"Tea?"

"Tea."

With that unspoken agreement not to throttle each other thus established, Kei leaned on the countertop like someone with nowhere else to be.

Because, for the moment, she didn't. Hayate was safely on the couch discovering the art of accessing an ongoing, context-free internet argument about things that didn't matter to him. Or make sense. Red Hood was allowed to be all domestic and dig through his cupboards for chamomile tea bags and some mismatched mugs. Nothing else was a time constraint other than their own endurance.

It wasn't like their circadian rhythms weren't ongoing trash fires anyway. Going by Kei's very brief look into the cupboards earlier, at least Hood wasn't making his problem worse by adding excessive caffeine to the mix.

Hey, Isobu, Kei said to her partner in…not-crime. Just in life and general shenanigans. Her brain-roommate. How's the night treating you?

I have decided to make myself unreachable for the moment.

How?

I will sit here, amidst the wreckage of crime and civilization, until our enemies develop gills. Isobu sent her an image of what was probably the harbor's bottom. Going by the wrecked boxes Isobu clambered over like a diver exploring the murk, someone had lost a lot of fully automatic rifles recently. And an awful lot of explosives.

If you add enough energy to the contents of that container, you'll probably kill anything nearby in a fraction of a second.

Oh?

It wouldn't even be hard. Sneeze, maybe.

Isobu considered this, despite having only passing familiarity with the concept due to a lack of a proper nose. With the sensation of blunt fingers flipping through a Rolodex, he searched Kei's open mind for—oh. Depth charges. Underwater explosion physics. Kei didn't have a ton of information to share without a reference at hand, thanks mostly to years of fūinjutsu training overwhelming the no years of chemical engineering, but maybe Isobu could have fun anyway.

The fish likely deserve a quieter evening.

Assassins don't. Assuming stabby crew could source enough scuba gear to fuck around and find out, Isobu had every advantage in the world.

Isobu's reply was more a smug feeling than actual words, which earned him phantom neck scritches from Kei's end. If anybody actually took a swing at the little guy down there, Kei would owe them a salute and a complimentary song on the world's smallest violin. They'd deserve whatever mauling they got.

"The hell are you staring at?"

Without the modulator or whatever the hell was going on in that helmet, Red Hood's voice—Jason Todd's—retained a scrap of that quintessential whiny teenage note that Hayate used to get his way. He wasn't actually trying to intimidate her; if he was, it wouldn't have worked. Instead, it was a little defensive.

"Checked out to talk to my inner demon." From the twitch in Hood's forehead, Hayate had already told him about Isobu. Past that, it was hard to know what Hood knew, because Kei never really explained her and Isobu's dynamic to Hayate either. "He's occupied. Just us here for this talk."

Hood was more than capable of drawing conclusions.

Not that I don't have a direct line to him, regardless.

What Kei hoped Hayate hadn't said was what she'd thought before this most recent experiment's tingling phase was over—that this was, by far, the most physically vulnerable Kei had been in years. Three, to be more precise. Isobu's chakra was at such a low ebb that her sensory overload was being managed by ibuprofen and whatever a month's worth of exposure therapy could give her. She certainly wasn't venturing into this battlefield of a conversation bulletproof, literally or figuratively. All so Isobu could be a stronger, smarter, and safer distraction for the assassins than Kei had managed to come up with so far.

Obviously, there were still some bugs in the system. They'd tweak one variable on the next test. Maybe distance.

Hood blew out a slow breath, leaning against the other counter with the electric kettle practically against his elbow. It was about as far from her as he could get, without making it obvious that he wanted space. "So you're at least a space cadet with a mission. Good to know."

Well, no one had ever called Kei out on it before. To her face, at least. Kei decided to let Hood take that small victory. She'd heard worse while minding her own business in Konoha, so she just shrugged.

"Nothing to say?" Hood challenged, even as he put chamomile tea bags into mugs. They looked like some store brand; the box had a teddy bear on it.

"I'll wait," Kei replied, and at that point the kettle clicked to let them know it had officially done its solemn duty.

"Hayate, do you want anything while there's hot water?" Hood called across the room in Japanese.

