There was a dead body on the floor with a big red spot where his head used to be.
Now his head was on Stephanie’s knuckles.
There was a body on the floor with a big red spot where his head used to be, and he was dead, and Stephanie killed him, and oh, God, she had just killed someone.
--
“Hood?”
He groaned.
“Spoiler? The hell do you want? I’m busy.”
The guy in his crosshairs gestured emphatically at the painting on the wall.
There was a long moment of static on the line. He drummed his fingers on the gravel roof and scowled, because they knew he was on a stakeout. An important stakeout. He’d put it on Tim’s f*cking ‘crime calendar’ and everything. Was it so hard to send a text? Honestly.
“...Jason,” she said this time, and the hairs on his neck began to rise.
“...Spoiler?” Silence. Which, where Steph was concerned, was unheard of. He really hoped no one was dead again. “What’s going on?”
“I did a bad thing.”
Her voice was shaking, fuzzy with static and the crackle of heavy breaths against the microphone. Jason blamed the rising chill up his back on the night air, and his nausea on the Jokerized fries.
“Tssch. Bet I’ve done worse.”
“No, no, Jason. Jason, I did something bad. I f*cked up. Really bad.”
Jason started to pack in his rifle, tossing it whole into his bag instead of taking the time to strip it to its parts. It wasn’t that he was worried, per say, because as far as Bats went, Stephanie was probably one of the least likely to go get killed (again), but he might as well go see whatever her problem was before Bruce found out and it became everyone else’s problem. He didn’t care about the stakeout, anyway.
Now, worst case scenario: What’s so bad you call Jason?
Easy. You call him when you need someone beaten, killed, or otherwise met with incredible violence. You call him when you’re running away for a week because Bruce is being a dickhole. You call him when you want to eat food by someone who can cook Gothamite comfort, and to yell really really loud.
When she spoke again, it was with a whisper, strained as if it were creaking its way out of her body, wasting away all the air in her lungs and making her voice into something high and reedy, splintering on the last word in her mouth.
“Don’t tell Bruce.”
You call Jason when you need to hide a body.
-
So, here’s the thing: there was this case with a fire, which was actually a murder, which was actually a mob hit, which was actually some other third thing-- but the important part was that there was a guy who kills people, and Stephanie was in his house, and he was currently trying to kill her. And she might have been losing.
Genzel was an ugly bastard, and he was uglier now that he was bleeding from his face, with a swelling lip and bloodshot, wild eyes. He’d gotten a few good hits in on her, cracking a rib under one of the tacky gold rings on his knuckles and spreading a bruise on her cheek from his heavy fist, but she wasn’t helpless, and Genzel learned that quickly somewhere between his broken nose, missing teeth, and equally fractured ribs.
He lunged at Stephanie, and she ducked under his wrist, punched him twice, and parried his kitchen knife off the armor plates on her forearm. She leapt back and they circled each other for a moment, both crouching low with fists in front of their faces and the lone kitchen light swinging between them.
Genzel grabbed a plate off the counter, and she leapt out from under the shower of ceramic as it shattered against the wall. He kicked the table-- and she didn’t expect that, whoops-- and made it clothesline her right in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her and pinning her against the wall. She shoved at it, hard, but Genzel caught the other side and shoved it right back at her, socking her in the gut with the solid edge, once, twice, until stars spun around her vision.
He wrenched the table back again, and with nothing to support her Steph pitched dangerously forward, grasping drunkenly at one of the bookshelves and toppling its contents onto the floor. It felt as if she’d only had time to blink before he was right in front of her, grabbing a fistful of hair and yanking her upright again. She scrambled to get her arm between his, bend him at the elbow and break the hold, but she got no further than her grip on his wrist as he bashed the side of her face against the wall, sending an explosion of pain and light across her vision, world spinning and the ground rolling under her feet. She managed to stay standing, but whether it was from her own strength or Genzel’s she wasn’t sure.
He shoved her back against the wall once more and crowded into her space, giant, rough hands wrapping around her throat and squeezing hard. Steph scrambled at his fingers for a moment before her brain rebooted itself and she remembered how to punch, socking him hard in the jaw. He yanked her up by the neck with enough force to lift the soles of her boots off the ground, and her eyes bugged as he slammed her into the drywall again, hitting her hard enough to crumple it under her shoulders and making her taste blood.
