Notes: This chapter fought me.
Tim could have cut the tension in the Cave with a batarang. And not even one of the new ones.
With Bruce in costume at the main console, Tim set up shop at one of the side monitors and looked through the open files. In sweatpants and a hoodie, with a can of Zesti sitting on his left and a bag of chips carefully hidden in a pocket, Tim had his phone sitting on his thigh and was getting near-constant pings from Steph.
Not that he could blame her. Crime Alley was her beat, at least until Hood showed up and started kicking over every anthill he could find. He hadn't come after Steph—hadn't directly fought any of the Bats except for the helicopter encounter—but the thought lingered.
Tim hadn't been on patrol tonight. With the Red Hood doing his level best to initiate a gang war and fight most of it single-handedly, Bruce and Dick were handling most of the legwork in Gotham for the moment. While Steph couldn't be ordered around by mere Bats, Tim kept up a steady-ish stream of text messages that encouraged her to stay well out of range of anything that looked like a showdown. Her costume was way less kevlar by percentage than his, and they both knew it. No one wanted to find out the hard way if Red Hood used armor-piercing rounds.
In the Bats' mostly-private group chat—run by Babs, which certainly helped security—Tim kept Steph informed and distracted by turns.
S: so what do i have to do to get an upgrade around here
R: what kind of changes are you looking for?
S: idk maybe more pouches?
R: you have more pockets than i do
S: that sounds like a you problem
S: pockets for life
R: someone's life, probably
R: sooner or later you'll have something that weighs enough to seriously hurt someone
S: like a brick? :p
Shaking his head a little, Tim flipped from the groupchat—from which Dick had been silent long enough that he was probably coming back to base for the night—to an encrypted file transfer app so Steph could receive a form he'd made for brainstorming armor modifications. Tim kept rigorous notes about his own equipment, but he wasn't the only person who worked on the specifics. He also wasn't the first Gotham vigilante to keep iterating on effective developments. If Steph wanted to think about changing things seriously, then having some kind of guideline could only help.
S: holy shit how big of a file do you NEED
R: this is the abbreviated version
R: i could send you an example with my notes
S: absolutely not
S: yet
S: let me think
Three dots appeared below Steph's messages, then disappeared, then reappeared again. She was probably just keeping her finger on the keyboard to keep him from thinking he was being ignored. Assured that Steph would send him keysmash when and if she felt it was necessary, but otherwise do what she wanted, Tim left his phone on silent and turned his attention back to the night's problems.
It was Gotham. There were almost always problems.
Usually, the problems didn't make it necessarily for Alfred to check Bruce for a concussion. Tim missed watching Bruce scowl his way through the exam because he came down from the manor a little later, but he avoided commenting when he noticed the mood.
According to the cowl footage that played on the central screen an hour ago, Bruce's fight with the Fearsome Hand of Four hadn't gone smoothly. Jumping into the melee to keep Red Hood alive wasn't something Tim felt he ought to criticize, but it had all gone sideways real quick after the initial few exchanges.
First, Suzaku joined the fight once the assassins flushed him out of his hiding place. While Tim couldn't understand the dialogue between him and Red Hood, Bruce had gone and helpfully inserted subtitles to make sure Tim could keep in the loop. Every exchange between Suzaku and Red Hood was just further confirmation that they were solid allies, if not friends. Even if Suzaku deferred to Hood less than he did to his sister when they reunited.
The "Robin's a snitch!" exchange still made Tim wince for Suzaku's sake. But at least Suzaku was safely hiding behind Genbu's shell and out of the blast radius of whatever Red Hood wanted to do next.
Which, apparently, briefly included taking a bullet for Batman. Not an actual bullet, even—it was almost impossible to be sure what an energy blast might do before it hit something, and most forms of standard-issue armor wouldn't disperse the force and heat safely. Still, Red Hood's armor let him survive the blast, even if he was momentarily stunned. Bruce's recording still let them all know, on the record, that Red Hood was the one being hunted.
