When you're young, life is simple. Everyday there is a new adventure in the backyard, the question of why the ocean is blue goes unanswered and shrugged off until your persistence wins you a fable of a paintbrush dipped in cerulean in God's ever-patient hand, the sun is just another deity in the sky, and your father is going to live forever.

When you're young, your parents are the household Titans standing at your back, made immortal from where your head comes up to their knees, not yet human in your eyes. Atlas has your father's face, holding up the weight of the world. Your mother sews together the tapestry of your future, holding down the fort, Goddess of the Hearth stoking the flames with the open palm of her hand to keep you warm. You have yet to realise that your father, too, is made of flesh and bone and half-baked ambition, and that your life was bought by the rotting carcass of your mother's dreams. You should never have existed. You do not know this yet.

Devon remembered the day the rug was ripped out from under her feet.

The first time she realised that her father could be cut down, she was ten, and it was the day she'd won first place at the science fair with her anatomically accurate papier-mâché rat. Walking home from school, her palm warm inside the envelope of his fingers, his smile bright as she rattled on about the false-started fake volcano and the glass dome filled with fire ants that her paper rat and its scaled-to-size Play-Doh organs had beat out, she'd failed to spot the darkness lurking ahead. How could she, when her father's attention had been sun-bright, the face of his affection attuned to her with such blazing totality, in the way that made her feel as though she were the only girl in the world? He held onto her rat and the cardboard poster as though they amounted to more than money, turning the rat this way and that with gentle fingers, examining her creation with such painstaking care as she explained that the heart of a rat, at rest, beat at a rate of 250 and 400 beats per minute, that its brain was the size of a grape, that eight days before an earthquake all the rats in the city disappeared completely.

"They have these early warning systems," Devon had said, talking with her hands as she always did, a bad habit her mother often scorned her for. "Their circadian rhythms are disrupted days before an earthquake happens, like, they can sense the waves and the signs before everyone else can and it gets them so anxious that they listen to their base instincts and run away. Cool, right?"

"Circadian rhythms," her father echoed with a breathy laugh, shaking his head as he echoed her own words—not to her, but to some invisible audience—the way her parents often did when she spoke of something vaguely technical. At the time she didn't understand what was so funny about it. In more recent years, Devon would come to realise that adults only did this when their child's mind began to outrun theirs. "You are the smartest little girl in the entire world, I think."

"Do you get nervous like that, Papa?"

"No," he tells her, grinning with all his teeth. "Never."

She should've known that was a lie, but at ten years old, Devon looked up to her father and saw only his head silhouetted by the sun, felt only the strong, calloused hands of a man who hefted a sledgehammer at a wall all day, and knew nothing of where he slipped off to after work, or why he wasn't at work on a Wednesday afternoon. She didn't know better.

It happened quickly.

In the moment between walking up the stairs into the unassuming maw of their apartment building and the next, came the shattering of the illusion.

But first: pain. White-hot, searing agony in the back of her head, and the sensation of falling. Vaguely cognisant of the rough hands ripping her small body away from her father's side, Devon let out a fearful cry.

Then the sickening crunch of bone breaking, and her father's chilling cry curdling the air.

It came to her in fragments.

One moment she was staring up at three large silhouettes, nasty figures whose faces she no longer remembered, their shadows falling over her like an invasion, the next she was curled up on the ground with a weight in the shape of a boot digging into her back, staring at the crumpled carcass of her paper-mache rat lying on the floor. Months of hard work spilling its guts and organs onto the floor. In her ears, a metallic, primal scream ringing and ringing and ringing through her head.

And then the swift tide of blood soaking through the cardboard and paper detritus, split like a knuckle.

She couldn't pull her head from the ground. Couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Could only watch the shadows flickering over the darkening paper-mache rat and the wall taking bats and fists to the crippled figure on the floor like a Punch and Judy puppet show. Papa? She'd wanted to scream, fear crippling her spine in its cold fist. Papa—where are you?

(The answer, of course, wouldn't come to her until she was much older. Where her father was, was in fact, thousands of dollars deep in debt, and the terrible thing that'd brought her entire world down was what her mother would soon damningly christen: Gambler's fate.)

Even when the men were gone and her father had stopped screaming, the shadows remained, hammers drawn, flicking on a loop in her vision.

What remained was this: the sound of more bones breaking, the violent pulse of the moment echoing down the hallway, stretching into a corridor of eternity, her father's body lying still on the ground, this blood and blood and replay.

Dread iced Devon's veins as she stepped out onto the sidewalk, ten years old again, walking into the unknown with her neck bared to the wind. This was the feeling sitting in her stomach now, the uncertainty of turning a corner and being met with a massacre.

They were back again, the grey Subaru idling on the curb with the windows rolled down. The engine purred to life the moment they clocked her presence. Peter went rigid beside her, hands shoved into his pockets, his head ducked down, his bruise-mottled face silhouetted under the hood. Through the space between them, she could feel the heat radiating from his body, the tension coiled in his muscles, wired for a fight.

"Watch your stitches," Devon murmured, keeping her head down and quickening her step.

Peter didn't answer.

