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At the ungodly hour of five in the morning, the news broke that the Joker and Harley Quinn were in their off stage of their relationship. Broken with a bang large enough to level one amusement park that is. Jason didn’t want to know where Harley had found that many raw explosives.
Actually he kinda did, because he was almost out himself.
But anyways, the harlequin was on her own, and based off of the last few times this had happened, the Joker would either be injured enough other rogues would start scrambling to fill the vacuum, or he’d have already started plotting a bigger explosion. Neither of which was something Jason wanted to deal with.
All in all, Jason had had a good reason to be prowling through the back alley of Quinn’s favorite bar. Joker always set a few henchmen to lurking after her until she chased them off. Or killed them. If they were still alive, Jason would have a direct source of information.
He did not have such a good reason for letting Quinn get the drop on him. For all her familiarity with firearms, the acrobat was a show-woman at heart, which made the way she slipped up behind him all the less expected.
His helmet had not helped matters, limiting his peripheral view to the point he only noticed her after she’d lined the needle up, perpendicular to his neck.
“Nighty night!” Quinn sang, depressing the syringe before darting away. Jason still made to grab her, with hands that suddenly felt ten times as heavy.
He hit the rooftop hard, breath jerked out of him. Face down too, so he couldn’t even try to shoot her. Maybe if he could get her to talk, his hand was just a few inches from a throwing knife strapped to his leg. If he could get a sense of where she was standing…
Well, it was the best plan he could think of, and speaking of, thinking was a little too easy for that to have been a sedative. He couldn’t move, but he was still very much awake. Which hopefully was just an oversight on Quinn’s part.
“Now here comes the fun part, lollipop,” Quinn said, gravel crunching as she came to stand right over Jason’s head. His fingers didn’t even twitch.
“Lollipop?” Jason asked, the words only loud enough to be heard thanks to the voice modifier picking up the puffs of air.
“Well,” Quinn said, “ I’m not calling you Red Hood—yet—and that helmet makes you look like a big red lollipop.” She paused. “Lollipop. Lollipop. Huh, that’s a fun word to say. Lollipop.”
Mercifully, the voice modifier did not pick up Jason’s sigh. He’d been trying to do something good tonight too. Something the old bat would have approved of, even, which just went to show. Even in his absence, Batman was a pain in Jason’s ass.
“You say it,” Quinn said, crouching down to roll Jason onto his back. The change in position made it easier to breathe, but he still couldn’t control his limbs. Jason wanted to know where Quinn found this stuff.
“Say what?” Jason asked. He’d never really interacted with Quinn after coming back. He’d heard something was going on between her and Ivy, but that had just meant she wasn’t around to interfere when Jason went after Batman. She had no reason to be going after him now either.
“Lollipop,” Quinn said, “Say lollipop.”
“Look,” Jason said, “Congratulations on breaking up with the clown, but I’m having a rather shitty night, so if you would just leave me be, that would be great.”
“Not unless you say lollipop,” Quinn said, carelessly flipping Jason onto his back. As if to punctuate her statement, she plopped down on him, sitting cross-legged on Jason’s chest and fidgeting with the knife she’d found there. Jason’s world took on a distantly green tint.
From the new angle, Jason saw two things. Firstly, a rather nasty set of bruises that covered her face before trailing down her neck and under her shirt. A set of black eyes was already developing.
It was enough that the green abated, rolling back to the very corners of his vision. Those didn’t look like the kind of injuries Quinn would have gotten breaking up with the Joker. Those tended to be more focused along shoulders and hips, from getting blown into walls by explosions.
The second thing he noticed was her pupils. One was blown large, as if she’d been dosed with Joker venom, while the other had stayed normal. That was absolutely not a good sign.
Quinn had always initiated the break ups, as far as Jason knew. It didn’t seem to have been the case this time.
While he was noting the changes in appearance, Quinn ran out of patience. “Say it,” she demanded, pressing the knife to the seam in Jason’s body armor right over his shoulder. “Say lollipop.”
“Lollipop,” Jason said, right as the tip of the blade broke skin. “Lollipop. Lollipop. Lollipop. Please. Lollipop.”
He was babbling, and he knew it. But Quinn didn’t normally act like this, and if she wasn’t the one to break up with the Joker, well, suddenly that comment about not calling him Hood yet was taking on an ugly shape.
