A/N - This is a real, real early fanfic of mine. I wrote it pre-March 2020, before the pandemic actually DID disrupt schooling. I thought someday I might write more, but I realize now in my massive WIP clean-out that it, too, is finished. It's old and a little rough, but I want it to see the light of day anyway.
Gotham's students were in the midst of an extended summer vacation.
Joker's bombing of the central school bus lot in April had branded him a hero to schoolchildren across Gotham, because despite Bruce Wayne's offer to pay for new school buses, it was taking time to locate enough buses across the country available for purchase. It wasn't like school buses were mass produced, since when did a school district ever have money for a new bus? Not to mention, it was unheard of for a town to need an entirely new fleet.
Therefore, due to the Joker's alarming rising popularity among the youth of Gotham, the School Board and Gotham City Council decided to attempt some propaganda of their own. Their brilliant idea was a summer essay contest for school students, with the prize of filling wholesome occupations "for a day" - such as the mayor, the fire chief, or the police commissioner. The powers-that-be were positive that this initiative would have students working feverishly on their essays all summer long as first one job, then another, would be opened to the lucky contest winners.
When the first deadline for entries for "Police Commissioner for a Day" arrived, however, the School Board found to their dismay that out of the paltry twenty-four entries they had received, not a single one was from a student. More disturbing than the poor grammar and spelling mistakes in the majority of the submitted essays was the fact that every single entry was postmarked from Arkham Asylum.
Scarecrow wrote that if he were police commissioner, he would legalize the use of recreational inhalants. The Mad Hatter's essay was written in iambic pentameter and illustrated with sketches for his redesign of police hats, which were objectively quite stylish.
Mr. Freeze believed that freezing Gotham into a perpetual winter would deter crime as the less-determined criminals would be reluctant to leave home to go out in the cold. He had gone the extra mile and had finagled the Penguin into endorsing his 'candidacy,' as he called it, with an essay of his own detailing the different species of endangered penguins that Gotham could become a sanctuary for once Mr. Freeze had sent the city back to the Ice Age.
Riddler proposed to overhaul the police academy's coursework by rewriting the entire curriculum as a series of riddles to be solved by aspiring officers, which would hone their detecting skills as well as weed out the weaker minded candidates. Commissioner Gordon privately thought that this was a novel and innovative suggestion that he wouldn't at all mind implementing. But he couldn't quite bring himself to share his opinion on that with Batman, although he was doing his best to subtly drop some hints that he'd like the Dark Knight to design such a course himself.
Red Hood chuckled silently to himself as he eavesdropped from the shadows of the police station roof, where Commissioner was wrapping up his litany of woes with one more attempt to win Batman's pitying assistance.
"I told you, Batman, we'd have gotten a lot more essays, and from actual students, if you'd have offered them the chance to Be Batman for A Night." Gordon was, as par for the course, speaking to himself by the time his sentence ended, but his words gave Jason an idea.
He did love to read and Gotham did have a shockingly low literacy rate. It was also true that this five month vacation was bad for the students' educations. Maybe it was time for Red Hood to be a little more of a public servant and do something about that, he thought to himself with a sly grin. Maybe it would teach Batman to step up.
Bruce almost had an aneurysm at his mid-afternoon breakfast the next day when Tim came dashing in, waving his phone wildly in his hand at the same time that Oracle started calling Bruce's cell non-stop - while simultaneously texting him to 'answer his damn phone because Jason had really gone too far this time.'
"Red Hood is trending!" Tim shouted before Bruce could answer Oracle's call.
"It's the Be Red Hood for a Day Essay Contest!" Bruce read with dismay on the phone screen that was slapped down in front of him. "In at least a thousand words, tell Red Hood why you deserve the right to suit up with him. The winner will get to use his guns! Wear his hood! Shoot criminals! Taunt Batman! Longer essays will be given higher consideration. Essays with poor spelling and grammar will be discarded. Submissions are open for the next seventy-two hours only, so don't delay! Get writing and proofread that work!"
"Oh, hell no," Bruce growled, slamming his hand down so hard on the table that his coffee splattered out of his mug and onto his eggs benedict. He picked up his phone (that Oracle was still frantically calling) and without even giving her a chance to talk, he barked out "Can you hack the submission site and shut it down?"
His frown grew even deeper as Oracle answered him, because apparently, no, she couldn't. Jason had encouraged his contestants to get around her wiles by posting their submissions on any and every social media site, with the hashtag #talesforthehood - but he'd also hacked the sites and added #talesforthehood to .post. Allowing him to filter his non-hacked posts from true submissions, while preventing Oracle from doing a mass-delete of his hashtag.
"What do you mean you're Oracle but you can't shut down the damn internet?" Batman yelled into the phone as Damian and Alfred appeared wide-eyed in the doorway of the dining room. Tim groaned and texted Steph.
"Did you hear about RH and the contest?"
"Yep," she wrote back.
"Crazy, right? Bruce is losing his mind."
"Can't chat now, Tim, I'm super busy. Byeeeee!" Steph wrote back.
