Chapter Text
It takes Jason a depressingly long time to realise the new guy is more than a pretty face.
***
Jason Todd is not cool. He knows this. He is comfortable with this. He’s been off his whole life. Even when he was a cute thirteen-year-old backed by Wayne money, he was the pariah of his school. Too smart. Too stupid. Too rough. Too soft, dark, white, straight, queer—You name it, someone, somewhere found a way to ridicule and exclude him from their group for it. It’s a fact that he’s come to term, now that he’s settled into a Post No Man’s Land life of a Gothamite Crime Lord. It is as it is; there’s no use crying about it.
With that in mind, the first time he sees Hobard Hobie Brown, with his effortless beauty and hooded cat eyes, his brain is predisposed to dismiss him. He took one look at his lack of scars, shiny hair and arrogant line of his chin and thought: privilege. Pretender. Tourist.
How embarrassing. He, Jason, who grew up around Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake, who knows rich kids can be as unhinged as the destitute ones. Who knows that everybody breaks if pushed hard enough, and extreme wealth will only make you into a sociopath who requires someone like the Red Hood to deal with. He knew better. Knows better. And, maybe that’s Hobie’s genius. He did what B did, only focused on a different aspect. B plays a man who is made weak by his lack of purpose, hedonism and camp behaviour. Hobie’s game is that of an abrasive, loud teenager without substance who inserts himself into conversations he is not equipped to handle, even if he had read the theory—Which he hadn’t because, in the end, he saw the cultural markers of the oppressed and disadvantaged and claimed them as fashion accessories.
Yeah.
***
Jason exhales a long, studying breath. The kid’s not doing anything wrong, calm down. If anything, he’s doing good, perched high up on a gargoyle and singing a song in Diamond District. He amassed hundreds of people too. Thousands, maybe. So what if you want to slap some respect into him? You know it’s your complexes talking. So what if that sheltered kid dares to speak for you?
He clenches his hands and exhales a long breath. Yeah, well. Just because he’s harmless doesn’t make the whole performance less aggravating. Jason can barely stand stuff like this when it’s done by his—his—Whatever B to him. Seeing this artfully tousled boy with his guitar and his piercings and his lips try to claim some sort of oppression—Yeah. It stings. What happened, sweetheart, he thinks, aware he’s being a dick here, and not caring too much about it. Did your favourite organic coffee shop run out of CBD bubble tea? Did your last modelling gig not serve gluten-free macarons? Was the shipment of sustainable guitar picks you import from Japan late this month?
And he can’t even move along, because as irritating as the kid is, he doesn’t deserve to be eaten alive by the local fauna. Sooner or later, one of Gotham’s many psychopaths will sniff this atrocity out and come to fuck shit up. Plus—it could be worse, right? It could. Some form of protest is better than none. The kid could have been making the big bucks in Seoul, Berlin or Paris. He could have been soaking in a spa somewhere in preparation for his next Cartier photoshoot. Instead, he’s here, getting rained on in the miserable September wind, ruining his fancy instrument.
“Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain,” croons the kid, sound somehow bouncing off the concrete and stone and filth of Gotham. Jason knows the gargoyle he’s sitting on. He likes that gargoyle. "I got a head full of ideas that are drivin' me insane.”
“They say sing while you slave and I just get bored. Ah, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.”
Jason tries not to look at the crowd. Gothamites will stop to watch a fool humiliate himself, much like they will idly watch an execution. Street theatre is a loved cultural artefact of this cursed cesspit, especially if it ends with Scarecrow dosing the performer with something that will make him tear his own face off. With that said, they’re not smiling, now. They’re not animated, and thank Christ for that, but they’re listening. When the tune shifts from bluesy melancholy to cynically youthful Rock’n’Roll, Jason is disgusted to say that he can sort of see why.
“I'm breakin' rocks in the hot sun,” sings the kid, eyes glittering with a little too much intelligence. “I fought the law and the law won.” A little too knowing. Hideously young, yeah, and smug, but not dull, sadly. “I needed money 'cause I had none. I fought the law and the law won.”