He really didn’t want to die as a result of the clown’s awful love life.
“Awww,” Quinn said, “It doesn’t sound as good when you say it. Not funny enough.” Her lip twitched into a sneer at the last bit, and Jason only had time to make sure his tongue was clear of his teeth before the knife was forced fully into his shoulder.
He screamed. The noises from the bar below faded away for a moment, before climbing right back up, with the music turned even louder.
“But don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re funny soon,” Quinn said, ignoring the shout altogether. She raised her fingers to her mouth and whistled, the sound loud in the silent alley behind the bar. The dead silent alley.
Already knowing what he would find, Jason tried to look over the edge of the roof, about six inches away. Sure enough, there were three bodies there, one of which was missing huge chunks of flesh. All were dressed in Joker’s henchman uniform.
With timing Jason could have appreciated— were it not happening to him—that was the moment one of Quinn’s hyenas chose to bite down on his jacket.
Jason jumped, the motion barely rocking his body, and swore, which earned a shushing noise from Quinn. Then the other hyena was biting down on his jacket, jarring the knife still embedded there, and he was being dragged across the roof.
It was a small, squat building, the roof barely high enough to allow for the occupants within to stand upright. Critically, it meant that Jason was still a good eight feet off the ground, and Quinn didn’t seem inclined to lower him carefully. Or to even supervise the process, Jason added as she skipped the other direction and off the roof without pause.
One of the hyenas—what were they called? Brutus and something, Gloria?—let go, and Jason looked over to see that he was at the very edge of the opposite side of the roof, next to the parking lot.
It—he Jason learned the next second—jumped over him to safety before biting into his jacket again. Now both of Quinn’s eerily smart pets were on the same side, lifting up until Jason was teetering on the very edge of the roof.
It would hurt, a lot more if he landed on the knife still impaled in his shoulder. Jason tried yet again to move his arms, kick the hyenas off, grab ahold of the roof, anything. Nothing happened and a vein in his neck started to throb.
The hyenas jerked at his jacket a final time, and Jason felt himself slipping. He hadn’t even finished relaxing all his muscles as much as he could before he was stopped. By something metal about four feet below the roof.
“Ouch,” Jason said, because who was there to judge him. The surface below him was uneven, and his landing had provided him with a decent view of one side of the truck bed. Beyond which the very, very tips of two pigtails were making their way toward the driver’s seat of the raised truck.
Quinn gave another whistle, and the two hyenas hopped into the truck bed after him, one curling up against Jason’s back while the other stuck her head into the front cab through the back window. The engine started, and Quinn peeled out of the parking lot.
Jason tried to pay attention, without the Joker it would be hard to predict where she was headed. Ivy didn’t much care for kidnappings and none of the Red Hood’s men were loyal enough for Jason to be used as a tool to ensure their obedience. There wouldn’t be a logical destination.
At the second hairpin turn he lost focus; he’d slid across the truckbed, hitting the side with his injured shoulder. The world went white, and stayed that way for the next ten minutes, until Quinn stopped taking sharp turns at full speed .
It took him another minute to notice that they were no longer moving. Immediately after came the realization that they were parked right outside Parkson Building, where Gotham’s main news channel was recorded.
“Quinn,” Jason croaked, “Quinn, whatever you’re going to do, don’t broadcast it.” He didn’t get a reply.
“Harley Quinn,” Jason yelled again, only for the voice modulator to bring it back down to a conversational volume. He still couldn’t move his hands enough to fix it.
“I heard ya, I heard ya,” Quinn said, her face appearing over Jason’s own. “Why should I, er, listen. I kinda had a plan going here.”
“I had one going first,” Jason said.
“You have a plan?” Harley laughed. “Mr. Here’s-a-bag-full-of-heads -let’s-see-what-happens have a plan. Sorry, lollipop, I don’t believe you.”
“Stop calling me that,” Jason said, his finger twitching that time. Whatever she’d given him, it was starting to wear off. Now he just needed to distract her for a bit.
Jason knew for a fact he was annoying enough to manage that.
“Well, it is almost time to start calling ya Hood,” Harley said. “Say, why’d you pick one of his old monikers in the first place?”
“His?” Jason asked, because if Quinn was doing this, he was gonna make just as miserable for her as it was for him.
