Chapter Text
What a shitty night.
Normally, he would have kept patrolling for at least another hour before even considering going home, but Jason was exhausted. Gotham’s damp cold had seeped into his bones over the past few weeks, and he was starting to remember why he hated winter more than any other season. His joints ached, his muscles were tense, and every gust of wind seemed to find a new way to seep through the seams of his jacket.
And there were still almost two hours left on his shift.
Jason let out a snort inside his helmet as he stopped the motorcycle at a traffic light. He was already shivering. He needed a warmer suit.
When he was Robin, he had different versions of the uniform for each season. As Red Hood, he’d never really worried much about those things.
For a long time, the temperature had been a minor annoyance. It could be unbearably hot or below freezing, and he hardly cared. It probably had something to do with the Lazarus Pit. Or maybe he was just young and stupid.
Winters in Gotham were brutal, and he wasn’t about to freeze like this for the next four months. He promised himself he’d work on it the next day as he rode down an almost empty avenue, the rain gently pelting his helmet.
Jason yawned behind his helmet and settled more comfortably on the motorcycle. The city lights reflected off the wet asphalt, turning the streets into long, blurry streaks of red, yellow, and white. At that hour, there was hardly any traffic left—just a few cars cutting through the night, leaving trails of water in their wake.
His mind began to wander.
Had he left enough sand in the sandbox?
Jason frowned. He was pretty sure he had. Although he was also pretty sure he’d thought exactly the same thing the last time he got home and discovered that the cat had decided to voice her opinion on the situation by using one of his rugs.
The little stray had turned up a year ago behind the building’s trash bins. He remembered that night perfectly because it was freezing cold, just like it was now.
He’d gone out to throw away a bag after a particularly long patrol when he heard a high-pitched meow coming from the alley.
His initial plan had been to ignore it. Until curiosity got the better of him.
He found her hiding behind a dumpster. She was a tortoiseshell cat, far too thin for her size, with her tail broken at a strange angle. She’d tried to hiss at him when he approached, though the result was rather unimpressive because she was shivering so hard from the cold that she could barely stand upright.
He took her to the vet with the intention of having her treated and finding her a family. That had been the initial plan.
Then the vet explained that her chances of being adopted were slim. She was an adult cat, had a medical history, and the shelter was already starting to run out of space. Jason had made the mistake of feeling guilty.
Two weeks later, he left the clinic with a carrier in one hand and a hefty bill in the other.
He named her Pretzel because her tail never fully straightened out again.
“Hey, Hood. Are you near Parke Kane?” Red Robin’s voice echoed from his intercom.
Jason raised his hand to his helmet and pressed the button near his ear. “Yeah. What do you need?”
“I’m tied up with a minor robbery. Can you cover it? It’s always quiet there. Just cover the route.”
“Got it. I’ll leave the boring paperwork to you guys.”
An amused snort escaped through the communicator before the connection cut out.
Jason tuned back into the police scanner frequency in case anything came up nearby. One of the advantages of working without a partner was that he could choose how to get around, and any excuse was a good one to take out the motorcycle.
With Robin out of patrol due to an injury, Dick busy in Blüdhaven, and a worrying shortage of active-duty police officers, the city was operating with fewer personnel than it needed. And with Christmas approaching, that didn’t help either.
Hopefully, the staffing shortage would be resolved by graduation season.
The vigilantes did a great job, but the beat cops were familiar faces crucial to the community and served as the ground troops covering all the ground that a small group of vigilantes couldn’t. Numbers simply weren’t a strength the Bats had.
Jason parked his motorcycle at the edge of the park and realized he’d only been there during the day. At night, the place lost any trace of friendly life. He vaguely recognized a few signs for closed stores and apartment buildings across the street. It was clear that this part of town didn’t receive the same care as other areas. The facades were weathered, with peeling paint and rusty railings that creaked in the wind.