And when Bruce got knocked for a loop a little later, his cowl cam still caught Suzaku holding off both remaining opponents single-handedly. If Tim didn't already know Suzaku was a combat-trained metahuman and a little hellion to boot, that footage would've cinched it.
Unfortunately for Gotham, the Suzaku-and-Genbu reunion was nowhere near as important as the conversation after every assassin was defeated and lying around the parking lot in various states of painful injury.
Tim couldn't get it out of his head if he wanted to.
First there was Red Hood's voice, irritated by whatever expression was visible with Batman's cowl in the way, saying through his helmet's modulator, "You should be happy I didn't kill any of them. They're all assassins."
And Bruce, unwilling to back down from an implied challenge: "And what are you?"
"I'm cleaning up Gotham more than you ever did."
It wasn't a real answer to the question, even on Tim's first viewing. It didn't clear up the motive behind that thesis statement. Red Hood was the exact kind of person who usually got compared to GCPD officers pushed way too far. Dangerous enough that they, too, needed to be put in Blackgate for everyone else's safety.
As always, Bruce hadn't been impressed by a murderer's rationale. "You're stealing territory from Black Mask and killing anyone who gets in your way."
"Black Mask is just a part of the plan."
And based on Genbu's testimony from a little further on in the footage, and what she'd said during her interviews before this point, Tim was willing to accept that Red Hood was taking steps toward a concrete goal. There was an endgame.
"'Plan?' You're becoming a crime lord."
An effective one, too; Suzaku's account of Red Hood's actions and his casual treatment of him indicated camaraderie, even after—no. Suzaku wasn't bilingual. He wasn't from Gotham, or even this world. Hearing Batman argue with Hood in English about crime-fighting philosophy meant absolutely nothing to him. Tim scrapped that theory.
"Yes! You can't stop crime, that's what you never understood. I'm controlling it. You want to rule them by fear. But what do you do with the ones who aren't afraid? I'm doing what you won't—I'm taking them out."
Jesus. The worst part was that Red Hood clearly believed it. Zealots didn't stick to their own stomping grounds forever.
Tim's phone screen lit up, so he scooped it up to check if Steph had made any progress. Instead, she'd written something else.
S: hey did you see where G and S2 went
S: S2 didnt show tonight
In their very simple chat code, "S2" was Suzaku's moniker until such time that he coughed up a different name. Given the time Suzaku spent with Hood and probably not socializing with normal people, Tim wasn't holding his breath. Genbu hadn't bothered either. Tim's R—for Robin, of course—was more of a courtesy. There wasn't anyone to confuse him with.
R: B saw them off R: security says they made it back to G's place pretty quick
R: N went to talk to them after R: G didn't feel like translating everything
S: is N still doing that? R: think he's on his way back now
R: but it's been quiet
S: well lmk if you need something
S: im just going to stare at this blank template until my eyeballs fall out
S: or I fall asleep
R: it'll be fine
S: optimist or liar
S: which are you?
R: why not both?
Steph left him on read after that.
Tim used both the Batcomputer and his laptop's piggybacking functionality often enough to know exactly what cases Bruce was working on at any given time. While in the Manor or the Cave, the connection was the next best thing to instantaneous.
Bruce had two cases open at the moment.
The first was the ongoing conflict between Genbu (and Suzaku) and the League of Assassins, which didn't look like it'd resolve itself. While they'd managed to hide the siblings from the League's attention and, frankly, their harassment, no one really thought that situation would last. Genbu could fight off any thirty ninjas solely because of her powers, but that didn't address the root problem. Or the sheer number of ninjas. The League needed to have its motives sussed out and invalidated, and thus far Gotham's gang chaos was causing too many distractions. None of Dick or Bruce or Babs or Alfred wanted Steph and Tim to be forced into the field, but that left them a bit short of "all Bats on deck." The Birds of Prey would have to be called back from their mission and Batwoman updated before they could make any kind of progress on the League case.