“Joker’s,” Quinn sneered, sounding far more like the recordings Jason had watched of Dr. Harleen Quinzel. “Now, you’re either a wanna-be with no clue what you’re doing so you stole a moniker from someone way above your weight class to flatter yourself, or you’re a fan of his.”
Fuck you,” Jason said, ignoring the growl from Brutus that earned. “He killed me, and I’m gonna return the favor.” Oops, that last bit might not go over too well if Quinn was feeling possessive.
“Looking awfully alive for a dead guy,” Quinn said, bending down further. Her hand wrapped around the knife again, and Jason hissed. Then she pulled it out, and Jason’s scream was eaten by the helmet. Again.
“A lot more blood inside ya too,” Quinn said. “What do you really want with him?”
“I told you,” Jason said, green flickering everywhere he looked, “He killed me, and-and my dad didn’t even care, he just went out and found a new kid to adopt.” And that didn’t hurt Jason, the green whispered, it just offended him.
The green was fading away nonetheless, and Jason hurried back to his point. “I want to make my dad look my murderer in the face and see what he does now.”
“You. Lollipop.” Quinn said, “Have guts. But your story has holes.” She popped back off his chest and vaulted herself over the side of the truck.
“Oh yeah?” Jason said, tilting his head to follow her as the hyenas started dragging him out of the truck. He was starting to get more control back.
“Yeah,” Quinn said, bright-eyed and swaying on her feet. “Even in Gotham, zombies don’t come back to life eager to give people second chances.”
“Second chances?” Jason certainly did not squawk .
“The whole complicated plot to make your dad kill Joker, that’s a second chance. Otherwise you’d have just shot both the idiots already,” Quinn, or perhaps Quinzel, said.
“I almost did,” Jason muttered. The voice modifier must have filtered it out as background noise, because Quinn didn’t answer him.
She did pull out a rifle Jason would have envied before throwing the building's double doors open. They hit the walls with a bang and every head in the room turned towards the door with what had to be dread. Jason certainly could understand.
One would think that newspeople would learn to add more security, with how frequently villains waltzed right in. But for some reason, they had all near unanimously decided it was better to simply take the day off when a villain came calling instead. Going by how often the security guards got killed anyways, there may have been some sense to it.
“Hi,” Quinn chirped, “I’m here about a very special news segment. It’s called Fuck You Clown.”
Someone inside responded, but it was too far away for Jason to make out the words. Whatever they said, it was enough for Quinn to flounce inside and, several minutes later, everyone but the tech crew to run out.
Jason hadn’t had high hopes that someone would stick out their necks to rescue him, and he was not disappointed. The male news personality, Jason thought he’d been bought off by Penguin, almost tripped over Jason in his haste.
One of the audience members paused, however, wobbling on her towering heels to do so, and took a moment to judge him. “Sorry,” she mouthed a moment later, a reasonable response to Jason’s three hundred something pounds of limp muscle and body armor. She took off again, lest she be the last one out.
Jason still half wanted to call her back, and it was only the reemergence of Quinn a few moments later that stopped him.
Stopped him with a vengeance, as Quinn casually kicked the back of his knee, where the body armor couldn’t cover. Jason grunted, low enough the helmet should filter it out.
“I’ll be nice,” she said, “and limit this to half an hour. Since I’m making a point here, not getting even with you.”
“Why don’t you skip the point making and go get even with him? ” Jason said, immediately self preservation jumping to the top of his issues. If Quinn wanted to steal his revenge, Jason might even prefer it to another beating connected to the Joker.
No, Jason decided, he wasn’t going to waste time comparing the two. He was going to get control of his limbs back and show Quinn—show everyone—what his vengeance meant.
“I am, don’t worry,” Quinn said. Then she whistled for her fucking hyenas again. Jason’s eye twitched and he had to bite his tongue before he told the madwoman she was insane.
His finger twitched again, responding faster this time. It didn’t stop the hyenas from dragging him inside and onto the shitty plywood deck just below the cameras’ view. If it weren’t for the helmet, Jason would probably be dealing with a broken nose after being dropped like that.
“Hello Gotham,” Harley Quinn said, drawing the words out as she turned to beam at the cameras and their petrified crew.
“As I’m sure some of you have noticed, the Joker and I are over. Done.”
