#the arkham knight is a scary motherfucker

[lambsouvlaki]

For the Hell of it - a Visitor

Character: Jason Todd x civilian! Fem!oc

Rating and Warnings: T, violence, swearing.

Word Count: 1968

Summary: A Jason from a different timeline appears in Andy's house. He has the letter 'J' branded on his face.

Masterlist

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Sometimes it hit Andy that her best friend was an on-again off-again crime lord and an unrepentant killer.

She had a tumultuous relationship with crime herself. She was a felon after all, even if she contested her guilt, it wasn’t a label that came off. Any neat little ideas she was raised with about good people and bad people had been blasted off by the pressure washer of life. 

Sometimes when Jason did something particularly adorable, which was alarmingly frequent, she remembered the new cellmate she got halfway through her sentence. She was in on nonviolent charges but nobody was fooled, she had turned herself in just to get off the streets. That new Red Hood guy had a bone to pick with her. 

The woman stared up at the guard towers in the yard on her first day and asked why there weren’t any spotlights facing outside the prison. She would wake up with a start and stare at through the bars in terror. Every shadow was suspicious. And she wasn’t the only one. Andy, a bookish nineteen year old afraid of making prolonged eye contact, found herself one of few inmates not afraid of the dark.

Really, only the sex workers weren’t afraid of Gotham’s latest nightmare. And wasn’t that bizarre?

Andy once saw Jason cut a radish into a perfect tiny little teddy bear to place atop a bowl of tonkatsu curry, purely because the recipe’s photo included a radish teddy bear and like hell was he going to miss out. This was the man her remorseless murderer cellmate cowered from. Gave up her freedom to escape.

There was that one rumour about a duffel bag of heads. Her cellmate never shut up about it. Andy dismissed it as the invention of terrified thugs with nothing to do on long stints of guard duty.

Having met Jason’s dramatic side, she was pretty sure she owed Cheesewire Wendy an apology.

She still struggled to picture it though. She understood Jason was capable of incredible violence. Intellectually, it was very scary. In practice… in practice she never felt safer than when he was around. Even in the helmet, he flustered her, but she wasn’t afraid of him.

Then she met the Arkham Knight. 

She was on her way home in broad daylight, walking down the corridor of her apartment complex, when she saw a bright strobing light under her own front door. A bizarre sound that made her ears pop rang out and then died at the same time as the light. She frowned, balancing her groceries to rifle through her handbag for her keys, and unlocked the door. 

“Jason, what are you-” She froze. 

She didn’t recognise the man standing in her living room. No, she did recognise him, right down to the way he pointed his gun at her face. He had a ‘J’ branded onto his cheek. In his other hand he loosely held the white and black civilian leather jacket Jason had left here last weekend. 

Andy put her hands up and didn’t move. Her groceries fell to the floor and loose tomatoes and a tin of coconut cream rolled across the hard wood. 

“Shut the door.”

She did as she was told then put her hands back up again. 

He looked at her through cold blue eyes, assessing. He was in military style armour, to her inexperienced eyes, with hard metal plates all over the upper body. A blue and black high tech looking helmet sat high up on his head. He had more weapons on him than she could count.

He had Jason’s face, but not his build, he was shorter, slighter, with pinched features, and there was something hunched about the way he held his upper body.  There was no bat on his chest. 

“You know me.” His voice was unmistakable. 

“I… I don’t know if I do.” 

His lips pursed and he lowered the gun. She didn’t think that was permission to lower her hands. 

“You know the me from this world.” He dropped the jacket on the back of her wheelie chair and cast his eyes over her apartment. Jason’s presence in her life had changed it, sure, but only in small ways. Surely that wasn’t enough to tell him anything? 

What he meant about ‘this world’ was too mad to be true. She stared into blue eyes that had been green for as long as she had known them. He didn’t recognise her. He recognised Jason’s coat. He had a fucking ‘J’ branded onto his face. It was too weird to question when there was a strange man with a gun in her house. 

“Don’t try to deny it. Did he retire from being the perfect and loyal little soldier?” He stalked towards her. “Pretend Gotham is fixed, that he can relax? That he’s safe?” 

“I- I don’t-” she shook her head desperately. “Jason isn’t a soldier. I don’t know what you’re talking about!” 

Maybe he was Jason Todd from another world. But he wasn’t the Red Hood. She had only ever made Jason one promise, and that was to never tell anyone his secret, not even people who already seemed to know. 

He stopped about a foot away from her and glared. Being smaller than her Jason didn’t make him any less terrifying. She blinked frantically, trying to clear the unshed tears of terror from her eyes. She couldn’t go to pieces now, she couldn’t.

After a long moment he scoffed. He stepped back. IF anything he looked kind of put out. She let her hands fall. They were shaking. 

“Can I pick up my things?” she asked.

He grunted. She took it as a yes and crouched down to start rounding up fruit and vegetables. He moved to go look out the windows. She snuck her phone from her pocket, lowered the volume to nothing, and quick-dialled Jason. She put it in the paper grocery bag and put the whole thing on the dining table. 

She cleared her throat and gathered her courage. “What do you want from Jason?” 