(Tim wasn't looking forward to what would happen when Genbu and Suzaku got a real case of cabin fever and decided to strike out on their own, and he didn't think anyone else was, either.)
The second was the Red Hood. And his DNA was spinning through the Batcomputer's analysis program and had been since Bruce came storming back into the Cave. Reviewing footage didn't make numbers like that crunch any faster.
Tim frowned at his screen, tucking his phone away. Bruce was running the sample against practically every criminal database in existence, but—
The rumble of the Wingcycle was audible all the way from the entrance of the cave.
Tim straightened from his habitual curled-over typing position, turning his chair around and leaving his laptop on the desk. Dick had gone worryingly silent since completing that interview with Suzaku, and he'd refused to transfer his recording to Babs or the Batcomputer by just piggybacking off the Wingcycle's connection. The wireless signal, apparently, wasn't secure enough.
Ominous.
Dick parked his motorcycle on the big turntable used for getting various Bat-vehicles to their assigned spots. The Wingcycle didn't have one, and clearly Dick didn't plan to stick around long enough to cram it into a stall with its Robin and Batman counterparts. Instead, he ripped off his helmet, ran his glove just enough through his hair to get it out of his face, then headed for the Batcomputer with excess adrenaline flowing through every movement.
Tim got to his feet faster than Bruce did, though he did wheel his chair away from the center console quickly enough to avoid a potential confrontation.
Good, because Tim hadn't mentally prepared himself for a mediation. It would be round thirty and counting. They'd confined the disagreements to places out of Tim's earshot once they realized he could and would corner them separately later. Dick and Bruce's ceasefire was always a little tentative when a case got under their skin. Tim neither wanted or needed to rehash yet another Bat-fight about secrecy or caseloads or whose diet was more of a train wreck.
Dick peeled off his mask using the tiny tube of solvent sitting on one side of the desk, then set it aside. Then he fished around until he found a cable to connect the mask's recorded data to the computer. Unsurprisingly, the file was large enough that the Batcomputer coughed up a progress bar, to go along with the DNA analysis one.
"Any discussion with Suzaku participating took place in Japanese," Dick said as Bruce went for the keyboard. Without the mask, it was clear that Dick was barely fighting off a scowl. Stress. "Get ready to do some translating. I tried dictating earlier but—look, I need a second set of eyes on this."
"Then you'll have them," said Bruce. He maneuvered his computer chair so that it was back in range of the keyboard, at Dick's right side.
Oracle's icon blinked on in the corner of the screen, silently indicating that they had her attention.
The autumn chill in the cave was suddenly oppressive. Tim tucked his hands into his hoodie's front pocket and peered at the screen. The blue-tinted electronic glow glared back at him, casting everyone's features in uncanny light.
"Can you give us a summary? You seem…" Tim hesitated. In truth, Dick looked like he'd seen a ghost. Shock, maybe. Tim eventually settled for, "You're a little on-edge."
Dick laughed, but it was thoroughly fake. "Yeah, I'd say so. Even Suzaku noticed. Forced me to sit down and take five before I left."
"Summary?" Tim insisted.
Before Dick could come up with an answer, the Batcomputer chimed softly. DOWNLOAD COMPLETE glared down at them from the main screen, and Bruce was already moving the cursor from idling at the side of the screen to the "Play video?" popup message.
Dick shrugged. He waved a hand at the screen. "Or we could watch."
Bruce clicked "Yes" and the playback began. The first thing in the video was a first-person video of facing a closed window, unsurprisingly. Dick must have made the call to start a new file rather than just make them work through the entirety of his patrol footage, which saved them time now.
When Genbu briefly pulled down her magical security system and Dick was allowed inside, Tim leaned forward and mostly dismissed their first round of conversation. Just because Dick handed off a plastic bag—which made everyone briefly give him a Look for shopping in costume—didn't make that detail automatically important. What was interesting was seeing Genbu and Suzaku's real faces.