Ugh. Fuck you, too.
***
He doesn’t catch the next performance with the punk-rock debuante, but he absolutely clicks into the stream as soon as it comes up.
The footage is shaky—a handheld phone—and the breath of whoever is filming is audible. The breath and the excitement. They sound young, this anonymous cameraman, and thrilled to be observing this. The shaky zoom-in to the figure slouched on the fire escape, plucking out notes from his instrument is clear enough.
“If you thought things had changed, friend, you'd better think again,” sings the guy. “Bluntly put, in the fewest of words, cunts are still running the world.”
Jason finds himself huffing a grudging laugh. How did he even sniff out the house of one of Gotham’s many mob ADA’s, he doesn’t know, but he did. Assistant District Attorney Farrow has been in Falcone’s pocket since day one of her tenure, but she’s clever enough and sane enough to have been left alone by everyone. Both B and other crime lords have bigger fish to fry, and Farrow is always careful not to cross that line.
“Now the working classes are obsolete. They are surplus to society's needs. So let 'em all kill each other and get it made overseas.”
A little on the nose, yeah, but the cameraman giggles—they are a she and maybe a fifteen-year-old she at most. Jason can sort of see why. The singer had leaned so far out of the fire escape that he’s all too close to plummeting to his breath, and he’s not even remotely tense.
“If you don't like it, then leave, or use your right to protest on the street. Yeah use your right, but don't imagine that it's heard; not while cunts are still running the world.”
The camerawoman—cameragirl—cheers and joins the chorus. It’s perhaps not high poetry, yeah, but even Jason’s shrivelled soul can admit it’s funny to hear dozens and dozens of people chanting Cunts are still running the world at Farrow’s house.
“We know what you did,” the singer says, once the music dies out, head tilted to the side. The camera can’t catch his expression but his body language is languid and bored. “We know who you send to prison. You have quotas to fill, yeah?”
Well, yeah. Duh. Farrow is hardly the worst of ‘em. Hell, she’s practically decent. Yeah, she’s bout and paid for. She won’t ever convict Falcone’s guys, but she will try to fill her quota with other thugs, not girls and boys trying to survive.
The music picks up again. Instead of the easy, youthful tempo, now the notes elongate, twisting together into thick ropes of sound, with plenty of snarls and thorns for texture. He misses the first bit, because the girl fumbles with the phone. “Why ask politely, why go lightly, why say please,” he makes out. “They only want to get you on your knees,”
Yeesh. A little on the nose, maybe?
“There are a few things I never could believe.” The singer jumps up, finding his balance on the railing somehow. He’s still playing, to make matters worse. “A woman when she weeps, a merchant when he swears.” He’s not even looking at his feet. No, his head is tilted up, as he rocks back and forth on the railing of a rickety fire escape that can break under his weight at any second. “A thief who says he'll pay, a lawyer when he cares.”
Cute, he thinks and then has to spend a few moments scrubbing his mind in punishment. So what if he’s making fun of a dirty DA with clever song lyrics? How much is that worth? So far, yeah, he’s been lucky. A few Falcone guys could have been nearby. Some of the many cops she didn’t prosecute. What would he do then, pull a Snow White?
***
The presence of the Phantom—full name the Punk Phantom, because Gothamites have as much subtlety as a slap to the mouth—starts to become more felt. Jason doesn’t have or use social media, but Tim does, and he makes sure to inform him when the nutcase is seen drawing graffiti on the courthouse, throwing pastries at cops and similar stunts of youthful civil disobedience.
Jason doesn’t get involved, because he has work to do that doesn’t include a wannabe punk musician who is probably doing some sort of avant-garde performance piece. Therefore, he blames the shock for how much he enjoyed a sequence he stumbled into entirely by accident.
“At school they give you shit, drop you in the pit—”
Where is he, though, Jason thinks, baffled. The crowd in front of the City Hall is growing, but it’s hardly thick. He’s not on the balconies and his voice seems to be bouncing around, each line coming from a different direction.