She bit her lip as she swiped out of Tim's text and went back to the notes app on her phone. The fact that Tim had dumped her six months ago wasn't the reason why she didn't want to talk to him now. Well, it was part of the reason. After everything they'd been through together, and after Steph had done everything Bruce asked her to like a good little Robin and Batgirl, Tim was going to up and tell her that he didn't trust her anymore? That he couldn't trust her?
Steph didn't know if she was ever going to get over that hurt. She'd thought about marrying Tim, if she was honest. Yeah, she'd been barely out of high school at the time, and what do teenagers know, but… she really had thought they'd end up together for good. Except, as hard as she'd tried to keep him, he'd pushed her right out of his life.
So who did he think he was to try to chat with her now? And all because Bruce was riled up over Jason. Again. For what was that, the third time this week? Fifteenth time this month? Anyway, Steph had more important things to do. Like win an essay contest.
She'd barely ever crossed paths with Jason. Oh, she'd seen him in the distance once or twice when she was Batgirling around town with Oracle in her ear. She'd been warned away from him by Oracle and Bruce and Tim and Dick and even Damian, who barely spoke to her in the first place.
And she wasn't an idiot. She knew that Jason intended this contest to be for kids. But, he'd said students, and she was a college student, so that totally counted, right? Right? Yes. Besides, what did it hurt to try? At worst, he'd think she was a loser and really, what else was new? Steph was fairly used to being written off at this point in her life by any and all vigilantes.
But if there was a chance, any chance at all that he'd take her seriously… she had to try. She was too scared to try to approach him on her own as Batgirl o ask for his help. He was on sore terms with Bruce and most of the other Bats and she didn't have a death wish. Or a get-the-crap-beat-out-of-her wish.
Honestly, she hadn't ever considered asking Jason for help at all until she woke up to see his contest staring her in the face this morning, all over the news. The burning, feverish desire to win had hit her so hard that it knocked her breath out. If only - if only… She meticulously continued to type on her phone, since she didn't own a laptop and sure as hell couldn't use a library computer for this, and she read and re-read and proofread the autocorrect mistakes, and then she wrote some more.
Finally, Steph hoped and prayed and did the stupidest thing possible: she went to the copy center and printed ten copies of her essay out on actual paper with her new, anonymous email address listed at the top. Then, she'd gone and taken herself down to Crime Alley (in her regular clothes but with a baseball cap and sunglasses on.)
She'd proceeded to hit up two bartenders, five hookers, and three smallish kids not big enough to make Red Hood feel threatened, and she'd handed them each a copy of her essay sealed in an envelope with #talesforthehood written on the outside - plus five bucks and a dollar scratch-off ticket for their trouble, along with a plea to pass her essay along to Red Hood if they saw him.
Sixty dollars was way more than she should be spending on anything this semester, let alone a lame-ass chance to win Jason's essay contest. Lady Luck might not even consent to get her essay into Red Hood's hands. But she was desperate, and some things were worth the money - no matter how little she had.
However, the next twelve hours made it clear that Steph was not alone in her adult ambition to win the contest. Since Jason had failed to designate a specific age limit for contestants, his hashtag started blowing up by mid-afternoon. All manner of female entrants well over the age of eighteen, who appeared to care quite a bit more about doing Red Hood for a day than they cared about being him, were submitting essays.
Bruce choked on his post-patrol water bottle and blushed a deeper red than he'd previously thought possible when Tim and Duke began reading aloud from the BatComputer some of the more alluring essays before he could leap over them and turn the monitors off, all while giving them a viciously disappointed Batdad-glare. He almost revoked both of their suits on the spot when Tim wondered aloud about how popular a Be Red Robin For a Day contest would be.
"Not nearly as popular as a Be Nightwing For a Day contest," Duke pointed out calmly.
"That hurts," Tim said with wounded pride.
"Please," Duke said. "You know that Dick has the superior ass."
Bruce let out a muffled groan and stalked off to the privacy of his bedroom. He knew he couldn't stop his boys from reading that filth, but he sure as hell didn't want to be there while they did. He sighed as he poured hydrogen peroxide in his ears in a futile attempt to sanitize them from what he had heard. He generally avoided thinking about guns as much as possible, and what some women wanted Jason to do to them with Red Hood's vast arsenal - he shivered and applied his q-tip with vigor.
"I can't believe this stupid contest," Babs complained to Steph the next day in her Oracle lair. "Jason cannot seriously be thinking of putting a gun in some kid's hand and helping them shoot people."
"I'm pretty sure at this point, the winner's not going to want him to put the gun in their hand," Steph said dryly. She grinned outwardly at Oracle, but inside she was dying. Why, oh why, oh why, had she submitted her essay so fast and in person, with no take-backsies, before realizing what the contest was devolving into?
"Dating apps exist for a reason," Babs continued to huff in frustration. "Couldn't the man have used one of those if he was so desperate for a hookup?"
"Maybe he wasn't looking for a date at first and it just turned into that," Steph said quietly, trying to fight back her secret embarrassment. She sighed as she finished gearing up as Batgirl and got ready to head out. She had honestly thought that Jason might sincerely be trying to ramp up the Gotham kids' reading and writing skills, although that assumption hadn't been enough to stop her from entering for the sake of her own personal mission.