She swung her knee up with all the last of the air in her lungs, muscles screaming with exertion, and felt the hot swell of satisfaction as her studded kneepad collided with Genzel’s shriveled, ugly balls.
His mouth dropped open wide and he stumbled with a wheeze as she fell, hacking, against the bookcase once more. She sucked in only a few desperate breaths before she charged him like a bull, running off the adrenaline of just nearly being strangled, and clocked him one in the face. He stumbled back against the table and floundered for a grip, which gave Steph enough time to kick him in the balls again, and then knee him in the head as he doubled over a second time. He fell spluttering onto the floor, one hand over his groin and the other over his bleeding nose.
He opened one red eye and looked at her with such fury she felt her skin crawl.
“I’m not going to kill you until you beg me,” he said. “I made all of them beg, eventually.”
She stumbled forward as he began to stand and tackled him with all of her weight, sending them both crashing across the floor and knocking the table out of the way with Genzel’s stupid head. She clambered on top of Genzel as he tried to roll aside, straddling his chest and pinning his arms to his sides as she punched the breath from him, a moment’s advantage for her to strike. She bashed her knuckles against his cheek, and he spat blood across the floor-- not enough, not enough for all those girls, and Stephanie was almost one of them-- so she punched him again, and again, and again still.
The one living girl she’d found, skinny as bones and covered in horrible bruises, bite marks on her legs, her arms, her face, she’d just stared at Steph when she came to the rescue, eyes open but unseeing as she gazed through the open doorway and made no attempt to move. When Steph had tried to pick the girl up, she’d slipped on the blood she’d been sitting in.
He would have done that to her. She-- Chloe, her name was Chloe Markus, age 19, gluten allergy, missing for 33 days, last seen at-- she was so thoroughly beaten she could no longer fight back, not even when Stephanie failed her and Genzel finally killed her. He'd have killed every girl he could get his hands on, if he could. He wore a dirty tank top and ugly gold rings that were going to print 4 even marks on her cheek, and he wasn't a supervillain. His only power was devouring the life from innocent people through pure human cruelty, just because he wanted to. What made a creature like that? If Stephanie hadn't been Spoiler, would she have wound up here anyway?
With each fall of her fists, the itch under his skin intensified, the cold poison Genzel had breathed at her burning out of her veins and into pools on the floor. He’d tried to chain her up after he caught her, wrists above her head, handcuffs around a pole. He stole her toolbelt and tore her cape and he would have shed her of more were it not for her suit's bat-defense system nearly frying him to a crisp when he tried touching it. He'd never even got a chance to lay a hand on her before they were beating the sh*t out of each other, but still, the sight of his palms made her stomach roll and eyes sting. Every girl in Gotham knew there were fates so much worse than death.
She couldn’t see through the sweat, blood, and tears that stuck to her eyelashes, red and clumpy blonde hairs stuck to her lips. She would hate this f*cking city, if it weren’t the beat of her heart. She hated having to go in before dark. She hated the way goons loomed at her as if she were the easy pickings, the one lame gazelle. She hated that Batman told her she shouldn’t be patrolling alone, and she hated that sometimes she thought he was right. She hated Genzel, and the one before him, and the one before him, and the one that would always come after.
But she wasn’t going to die to this one. No one else would.
With a furious scream, she laced her fingers together and brought her combined fists down hard, feeling a warm, wet spray against her cheeks.
She gasped, panting, loud breaths echoing in the empty room. The silence rung out like the last reverberations of a struck bell, a low warble in her ears that blocked out the sound of the streets below. Below her, Genzel didn’t move.