In the center, a narrow stream cut through the grounds, spanned by a small wooden bridge. On both sides stood rows of cold metal playground equipment and motionless swings that swayed in the breeze. Further on, the food trucks remained closed, their signs turned off and their metal surfaces covered with a thin layer of nighttime moisture.
At that hour, no one was left. And if there was any movement, it was probably a drug dealer or a bored teenager.
He stepped away from the motorcycle and walked along the sidewalk, dodging scattered trash that someone—or something—had torn open and strewn across the ground. Torn bags, crushed containers, unidentifiable scraps. Raccoons, perhaps. Or a homeless person looking for something that might still be useful. Jason carefully avoided stepping on the debris, clinging to the faint hope that at least someone had managed to get a decent meal out of it all.
He jerked his head up at the sound of an out-of-place, chilling noise in the darkness just when he thought he was alone, putting him on high alert.
The noise stopped. It wasn’t like footsteps. Something was crawling along the ground far enough away from Jason that his eyes couldn’t pierce the darkness. He held his breath and fumbled for his gun with his dominant hand.
The noise started up again, but this time faster, and Jason’s instincts told him this was neither a prank nor an animal. He sprinted forward, sliding slightly as the ground sloped down toward the riverbank, and quickly landed on the shore, the sour smell of shallow water and sweet, moldy duckweed hitting him in the face.
The ground was a mixture of silty mud and pebbles, and his boots striking it mimicked a variation of that scraping sound. “Hey! I’m Red Hood! Come out and tell me what you’re doing here!”
No one should have been in the park; it closed at dusk. But people probably knew there weren’t enough police around to arrest intruders.
The shuffling stopped. Jason’s eyes finally adjusted to the dim light, and he saw a shadowy figure standing under the bridge, right in front of the drainpipe.
Jason’s skin prickled without warning just as a chuckle echoed off the concrete structure. It didn’t sound like a man, a woman, or a human. It was more like a coyote declaring that its hunt was over.
Jason remembered that his helmet had night vision and quickly activated it. A dark green glow soon filled his eyes, allowing him to make out reeds, mud, and the silhouette of… someone. Something.
Jason tried to focus on the face, but he couldn’t make out any features. It was right in front of him, just a few feet away, and he blinked constantly to be sure, but it was as if his eyes were forced to rely solely on his peripheral vision. He was getting dizzy and finally looked down at the figure’s body to see if he could memorize its clothing. The black on his shoes gleamed. In warm light, it would definitely be red. The figure was holding something. It wasn’t a weapon. It was rectangular and fit in his hand, but Jason couldn’t make out what it was. He almost thought it was a cell phone.
They motioned for Jason to come closer, and he instantly thought, “Yeah, fuck off.” He raised his hand to alert the police in case anyone nearby could block the exits, but the moment he did, the figure dropped whatever it was holding and vanished into the tunnel.
“Shit!”
He crossed the spot where they’d been standing and kicked the object. A new sound chilled him to the bone. The echo made it sound like there were ten more people, but it had to be just one.
Jason had heard many people cry—out of surprise, grief, joy, for any reason—or so he thought. But this was a cry foreign to him. Deep down in his heart, he knew that whoever was crying was suffering.
It was something so deeply sad that he almost wanted to stomp on the tape recorder to make it stop playing, but he picked it up instead. The voice on the other end—perhaps a boy or a child; he couldn’t tell—was pleading with someone.
“Please. I just want to go home. I won’t tell anyone… I promise. You can let me go and I won’t say a word, please. Please, please… I just… I just want to go home, let me go to...”
A scream that should have blown the speaker apart cut off the last syllable, and Jason pressed the power button. But the screams didn’t stop because they were happening in real time. They were coming from the tunnel.
There was someone, still alive, close enough for him to reach them before it was too late.
The splashing almost drowned out the screams as his boots churned up stagnant water and he moved forward almost blindly, but he could navigate by sound and resolve the problem once he reached the source. The screams turned into hysterical sobs, and Jason thought: Hang on, please hang on.
And then the laughter drowned out everything else.
Jason stumbled up the last few steps of the building. His legs seemed to move on pure muscle memory.