Looking at Genbu and Suzaku without their masks, their family resemblance was undeniable. Suzaku's cheekbones were sharper, but the effect was softened by his age and more upbeat personality. He had a wiry sort of build, like Tim, and clearly hadn't hit his teenage growth spurt yet. His hands both bore swordsman's calluses, and the faint scars that indicated a long history of minor training injuries. Looking at Batman's cowl footage confirmed that experience on its own; the kid was a living buzzsaw when he decided to go on the attack.
Meanwhile, Genbu's hair was jet-black instead of dark brown like her brother's, and had a slight curl that his didn't. She also had a bit of a tan compared to Suzaku's pale countenance, and both the scar and the mole on her face served as identifiers. And if seen at a distance, well, there was no hiding the fact that Genbu was almost eight inches taller than her brother and still broader in the shoulders.
And once Suzaku hid in the bathroom, Dick and Genbu kept talking. At least this part of the recording was in English.
"Nightwing?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't try to make my brother feel guilty about the dead gangsters."
Tim didn't even have to look to know Bruce's hands were tightening into fists inside his gloves. His hands were still near the keyboard, ready to apply first-draft subtitles when the language changed again, but it was certainly something they'd never heard from a teenager's guardian before.
Dick's recorded voice let them all know how humor had worn thin. "Oh? I take it he already told you his side of the story."
"Yeah, I heard it." Genbu's voice sounded resigned and defiant in almost equal measure. "But the truth is that Suzaku doesn't care about them. We were raised with the expectation that the highest priority was coming home alive. They'd already shot him. He acted according to his training."
"He's a child. We wouldn't hold him responsible for his actions like an adult, Genbu, but you have to admit that this situation is a mess. Between Red Hood and his gang war, and you and the ninja situation, there's good reason to be worried."
Saying that clearly didn't make Genbu feel any better, going by the look on her face.
It made Tim regret again, briefly, that he hadn't seen the resemblance earlier. Masks or not, Tim had figured out Batman as a kid. If he hadn't held onto that Cain-and-Abel relationship theory for so long, the two of them might've been reunited sooner and avoided some of the trouble looming now. Even if Suzaku could be interviewed as a Red Hood confidant, due to his month-long separation from his sister, Genbu's distress during her run-ins with the Bats was very real.
The next few exchanges were more confirmation of Genbu's stance on morality—mostly that she and her brother both viewed death as an unfortunate necessity. Tim suspected as much, but the confirmation was helpful. Tim wasn't going to call on either of them outside of an emergency, and even then only after a long talk about rules of engagement.
But that was around when Suzaku emerged and joined the conversation, so everyone swapped to Japanese.
Not for the first time, Tim wondered how the actual hell Genbu was familiar with American English down to regional idioms, but her brother could barely parse a few broken sentences. "Parallel universe" only covered so much ground. There was definitely something she wasn't telling them. Maybe even something she was keeping from her brother. Tim's mental case file kept gaining addendums as he watched the data flow.
Though, going by the way Bruce's fingers flew across the keys to correct the Batcomputer's auto-generated subtitles, it seemed like the conversation was headed elsewhere. Insofar as Genbu got them all to agree to disagree, and respect laws against murder in the meantime.
The interview continued. The two of them even took a moment to argue over if parallel universe problems made them older or if the time lost didn't count, which revealed that they were both teenagers. Sixteen and fourteen years old. Veteran soldiers from the age of nine, in Genbu's case.
Bruce's parents had been murdered when he was eight. Tim had barely figured out Batman's identity back at that age. Neither of them had been ready to run across rooftops, punching evildoers in the face with aplomb.
Dick got the closest. He'd been swinging through the streets of Gotham at twelve, having spent, by now, half his life fighting the good fight. But the way everyone recoiled from Genbu and Suzaku's story made it clear they were all on the same page; these two had not been child or teen heroes. No, they'd been soldiers. And the discrepancy between Genbu's and Suzaku's records didn't make things better.