Great. Mission accomplished. Spoiler for the win. She could finally call in the police, and Babs would send all the evidence she found, and they would take him and lock him in Blackgate, or wherever, where hopefully he would get shivved a bunch of times and die, because he was awful. Go justice. But now Steph's work was over, the case was closed, and she was safe. Like a switch flipped, all the strength began to seep from her, bleeding away into a dazed, hesitant calm. The ceiling swirled pleasantly as she tipped her head back to stare at it, hands falling to her sides, still clenched. Slowly, the roar of blood in her ears began to quiet, and she coughed weakly as dry air scraped her throat. Below her, Genzel didn’t move. She sloughed forward again, shakily wiping the hair and sweat from her face with her arm. Her mask had come partially unstuck and was beginning to roll down her face, and she spat it out where it pressed uncomfortably against her lips. Her mouth was tingling and so were her legs, falling through the floorboards and she was sinking down, down, past the stone room and into the ground and back into the sky on the other side, floating away. She was safe. Still, Genzel didn’t move.
She looked down at him, then, his shirt rumpled and spattered with blood, both his and hers, mixing in with all the beer stains and grease there’d been before. One of his arms was still pinned under her legs where she sat on him, and she followed it down to his hand, examining his bloodied knuckles and the purpling of a newly broken thumb. His right arm was half raised beside his head.
When she looked at his head, it was the strangest thing. She could find his shoulders and where they connected to his neck, could see the hair at the top of his head, but… she just couldn’t find his face. It was like where it was supposed to be was something else, a strange, buzzing mass that hurt her eyes and made her dizzy. What was that? A mask? Why was it so wet? Why did her knuckles hurt? She looked down at her fist. Lodged between her third and fourth knuckle was a… tooth? That must have come from someone’s face. She looked back to where Genzel’s face was supposed to be, and found the tooth’s 31 siblings among the shape on the ground. This must be his tooth, then. And teeth go on the face, so that meant that this was.
Stephanie found his face. Genzel didn’t move.
She screamed.
--
“I wanna get down.”
“Oh, nuh-uh. You need to get cleaned up, first.”
Stephanie started to slough sideways off his back, and Jason hurried to get them both off the carpet before she spilled herself onto the floor. He set her down on the bathroom tile instead, her costume peeling stickily off his shoulders as she swayed where she stood.
“You gotta get out of the suit, Steph.”
“I’m cold.”
"Yeah, it's wet. You'll be less cold with it off."
She looked down at her hands, flexing them open, then closed, and began to shake.
"I can't."
“You done it a million times.”
She turned her palms out to Jason, the fabric of her gloves no longer purple.
“My hands are-- I can’t. It’ll get dirty. And this-- it’s evidence, isn’t it? I can’t. I can’t.”
He sighed and started the shower faucet.
“I can. Come 'ere.”
Starting with her sticky gloves, Jason carefully began to pull her free, trying to gently crack away the dry blood gluing her suit to her skin. She started crying again as he unlaced her boots, and he had to wipe her face more than once as her tears and snot made the blood and grime run down her cheeks.
“He was gonna hurt me,” she said.
“I know.”
“He was gonna make me like that girl. Chloe.”
Probably that bony one, bruised and bloodied, dead and face down just 3 feet from the front door. Her fingers had just barely brushed the threshold.
Jason shucked his own gloves and tossed them on the pile.
“And now he can’t,” he replied.
“I feel dirty,” she continued, as Jason helped her step out of her leggings. “He didn’t even do anything. Why do I still feel dirty?”
“Cause you got some dirt on you. You're gonna wash it off, and you’ll be fine.” He tested the water with his fingers. “Get in.”
Stephanie stared blankly at him, unmoving. Her eyes drifted aimlessly along the line of the shower curtain, and he nudged her again.
“Come on.”
“I’m tired.”
He closed his eyes.
Qué pasa, mijo? Mama’s tired, baby.…
Just get in the shower, mama, please. You gotta stay awake, please, come on.
She stayed standing. He sighed again. The spray was lukewarm as Jason tugged them both beneath it, soaking his whole stupid costume (weighs an extra 20 pounds when wet, you little sh*thead) and startling a confused noise from Stephanie, who lolled her head back to look directly into the showerhead. He covered her face with his palm before she could drown herself in it. Damian told him chickens do that, sometimes.