He looked at her sidelong. His hands rested lightly on the guns in his thigh holsters. 

“What do you want from me?” she asked. It came out as a rasping whisper. 

“What’s your name?” 

“Andrea.”

“What could I possibly want from you, Andrea?”

“I don’t know. You’re in my apartment. I assumed… for a reason?”

“I can tell you what you should have assumed: that the rest of your life is directly tied to whether or not you piss me off. By, say, calling someone.”

She froze. 

He crossed the room, leisurely, like some prowling creature, and reached over her to grab her phone out of the bag. 

She glimpsed the glowing screen. The green phone symbol for an active call floated over the contact name: ‘Still Has my Casserole Dish’, then the call duration of four minutes and counting. 

The intruder glanced at it, unimpressed. “You can keep the casserole dish,” he said, and ended the call. 

He unclipped one of his guns. 

The windows exploded in a blast of blinding light. 

She didn’t know what happened next, only the sounds of a scuffle, a gun fired twice, and she caught sight of yellow light armour blurring in her compromised vision, before she was standing behind the Signal. 

“Who the hell are you?” the intruder growled, as his helmet snapped down over his face. It’s face lit up with LEDs. 

Signal cocked his head and the LEDs immediately died again half a second before darkness flooded the whole room. The Signal grabbed her and hauled her out the window. 

They were swinging through the air before she fully processed what happened. 

A couple of gunshots followed them, and then silence. 

She looked back, as they stumbled onto a roof.

“Keep going,” Signal said, and pulled her forwards to swing across to a building not in line of sight of her apartment. 

They landed on the bare roof of an abandoned motel. There was no sound of pursuit. It set dread in her stomach. 

What kind of Jason Todd let his target go so easily? Signal looked around, not letting her get too far from him.  

“I don’t know who you’re supposed to be,” an all too familiar voice drawled from above. “Out in the daylight with your meta abilities, but all bats are the same at the end of the day. Predictable.” 

They spun and looked up. Standing perched on the edge of the neighbouring office building was their pursuer. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. 

Signal stepped in front of Andy and spread his arms. 

A shot rang out, and the foreign Jason staggered forward with a burst of blood. He was hauled backwards before he could fall. Red Hood hit him in the gut.

“Time to get out of here,” Signal said. 

She couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight of the two fighting, what little she could see from this angle at last. 

“We are not hanging around to see the show, lady, they are both shooting live rounds.”

That shook her enough to let him pull her away and swing down to an empty alleyway several blocks away. Andy was beside herself with worry, but Signal wouldn’t let her panic. There were other allies closing in on their location apparently. 

Signal checked her for injuries and made her drink half a bottle of water. A Narrows accent was sneaking its way through the gaps in his suspiciously generic Gotham accent. It was calming. 

“What’s your name?” he asked. 

“Andy. Um. Andrea. But call me Andy.”

“Ha, take that Nightwing.” 

She blinked a couple of times. “What?”

“Hood talks about you all the time. Never says your name though.” He shrugged. “We were curious.” 

“Curious about what?” She asked, both her eyebrows rising. She had to be the least interesting person any of them knew. 

Signal just smiled and shrugged again. She got the feeling she was on the outskirts of some in-joke. 

Before she could chase it up, Red Hood landed heavily on the pavement at the alley’s opening. He was alone.

He stalked towards her, radiating fury and danger. The shaking, panicky thing inside of her chest calmed. He didn’t stop advancing until he was looming over her. 

“Are you hurt?” he asked. The voice modulator did a bad job disguising how upset he was. 

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, her eyes narrowed in on the cracks over the front of his helmet. Blood was smeared over his side. “Are you-”

“It’s not mine.” 

“And the other guy?” Signal asked. 

“Back to his own universe, I think. He disappeared mid-fight. O’s keeping an eye out in case we have any more visitors.”

Signal nodded. “That’s my cue then. Nice meeting you, Andy!” 

He shot his grapple gun and disappeared into the blinding afternoon light. 

Red Hood let out a shaky breath. He took off his helmet to reveal a domino mask underneath. He ran a hand through his loose curls. 

“You have to be more careful,” he said. “He was going to kill you.”

“He was just in my house, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Calling me was the right thing, but if Signal wasn’t in the area… I wouldn’t have made it in time.”

She sucked in a shaky breath and let it out again. She grabbed his arm just to steady herself.

He pulled her closer and hugged her tight. He leaned his forehead against hers. 

“Alternate you is a real asshole.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

She scoffed. “You called in the cavalry, you saved the day, you don’t get to be sorry.”

“Maybe.” He cupped the back of her head. She felt safe. “I’m going to teach you how to handle yourself in a situation.”

“I don’t want to be in any situations,” she groused, hiding her head in his jacket. Oh, it was sticky. Gross.

“You’re always getting into a situation.”

She sighed.

Next>>

[scaryscarecrows]

Mr. Arkham Knight, sir, what is/was it like working with the one and only Scarecrow himself? Is he really as terrifying up-close as everyone says he is?

You forget: I know him. Y'know. Up to a point. Scary? Eh. Motherfucker? Yeah. He drugged me at some point and that...was not a good time.

-Jason