“—Then you're a prime example of how they must not be—”
Is it the rooftops? Probably not. Rooftops are Bat-turf; Jason knows them. Even these fancy ones in Downtown.
“—You'd love to see me cop-out, 'd love to see me dead. Do they owe us a living—”
“Of course they do,” the crowd chants back. There’s more humour in it than actual violence, but—Well, this is how riots begin. Riots in Gotham are a bad idea, and not only because they attract psychopaths.
“They'd give you a lobotomy for something you ain't done. They'll make you an epitomy of everything that's wrong.”
It’s angrier than his typical stuff, he thinks, amused. Less detached-cool. Less unaffected, bored teenager sneering truth at the dumb, working-class oxen.
“They'll use you as a target for demands and for advice. When you don't want to hear it they'll say you're full of vice.”
Aw, poor baby. Did we have a bad day, then? Did the cook over-knead your brioche doughnuts, and they came out a bit bready? Did your daddy and mommy threaten to cut you off if you don’t stop this nonsense and return to bouncing between couture and artsy, tasteful jazz?
“Do they owe us a living?”
The crowd is ready, primed and fed top-notch entertainment. “Of course they fucking do!”
Christ.
A figure drops down from underneath the roof of the courthouse. It swings down, rather, using some sort of rope probably. More importantly, it unrolls a giant billboard-sized canvas with a rather expert rendition of a glory hole, with their mayor on one end and a long list of men on the other. The usual suspects are there—Penguin, Two-face, Falcone, Maroni, but also, and Jason can’t overstate this, Bruce Wayne.
He’s still laughing when the police pour out of the City Hall, chasing after the boy. They won’t catch him, probably, but he can spot a few shady guys in the crowd.
“Hang on, kid,” he says, swooping into the fray and plucking out the surprisingly light figure. He’s not a short man, around Dick’s size, but he’s all long limbs and fluff. Up close, you can feel that the guy isn’t taking as good care of himself as he should.
“Red Hood,” the Phantom mutters. “Now this is a turn I didn’t expect.”
“Whyever not?” He sets his shoulders and fires off a grapple, the kid pressed into his side. “You’ve been pissing off everybody you possibly could for a while now and crowds are the perfect place to shank a guy. Brace, now—”
The whole thing doesn’t take more than a minute, until Jason is depositing him on the roof of the opera, passing a critical eye over his figure.
“You oughta eat more,” he says, tugging the disarrayed jacket back into place. “How are you going to outrun the millions of people you drive into incoherence if you swoon from hunger?”
The kid arches a pierced brow at him, batting his hands away. “I expected you to be a part of the pissed-off group, to be frank.”
Now how could he explain that, yes, he is beyond irritated, but also he drew a ten-meter-high mural dissing Bruce Wayne and that alone makes up for a lot of it. Without compromising their identity, of course.
“And you let me carry you away,” he settles on. “Skinny and reckless.” He pauses to absorb what he has said. “Which I probably could have intimated. That one’s on me.”
For some reason, a flash of amusement passes over the kid’s eternally unimpressed face. “I am very intuitive,” he says, upsettingly. “You didn’t mean to harm.”
Jason doesn’t hide his sigh. He’s probably into astrology. He probably goes to therapy and has a healthy relationship with his father. How dare he.
“I’ve heard plenty about you,” the Phantom continues. “Can’t say it fits. Anti-establishment crime lords with robust healthcare options are a new for me.”
Amusement sours in his chest, turning into exhausted resignation. “You shouldn’t be around me and mine, kid,” he says. “Stick to your strengths like being pretty, loud and flashy.”
“Charming.”
Huh. If Jason didn’t have a lifetime of being around emotionally unavailable bats, he’d miss the irritation quickly blended into nonchalance.
Too bad, so sad.
“Keep yourself safe, kid,” he says instead. “Preferably by going somewhere warm and sunny. Gotham isn’t kind to us, and she loves us. There is no kindness to be found, here.”