Kei glanced over her shoulder to find Hayate waving them both off. He hadn't even looked up from his phone.

"He told me all my tea was trash," Hood said in English, with a note of amused exasperation in his voice.

"Typical."

The longer they stayed in Gotham, the more Kei worried Hayate wouldn't be able to adjust smoothly to being home again. Getting used to luxuries here wouldn't do them any good when Konoha's technology and industry was stuck somewhere between twenty and forty years behind this city. The main thing they had going was the massive magic-using population, and it definitely wasn't a case of all fighters being equal.

When Kei arrived there, she hadn't had a choice at all. Living in a modern city, despite the constant attack on her senses, was an unholy combination of being haunted and constantly reaching for muscle memory. Sixteen years of shinobi life hadn't stripped that familiarity yet. It just made her into a puzzle piece too soggy and misshapen to fit anymore.

"Here."

There was a mug. It said, "The second mouse gets the cheese," down one side, accompanied by a cartoon mouse stepping over its comrade's cartoonishly crushed corpse, caught in a mousetrap.

Hood's taste in mugs was kind of terrible, but it seemed to be a genuine offer. Mainly because he looked kind of embarrassed to be seen in the same room as a person who could see it.

When in Rome… "Thanks."

Hood set the mug, teabag and all, in front of Kei's slumped form. He even left a saucer next to it, in case Kei was the type to remove the teabag for precisely measured diffusion. Honestly, Kei would have preferred a handful of dried goji berries instead, but she wasn't going to complain to Hood about changing his tea service just because of nostalgia.

Kei dragged the mug closer by its handle and made a point to breathe in the steam. Anything to help her keep calm.

"So," began Hood, sitting down across from her again. He'd mirrored her movements a little, at least as far as keeping his mug close. But he appeared to have lost momentum a little due to Kei's weirdness.

"How many people have you killed this month, out of curiosity? My brother said it was twenty the first night you two met."

"What are you, a cop?" Hood snorted. "I doubt you actually care about what happens to drug smugglers, gangsters, and general Gotham lowlifes. A number won't fucking matter to you."

"I don't." Kei placed a finger along the edge of her mug, then gave up on the tea for the moment. "But everything I've heard about you leans toward that event being…unusual. You're not Rambo."

"Nope. No jungle life for this supervillain." Hood made a point of examining his arms and shoulder, then shrugging. "Also, camo and a mullet can burn in hell separately, never mind together."

Kei couldn't help but feel like Red Hood missed the threshold for "supervillain" because he didn't meet the style requirement. His costume was more armor than aesthetic. "Still, you didn't answer the question. Why wipe out everyone there?"

"Because they had the bright idea of killing a kid in front of me. I decided to teach them a lesson their friends won't forget anytime soon."

Because people learned so much with bullet holes in their heads. And Kei wasn't sure Hood had left any evidence a standard issue gang would be able to interpret. "Between them and any assassins you were complaining about, and the three of your own men—"

"So you have been talking to Bats."

"It's what you hired me for," Kei said flatly. "And then the Bats paid me as an informant."

Hood leaned forward on his elbows. His fingers might've twitched a little, toward weapons they'd both left in Hayate's reach and not theirs. "Sounds like something I need to hear."

"I got an apartment and a credit card out of making wild guesses." Kei pretended she hadn't noticed the twitchiness. Red Hood's operations were the kind of secret he did kill to protect, but Hayate's testimony about her strength was still winning out. "Nothing I said compares to you leaving actual blood samples at the scene of that fight."

By now, definitely. Kei still wasn't sure if she wanted to be a fly on the Batcave wall to that revelation or not. Based on how long it was taking for the Bats to get back in contact since Hayate's testimony about Hood's appearance, they were still working out the interpersonal drama safely out of headshot range.

Hood deliberately relaxed. "True." He made a noise between his teeth, briefly, and looked toward the rest of the room. "My personal body count is in the fifties, since you asked so nicely. Started before Gotham and ramped up to get things done right. Happy?"

