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i.
Jason made it all the way back to Gotham before his mind caught up to the green haze. It helped, maybe, the distance from Talia. She had kept him sane for a year, but her strategy for doing so had been to distract him with violence and a single minded goal. And Jason had clung to it as much as it had clung to him, scratching up his insides, clawing its way down his veins and muscles to his hands, so deadly now, begging him to unleash it, just unleash it on those deserving, those who had hurt him and refused to protect him.
Who was Jason to refuse? How could he? Giving in was terrifying, but holding on was worse, and surely avenging his own death, saving future, stupid, idealistic kids from the stupid clown was worth it. The green haze and the spiraling hate kept him going for a year. It kept him going through the memories of crawling out of his own grave, through the deadly training of the League of Assassins, through the realization that Bruce had chosen the Joker over him, had already replaced him. It carried him away from Talia to the airport taking him back to Gotham, all the way back home, all the way until he stepped into Crime Alley.
Bruce, for all his talk of protecting the city and making it better, had written Crime Alley off years ago. He saw it as a cesspit of criminals rather than victims, no matter how much he might have proclaimed otherwise. If he even bothered to do that. Jason still saw it as home. He saw the good, the bad, and the desperate. He saw the people he had always wanted to protect, had been planning to protect as Red Hood.
It wasn’t until he walked into the filthy, polluted, smoggy streets of Crime Alley that Jason breathed in a breath truly deep enough to clear the green haze from his vision, the part of the haze so ingrained he hadn’t even noticed it there, had gotten used to the feeling of the anger thrumming beneath his skin. It was like taking off colored glasses after hours of wear, the world rushing back in in reds and oranges that had been muted before, so intensely alive it seemed fake.
He walked down the street as the sun was setting low, striking as it only was in Crime Alley, and realized he wasn’t the bad of Crime Alley trying to do good. He was what he had always been, the desperate. Only, this time, he was more like his mom. Hadn’t he thought the Pit felt like it was crawling through his veins, begging him to feed it with violence? Was it not the same as his mother, ready to do anything to get the relief of drugs back into her veins?
Years and years, and Jason had avoided drugs like the death warrant they were, hating painkillers and blood tests alike for their reminder of his mother, wasting away day by day while all he could do was watch. Jason really, truly believed that he was right. The Joker deserved to die. Bruce was wrong. And Tim Drake was an impostor. But-but he could admit that no one ever thought as clearly as they thought they were when they were searching for their next hit. And he felt sick at the idea of becoming his mom, no matter how much he loved her. So he would wait. He would detox the violence from his system. No fighting, no guns, no killing, no revenge schemes. Just until he was sure that his desires were truly him and not a green wasteland buried in his veins and his head.
Which meant leaving Gotham as soon as he had arrived. It was too tempting to just follow through on his plan while he was right there, and besides. Even a 19 year old man who was as obviously dangerous as him was unlikely to survive long in Crime Alley without employing at least some violence. Staying wasn’t feasible for his detox plan to work.
In his first life, Jason had barely left Gotham, outside of a few trips with Bruce, except when he decided to go to Ethiopia. Most of his experience outside of Gotham had been in Europe, but that was with Talia and the League of Assassins. He doubted Talia would be understanding of his reasons for abandoning the plan an hour into it. In the end, he simply turned around and walked across the border as fast as he could, like simply leaving the bounds of the city would uncoil the green from around his heart and lungs, would leave him peaceful rather than clawing and desperate. So quick to run away for clarity from the only place he found it in.
ii.
Jason had been a thief before he was Bruce Wayne’s son, before he was Robin, before he was a bleeding teenager, alone in a warehouse, before he was a mindless body struggling out of green, green water. So when he found himself adrift, aimless, fleeing from the only home he had ever known and had fought so hard to return to, he returned to the only other self he could remember being.
It wasn’t ever a truly justifiable path to return to. He wasn’t a starving, grieving nine year old alone on the streets of Crime Alley. He had skills and resources, enough to get him started on most legitimate paths if he wanted to, enough to restart anywhere he wanted to. Sure, the League, especially Talia, probably would have protested him so obviously bailing on his plan, but it was clear pretty fast that they did not care enough to put more resources than he could handle into stopping him.
Really, it was instinct, and it was convenient. He took random trains and buses once out of Gotham, aimlessly following their travel lines until he eventually ended up in Chicago. He got bored of the city in a few days, and didn’t feel like bus hopping again, and partly he just wanted to know if he could still do it. So he hotwired a car.