She had most likely gotten it wrong, though, despite her hopeful words to Oracle. Probably only a clueless dork like herself would assume that Red Hood cared about literacy. Because Babs was most likely right. It was only about Jason getting himself laid all along, and he was undoubtedly using the raunchiness of his contest as a way to mock the City Council for even attempting such a stupid idea as an essay contest.
Well, what did it matter, she tried to tell herself. So he'd think that she was an even bigger moron than he already must think she was. If he thought about her at all, which he probably didn't, because why would he? She was only Batgirl, and not even up to the level of Babs or Cass when they had held the mantle.
So it was no big deal. Right, Batgirl? she vainly thought to herself. Jason probably wouldn't even get her essay; what were the chances any of her contacts would even see him, let alone give it to him, instead of throwing it right in the trash as soon as she'd turned the corner?
Steph tried to clear her mind as she went out to kick some ass for the night, hoping that she'd feel better in a few days when the contest was over. The next two days passed with such a lull in crime in Gotham that Bruce had far too much time on his hands to sulk in the Batcave. Goddamn writing contest, Steph heard him muttering over the comms to Oracle one night.
The day of the deadline finally arrived, and Gothamites awoke to RedHoodRLnss posting that he would be taking the rest of the week to read through the slew of submitted essays before picking a winner, and that he be notifying the winner by DM so as to protect their privacy.
"Pfft," Babs made a rude noise. "He'll be sliding into DM's from now until eternity, he has so many women lining up to fuck him," she scoffed. "But, I swear, if Bruce catches him out and about actually teaching some kid how to shoot a gun…"
"Babs, this is Gotham," Steph pointed out. "We come out of the womb knowing how to shoot guns."
Oracle gave her the evil eye but Steph just laughed and scampered off to Batgirl around Gotham, trying to push her secret mortification out of her pores into the polluted night air. It was 4:30 a.m. before she was home and in bed and idly scrolling through her phone while she waited for post-patrol adrenaline to wear off.
There was no point in checking her anonymous only-for-the-contest email address yet, she knew this. Jason was going to be reading essays for the rest of the week. And he wasn't going to write to her, anyway, because he wasn't going to get her essay and she wasn't going to win.
Still, Steph couldn't help opening her inbox.
She gasped when she saw a lone message titled Congratulations, Red Hood. She clicked it open and read:
You win. Shoot me your phone number. - J
"Oh, shit," Steph whispered. Her heart started racing as she blushed in a sudden panic. She hadn't expected to win anymore. Not after all of those pornographic essays. Oh, God, what had she done? She couldn't go through with it now, could she? It was one thing to want to beat out a bunch of little kids who Jason shouldn't even have been enticing to be Red Hood in the first place, but now that all of those horny bitches had jumped on his bandwagon, too, Steph felt like an immature loser.
She was supposed to go hang out with Jason for twelve hours after reading all of the smut that he'd been bombarded with? Not that she'd really been looking forward to the hanging-out-with-him aspect of winning the contest in the first place; that would always have been the uncomfortable collateral damage of winning.
But she'd been willing to put up with the awkwardness of socializing for a day with the man she knew only from photos and silhouettes, the man who'd tried in the past to kill Tim, the man who the entire BatFamily had warned her away from, if he could give her what she wanted. Except now there was another layer of ick floating around it that she hadn't originally been expecting. But it couldn't be helped. Steph wasn't about to turn this chance down, so she took a deep breath.
R u fr? she wrote in a reply email. You'd better be, or I've got a gooperang with Red Hood's name on it. She added her phone number underneath and clicked 'send.'
Steph held her breath for a minute before realizing that she was being silly. Who knew when he'd get back to her? She should play some Candy Crush and then go to bed instead of sitting on pins and needles. Candy Crush had hardly loaded, though, before her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
I'm for real, Blondie, she read. Time to upgrade your goop crap to bullets. Steph had to clap a hand over her mouth to cover her sob, because her mom was asleep in the next room - but ohmigod this was really happening! She buried her face in a pillow to try to muffle her whimpers and the tears that were suddenly flooding her face. She was grateful, so fuckin' grateful, and she hoped to hell that Bruce and Babs wouldn't find out, but - oh, shit.
You won't tell B? She nervously texted back when she got herself under control. She was treated to an eye roll emoji back.
What the fuck do you think? he wrote after it. The three little dots blinked for a second. And then: I got you, Dead Robin. Steph gasped as ugly tears started to slowly leak out of her eyes. She wasn't even sobbing as much as hyperventilating as she rolled onto her side and drew her knees up to her chest, pulling the covers over her head as she went.
Jason wasn't supposed to be nice or caring. He was supposed to be an asshole. A murderous, vindictive asshole. That's why she'd entered the damn contest, for fuck's sake. Oh, God, she wasn't supposed to have warm fuzzies filling her up from Tim's almost-murderer, who had just validated her more with two words than B or Oracle had ever validated her in all the years that she'd been a mask.
And she definitely wasn't supposed to be Red Hood for a Day. But when had what she wasn't supposed to do ever stopped her?
Spoiler alert: Never.
The End
A/N - Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Tumblr at River9Noble.