Kei's official kill-count was probably… A little over a hundred enemy combatants, but mostly because she'd avoided situations where she resorted to Isobu's unchecked power. Even the bulk of her wartime missions were scouting or sabotage affairs, rather than Sensei's habit of pitched battles. Since the end of the war, large-scale shinobi operations were rare as the villages pulled back their military forces to rebuild, and banditry surged into the empty niches left in local power structures. The end number would've been higher given the glut of solo combat deployments she'd had over the last year or so, if not for the massive power difference between Kei and most of her new opponents. She didn't actually need to kill all of them all the time.

So she…handed them over to local or Konoha authorities alive. Often to be executed. Those deaths didn't count.

Kei rubbed the edge of her scar as she thought about it. "I think mine was listed as a hundred and fifteen the last time I checked my file."

Hood eyed her. "Kind of low for a city-destroying monster."

Dammit, Hayate. "He talks up my reputation sometimes. I don't actually enjoy causing death and destruction." She shrugged with one shoulder. "But better me in the role than someone else."

"I wasn't aware that demonic possession was something you could volunteer for, outside of death cults and certain kinds of bullshit literary references."

That made Kei laugh, low and bitter. She loved Isobu like a part of her family, but none of them should ever have been put in a position where shoving a bijū into Kei's chest was the only solution to the problem at hand. "Well, I did."

"…Okay, take that subtext and make it text. What am I missing here?"

"What did Hayate tell you about jinchūriki?" Kei asked, rather than answering immediately.

"You're playing landlady to a giant monster that could kill Gotham in a blink and a tsunami, you're way stronger than average and let the kid use your reputation like a club, and the fact that you are possessed meant you lost your mother in some kind of alpha strike on your hometown." Hood ticked the points off on his fingers, smirking. "How am I doing?"

Hayate, what the fuck.

Kei didn't doubt that Hood was twisting whatever Hayate had said, or else extrapolating from the data like the detective who'd trained him. It still made her want to bonk Hayate in the head with a sandal once this conversation was over, primarily because she had the strong suspicion that Hayate had set them both up to talk their way through this stressful mess on purpose.

Kei took a slow breath to center herself. "I'm surprised Hayate told you that many things." She made a show of pinching the bridge of her nose. "What else?"

"Your society's a brutal feudal nightmare," Hood offered, satisfied now that he'd "won" the debate. "To summarize most of the murder-positive samurai shit he's said so far."

A proper Konoha shinobi would have argued against that interpretation, out of ingroup loyalty if nothing else. It was the proper Japanese thing to close ranks against outsiders, and to avoid criticizing the ingroup because of a collectivist mindset that served people well in certain moments. From what Kei usually experienced in the mundane day-to-day, it served a valuable role in keeping all of Konoha's murderous capacity pointed in the same direction: outward. And in most villages, encouraging that loyalty reduced the chance that an individual shinobi might look around, see how screwed up everything was, and peace out at top speed.

Kei knew at least four missing-nin who'd concluded that the whole thing was a racket and took off. Over in Sorayama, Rikuto was the most wink-nudge about how he'd ended up among merchants instead of in Iwagakure, despite bearing the Lava Release bloodline. Kei still didn't know how he'd faked his death.

Kei had done her time as an American, one incarnation back. Complaining to an agreeable ear was practically a national pastime. So she just said, "Yep," before taking a long sip of her tea.

"…I was expecting a denial."

Kei sighed quietly, still managing to set her bangs fluttering. "Don't tell my brother. I'm trying to put off that argument for another day."

Hood drummed his fingertips on the side of his mug. Then he shifted to do that on the countertop, still peering at Kei like she was a puzzle he couldn't figure out. Or maybe an alien, because that was almost more likely that certain other kinds of problem that Kei represented. "If you know that, then what the fuck made you choose the baby assassin career track?"

There were…a lot of answers to that question. Some of them tangled up into what Kei still hesitated to call "fate," and some were just petty. It kind of felt like digging out a part of Kei's heart with an ice cream scoop to try and confront it in mere words.

What she'd said to Nightwing was true; if Hayate decided one day to say "screw it" and retire from the ninja lifestyle, Kei would be as supportive as he wanted. Maybe back off a little if he asked. But Kei couldn't follow him on that theoretical path for a number of reasons.