Slowly, the water ran red, then pink, then clear again, as the worst of the night sloughed off her skin and down the drain where she stared, expressionless, swirling a washcloth over the same spot on her arm over and over. Jason brought out a stepstool, a cup, and his recycling bin, and sat her facing away from him on the stool as he began to wash her hair.
Her hair was thick, the strands coarse, wavy once-black curls whose ends frayed with bleach and cheap shampoo. She smelled like coffee and cigarettes.
Her hair was thin, clumped together, knotted with blood and wispy like cornsilk, and stinking like Gotham’s industrial district. It took four tries with the shampoo to get it to run clean and golden, and longer still to work conditioner back into the mats, carefully carding through the knots with practiced ease.
"'Hope' is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -"
"Mmm. That's… Emily Dickenson, isn't it? Oh, Jason, que bonita. Will you tell me the rest?"
"I don't get it."
He snorted. "Because you're a dirty philistine. It’s poetry, numbnu*ts."
"You're a dirty philistine. numbnu*ts."
He rinsed away the conditioner, and sat back, swatting her on the shoulder with the towel.
"Get up."
Stephanie got up.
"Gimme your head."
"Huh?"
The noise she made when Jason dropped the towel on her head was a lot like a goose being choked mid-honk and he scrambled her from side to side, scrunching her hair dry. He pulled it away with a flourish, and snickered at the way it made her hair frizz out.
It had the added bonus of shaking some life back into her, and when Steph parted her hair around her face, sputtering, there was a little more familiar light in her eyes. Still definitely in shock-- if he left her now she would probably still be standing there when he came back, but she was no longer crying or covered in brain matter, so he’d take it as a net win.
“Dry off. I got pajamas, I’ll leave ‘em by the door. I’m making sandwiches and I don’t want high-schoolers running naked around my apartment. That’s the last thing my reputation needs.”
He stepped out into his bedroom, digging out a T shirt and a pair of shorts from his dresser and tossing them at the half-open bathroom door. He picked his earpiece up off the nightstand as he passed, and waited to open the line until he was in the kitchen.
“Yo, Oracle.”
“Hood? What a pleasant surprise. You usually don’t call unless something’s on fire.”
He lit the stove. “Hey, I call you when Alf makes cookies, too, and that’s a goddamn privilege.”
“Well, are there cookies?”
“No. I need a favor and you can’t ask why.”
“No. Why do you need a favor?”
“Cause I do. Steph’s case, Genzel. I need the address, I know you got it.”
“Of course I do.” The sound of keys drifted faintly over the line as he tossed a piece of bread and cheese on the pan, watching the Swiss start to melt. “Why not ask Steph? Suit tracker says she’s with you.”
“Stalker.”
“You’re too sweet. Doesn’t answer my question.”
“Yeah, and I’m not gonna. Hand it over, O.”
“I sent it to your helmet link. What are you going to do with it?”
“None of your business. I’m handling the case now.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“Then I’ll sound like B, instead. Lock it down, Oracle, nobody goes in there but me. Also, I have intimacy problems.”
There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the sound of cheese sizzling on the pan. Jason put a slice of ham on it, then flipped it to toast the other side of the bread.
“Jason, is Stephanie okay?”
“She’s fine,” he lied. “She got her ass kicked and she’s sleeping on my couch.” It came out easy, years of practice. He glanced up to see the bathroom door had not opened any further. “Nothin’ she can’t fix, but B’s gonna be a bitch about it if he finds out. So she called in a favor.”
“And now you’re calling in a favor.”
“Yup.” He popped the ‘p’ between his lips and dropped the hot sandwich on a plate, sliding it to the empty seat on the other side of the kitchen island.
“...Jason,” she said, seriously.
He poured a glass of orange juice and set it on the table. “Yeah? Whaddya want, I’m busy. Pullin’ teeth, and sh*t. Torturing people.”
“Stephanie isn’t okay.”
It was probably supposed to be a question, but she didn’t say it like one. She already knew the answer. Wisps of steam curled off the hot bread, and he glanced at the bathroom door again. Through the crack, he could see a sliver of Stephanie’s form still standing, staring straight ahead, unmoving with the towel in her hands. He sighed. Yeah, he’d have to go get her, after all.