The window wound down, and the silvered head of Officer Daniels poked out. Today, he wore a blue button-up shirt with a creased collar and a particularly malicious gleam in his eye.

"Morning, kid," Daniels chirped, his faux cheer grazing against her nerves. "Your mother call you yet?"

Devon set her jaw and kept walking. As much as she wanted to slam her fist through the windshield, she knew that anger simmering beneath her bones wouldn't get her anywhere. What she needed was to get to campus. Fast.

Besides, there was a silver lining here. Neither officer had said anything about the broken window. Nor did they take much notice of Peter, walking just a few steps behind her, slow enough that neither would suspect that they were, in any way, affiliated, but at a quick enough pace to listen in.

"Hey, kid!" Barked the other officer, whose name Devon had forgotten, though the sourness in his vulpine face was enough recognition she needed. "We're talkin' to you! You wanna give us an answer or—"

Devon dug through her pockets for her earphones. As a safety precaution, she never listened to music while she walked around in Gotham, but it served a powerful message to most when she plugged them in. Fuck off.

"You want to see Drew again, don't you?"

At that moment, Peter seemed to notice the flicker of darkness crippling Devon's expression, the falter in her step as she bunched her fingers into fists, white-knuckled and trembling.

The other cop snickered, a wicked sneer crossing his face. "Oh, now you're interested. You know, Drew's young. Won't be long before she forgets about you entirely."

Devon glared holes into the cracked pavement, the words ringing in her head, warping her field of vision. She felt strangely off-kilter, the world tilting on its axis at all the wrong angles. Drew. Devon hadn't heard the name in years. Hadn't seen her younger sister in twice as long. A hot knot of hatred swelled in the base of her throat. Devon clenched her jaw, ground her teeth so hard she could swear she felt one of her molars crack.

Plugging her wired headphones in, Devon put one foot in front of the other until the detectives disappeared. Peter's presence was a weight at her shoulder, falling into step with her when they put enough distance between themselves and the apartment, the car idling by the pavement winking out of view.

Every once in a while, Devon glanced over her shoulder to ensure that her tail stayed clean. She felt Peter's presence at her shoulder like a hot shadow and nearly flinched from its proximity. She'd expected him to split off, but he seemed intent on trailing after her like a dog on a leash. She didn't understand why, and she found neither the appropriate words nor a window to ask. Steeling herself, Devon pressed forward, letting her feet pace the route she knew like the back of her hand. Through her wired headphones, a single Radiohead song that'd been gummed up in her head for the past week played on a loop. Thank God, even at its worst, Gotham was a walkable city.

Halfway through the twenty-minute walk to campus, a tap on her elbow steered Devon toward a deli, where she paid for two sandwiches and grumbled something about a running tab and a two-percent interest rate.

"You are severely short-changing yourself," Peter remarked, his tone flat, ripping the wrapping off his sandwich and chucking the shreds into a pile of trash on the curb. "You'd make a terrible loan shark."

Plucking out one of her earphones, Devon wrinkled her mouth in a manner that was meant to mimic disapproval, but the lightning bolt of unease beneath cracked apart her expression. She kept her sandwich in her backpack, opting to save it, instead, for the bare sliver of time between Neuroimmunology 403 and Animal Ecology 467 which she called lunch.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Chewing through a mouthful of his turkey sandwich, Peter slanted her a deadpan look. "Um. Eating? Duh."

"I mean, following me." Devon made a vague gesture of frustration, impatience tearing across her face. "Don't you have your own... business to attend to?"

Peter shrugged, the very picture of infuriating, unshakable nonchalance, and said nothing about it. The silence that ensued was a stone-faced statement on its own—he wouldn't be addressing this topic any further. Even though she'd spent all night covered in his blood, Devon didn't dare prod.

"You should at least go home to rest."

"No."

She threw her hands up in irritation again, and caught a glimpse of Peter's mirthful smirk which he smoothed over with another bite of his sandwich.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Why not?"

A dark scowl thundered across Devon's face.

They were silent for a moment as they passed the post office which marked the last quarter of the commute by foot.

"Who's Drew?" Peter asked, breaking the silence. He'd polished off his sandwich by now, and was dusting the crumbs off his hands.

"None of your business," Devon bit, more aggressively than intended, teeth bared with the hostility of a cornered animal protecting a missing limb.

Sensing the wound, Peter didn't press the topic any further. She supposed he understood—if he didn't want her asking questions, he shouldn't go prodding her for answers, too.

The Linwood Biological and Veterinary Medical Science Campus was a refined, sophisticated institution of Gotham University—one of their many aged but monumental campuses spread out across the city—that bore a sprawling courtyard gleaming auburn beneath an ancient oak tree, bisected by a wide brick path leading up to the building itself. It contained a cluster of buildings dedicated to the biomedical sciences, immunology, and other such academic fields pointing toward the majority of the appropriate pre-vet requisites.