First: While people from the ninja world could become stronger through luck of the draw (see: Hidan), the most consistent source of power was training. And unlike standard-issue humans, shinobi…didn't really hit a point of diminishing returns when physics said so. Like, yes, there was a reason people didn't tend to train as intensely as Gai did. Mostly pain. But "normal" humans weren't supposed to be able to leap five stories just because they'd used weights a couple thousand times.

And aside from her mother's tutelage, opening those doors wasn't free.

Second: Joining the shinobi corps was what got Kei in contact with people as vital and vulnerable and precious as her team. Obito, Rin, Kakashi, Sensei… Without having joined the Academy and graduated in record time, she'd never have known them except in passing. And given the hell that rolled inexorably toward them over time, now there was no leaving them behind.

Kei had always been a bit of a doormat like that. Swept up in the current no matter where it took her.

Third: Jinchūriki didn't get to be anything else until the day they died. As Isobu's host, Kei was an irreplaceable war asset to whatever faction held her loyalty. Or her leash. And that was—if not Konoha itself—then at least the people she cared about, who all lived in the village. If Sensei needed her power, the expectation was that she'd be halfway out the door before he even said anything. That was the whole point.

But the key—the most important thing in her world—could only be one answer: "I wanted to become stronger, and that was the only way."

"That simple, huh?" Hood didn't look impressed. His hands had tightened a little around his mug, making the tendons stand out white.

"Of course it wasn't," Kei told him, well aware that the rising tension was her fault. If Hood wanted the truth, he could suffer for it. "I know the system we grew up with was a trash fire at best. I'm not defending it. But the way someone gets access to training and resources to actually develop their powers is by signing up to fight, and that recruitment age is…low."

"How low." Yeah, that tone was not a great sign.

Definitely not gonna tell you about Kakashi. "I was nine on my first assignment."

"Nine. Because putting third graders in combat is such a great idea," Hood spat, disgusted. At the same time, there was a calculating gleam in his teal eyes. Kei watched a muscle in his jaw jump as his gaze darted over her face, cataloging her features for any sign of a lie. "How old are you now, anyway? If your brother's fourteen…"

"I'll save you the guessing game. I'm sixteen." There was every chance that if Kei mentioned who was doing the guessing, she'd confirm for herself if mentioning the Bats by name was a trigger, like Hayate theorized. Instead, she crossed her arms and added, "I've been at this for almost eight years."

Silence. Hood's expression had gone eerily blank, given how important tracking his microexpressions had been thus far.

"Hood?"

Hood stayed frozen for a moment longer, then took a deliberate sip of his too-hot tea and squeezed his eyes shut. His breathing went deep and even, with only the slightest hitch to indicate he was, in fact, counting. And trying to use a breathing exercise to keep his temper in check. A muscle in his jaw jumped again.

Kei was once again struck by how hopelessly young Hood was. He couldn't be an adult. Not someone with a house in the suburbs and two-point-five kids going to public school. And even if he was qualified to buy cigarettes—which she doubted, for reasons of being legally dead—his emotional regulation was probably no better than any of Kei's peers. Half the people who worked for him now had probably been gangsters since before he was born.

Didn't really make him any less dangerous to the average person, though.

"What the fuck kind of magical murder cult did you dig yourself out of," he asked at last, his voice as flat as he could make it without vocoder assistance.

Kei weighed her options. Hayate already knew they were in the wrong world, but didn't appear to have shared that information with Hood. Meanwhile, Kei had cracked and told Robin and Spoiler more than she'd intended. Some of the things Kei implied were for her and Isobu, who held a special place next to her literal heart, and exactly nobody else.

Hood kept trying to stare her down. It was such a barebones attempt at intimidation that Kei briefly entertained the idea of rolling her eyes where he could see it, because nothing short of a gun pointed between her eyebrows would make Kei hesitate now.

"Could ask you the same thing," Kei replied, matching Hood temper for temper even as her tone was pure ice. "Given that pitch about translating for the League of Assassins."