She turned back to Jason, a pair of manacles Arkham wouldn’t use dangling from a hand. Paired with the automated grappling hook in the other hand, Jason could picture what was about to happen next.
“Now, since Joker is a slimy ball of shitty choices, being around him right now would make me sick,” Quinn continued in that painfully cheerful voice as she hooked Jason up and retracted the grappling line until he was dangling with his knees still too floppy to support him. “So I have the next best thing.”
“The newest wearer of the Red Hood.”
“Who also wants to see the Joker in agony,” Jason interrupted, or tried to at least, the bat slamming into his stomach cut him off before the second word. If it weren’t for his body armor, he’d be screaming. As it was he couldn’t help but growl as he waited for his lungs to stop spasming.
“Shut up unless you’re screaming for the cameras,” Quinn said, raising her bat again.
~~~
There was still an hour or two before patrol when Tim poked his head into Bruce’s study. “Joker and Harley have broken up.”
Bruce looked up from the bat-gauntlet he was cleaning. Strictly speaking, it was not something he should have outside of the batcave, but Brucie was supposed to be testing the new yacht he’d very publicly purchased the previous week. No one was going to walk in on him. Aside from Tim, of course.
At the invitation, Tim entered fully, revealing the laptop in his off hand. “Harley’s not following the pattern. She’s on the news this time—look.”
Bruce looked. It was Quinn standing in front of a slumped body dangling from the ceiling. The Red Hood by the looks of it. Although, laying eyes on the drug lord for the first time, Bruce could tell he was too broad—and uninterested in showing off—for the name to be an alias of the Joker.
“The Red Hood got involved?” Bruce asked, pushing back from his desk.
“Other way around,” Tim said, “From what I heard it looks like Harley went after him. And she’s not using the Joker’s typical toxin either.”
“Why aren’t you reacting?” Harley’s voice interrupted, singsong tone high enough the laptop speakers went staticky.
The Red Hood gave a near imperceptible jerk of his head. A mechanical sputtering noise, a snort perhaps, filtered through his helmet.
“I’m not reacting because you paralyzed me,” the Red Hood said, and Bruce took a moment to scan the man’s limbs and back.
The body armor was barely scratched, yet the Red Hood’s feet were dragging against the floor, and he was slowly spinning on the rope to the point where every few minutes Harley would reach out and spin him back to face her.
However, Hood was still giving little jerks every now and then, like he’d forgotten he couldn’t move. A chemical paralytic then.
“I didn’t paralyze your voice,” Harley said, before bringing her bat down on his shoulder in a maneuver that would be highly painful, while doing no permanent damage. The Red Hood didn’t make a sound. Bruce began to pull his suit on, trying to keep an eye on the laptop as he did so.
“Come on, lollipop,” Harley whined, “The whole point of this is to demonstrate how much I wanna hurt the Joker, but you’re not being very demonstrative.”
“Sorry Quinn,” The Red Hood said, going curiously silent for a moment before resuming. “The voice modulator’s not made to pick up anything but voices. You’re not gonna hear me screaming.”
“Ha,” Harley laughed, and Bruce had to look up as he guided the batmobile out of the cave and up the twisted drive. In the passenger seat, Tim kept up a running commentary of what was happening on the laptop.
“She’s not facing the camera,” Tim said, “I think she’s talking to Red Hood—no, she’s trying to take his helmet off.”
“Can you get any physical characteristics? An estimated age range?” Bruce asked, forcing the batmobile to turn without clipping the sidewalks. Two wheels left the ground, and Bruce grunted as he had to force the steering system another half turn.
They landed with a jolt that had the laptop slamming into the gearshift with crippling force. For the laptop that was. It snapped, the screen turning to a staticky blue as it dangled by a few wires. Sound continued to play from the speakers, which was something.
“I’m sorry.” Tim peeked over towards Bruce. “It just slipped.”
“It’s not your fault,” Bruce sighed, “I should have given the laptops a stronger case.”
“You’re a kid.” Harley’s voice crackled through the tinny speakers, cutting off the rest of their conversation.
“And not just any kid—I know you,” Harley said. The speaker was too rough to get much in the way of tone, but then again, Harley delighted in drawling out her words until any speaker should be able to tell when things were going her way.
Bruce carefully nudged the car another five miles faster. Tim noticed, and reached for the panic handle.