“No, she’s not.” Babs sucked in a breath over the line. Jason walked toward the bathroom. “But she’ll walk it off. So I’m gonna handle it.”
Barbara was smart, too damn smart, but she was easily one of his least-unfavorites of them all, in no small part because she knew how to keep her mouth shut. Jason knew Barbara probably knew or could at least guess what had happened. If she hadn’t yet, she certainly would after Genzel disappeared and Jason put a convenient pair of bullet holes in the floor for good measure. That part, she wouldn’t be able to hide from B, and Jason would get chewed out for killing a sh*tbag, probably kicked out of Gotham for a few weeks until they begged him back for the next cataclysmic attack of the month, but nobody would actually doubt he’d done it. Jason killed people all the time. (He didn’t, not really, but they thought he did, and he didn’t correct them.)
“...Okay. It’s locked down. No-go perimeter on the area. You’ve got 12 hours to take care of it before it auto-pings the others.”
He could have the cleanup done in 4 hours, depending on how messy it was. He thought back to Stephanie’s bloody, bloody fists. Maybe 6.
“Thanks, O.”
“Jason. Whatever it is you’re doing… thank you. ”
His throat clicked as he swallowed. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
--
“Am I gonna go to jail?”
“No.”
“I killed somebody.”
“Yeah? I put 12 severed heads in a duffle bag. You ain’t special.”
“B’s gonna make me quit. He tried to do that before, but then last time I almost died, so I don’t know what he would do now.” She went pale. “Oh, God. He’s gonna send me to Arkham.”
He won’t, Jason didn’t tell her, because he might.
“B’s not gonna know jack sh*t,” he said instead.
“He’s the world’s greatest detective.”
“And what are you, the world’s lamest narc? Listen, Steph.” He put a hand on her shoulder, then flicked her nose when she still failed to look at him. “You didn’t kill nobody, ‘cause there’s no body to find. No body, no crime. Easy as that.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Yeah? Tell that to the bodies I sunk in the river. Oh, wait.”
“But I punched a person in the face until his head exploded,” she said, the same way one might say I saw a bird today.
Jason didn’t think he remembered the first person he killed. It might have been when Talia handed him a sword in the League, or it might have been in Gotham while he hunted down his family. For all he knew, he might have killed and ate the gravekeeper the day he crawled out of the ground. He used to feel guilty about the not knowing. Most of the time now he was grateful.
“No you didn’t,” he replied. “I did. I shot him 2 times in the head with a hollow point round.”
She stared at him for a very, very long time.
“...No, you didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did.”
When he first remembered the killing, he’d blamed it on Bruce. Then he blamed it on Talia. Then he blamed it on the Pit. The whole time, he knew the reason he was cleaning blood out from under his fingernails wasn’t because of any of them. But the alternative was confronting the thing he had become, accepting it, and settling into it like a peeled-off skin. Bloody, wicked Jason.
He wound up looking into as many of his victims as he could find, people he'd hunted or crossed paths with in his disjointed, maddened march home to Hell. He wanted to know if he’d killed them, he needed to be positive of it, that he’d done this undoable thing; a part of him still begged and prayed for the scumbags to be alive, skulking around corners, disappeared from town after some bodily violence, maybe laid up in a hospital with a bodyful of broken bones, but not dead by Jason’s hands.
He found one. Alone in a field, unidentifiable. It took him six months of searching, to find that one body. He didn’t find a trace of any others. He knew what that meant, but in a way, not seeing the bodies, not remembering where he’d buried them, if he’d even buried them at all-- it would have been easier to believe he wasn’t to blame. He could have deluded himself into thinking it wasn’t his fault, he’d needed to believe that it might have been someone else, or he would go crazy. Jason hadn’t killed those people. It was someone else. It had to be, or he’d go crazy.
He went crazy.
“... Did you really shoot him?” Stephanie asked softly.
“Yes,” he lied.
“Two times?”
“In the head.”
“With a--”
“--Hollow point round. Bang, bang. Piñata party.”
“Yuck.”
“Bigtime. But nobody’s gonna find him, ‘cause I took care of it. No body.”
