Chapter Text
Dick woke up after a long patrol in Blüdhaven and turned on the TV for white noise but the news quickly caught his eye.
‘Gothamite taking over the charts: new artist Red Hood has gone viral,’ read the headline but what surprised him was the image. A six-foot guy dressed in a store-bought Robin costume was breaking into the Titans Tower and successfully.
Dick picked up his phone to call Tim, who he already had a few missed calls from. He called him back and he picked up at the second ring.
‘Hey, everything ok?’ Dick asked
‘Well, a guy broke into the tower, called me his replacement and then beat me up and jumped out the window. So I’m perfectly fine, thank you for asking.’ answered the young bird.
‘Any idea on who he is?’ he continued as he ate a bowl of cereal.
‘He was pretty thorough and he fought just like us, but the only person whose replacement I could possibly be has been six feet under for a long time.’
‘Maybe he’s some dude with a grudge’
‘Some dude could break into the Titans Tower?’
‘Well you figured out our identities as a random kid with a camera’ Dick heard something from the other side.
‘I gotta go, Bart’s calling me’ Tim said as he hung up.
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A week ago Red Hood had gone viral for his album cover of breaking into the Titans Tower dressed as a traffic light, which he also live-streamed on Twitch while blasting his first song: So Easy to Replace Me. The song itself wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t good enough to be that famous. Of course, the red graffiti on the tower saying “Red Hood was here” is great publicity.
Jason was reading the articles about him as he sat in a café in Jump City, looking up and admiring his work which was getting wiped off the Titans Tower. He decided he would start working on a music video as soon as he got back to Gotham. But he promised Talia he would drop by the League and she probably had questions by now.
A few years ago, he had crawled out of his grave and ended up lost in Gotham. A year later, Talia Al Ghul had found him and taken him into the League of Assassins, led by Ra’s Al Ghul, her father. She put him into the Lazarus Pit, a magical glowing pool which restored most of his memory, and trained him in the League way for about two years until she put him in the field and now, after seven months, she let him go on his own path for vengeance from the man who calls himself vengeance, the man he once called his father: The Batman.
He had sketched a plan during his time in the League: beating up the new bird boy, a bomb in the Batmobile, maybe a bag of severed heads. But he threw it all away when he realized that the way to get the heroes’ attention would be to openly call out the Dark Knight to the whole world. There’s one thing which everyone in the world knows about: music. So here he was: the second Robin, the boy wonder, on Billboard Top 100.
He wondered if Bruce would recognize him four years later as a taller, stronger young adult. He doubted that the bat could ever believe that his smiling boy could ever do that and people don’t come back from the dead. Except, well, practically every hero. Jason had discovered that some rift in space-time had revived him, but he didn’t know the details.
Tired of his phone, he finished his coffee and left Jump City, just in time to see the Batplane land in the distance, probably to check on the boy he had seen watching his patrols before he died, who became Robin.