"What kind of broken system is this?" Tim wondered aloud, even though he'd seen the notes. He'd written the notes. Seeing "Warring States" in plain text had gotten him to search for societal standards in premodern Japan, and that brought up concerns about what a society might consider adulthood.
The lowest number Tim had seen, even after searching for hours, was fifteen.
"They really weren't bothered by it," Dick said, "though I think even for them, the 'jinchūriki' thing was beyond the pale."
"Genbu didn't even really explain how that worked." And once again, Tim wasn't sure how much he wanted to know.
Everything he and Steph had come up with afterward just made it sound worse. Had Genbu gotten possessed by accident or on purpose? And in either case, how? Was it a curable condition, or was that just what her life was like forever? She still acted like a person, which was against most of what Tim could recall from Bruce files on Jason Blood and his accounts of full demonic possession, but there were methods of mind control that were nearly seamless. Tim couldn't ask her now.
It was all…just a lot.
And the interview dragged on.
Clearly, Suzaku was reluctant to say anything that would give the Bats more information about Red Hood's operation. He outright refused to share the locations of safehouses or any deals he might know about, and even complained that Red Hood had left him out of the important parts anyway.
Genbu let him get away with it most of the time; whatever else she was, it was clear she was an indulgent older sister.
Then Suzaku dropped the bomb: "Akaboshi's one of you."
Bruce's fingers stuttered on the keyboard. The heel of his hand smacked the spacebar, freezing the screen on Suzaku's exasperated expression.
"It keeps going," Dick said, even as Bruce and Tim both whirled on him. His mouth was a thin, grim line. "You need to see this."
Behind them, Alfred took a moment to venture closer to the main screen and read what Bruce had written. He hadn't set down his tray of tea. "My word. And this is accurate?"
"What he said versus what B wrote? Absolutely." Dick reached past Bruce's hand and left his hand hovering above the spacebar. "Come on. Keep up."
Though he accepted the suggestion wordlessly, Bruce missed a couple of lines as the camera's view lurched. He restarted in time for Suzaku's plaintive voice saying, "—not exactly an insult. Did you kick him out for being too violent?"
"Excuse me?" was what Dick's recorded voice said. By this point, Tim had also pulled out his translation app to check Bruce's transcript. From the blinking at the corner of the screen, so had Babs. "That's impossible. None of the people we've trained would have the time or inclination to turn themselves into the Red Hood. Or the build. Are you sure that's what you saw, Suzaku-kun?"
This went on for a little while, with both Suzaku and Genbu were in agreement even as Dick tried to push back against their theory. Apparently, Suzaku knew enough nuances of different combat forms to see similarities between Red Hood (sans guns) and Batman. Genbu pointed out that Red Hood knew way too much about how the Bats operated to be a stranger, and that Tim had to concede. They'd not caught Hood for that exact reason.
Then Genbu, out of patience, dropped the hammer. Dismissing the option of a sketch artist, she turned to her brother and said, "Akaboshi's identity is already compromised." Over Suzaku's token protest, she ordered, "So, show us what he looks like without the mask. We'll probably know in a few hours anyway."
Tim had seen enough of Genbu's magic to recognize a somatic spell component when he saw one. Suzaku stepped back, made some of the same kinds of hand gestures Genbu did during fights, and was occluded by white smoke. He was already appending the mental case file with more data.
And the person who stood there when the smoke cleared was—
Bruce lurched up out of his chair, upending it so the wheels spun uselessly in the air. In the blue light, his face was ashen.
Alfred dropped his tray, shattering everything on the stone. His hand covered his mouth in shock.
"Oh my god," Tim heard himself say. He gripped the console for balance, staring up at someone impossible. The hair was the same except for a white streak, the mouth twisted into a scowl Tim recognized instantly, and the face was just too familiar despite being on the far end of puberty. Like the owner had never died. "Dick, that's—"
"That's why I had to come back." Dick's voice was a dead whisper. Haunted.