***
It goes on like this for a few weeks. The kid would pull outrageous stunts, Jason would swoop in to bail him out if he was near, they would spend a few mints in snippy back-and-forth, and he’d bail.
Linus & Son Construction is a bigger deal, however. He even gets a heads-up from the Phantom, with a vague time and place. In this case, the time and place is a construction site of a glitzy high-rise casino and hotel combo.
Jason, having been warned, brings a cushion and a thermos of tea and sits back to watch the show. When the canvas unrolls to reveal several real-estate moguls bent over, wearing ball gags and lingerie, with Brucie Wayne lounging in an arm-chair, he has to work hard not to choke and die with how much he’s laughing.
The backdrop of heavy, humourless blues pushes the performance from shock comedy to cynical theatre.
“They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,” the Phantom sings, beats slow to allow for the construction workers to stomp their feet in the rhythm. “ Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?”
At least the kid had the good sense not to include any of B’s adopted sons. No, the ridicule, such as it is, focused on his stranglehold on Gotham’s economy, especially in terms of real estate. Fair enough, really. B owns an ungodly amount of Gotham, something around a fourth. It’s a ridiculous number, but Gotham is a ridiculous place.
“Once I built a tower up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?”
The song is probably a bit too biting. He could have chosen something more thematically appropriate than a genuinely working-class tragedy.
“Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.” This time, the kid doesn’t run, he climbs up on the rope on which he swung down from the top of the construction and swings once, twice, three times. Whoever taught this kid gymnastics knew their stuff. His balance and agility are nuts. “Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Say buddy, can you spare a dime?”
Yeah.
“Come on, kid,” he says quietly, once he swings him away. The live-current of anger he can feel in him is—odd. “You did good, but it’s time to rest, now. Let’s go.”
“No pithy, biting commentary,” the Phantom says. “I’m honoured.”
You’re spoiling for a fight is what you’re doing, and you’re not going to get one right now. “I have a sore throat,” he says. “I’m on a strict diet of silence and compliments. It’s a lot.” He tucks him closer to his side, as they turn a corner. He’s not taking the kid to Uptown, but Giannino is a cute place and they don’t ask questions.
The kid looks like he would like to ask some questions, but is too moody to bother. That’s fine.
Ana greets him at the door, hands on her hips, dyed hair tied up in a tight bun. “Now you remember Aunt Ana, yes? Not when alone, oh no. Only with pretty boy. Shameful. If my old mother was here, she would smack you with spoon.”
Bless.
“The kid needs feeding,” he says, pushing the silent figure forward. “I’ll stop by, promise.”
“Don’t make promises you will break,” she snaps, but she’s already bullying the Phantom up the stairs and into the private room. “No respect, this boy. Think he’s hot shit because he shoots guns and has big muscles. Hah.”
“Ana’s husband is Croatian and she’s Serbian,” Jason tells Phantom, who looks more and more bewildered to be pushed around by a tiny grandma with a face that can easily be described as one big wrinkle, with dyed red hair and gnarly hands. “Trust me, that’s a big deal, especially for their time.”
“So says the boy who never once visited the homeland,” Ana says, doing some witchery around the room to clear out all the accumulated junk that always finds a way to her spare room. “Is a beautiful city, on the coast. Fish is fresh, and we have a guy for wine. Mediterranean fish, too, not this ocean crazy thing with giant pretty lobster that taste like sponge and clam you sooner throw than eat.”
“Why would I ever go to Croatia if you’re here,” Jason says. Thankfully, his smile is hidden by the helmet, so his cred remains untarnished. “Now, Aunt Ana, I leave the menu in your expert hands, but I would ask you to look at those skinny wrists and decide accordingly.”
“I see, duckling,” she says, eying the Phantom with the grim determination of a woman feeding up a skinny pig for slaughter. “I also pack a bag for you. I know you have been drinking those cursed shakes. No, don’t lie, Aunt Ana always knows—”
***