Though her (lack of) oratory skills were probably shitty enough to wreck her arguments if nerves wouldn't.

"And the fact that you couldn't just means they were trying out a new phase of their usual 'work for us or else' spiel." Hood crossed his arms on the table, shoving his tea to the side to make room. "Not all of their recruits are homegrown."

"A new phase," Kei repeated, surprised by the flash of irritation that prickled out to her fingertips. That was certainly a term for "magically transporting potential military assets," because hell if Kei knew who else showed some evidence of knowing who she was before she introduced herself. Even the Bats had no idea. "Then where'd they get you, Hood?"

Unsurprisingly, that particular question was unwelcome. Hood grimaced, which made Kei wonder if she ought to award herself a point for making him flinch.. "None of your business."

Then I'll just have to wait to hit you from that angle again. "My brother doesn't have the security clearance I do," Kei said, changing tack. "If we'd come here on some kind of mission, he—might have still gotten into trouble, but not out of ignorance. Instead, we were split up and he nearly died. So, thank you." She made sure to meet Hood's startled green gaze squarely. "Thank you for looking after him, Hood."

"You shouldn't be thanking a crime boss for practicing basic fucking decency," Hood muttered, glaring down at the countertop.

"You saved his life, and then kept him safe in this city. Better than I could've. I'm sure it wasn't easy." If she'd said this already to Nightwing, Red Hood could know it too. It concerned him the most. "Look, my brother is the most important person in my life. If…you need a favor, at some point, let me know."

Hood took a long sip of his tea, probably stalling for time to think.

Kei considered the temperature that the steam implied, then decided against copying him.

Hood set his mug down with a sigh. No sign of a burned tongue, though. "Nobody does shit for free in this town. And I don't feel like wearing a noose made of terms and conditions just because you say so. Where's the limit?"

"I won't fight the Bats." Kei watched Hood tense up again at the term, then went on as though she hadn't noticed, "And I won't kill for you."

"Scared?" Hood asked, though he wasn't putting enough malice into it to be a taunt. It sounded more like a comprehension question.

She'd kill for other reasons. Just not Red Hood's schemes.

Kei shrugged, then leaned onto her raised palm. Her other hand rested on the handle of the mug, at least until she started to idly push it around, fidgeting. "Pissing off my landlords feels like a bad idea. Especially after the work I've put into the place."

"Gotta love the sunk cost fallacy. Too far in to change tracks now." Hood glanced over Kei's shoulder at Hayate. "It'll have to be big enough to square the debt of putting him up for a month." Hood's expression went cold again. "So, you won't even kill a malignant pustule like Black Mask? Even after what he's done?"

Yeah, right. You need to go through about six more layers of bureaucracy before you get close to really hiring me. "It's very hard to think of him as a threat when you've spent the last month kicking him around like a football."

"Hah. Well, it's nice to be appreciated for the artistry, sometimes. I could see how that'd breed some complacency." Malice was back and lived in Hood's conspiratorial whisper. "But I was really more talking about the bounty he put on your brother's head."

The mug handle cracked in her hand. "What?"

"I think it was around twenty-thousand dollars for him, because Black Mask wasn't sure if he really existed as 'Red Shadow' or not. Even then, it's more about getting information out of him about my operations. Roman Sionis is the kind of man who'd snatch anybody and break out the thumbscrews the second money didn't talk." Hood tilted his head to one side, pointedly eyeing the cracked porcelain Kei was trying to sneak out of his sight. She owed him a new mug. "Don't go around thinking he has standards or lines he won't cross. If he does, no one's found them yet. Why else do you think people were so eager to throw in with the new guy?" Hood spread his arms as though to say, "And here I am."

"I assumed the heads in duffel bags had something to do with it," Kei said, but her heart wasn't really in it.

She hated dealing with organized crime. Kei's role in those missions was just pure intimidation, and only if the head negotiator asked. She felt more like a tiger on a leash than anything, brought out to show off and otherwise being left in a cage. Give her an abandoned Orochimaru laboratory any day. At least the basement horrors didn't have economic concerns. They just tried to kill her.