He stopped in front of his apartment door and spent several seconds staring at it before remembering he needed his keys to get in. It took him nearly a minute to find them and another minute to get the lock open. His hands were shaking too much. The key slipped through his fingers twice before he managed to insert it. Jason briefly pressed his forehead against the wood as he pushed the door open.
Jason’s hands and forearms were stained with blood, and he wasn’t even wearing his Red Hood suit. He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt that Alfred had brought him as soon as he saw him enter the cave. The rest of his suit was in the cave, collected as evidence, along with his helmet containing the video card and audio recording.
He’d been offered the chance to wash up and stay at the mansion. Jason had refused.
He just wanted to go home.
When he finally made it into the apartment, his feet moved across the carpeted hallway floor almost automatically. He had barely taken three steps when something moved at the far end.
A shadow stirred, growing from the corner of the wall. Jason reacted before he could think. He leaped to the side as a hand disappeared into the sleeve of his sweatshirt in search of a knife. His heart pounded painfully against his ribs.
Then the shadow stepped into the light.
Pretzel emerged from the corner, wagging her tail with utter calm before sitting down to start licking one of her paws.
Jason let out a sudden breath.
"Shit."
He ran a hand over his face.
God, he had to calm down.
The cat didn’t even seem to notice that she’d been seconds away from being impaled.
Jason shuffled on to the kitchen. Pretzel beat him there and leaped straight onto the counter, meowing demandingly. Jason had been trying for months to get her to stop doing that. He’d tried treats, scolding, and even putting aluminum foil on the surfaces. Nothing had worked, and she did whatever she wanted.
He ended up pulling the bag of food from under the sink while the cat paced back and forth along the edge of the countertop. The sound of kibble falling into the bowl briefly broke the silence in the apartment.
After the cat began to eat as if she’d been starving, Jason opened the fridge. Inside was a slice of pizza and a can of beer he’d saved specifically for that night when he got back from his patrol. Now, the mere thought of eating anything turned his stomach.
He closed the door again.
His gaze drifted down to his hands. The blood had dried and turned brown, caked under his fingernails and on his fingers—a thick layer, as if he’d submerged them in a bucket.
Jason swallowed hard. His throat tightened. He took a deep breath, and the air came in unevenly, accompanied by a chill that ran through his entire body.
And then he simply collapsed.
One moment he was standing in front of the refrigerator, and the next he was on his knees on the kitchen floor. He buried his face against his chest as a choked sound escaped his throat. His whole body began to shake violently.
God.
He’d seen a lot of things.
Too many.
He had seen many dead bodies. He had seen torture. He had seen murders so brutal that even years later he still remembered some of the details.
But he hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time.
Jason was breathing as if he were underwater. As if every breath came too late. He covered his mouth with both hands and closed his eyes tightly as his shoulders shook. He was crying so hard he could barely make a sound.
And yet, when he closed his eyes, he could only see him. The boy he’d found in the tunnel, emaciated and without a single patch of skin that hadn’t suffered some kind of horrific abuse. If he wasn’t bruised, he was burned, and if he wasn’t bruised or burned, he was torn down to the muscle—and in some cases, like on his fingers, down to the bone. He couldn’t even guess his age—maybe sixteen—because he barely recognized him as a human being. He was freshly slaughtered flesh.
He opened his eyes with a start, and the kitchen came back into view. The distant city lights streamed in through the window. Pretzel looked at him for a moment, curiously, then went back to eating as if nothing had happened.
The constant hum of the refrigerator filled the apartment. In the distance, a siren echoed between the buildings and faded away shortly afterward.
Jason wiped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and managed to stand up. His legs felt strange, as if they didn’t quite belong to him. He ended up dragging himself to the bathroom and stripped off his clothes without bothering to pick them up off the floor.
It took forever for the water to heat up. Jason sat on the edge of the tub, watching the stream of water fall into the drain. The steam slowly covered the mirror until it completely obscured his reflection.