“And if there’s no body, then…”
“There’s no crime.” He clicked his tongue at her. “Bingo. Atta girl.”
“That’s not what happened.” Steph shook her head, but she didn’t look so sure anymore, and that’s all he needed. A little doubt to keep the self-denial spinning. Maybe gaslighting a high schooler out of a very real murder and then hiding the evidence made him a bad person. Luckily, he was already a bad person for a bunch of other reasons, so there was no real loss on his part. “...Is it?”
“Yeah, it is.” He pushed the sandwich towards her. “Now, eat your damn sandwich.”
“Okay.”
-
Jason picked up her plate (when had she emptied it?) and Stephanie wondered a lot if dying would feel the same a second time.
Would it be different if someone shot her dead? Cut her in half? Set her on fire? What would it feel like if she punched herself in the head 30 times?
She opened her fists, stiff and aching, open and close, closed and--wondered: would she feel her knuckles inside her skull before it killed her? Would getting punched in the brain hurt? Maybe it would just be colors, like an explosion of light and sound. Maybe that would be worse, somehow? Would she have a chance to be glad? It had been dark there, when she went. Not cold nor hot. The sensation of falling, suspended. The pressure of gravity, suddenly relieved.
Did he feel it?
She didn’t remember… everything from when Leslie had her on the table, but she remembered the sensation of floating, freefall, like a dream where you wake up the moment before you hit the ground, and then silence. There was sleeping, and then there was sitting in the dark with your eyes closed. Steph laid in a bed with eyes that would not open, pacing circles around her head and looking up at an empty sky.
Waking up then felt a little like she did now. Her stomach was full, but she couldn’t taste anything. She was warm, but could not stop shivering. She was scared, but she felt nothing at all.
Jason wiped her greasy fingers with a napkin and lifted her from her chair.
“Am I a bad person?” she asked, arms wrapped around his neck.
“Am I?”
“I mean. Maybe a little. You did try to kill Tim.”
“Who hasn’t? He should try being less killable.”
“Yeah, he should.”
The others didn’t… get Jason, like she did. They didn’t grow up in Gotham, not like he, and Steph, and Duke did. But even then, as much as she loved Duke, loved hearing Gotham sing when he and Jason spoke, loved the way he would let the kids in the slums rope him into hopscotch, she loved how he laughed differently when it was the three of them, loud and brash and bold like the city that birthed him-- there were things Jason understood. To be raised by a man in a life of crime, with heavy fists and jagged words. To have a mother who loved, but not enough to save them. He knew what it was like, to see the Gotham’s ugly belly, to roll it over and see it crawling with filth and bloated with flies; Jason had been a girl, once, but once in Gotham was all it took for a lesson never to be forgotten, and so now Jason ruled the red light district, because he understood it differently than everyone else. Jason was who Stephanie could have become. Stephanie was what Jason could have been. They were two halves of a whirlpool, circling each other and draining into the same dark blue sea.
Gotham was dirty, and wicked, and woven directly into their veins.
“Good and bad is cop bullsh*t,” Jason said. “You know what’s right.”
Do I? she thought, then thought of the victim’s corpse she’d found burned everywhere except where she could be desired. She thought of bloody fists and brain matter.
“Do you like living in Gotham?”
He snorted. “f*ck no.”
Stephanie liked helping people and fixing things. She liked making babies smile and petting people’s dogs and saving people in a colorful costume. She tried to make Gotham a better place. She killed someone. She might have beat him to death with her hands.
“Do you want to leave?”
“Nah. Home’s home.”
Jason baked cookies for Alfred’s birthday. He cooked food that was too spicy for anyone (including himself) to eat, and then pretended it wasn’t because he was stupid, and lame, and liked to play tough. His territory had the lowest rate of crime against women and children in the city. He cut off people’s heads and put them in a duffle bag. He shot people in the head with hollow-point bullets.
Good, bad, right, wrong. Both and neither. Cop bullsh*t.
He laid her in his bed, sat heavily in the chair beside it, opened a book on the nightstand-- so worn the title was nearly illegible, poking out with sticky notes and bookmarks and writing in the margins-- and began to read aloud:
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
She squeezed his hand.
He held it.