Sure, Konoha tolerated yakuza as long as they toed the line. That was bad. But they also reserved the right to smile, write up a report, and have someone like Kei dismantle everything in sight because someone got too uppity and needed "reorganization."

"It put me on the map. But I targeted Black Mask for a reason." Hood let his gaze drift toward Hayate again. "Even I wasn't sure about the rumors until one of the Fearsome Foursome shot at him. And you curb-stomped the guy, in case you were wondering."

At this rate, she was going to go back to chewing her nails from nerves. For all that Hayate was a better sneaky shinobi than Kei was—in context—it seemed he also hadn't been as careful not to be seen. "I wasn't, but thank you for telling me."

"Figured a 'responsible guardian'" —complete with air quotes— "might want to know what their brat is up to." Hood shook his head slowly. "I don't want to see him running amok again."

At this point, Kei agreed with that. "Fair. I wasn't planning on letting him cause more trouble."

"It's never the plan," Hood scoffed. "Happens anyway, apparently."

"True. Hood?"

"Hm?"

"Hayate cares about you. He doesn't call just anyone 'Aniki' and claim them as family." Kei considered the mug and swirled the tea with a few quick turns of her fingers. "Whatever you're doing with Black Mask and the gangs, be smart about it. And don't die."

Hood laughed out loud, as humorless as anything. "Maskie will have to try a lot harder to even come close to killing me."

Yeah, I figured you'd hit the "jokes about dying" stage by now.

And you never have? Isobu sounded skeptical.

Weirdly enough, no.

Maybe it was because Kei just didn't like to think about the way her life was sharply divided into before and after once she was born again, but there was only continuity of self between them. Nobody from her old life could call on her anymore. Red Hood, as amiable as he acted here, had actually come back from the dead to a world that would recognize him if he didn't invest in face-concealing headgear. Kei was pretty goddamned sure their death experiences were not equivalent. She wasn't defined by it the same way—couldn't even remember it.

Red Hood absolutely remembered who and what killed him. For evidence supporting this hypothesis, Kei only needed to look at the guy for five seconds.

Kei wasn't going to let him off easy for that, though. "You're still dealing drugs, Hood. Despite your policy on not selling to kids, you're just shooting people who cross the line instead of tackling the root problems. You see how I have more specific policy questions."

Like systemic poverty ensuring that all shit rolled downhill. Putting anyone under that much stress and taking away their options caused crime statistics to spike. It got even worse when actual malicious actors—crime lords included—rolled in and took advantage of a population living in horrendous conditions to squeeze all remaining resources out of them. Much of the drug money Red Hood played with now had been pulled out of the same people he claimed to protect. It was just staying in the Alley and providing Hood with rocket launchers instead of being siphoned to Black Mask's Diamond District high-rise.

Once upon a time, Kei had done her due diligence in a sociology classroom. Gotten an A, too. It was just that her thoughts on the ethics of prison reform were useless when Konoha didn't have one. There was a cultural preference for summary judgment in the field.

"When you've got failures up and down the chain and both Blackgate and Arkham have breakouts every other weekend, it's not a solvable problem on an individual level." It appeared Red Hood had also done some philosophy reading. He crossed his arms on the top of the counter, leaning forward a little to emphasize his intensity instead of looming. "Throwing every one of the Falcones' or Maronis' enforcers into a Swiss cheese prison every fucking month isn't viable either."

"Then the issue is security."

"Sure!" Even his agreement was ferocious. "But it's also corrupt officials from top to bottom, short-circuiting every mechanism of justice the city might have left, and all while Batman has his goddamn crime-punching nightly workouts." Hood's eyes gleamed coldly, even though he'd been the one to bring up nighttime vigilantes. In a harsh, almost mocking tone, he went on, "And you know, some people can be thrown every bone in the world and still maul the fucking hand that feeds them."

Well, I don't think he's going to give me a better opening than that. "You're talking about the Joker."

Hood's grin was outright wolfish. All he was missing was an Inuzuka's sharpened eyeteeth. "Someone hand the lady a prize."