He grabbed the nail brush from the sink, sat down on the bathroom floor, and tried everything he thought might calm him down. He washed his hair and rubbed a soft towel over his back, but nothing he tried could help him cope. He felt helpless and could do nothing but listen to his own ragged breathing until the water began to cool.
Jason decided to stay with the boy because, somehow, he was still breathing after being mutilated and left naked in freezing water, just to die.
That decision allowed the monster who had done this to escape, laughing as if he’d won a game, while Jason tried to comfort someone who no longer understood comfort.
But the boy’s chest was torn open. He had been disemboweled. The boy was crying with blood bubbling between his cracked lips, and Jason held his head in his lap, speaking to him in a soft voice, telling him that the police were on their way and that he could hold on a little longer, that he believed in him.
“It hurts,” he had stammered, and Jason, without thinking, said, “It’ll stop soon.” And that turned out to be true because it did stop soon.
No one made it in time. The Bats didn’t make it in time. The police didn’t make it in time.
Jason didn’t make it in time.
Stephanie finally found Jason, his arms covered in blood up to his elbows, performing CPR on a dead high school student whose eyes were still open but who had already passed away.
Jason swallowed hard. The nausea returned immediately.
He saw the boy’s skinned hands, the blood glistening wet, and the bones glowing in the darkness. He saw the bite marks on his thighs from human teeth and his feet blackened with a stench that indicated the cause was fire, not dirt. The black hole in his face, which would tear him apart if he dared to keep trying to understand it, and that damned laughter.
It hadn’t been an animal that did those things to him. It was another person. Who laughed, as if he were enjoying what he’d done.
That boy had died in fear and pain, and Jason… was unable to help him or even hold the man who did it accountable.
Batman had asked him for a description. Time and again he’d tried to reconstruct the attacker’s face, but every time he got close to the memory, he felt something slipping through his fingers. He couldn’t remember the color of his hair. He couldn’t make out the shape of his nose or the structure of his face. He wasn’t even sure of his approximate age or ethnicity. There was a void there, a blank space where the details should have been, and the more he tried to fill that void, the stronger the dizziness became—the dizziness that had been haunting him for hours.
In the end, he’d had to step away to keep from throwing up.
His throat felt as dry as ashes as he remembered it. He silently cursed himself. He should have stood his ground. He should have kept searching. He should have helped secure the perimeter or checked the tunnel entrances one more time. Anything would have been better than standing there motionless while everyone else worked.
However, after nearly an hour, Batman had let out a long sigh and told him to go home.
“You were with someone in their final moments. Go home and process it.”
And despite his protests, Jason had had to do it because he’d simply become a hindrance.
The police, Red Robin, and Spoiler continued to comb the area. They searched streets, sewers, abandoned buildings, and nearby rooftops. They looked for security cameras, witnesses, and any clues the killer might have left behind. However, it was as if he had vanished into thin air. As if he had stepped out of that tunnel and disappeared from the world.
Meanwhile, GCPD officers stood by the body, securing the scene and covering the boy’s now-cold corpse with a sheet.
Jason closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the damp tiles of the shower.
He didn’t know how long he’d been there.
The water had been cooling for a while. Long enough to make his teeth chatter and send shivers down his spine, but even so, he couldn’t find the strength to get up.
He rubbed his skin so hard that he ended up leaving red marks from the friction. Yet every time he stopped, he swore the smell was still there—the sour stench of stagnant water, the mud, the blood—that nauseating mixture that seemed to have clung to his hair, his skin, and under his fingernails.
At some point, he managed to sit up. Jason didn’t remember exactly when. He only knew that he ended up crawling out of the bathtub, leaving drops of water on the floor as he made his way to his bedroom.
Jason collapsed onto the mattress, still exhausted, his muscles heavy and his head throbbing behind his eyes. He tried to sleep. He really tried. But as soon as he closed his eyes, he heard that laughter again.
And when exhaustion finally overcame him, all he found on the other side were dreams filled with faceless shadows and the laughter of coyotes echoing in the distance.