No amount of bulk or number of years could rip the second Robin's visage from Tim's memory. Not from anyone else's, either. They were all haunted.
"Could—" Tim swallowed with a dry throat, feeling it click. Feeling sick. "Could Suzaku be wrong? He's a magician and a soldier, not a trained detective. He doesn't have an eidetic memory."
"It'd be a hell of a coincidence," Dick replied, sounding like he didn't believe it for a second. "I was thinking Clayface, but the sample would've turned up as Gotham mud hours ago. And Suzaku doesn't know us well enough to take a deliberate shot like this."
But Genbu might, was the thought that struck Tim like lightning.
She'd said she arrived in Gotham just before Red Hood's debut, and he'd specifically hired her to distract all of the Bats from his actions. That it hadn't worked didn't mean there wasn't something else going on. Despite clearly not being a Gotham native herself, and admitting to not knowing who Red Hood was before their first encounter, Genbu slapped together conjecture about him quickly after settling into the safehouse.
She'd told Tim she thought Red Hood was younger than Dick was, that he hated the Joker, and said outright that she didn't think he was actually a danger to Suzaku. That she was grateful for his help keeping her brother safe.
Tim had a box's worth of puzzle pieces in his mind, and now it felt like someone had swapped half of them out when he wasn't looking. And there were two solid directions to cast blame.
Well outside of Tim's whirling thoughts, Dick's fist clenched against the console. The adrenaline was back and uglier now, and every inch of him looked like he'd rather be punching something than standing here and waiting.
"If it's him," Dick began, in a low tone two notches up from a growl, "how?"
Bruce blew out a slow breath, eyes still fixed on the frozen screen and on his lost son's face. "We speculated before that there was a link between the Red Hood and the League of Assassins."
"Genbu did. He translated League dialect for her," Dick said, but his shoulders dropped. The fight was draining out of him into the hidden reservoir deep in his soul. It would come back when called. "The Lazarus Pit?"
"It can't revive the dead." Or else Ra's al Ghul would make literally no effort to keep himself alive; he had enough cultists and enough money to make certain all he needed was someone like Ubu to actually shove his corpse into the pool.
Tim forced himself to march back and grab his laptop. He opened Genbu and Suzaku's shared case file, adding links and appending notes with the harsh click of keys under his fingers. He had to get all of it down right now, one-handed or not. Rather than working two cases, it looked like they were all ultimately focused on the same one. The crossing trails originated from that snake pit.
Tim let Dick and Bruce's frantic conversation flow around him. Dick, for his part, sounded like he was making contingency plans for bringing Jason back somehow. Bruce was on board, given that neither of them were actually shouting at each other.
If—if the Red Hood was Jason, then what?
Tim hadn't known Jason before, except by sight. They'd attended some of the same Wayne charity galas after Jason was adopted by Bruce, but they kept to their own corners. He had a bit more distance to make his assessments.
Then, for one thing, the memorial had to come down.
Jason's Robin uniform, or most of it, stood on a mannequin inside of a glass case. Tim didn't remember the number of times he'd found his gaze caught on it when the role of Robin felt like it was bleeding him by inches. Sometimes he'd walked up to it, putting a gloved hand on the glass, and…didn't quite pray, exactly. Spoke to it, like Jason might actually listen, instead of taking in the details again and again. Cataloging each rip and scorch mark, knowing exactly what they meant. Being able to tell, from familiarity, when a component had been replaced because it was too damaged even for a memorial display.
Tim had read the autopsy file. Knew Bruce had memorized it.
"Master Tim?" Alfred asked quietly. Tim looked up to find him standing to the left, also looking down at the inscription on the display case.
"Just trying to think this through, Alfred. Don't worry about me."
"You'll find that I have plenty of worry for all of you, and yet more to spare." Alfred briefly rested a hand against Tim's shoulder, and Tim leaned into that touch because how could he not? Looking at this reminder, now, was ghastly.