And then his money started running low, with no immediate source of a restock now that he had abandoned his plans with no warning. He could have, at that point, done the reasonable thing and gotten a job, even a crappy one, used his second chance at life (ha!) properly. But while he was debating doing so he spotted a gorgeous black Lambo parked in a back alley. Part out of nostalgia, part out of anger at knowing the reasons such a nice car would end up in such a place, he stole that car too. He sold it soon after, channeling his inner Brucie to convince the people that his poorly forged papers were legitimate.
It built and built from there. Jason had grown up with nothing, then with the belief that it couldn’t be so bad to take from others who had so much when he was so desperate, to being taught that stealing was wrong, but casually believing that every other law besides laws outlawing murder did not truly apply to him (which, even if they hadn’t been Batman and Robin, would have applied. Billionaires could get away with almost anything. See: Every billionaire ever, good or bad). It was only a natural progression that he combined these skills and started taking what he thought the rich didn’t deserve. Selina would be proud.
The thefts got more daring and elaborate, the cons and art needed to pull them off more involved. All of his lessons in classiness and rich people etiquette were put to use once again, his ability to blend in while he stole all of their goods a constant inside joke with himself, when he had always stuck out at Bruce’s ridiculous galas. And even besides the thrill of the con, of the job and the stunts, he loved the events. He’d never be charming and extraverted like Dick, but he enjoyed the chance to discuss literature and art like he never really could before. He liked flirting with men and women alike without constantly feeling like he was just a pet for them to coo over or a rebellious adventure for a night.
Most of all, he liked using cons as an outlet for his frustration with Bruce, who he couldn’t ever go back to, couldn’t let himself go back to for so many reasons, who had billions of dollars and still thought the best use of his time was dressing up in leather and trying to punch and preach his problems away. Truly, Bruce Wayne could go fuck himself.
It would have been unforgivably stupid to steal directly from Bruce. Bruce was, first of all, Batman, and not easy to steal from. Secondly, that would just be rude to Selina, who had never done anything wrong. And most importantly, Bruce would recognize him. So would Dick, probably, and Alfred. It didn’t matter the score or the party, if the Waynes were attending, Jason was not. It was one of his few rules, and it worked, keeping him out of the line of sight of the Bats and the Waynes, even as his other rules collapsed and he ended up bargaining desperately from inside a jail.
iii.
It had taken some time for Neal to get used to the city not breathing around him. New York City did not scream and cry and cling onto Neal in the way he had grown used to Gotham doing in his youth, never knowing anything different. No matter how alive the people and energies of the cities Neal had traveled to were, he had never found a place that seemed to slumber like Gotham beneath his feet, as caring and cruel and inescapable as any parent at any given moment. Just as unpredictable and as in need of constant, draining aid, too.
Some nights, he missed it, the feeling of being connected to not only the people of Gotham, but also the places. Most days, he was completely satisfied with the tradeoffs. New York may have been called the city that never slept, but they would never know the terror of actually living in a city that never stopped, never rested, where being off your guard for a second left you vulnerable to a whole gallery of psychopaths. And even in these “melting pot” cities that people from all over flooded to looking for opportunity and never left, they still did not know how a city could not just pull you in to its gravity, but also trap you within it, turning its own chest into as much a prison as a source of protection, filling you with obligation and a fierce, unbreakable connection. Sure, New York City had a pull, but Gotham had a tether and a hook and a cage waiting at the end and wouldn’t let you go.
You can take the boy out of Gotham, but you can’t take Gotham out of the boy. And in the end, the boy will always return home. Neal just hoped he had a few more years before his body set him walking back to his destiny on the streets of his first home.
Neal had been running from it for years, knowing only that he couldn’t stop, lest Gotham and all that it represented to him catch up. Sitting in a prison cell for four years had thus obviously started as torturous. After a while though, he almost enjoyed it. No running home when he couldn’t even run down the road. The tracking anklet served the same purpose, to an extent. It was easier to avoid Gotham’s siren call when he was accountable to someone else for where he went. It helped even more that the person he was accountable to was someone like Peter, who was so wholly good in a way that Neal had rarely encountered. A Superman even without the superpowers, better by far than Batman.
Of course, the reliance on Peter was dangerous. Neal had learned that lesson the hard way, over and over. People were amazing and always there until they weren’t, and in the moments it really mattered you could only trust yourself and your own abilities. Getting so tangled up with Peter and El and Sara would only make it more painful when he inevitably disappointed them or they failed him, or, most likely, when he left. He was a thief, stealing art and time and love, and once he had taken enough, he was on his way, before the universe decided he’d taken too much and ripped it all away.
iv.
Neal found out there was a new Robin while he was in prison, but it trickled in through the gossip pipeline, and even though Neal was one of the most well-informed prisoners there, an already Bat-convoluted tale became nonsensical once passed through that many people, especially criminals getting third or fourth hand accounts. So he heard the fact, and dismissed it. Keeping up with the Bats was hard even with his level of inside knowledge, and doing so was a recipe for disaster anyway. If he really needed to know, he figured he could always look up the most recently-adopted Wayne kid and who they were dating. It was nearly foolproof.
