Chapter Text
Prelude
Ask any hero you care to name, and they will have an opinion on fate. It is the sort of thing that heroes think about.
Some know fate personally, or think they do. They know a shining helm, a goddess, a sentient force that can be reasoned with.
Others refuse to believe in it at all. It is the only way they can live their lives.
And many – paragons beyond reproach, grey-area ciphers, and yes, even those the world has marked outright villains – lie awake at night with the question, letting it turn their pillows to stone, their bedclothes to fire, the familiar darkness to unfriendly eyes. They worry about lives saved or lost, disasters unaverted, an endless litany of could, if, and should have.
Here is a secret: Fate exists.
Here is another secret: It does not care about being thwarted.
Not when it comes to the little things.
In a thousand, thousand universes, pearls will catch the light as they fall to the puddled ground in an alley. Ropes will fray and snap above a sea of helpless, horrified onlookers. These are the big moments, the ones that would require a very large stone in the stream of reality to divert.
For Jason Peter Todd, however, all it took was a single tiny plant falling into the current and whirling away. For this, fate blinked. And the river moved.
Chapter 1
The world might not know it, but Nightwing was a very good detective. They saw the aerial acrobatics, they heard the quips and jokes, and some of them (a growing number of them, in fact, at least here in Bludhaven) had seen first-hand how he could fight.
No one ever saw the paperwork.
At that precise moment in time, Nightwing was kind of wishing he also couldn't see the paperwork. Haven Pharmaceuticals' records were a snarled mess of shell corporations, cooked books, and an inconveniently high number of vaguely named entities. And somewhere in there was proof that Haven Pharm was adding a little something extra to their products that they really, really shouldn't be. Something that made ordinary people start exhibiting side-effects like homicidal rage and a sudden increase in muscle mass.
Nightwing clicked and scrolled through it all, rubbing the middle fingers of his right hand absently against his lips as he did so. It was a thinking gesture and a soothing one, a tic he'd developed at age eleven and never kicked. He could practically hear B in his head lecturing him on the inadvisability of physical tells, and the even bigger inadvisability of drawing attention to those tells by painting a bright blue stripe down his arms and the fingers in question.
He lowered his hand and sighed. He was going to have to copy everything and take it home. He hated homework, but he couldn't peruse all of this in one night, not if he hoped to understand it. He pulled out a thumb drive and got to cloning.
It took half an hour even with the advanced tech he had at his disposal, courtesy of Oracle. When it was done Nightwing made sure he'd left no trace and was about to escape back to the dubiously fresh air of Bludhaven's skyline when, all around him, alarms blared to sudden and unexpected life.
He didn't stop to question, he just ran: out of the server room where he'd been doing his digging, down the hall, darting for the stairs that would take him up to floors above ground that had doors and windows.
He burst through the stairwell door and collided with another body.
Already? Since when is security so fast? he wondered. Then he realized that this person had been sprinting up from the next lowest level and seemed just as surprised to run into Nightwing as Nightwing had been to run into him.
Both jumped back, Nightwing drawing his escrima sticks and the other guy dropping into a hand-to-hand stance.
Nightwing took in his appearance at a glance: his face was hidden in the shadows of a deep hood. The hood was attached to a vest that looked heavy enough to be armored. It was a purple so dark that it could have been taken for black if it wasn't next to the rest of his outfit. His arms were bare but for wrappings around his fists and forearms that looked like vines.
The clothing under the vest was black, sleeveless, and so close-fitting it might have been painted on. His pants were well-fitted, too, but loose enough to move easily in and with plenty of pockets, and more thick vines curling around his thighs and waist like holsters. Nightwing half expected his boots to be laced with greenery, but no: they were simply heavy-duty combat boots that looked like they meant business. Meta? Really enthusiastic gardener? He supposed he’d find out.
Nightwing's evaluation was split-second, but still, it was odd that the guy hadn't moved and didn't seem inclined to. "Are we gonna fight or nah?" Nightwing asked.
The hood cocked. "Nah is an option?"
"Yeah, I'm in kind of a hurry here. Wait – you set off the alarms?"
"Maybe?"
Ah, damn. "Were you doing something illegal?" Please say no, I do not have time.
The guy straightened and folded his arms. The vines twined into a more comfortable position, apparently of their own accord. "Were you?"
"Fair enough," Nightwing said, eyeing the greenery. New vigilante or new villain? Figure it out in a less compromising position. "We'll talk," he promised. Then he shot a line up the middle of the stairwell and took off.
Mere minutes later, Nightwing was settled on a convenient rooftop a few buildings away – one that offered enough cover in the form of ductwork and ventilation apparatus that he could watch what was going on at Haven Pharmaceuticals. He wanted to try to figure out what the new player had been up to over there and how badly it was going to interfere in his own investigations.
He didn't expect the chance to hear the answer directly from the source, but soon enough there was a small sound of scuffling toward the back of the building and Nightwing's new friend clambered over the side. He straightened, then froze when he noticed Nightwing noticing him.
"So," Nightwing said, turning from the show of lights and sirens below to give him his full attention. "You gonna run?"
The other man appeared to think it over for a moment. "No."
"Good. What do I call you?"
"Nightshade. I'm new in town."
"Nightshade? Really?"
Nightshade didn't respond.
"I'm going to call you Shade, or this is going to get confusing."
"Do what you want, just stay out of my way."
Nightshade was a few inches taller than Nightwing, and more than a few inches broader. He looked like a brawler, though he apparently wrapped his fists in plants rather than tape. His accent said Gotham. Nightwing made a mental note to check in with the family. The code name… was not promising. "Sure," Nightwing said. "Just as soon as you tell me what you were doing in Haven Pharmaceuticals."
"What's with the third degree? I had as much right to be in there as you."
"I don't think so," Nightwing said. "Bludhaven is my city. Whatever you did in there was sloppy enough to mess with my work and I want assurances it won't happen again."
"Well you're not getting them," Shade said. "My business is my business. You stay out of it if you don't want to get hurt."
"At the risk of sounding petty, I was here first. And frankly, I don't think you know what you're doing."
Shade shrugged. "Guess we'll see." He turned, clearly intending to leave.
"Hey, wait a second," Nightwing said. "If you don't tell me what you were doing in there, I'm going to have to assume we're enemies."
Shade looked back over his shoulder. His face was still hidden by the hood, but a few thin, green tendrils of plants peeked out like stray hairs. "We don't have to be enemies," he said. "But I get the feeling you're not gonna want me for a friend."
Nightwing frowned and took a step toward him, but Shade opened his hands and let fall what looked like several shiny black marbles. Nightwing jumped back as grey-blue smoke erupted. He grabbed his rebreather and dove through the smoke screen, but Nightshade was already gone.
Two days later, Haven Pharmaceuticals collapsed into a sinkhole, gone like it never was.