A Good Soldier.
As though Jason hadn't been Bruce's son. Alfred's grandchild in all but name.
There were limits to self-flagellation, even for Bruce. This was—almost a condemnation. Of who, Tim wasn't quite sure. It just hadn't been shoved into the spotlight until now, because they'd never really had to wonder what Jason might think of it.
Alfred came down to clean in the cave almost every day, barring his rare sabbaticals. If the sight of this memorial wasn't burned into his soul, Tim would eat his laptop.
Tim couldn't imagine Jason's reaction would be anything less than explosive if he saw this. Tim would hand him—not the crowbar. A baseball bat, maybe. Something cathartic for a new mob boss who clearly wasn't the same Jason who'd died. Not with the guns and the drug-running and the persistent harassment of Black Mask.
And yet, Genbu still clearly viewed Red Hood as the lesser of available evils.
Tim crouched down and ran his free hand over the brass plate. "A Good Soldier" was so—reductive. Limited. It wasn't a real view into who Jason Todd was.
"He was more than this, Alfred," Tim whispered. "Is more."
Alfred stayed silent for a long moment. Tim didn't know what he'd come up with to say next, and was a little terrified of it. He didn't want to see Alfred break down.
Luckily, they didn't have to wait any longer for confirmation.
The Batcomputer chimed again, drawing all of their attention back, and MATCH FOUND was plastered across the main screen. It lasted exactly long enough to burn into everyone's retinas, until Bruce clicked through the alert as though yanked on a wire.
All of them held their breaths.
100% MATCH: JASON TODD.
Minato checked the talismans for the fifth time in a row, clinging to the ceiling to get a better look with a penlight. He made a few careful adjustments with a narrow-tipped brush, then blew on it to dry the ink that tiny bit faster. After a tense few moments, he let the device slip from his hand and fall directly into Rin's waiting grasp. He flipped over on his way to the ground, landing on his feet again, and strode over to the observation post in the room.
"My apologies again, Hokage-sama," Shimika murmured again as he arrived. Her hands were carefully trained on the desk and she hadn't moved from her cushioned chair since settling into it. Both decisions hid fatigue tremors. "I wasn't strong enough."
Even if she hadn't fully recovered from the process of being the center of multiple highly experimental fūinjutsu arrays, carrying most of the exploration process's energy burdens, Minato had no criticisms for her. "Nothing you've done is inadequate or unworthy. We wouldn't have come this far this quickly without your efforts."
They were, in effect, trying to reverse-engineer both Obito's Kamui and half of the summoning methods ever invented. When Minato invented the Rasengan, it had been crafted from first principles as a combat ninjutsu free of hand seals. To kill anything his kunai couldn't cut, without using Sage Mode. It had taken him years to work out how to incorporate Wind Release into that design from that point forward, even when he'd already understood the technique better than anyone alive.
Shimika still sighed. "If I managed to complete the mission—"
"Don't worry about it, Shimika-senpai," Obito said from the center of the new array. They'd incorporated more and more data each time Shimika made her attempts to touch the other world, and the new fūinjutsu notations lining both of Obito's bare arms was so dense it could only be read from less than a meter away. Most of the kanji revolved around designating directions. He raised one of his inked-up hands and added, "How's your colony doing?"
"Recovering, as I am," Shimika replied.
"Good to hear."
To Minato's eye, she'd need another few days to feel entirely normal; the cost of losing so many kikaichū in one go was a long recovery period for most Aburame. Rearing the insects took more chakra than maintaining equilibrium.
Minato sat down next to Shimika, adjacent to Jiraiya and his borrowed crystal ball. Ignoring his teacher's sharp nudge—a reminder to take care of his own self—Minato said, "Remember, Obito, we're just trying to send objects through intact. I don't want anyone losing a finger this way."
Obito shrugged. "I'd just grow it back."
"The fact that you know this is concerning." Minato coughed to clear his throat. "Time for final checks."