He hadn’t had a need or desire to, though, since leaving prison. The FBI did an excellent job at keeping him busy enough on mundane enough tasks that the green flickered in his vision only rarely, and he had no desire to rock the boat by looking into people he knew would trigger it.
All this to say, Neal was as surprised as the rest of the team, if not more so, when a kid who couldn’t even be five feet tall dropped in front of them, along with the rest of the Teen Titans, to save them from the flavor-of-the-day costumed villain. Neal doubted the Teen Titans were really necessary for facing a criminal who named themself the Sinister Stock-man, or at least he hoped so, but unlike his handler he would not be wasting his time arguing jurisdiction.
Seeing the red-yellow-green-black on an unfamiliar kid, another kid, made his veins crawl and his vision fade green in a way it hadn’t in months, if not years. As he watched the kid fight, much more harshly than Dick or the Replacement, with better skill than he had at that age, he feels is fists clench and unclench, and end up digging his nails into the perfect lines of Byron’s suit to make himself stop and the green recede.
It’s fine, he’s fine. Just one criminal turned Robin turned criminal watching another Robin take his place. He’s dealt with worse. He decided he wasn’t going to deal with this the way the Pit screamed at him to. He had distracted himself for eight years with heists and cons and forgeries to avoid ever having the excuse, the chance, the energy to expel the rage sitting just under his skin. Non-violent criminal. Not a moral stance, a sign of his golden heart, as Peter seemed to see it. A warning to himself, a reminder. He had nearly sunk so low. Better a criminal, better a selfish hoarder, better a gentleman thief, than what he almost was.
He was wrong, anyway. He knows that now. He only had a handful of interactions with Tim Drake, the Wayne who was the most dangerous for him to see but the least dangerous one to see him. They were enough to know he was just a kid, smart and polite and starved for a loving family.
It wasn’t Tim’s fault, or this new Robin’s either. It was Batman’s, again. Tricking a young boy into becoming a child soldier once was an incident….doing it four times was child endangerment to an inexcusable extent. Neal was not one to color in the lines, but really, what the fuck were people thinking with these sidekicks?
So not all of them died, and death wasn’t very permanent around here. Didn’t change the fact that Neal still was haunted by the things he had seen as a child fighting crime, had gotten used to the feeling of living with at least one injured limb at all times by 13 while living in a cushy billionaire’s mansion. The longest time Neal had over gone without violence being the main source of conflict resolution was after he had become a true criminal, and wasn’t that just sad. What had led an entire world of reasonable people to see Batman getting into fistfights with violent criminals with a pre-tween as backup and think “That’s a great idea! I should do that too!” Who thought it was a good idea to send a kid into a fight to save the fully trained, adult FBI agents, with nothing but a dagger-
Wait, a dagger? What the fuck. Neal definitely did not carry around straight up daggers when he was Robin. Record scratch, Bruce was officially off his rocker. Did no one else see the kid wielding the dagger?
Abruptly, Neal realized he was being a bit hysterical, which was odd. Ordinarily he would say it was a reaction to a stressful situation, but in full truth this hardly ranked in the grand scheme of his life, even with a more deadly Robin thrown into the mix. The hysteria was bubbling out of some strange mix of the green’s frothing, angry depths and his recollection of how carefree he’d been as Robin, aware of the horrors of life but hopelessly immune to the fear of his own death. He was Robin, and he was magic, and Batman was unstoppable, so there was no reason to fear anything beyond pain. He’d been just like this Robin, throwing himself eagerly into every fight he could, when none of them should have been his own, using weapons that should have been out of place in such tiny fists.
Hysteria, sure. More like the thousands of shades of green in his head filled with jealousy-betrayal-bitterness being replaced with fear-regret-disgust, with no outlet handy.
The Pit craved violence, but it really fed off of emotional highs, a positive loop spiralling dangerously ever-upward, and so often feeding it with adrenaline could work nearly as well in a pinch, if he was willing to risk getting dragged deeper into it or left with no other options. It was that constant need for adrenaline to replace the feeling of bone cracking beneath his fists that fed his recklessness where pure belief in his immortality no longer could, pulling off many an impossible heist due to his willingness to jump off a roof or scale an impossible wall. But in this moment, he had access to neither option for channeling the Pit, both being incredibly efficient ways of losing all the trust he had fostered in the White Collar division. Instead, he stood back, and watched a tween stupidly, needlessly, fight his battles for him.
Yeah, fuck Batman too.