Kei tilted her head to one side, peering at Hood and mentally overlaying the helmet again. This situation wasn't a surprise, but it had to sound like a logical inference made on the spot. "So that's your game. You want the Joker out in the open instead of Arkham."

"Two for two. Not bad for a tourist." Hood's mouth pursed to one side. "You're not gonna do anything about it."

"Nope. The Joker dying is a net gain for humanity." Kei rolled her eyes even though she knew Hood would take that response as agreement with his ethics, then took a sip of her tea. It had cooled to "very drinkable" in the meantime. "If the Bats can't figure out your endgame, that's not my problem. I only care that you keep Hayate out of it."

"Hah, well, that shouldn't be a problem."

I fucking hope not, you over-dramatic jackass. What she said instead was, "At least we're on the same page."

"Stay out of my business and I'll do the same," Hood offered, once he'd downed half his tea in one go.

"Can do."

The conversation might have gone in circles for a while longer, if not for a sharp sound that blared from Hayate's phone. Hood's went off in his pocket a second later. By the time he checked it, Hayate had vaulted the couch and come up beside Kei, holding out his phone screen so Kei could see it.

"Why is it doing this?" Hayate demanded, looping his free arm around Kei's ribs.

"Arkham Alert" took up half his screen, but in English. The phone squealed again, twice, until Kei swiped her finger over it and started to read the actual notification. Why it was in English, Kei didn't know.

"I set up his Gotham-specific warnings," Hood said, looking at his own screen. "In case you were wondering."

Answered that question. Kei opened her mouth and read, translating sentence by sentence so Hayate could finally get looped in: "Breaking news bulletin: The Joker has escaped from Arkham Asylum. All citizens be advised, the man is a dangerous criminal and highly unpredictable. Do not approach if spotted. Shelter in place and avoid public spaces until further notice from the GCPD." And then Kei's scrolling arrived at a recent mugshot of the Joker's pasty face, alongside a photo the man must have snapped from his own phone, because there was more purple.

Hayate wasn't even looking at it anymore. Instead, his focus had turned to Red Hood and his expression was deeply unhappy from what Kei could see. His chakra buzzed in distress. "Aniki?" he said.

"I think it's time for the two of you to go home," Hood said in Japanese, getting to his feet. He was already reaching for Kei's broken mug, practically radiating a certain predatory smugness Kei usually only saw on S-class shinobi in lopsided fights they'd still win. "Don't worry, I'll clean up."

"Aniki—"

"Hayate, we're leaving," Kei interrupted. "This isn't our business."

Hayate gaped at her. "Oneesan, what—"

"No."

Kei bundled Hayate out of the apartment and across Gotham's rooftops in short order, though Red Hood did wave at them as they hurried out. While Hayate avoided shocking Kei at a touch to register his disapproval, it bored a hole in her back all the way back across the bridge, all the way back to the apartment, and until they were finally safe again. Until the window slammed down, Kei reset every seal for maximum lethality, and Hayate threw himself onto the bed with the deepest teenage sulk Kei had ever seen from him.

"You were supposed to help him!" was what he said when Kei prodded him about it. Fury was burned into his bones. "Aniki's going headfirst into hell on his own, with no backup, and we're just letting him do that?"

Kei threw up her hands. "He doesn't want our help. I can't dig him out of his own damn grave!"

Hayate stared at Kei for a moment longer, eyes huge with betrayal, and didn't say a word for the rest of the night.


Notes:

1. Well, at least they determined that they both think Hayate needs to be protected. Neither of them were going to whip out their big backstory tragedy punchcards on first encounter. C'est la vie.
2. In the Arkham series of Batman-focused action games, Red Hood eventually joins the roster. His solo DLC story is focused on him dismantling everything Black Mask has before finally killing the guy via kicking him out a fifth floor plate-glass window. Everything I've read about Black Mask indicated that he's about ten times more clever and dangerous in the comics than in adaptations—barring maybe the earlier parts of The Batman animated series from circa 2005.
3. There's a filler where Konoha does, in fact, maintain a prison somewhere in the Land of Fire. It's during the "Mizuki Strikes Back" arc. We are not canonizing that for the purposes of this story.