“No, don’t, please,” the Red Hood said, his voice too familiar to ignore without the voice modulator. “You don’t need to take the mask off.”
“Whatever you say, kid.” Harley said, and there was the clicking of locks disengaging. A second later, the regulated breathing of someone trying not to strain their broken ribs filtered through the speaker.
“Now, Gotham,” she started again, her voice getting louder as she presumably walked up to the cameraman.
“Duck!” There was a ka- bang , but Bruce couldn’t focus on that at the moment. Not when he recognized the Joker’s convertible parked outside the news studio.
Batman was out of the batmobile and running towards the doors, Robin right behind him. They reached the door just in time to hear a ptt and catch the glint off the barrel as Harley lowered an assault rifle.
...Just an assault rifle, none of the glitter or paint or kitchy designs that would suggest it had been modified in any way. Beyond Harley, the Joker was laying face down on the floor, not moving but for the rise and fall of his chest as he forced air into his lungs. One of his legs could best be described as pulped.
“Now, to all you kids and kiddos watching TV without your parents,” Harley said, “Change the channel. And to all you lovely folks who’ve been hurt by that monster—stay tuned. This has been a long time coming.”
Batman waved for Robin to check on the Red Hood as he made for Harley. In the time they’d taken to fully enter the building, she had traded out her rifle for a more traditional baseball bat. She was holding it so high above her head that Batman could reach out and grab it if he took a few steps forward.
“Please,” a woman said hands up as if to keep him from stepping around her, “I know you won’t kill, so please just let Harley take care of this. You don’t know what it’s like—to lose someone to the clown.”
“I do,” Bruce said, allowing himself a half step back, “I do, and I miss him every day. If I could save him, I would do anything, but-” Batman cut himself off, forcing his way past the woman to grab the bat before Harley could bring the weapon down.
Harley turned, hissing as the shock of the bat’s abrupt halt shivered up her arms. When she saw it was Batman, she skittered back, only stopping once she was well out of range.
“Batman,” Robin said, his voice overlapping with a hoarse “B.”
~~~
Jason knew his plan was shit the moment his replacement looked at him. The backup domino should have been enough to stay anonymous, since he’d died when he was fifteen and all.
“Robin?” His replacement asked, rushing to support him as his leg slipped out from under him. The paralytic hadn’t quite worn off then.
Jason wanted to point out that Replacement was Robin now, see how deeply he could twist the knife. He couldn’t though, not while breathing hurt and seeing the Replacement look at him with the same relief and hero worship he’d seen before reminded him of nights spent fetching a young photographer off of whatever building he’d clambered up that time.
Dominos really did do a poor job of hiding the faces of people you knew.
“I would do anything,” Bru-Batman said, tearing the two’s attention back to where Quinn was about to bash the Joker’s brains out. Then Batman grabbed the bat and Jason couldn’t let that happen again.
“B,” he said, voice cracking as he tried to yell. “B, wait.”
Batman heard him, or perhaps the newest Robin’s call, and looked back. There was a moment where he didn’t seem to recognise Jason, but then he was moving: Quinn’s bat was tossed across the room; Bruce was reaching out to hold him; and the camera was locked into its position focusing on the Joker’s semiconcious body.
“Jason,” Bruce said, stopping a hair’s breadth away from hugging him.
“Dad,” Jason said and his eyes were certainly not wet. “You came for me.”
“Jason,” Bruce said again and then he was hugging him, picking Jason up off the floor as he did so.
Jason was taller than him now, even without the extra inches that came from being suspended from the ceiling. Bruce must have noticed that as well, because the next second he was being hoisted higher, until the handcuffs Quinn had added slipped over the hook they’d caught on.
“You’re alive,” Bruce breathed, grunting as Jason’s full weight landed on him.
It was Jason’s turn to grunt next, as he felt someone else join the hug, their arms too small to wrap around the other two, despite what felt to be a valiant effort.
Jason could have stood there forever, however, Quinn was very obviously waving at him behind Bruce’s back. She had a chainsaw in the other hand, and was very clearly waiting for him to do something.
Slowly, Jason nodded, and didn’t look away as Harley ensured the Joker would never hurt either of them again. Only once she held up the head did Jason close his eyes and focus on the warmth of Bruce’s arms and the feathery texture of his replacement's hair where it brushed against his hands.