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"You want a sandwich?" Jason Todd -- fucking Jason Todd -- asked off-handedly as he walked into the kitchenette of the small, dingy apartment. "Oh, right, you can't answer right now. Well, I want a sandwich, so you get one too."
Dick strained against the ropes tying him to the metal kitchen chair. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, Jason knew how to tie someone securely just as well as Dick himself did. Jason had already searched him efficiently and removed his various concealed blades and tools. Dick was fairly sure that he'd be able to work himself loose eventually, but it wasn't going to be easy or subtle.
Jason reached into the refrigerator and pulled out two cans of soda. "Grape okay? I seem to remember you're not much of a red pop guy."
Dick already knew how ridiculous trying to yell at someone while wearing a gag sounded, but he was unable to resist the urge to tell Jason to fuck off. Jason grinned at him as he set the soda down on the table, apparently perfectly well able to translate through the garbling effect of the gag.
"Oh, that's not nice at all." Jason started pulling sandwich makings out of the fridge and cupboards, talking as he worked. "I'd have thought you'd be happier to see me, considering how hard you must have been searching. Impressive job hunting me down, by the way -- I put some serious effort into covering my tracks. Kind of annoying to see all that work wasted, but que sera sera, I guess."
Dick glared at him. Jason's "serious effort" had involved a trail of dead drug dealers, so it was fair to say that Dick wasn't feeling too sympathetic at the moment.
"Oh, don't give me that look." Jason brought two sandwiches over to the table on little plates. "They were dealing to kids. They had it coming."
"You're insane," Dick said, or rather tried to say.
Jason frowned at him. "Now, is that any way to talk to your host? I thought Alfred taught you better than that."
Dick fumed silently, watching as Jason cut the sandwiches into neat triangles with his evil-looking, serrated knife. Jason ate a quarter of his sandwich in one bite, washing it down with a gulp of soda. "Okay, I'm gonna un-gag you so you can eat. Don't bother yelling, this isn't the kind of neighborhood where the neighbors call the cops over domestics."
Jason removed the gag from Dick's mouth and held up a can of soda. "Drink?"
Dick grimaced, but his mouth really did feel like the Sahara desert. "Yeah," he said rustily. He half expected Jason to be a jerk about it, but Jason lifted the can to Dick's mouth and carefully tipped it so that he could take a sip without spilling it all over himself.
"What do you say?" Jason said, in the tone of voice you'd use on a five-year-old who'd forgotten his manners.
"Go to hell?"
Jason rolled his eyes. "Been there, done that." He offered Dick a sandwich quarter, shrugging when Dick refused it wordlessly. "Suit yourself."
"What are you playing at?" Dick asked him. "You can't honestly believe that Batman's going to ignore what you're doing. And, seriously, Bludhaven? You couldn't have picked a city a little further from Gotham?"
"I was homesick," Jason said, batting his eyelashes. "I missed the toxic Jersey waste dumps of my youth. Besides, I knew how much you like this city. I thought we could fight crime here together. Red Hood and Robin -- it has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"
"It's Nightwing," Dick growled, unable to resist even though he knew Jason was baiting him.
"Potato, po-tah-to," Jason said dismissively. "Fine, Red Hood and Nightwing, that better?"
"No."
"You're no fun."
"And you're psychotic." Dick watched Jason eat silently for a few minutes, before demanding, "Seriously, what the hell are you playing at? You know Batman got the alert as soon as I stopped checking in on comms. He'll be here any minute. What's the point of kidnapping me?"
"Can't a guy just want to have lunch with his big brother occasionally?" Jason pouted.
"I am not your big brother."
Jason frowned, putting down his soda. "Yeah. I know." He stood up, grabbing his hood from where it sat on the table. "Anyway, I gotta get going. Pimps to beat, drug dealers to kill. You know how it is." He paused at the door to the apartment, turning back briefly to say, "Tell Al hi from me."
"Wait--" Dick said, but Jason was already out the door.
Dick sighed, starting to work on freeing himself from the ropes again. Jason was crazy, that's all there was to it. He'd come back from the Lazarus Pit wrong in the head. That wasn't really Jason Todd anymore.
So why did Dick feel so damn guilty?