changing his mind about taking some of the painkillers.
He got the butter knife he'd stashed under the sink before beginning the arduous task of going all the way back to the other side of the apartment. Every step sent stabs of pain shooting through his body, he told himself he'd had worse and pressed on.
There was a metal grate covering the window, blocking any view of outside. The text book was opened at it's base, the tips of a few pages sticking between the grate and the wall. It would have been easy to miss, especially when the only other person in the apartment was supposed to be too weak to move around.
Tim wedged the knife into the tiny gap created by the pages. It wasn't much, and forcing it in was hell on his splinted hands, but after half an hour he'd wedged his make shift tool firmly under the grate and began to pry it up.
The locks creaked in protest when he exposed them, sweeping his knife between their fragile workings and severing the myriads of thin wires that kept them in place.
By the time he was done sweat was dripping from his neck and he'd looked back at the pain killers on the table more than once. The breath of fresh air he finally pulled into his lungs after what felt like forever made up for the effort in the end.
There was no time to savor his victory yet, he had to get at least a few blocks away before he could begin to believe he'd succeeded. He pulled himself through the window and onto the rusty fire escape with shaking arms, wishing he'd had the forethought to find a pair of shoes when he tucked the butter knife into his wet socks.
'No time.' He looked around the area to get his bearings. The apartment was somewhere in the bowery, his head was still too fuzzy to make out exactly where, and right near the top of the building. Tim's heart sank when he looked down at the stairs he's have to climb down for at least part of the way. He didn't trust his weak limbs to support him on the ladders, and a fall from that height would have killed him.
Taking a deep steadying breath he put one foot in front of the other and tried to focus on only that. He passed by the windows of other apartments, many lit up with the warm glow of TV sets and chattering people. All it would have taken was a few raps on one of those windows, asking someone to call the police and Bruce would have known where to find him right away, but doing that risked putting any innocent civilians in Jason's path.
The alley floor he got down to was covered in sharp pieces of glass that dug into Tim's feet, staining the socks with droplets of red. The boy barely noticed as he stumbled along, using the walls to support himself until he got to the end.
For an area as densely populated as the Bowery, there weren't many cars, but plenty of people crowded the sidewalks. Some gave Tim curious glances, but none tried to talk to him or offer the half-dressed teenager help. It was a common sight, and the people were too tired to care.
In some twisted way, Tim was glad he looked like hell. It was perfect camouflage in an area where Tim Drake would have stood out like Joker in a library. 'Joker.' Tim shuddered, wrapping his bare arms around himself in an attempt to warm himself up.
He kept his eyes peeled for a phone booth, or a wandering police officer, Bruce had to have put out some alert by then, and all he had to do was be noticed.
"Hey kid." A gravely voice called out to him from the shadows. Tim pretended not to notice, okay maybe there were some people who would notice him because he was a scrappy looking kid alone in the bad part of town, but those weren't people he wanted noticing him.
He felt more than saw the small group of men stepping in behind him, would have felt them shadowing him from a block away, not that they were trying to be subtle about it. Some of the looks he was getting morphed from concerned to outright hostile when he got to close.
No one wanted to get involves, Tim didn't blame them. It was his job to protect those people, not the other way around.
He was in no shape to fight, or even to run. Hell, just walking was taking all of his energy. There was no flash of blue police uniform, no glimpse of Batman's shadow in the sky. He kept on scanning the streets though, hoping he'd spot a phone booth at the very least, or a traffic camera for Barbara to pick him uo on. He kept hoping right until the hand grabbed hold of his shoulder.
"Hey kid, I was talkin ta you."
Tim was spun around so fast he lost his balance, falling into a puddle of something that definitely didn't smell like water.
"S-sorry." Tim's stutter wasn't completely fake as he looked up at the men. They were all of them at least as tall as Bruce.
"Sorry?" The one who'd spoken first chuckled, putting on a smile that sent ice shooting through the boy's veins. "Not sorry enough Mister Drake."
Okay, so apparently he hadn't been blending in as well as he thought he had. Tim swallowed, his hands balling into fists at his sides as he looked around one last time for some sort of surveillance equipment. The men moved nearer, Tim's hand ghosted towards the butter knife in his sock for all the good it would do him.
In a few seconds it didn't matter, he was hauled off the ground and tossed unceremoniously into the nearest alley. Burning pain shot through the left side of his body, jarring his immediate thoughts from his mind while his weak fingers held on to his useless weapon.