Chapter Text
Chapter 1
It had been a relatively normal patrol for Jason, muggers, rapists, and other such assholes. Now he was heading back in the early hours of the morning, rain beating down on his pain riddled body, freezing his fingers making grappling across Crime Alley difficult. And by God was he tired.
It had been roughly four years since he came to Gotham looking for revenge or justice seething with green rage and grief, he wasn’t sure which. Four years since-
He shook his head to get rid of the thoughts, the point was that Jason Todd was tired. Not just normal tired, but exhausted.
In the past year he had been trying so hard to control the pit rage and bit back remarks that would inevitably cause arguments. He mainly did it for his siblings and Alfred, never for Bruce. He also tried harder for Damian, he knows he is more sensitive with pit stuff because of his childhood, heck he was there when Jason was revived. Not that anyone other than the two of them will ever know.
Jason and Damian had a silent agreement to not say anything about their time spent together in the league. They pretended not to know each other, and while it hurt, it was for the best.
He also tries his best around Tim, though he never hurt Tim due to unforeseen consequences of catching him off guard and extremely sleep deprived in Titan’s tower, he still feels guilty about thinking about hurting a kid, especially Tim.
It wasn’t all bad though, he had Roy and Lian to cheer him up, he knew Lian thought of him as a second dad, and he was touched, but he had already lost one kid because of him, he couldn’t lose another, so he told her to carry on calling him Jayjay. Right now, Lian was with her mom, Jade had been trying to be better for lian so Roy let her take her on a trip in the states, so the kid will be gone for at least another week and will be a bit feral when she comes back. Roy is out of town for another two weeks on a mission of some sort so he will be taking care of lian for a week. He’s done it before, so it should be easy, but it doesn’t calm his nerves at being left alone with a literal child.
But that’s a problem for future Jason.
Right now, he is heading home to an empty apartment and taking a very long nap, and a hot shower while he was at it. The rain had picked up with the wind and was now battering his body while ominous thunder sounded around him.
It made the pain radiating from his joints all the more prominent and he just wanted to crash in bed.
Tomorrow will be spent mostly in bed, he decides.
Only a few more blocks to go.
Lighting lit up around him as he finally landed on the roof of his apartment, protocols be dammed,he just wants to sleep. He jumped down to the fire escape of his apartment and disarmed the locks and alarms and slid in with practiced ease.
He put the alarms back in place before taking his boots and helmet off, not wanting to drip water all over the place.
He then paused.
Someone was here.
His training had made it so he could sense others presence, but this was different.
Familiar.
The pit agreed with him, and he freaked out a bit when it gave a chirp to communicate it. It had never done that before. Jason would have been panicking if he didn’t know there was someone else here.
He picked a gun out of the holster on his side and stalked around the apartment being as silent as possible listening for hostiles.
Just then a noise sounded behind him, a creek of the wooden floorboards.
He whipped around only to be blinded by the light flicking on. When he regained his vision, he saw a tiny figure standing before him, dressed entirely in league of assassins uniform.
Oh, great he though another assassin child.
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The child couldn’t have been more than ten at most, and that would be a small ten-year-old. But they stood straight and had similar body language to Damian whenever he is confronted by his mother or someone from the league.
When the child didn’t move, he realised he was pointing a gun at them. Which broke his number one rule; don’t hurt kids. He slowly put the gun down not taking his eyes off the tiny assassin child in front of him.
He wasn’t stupid, he knew that the child was obviously trained to kill and what not. But he wasn’t in the business to threaten kids no matter what they are capable of.
Jason stared at the child; under the hood he could see slightly glowing green eyes.
Fuck, this kid has been in the pits. There was no way Jason was going to let this kid go back to the league now. At least until after the tiny assassin completed whatever mission they were here for.
Jason continued to stare at the child.
The child stared back.
The pit stirred and chirped, as if responding to something.
What the fuck?
The kid pulled off the hood of the uniform not breaking eye contact. It would be creepy to be staring that long if he wasn’t used to the same thing from Damian.
Jason then noticed her hair; it was long luscious black curls tied into twin plaits with a long white streak mixed in.
The kid then pulled down the mask hiding their face, her -it was a little girl- skin tone was that of Arab but he could see some Latino and white mixed in. Her face looked just like her.
Zaja.
His little girl.
Her eyes, though greener than not were just like his too.
But that’s impossible Zaja is dead and has been for at least four years now. Her throat slit at three years old by Ras Al Ghul himself. She was thought of as a weakness.
If she were alive today, she would be about seven years old.
The girl before him looked too much like an older version of the daughter he lost it hurt.
The girl cocked her head as if sensing his inner turmoil. She didn’t break eye contact and neither did he.
The girl then did something unexpected; she pulled the mask and neck covering down to reveal a scar. Right in the same place Ras had slit her throat.
All suspicions were thrown out the window in that moment. You can clone someone, but you can’t clone scars.
It was really her.
She obviously sensed his realisation and gave him a small smile.
He finally found his voice.
“Zaja?”