The shinobi around the room sounded off, one by one. Aside from Minato, Shimika, and Jiraiya-sensei, the other four were ANBU space-time researchers and Obito. Rin skirted outside of the main array's room and peered in from the hall, as did Kakashi's silent silhouette.
Minato took a steadying breath.
Obito picked up the two scroll cases and clenched them together in his right hand. The first contained a copy of the crane summoning contract that ordinarily sat in Kei's bedside dresser, and the other was a series of papers that a particular special jōnin would find tremendously useful so far from home.
A report summarizing their crystal ball recordings so far.
Observations about Zetsu infestation.
Sketches of her enemies, even if some of them were warped by the simplicity of insect eyes.
Well-wishing letters and a series of storage seals that were almost entirely supplies from home.
"All points are prepared," Minato said quietly.
Obito's eye lit up with crimson light as his Mangekyō Sharingan spun into shape. He grinned. "Gotcha, Sensei."
"Begin."
The air warped around Obito's hand as he focused Kamui primarily through his right hand, like water circling a drain. The fūinjutsu notation lit up gold against his skin, tracing down from his eye and the heaviest ink. The stark white fingers flexed around the scrolls, and then the first of them was gone.
"First package delivered," reported Jiraiya-sensei, who was peering into the crystal ball. The scroll bounced off the bed in Kei's borrowed, secured apartment and rolled under the couch.
No one being present was a little annoying, but Kei would've automatically incinerated it otherwise. She didn't tolerate untested fūinjutsu in her space unless she knew the creator, and a package couldn't advocate for its own continued existence.
Obito closed his eye, brow furrowing, and let out a slow breath. It hitched in the middle, just for a second. "Feels like the surgery, Sensei. Like…prying. Ow."
Minato winced automatically, and he felt both Kakashi and Rin flinch at the reminder. But he pushed it down with the weight of the mission and asked, "Are you capable of completing the delivery?"
"Never said I wasn't," Obito said, though his breath hissed through his teeth. His transplanted fingers strained. A red trail ran from the corner of his eye and down his cheek. "Okay. One more."
The second scroll vanished.
"Second package is on target," said Jiraiya-sensei.
Minato slammed his hand down on the key seal for the room's power, rendering everything in the chamber dead black ink. "The room's dead. Kakashi, Rin—"
As soon as he did so, Rin and Kakashi both darted into the central array and caught Obito as he swayed, one under each arm. Rin cupped her right hand over Obito's eye and was already calling up a diagnostic ninjutsu with one-handed seals on her left.
"Good work, everyone," Minato said as he stood. A careful look around the room revealed more nodding heads than average; their data from this experiment was good. It was time to return to the development stage. "Time to rest and regroup."
"As you command, Hokage-sama," rang out across the room.
Minato tried not to feel the mantle of command settle over his exhausted shoulders too much, and failed. "We'll reconvene in two days. Dismissed."
Notes:
1. The conversation between Bruce and Jason is pulled directly from the Under the Red Hood movie, and took place (slightly) offscreen while Kei and Hayate were hugging in chapter 12. Somewhat understandably, Kei didn't have the mental processing power for it.
2. I could not for the life of me remember what D&D's copyright-safe name is in the DCU. But Tim is familiar with the game.
3. Jason Blood is possessed by the demon Etrigan, and in the comics is one of Bruce's contacts about Magical Nonsense. The other prominent name is Zatanna, who's been mentioned before in this fic, but who isn't specifically an expert on demons. (Third place belongs to John Constantine, who… uh…has a tendency to solve very big problems with very few resources other than his own cunning, which often means a lot of collateral damage. Like, say, pretty much every friend he's ever had. He's the star of the comic series Hellblazer and has been incorporated, exiled, and reincorporated into DC canon a couple of times.)
4. The memorial case for Jason Todd is…a thing. If there was ever an inscription to make your kid feel disposable/replaceable, it's a contender.