Students milled across the courtyard, among which some lounged in close clusters on the grass, crushing glowing leaves in their hands and laughing mid-conversation. Devon stepped aside just in time as a girl flew past her into the arms of her friends, who caught her in their warm net and ferried each other toward a red stone building Devon knew as her Infectious Diseases lecture hall. This was a world closed to Devon, who kept her head down as she shuttled between classes and her part-time job at the emergency animal clinic, who lived inside her notes and counted down the days to graduation, who'd spent her entire life on the outside looking in. She'd spent four years of her life in this patch of Gotham and not once had she felt the sense of belonging the people around her seemed to possess. The pinch of envy that gripped her now was a familiar, staple thing. She brushed it off with practiced ease.

Devon checked the time on her phone screen. Dust and grime had gathered in the cracks webbing the glass protector, rendering the wallpaper of her lockscreen barely legible. Drew's little face peered back at her, grinning with missing front teeth. At first, it'd been motivational—y'know, putting in all this effort, grinding out the rest of the years to make it big, make it into financial independence so she could repay her fathers' debts and excise this city from her skin—until recently, where Devon felt the noose of time constricting around her neck, and Drew's grin had begun to morph into a leer, a scathing assertion of doubt.

Ten minutes till her lecture began.

Devon stopped outside the lecture hall's heavy, imposing oakwood doors, where a few other students had gathered. She turned to face Peter, who had both hands stuck in the pockets of his cargo pants, glancing around campus with a faraway expression that might've passed for indifference.

"Give me your phone."

"No!"

"I'm not going to mug you," Peter said, rolling his eyes. "I'm just going to give you a number to call."

"Look," she said, her voice low, "I don't know what your M.O. is—"

"Who said anything about one?"

"Stop it," Devon said, her tone firm as she levelled him with a livid stare. Fuming quietly, she jabbed a finger at his chest. "We don't know each other. You know where I live, and you know—I know that you know—that I live alone. Now you know where I study, which means you know more about my life than I know about yours. You haven't given me any reason not to trust you, but you also haven't given me a single reason to. So forgive me," she gritted out, "if I find it really fucking weird that you'd follow me all this way for nothing in return."

For an endless moment, Peter held her stare, his expression carefully blank.

"I owe you a debt," he said, his voice steady, quiet but serrated in the open corridor.

"You owe me a new window."

"No," Peter said, slowly. "I owe you. You saved my life. You could have let me leave your apartment to die on the street like a dog, but you put me on your couch and you exhausted fuck knows what resources you have on your student budget to put me back together." There was a certain gravity in his dark stare, his eyes, green as gleaming emeralds, burning with an earnest heat. "And you could have unmasked me, called the cops on me, or done any number of horrible things to me while I was out, but you didn't."

"I don't even know who you are."

"If you've read the news recently, you'd probably recognise my gear."

"Yeah, well, I don't exactly have time to do that. And I doubt Peter's actually your real name, but I'm not poking around in places where I'm not wanted, so I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same."

"That's too bad," Peter scoffed. "I still have to fix your window and replace your rug, so you're going to have to bear with me for a little longer."

"Forget the rug. Just Venmo me for the window."

"Fuck no, I'm not leaving a digital trail."

Devon slanted him a glare. "You don't understand where I'm coming from, do you?"

"No, I do," Peter said, something raw and ragged in his voice, like a nerve exposed. "That paint on your door wasn't just for decor. You've been marked."

"You don't think I know that?" Devon snarled. She pinched the bridge of her nose and drew in a sharp inhale to steady her breath, the barbs in her chest bristling around the darker details of her life she'd been so carefully protective of since she could remember. "I don't need your help. I don't want anything from you. If you really want to repay your debt, then just pay me back for the window—slip the cash under my door for all I care—and leave me the fuck alone."

✷

She left him standing in the corridor in the animosity-riddled air. Where he went from then on, she couldn't care less, but she was beginning to regret not taking his number. If that number was even real. If he'd even pick up when she called. At some point while her professor had been flicking through slides on the gut microbiome of a cow, Devon had come to accept—with a heavy heart and a sour taste in her mouth—that her already paper-thin bank account might have to take the crippling hit to repair the window.

Midway through her lecture, Devon's attention began to drift, snagging on the mouth of her backpack where the remaining eye of the cracked red mask glared up at her. Tapping her pen against her notebook, the half-scribbled notes blurring in her aching vision, she chewed on the pad of her thumb, taking a shred of dry skin between her teeth and peeling it off, savouring the sting.

Under the table, she Googled: GOTHAM RED MASK VIGILANTE.

The first link that came up was an article dated a few weeks ago asking: Red Hood Gone Rogue: Where Is Gotham's Red-Capped Menace Now?

A blurry photograph appeared below the headline.

Devon's heart stopped.

Red mask gleaming bright against the overcast Gotham night sky, the leather-clad figure in the cargo pants with the same, exact gun holsters standing on the arch of a bridge, glowering down at something beyond the camera's eye.

After a charged, inflammatory standoff against the Joker on Gotham Bay Bridge, the Red Hood has since vanished off the face of the earth. The red-capped menace once commanded a reign of terror over Gotham's underworld, seizing control and choking the operations of four separate syndicate organisations to the point of structural collapse, anonymous sources have confirmed.

The last confirmed sighting of the Red Hood was on Gotham Bay Bridge several months ago, while the Joker held hostage and attempted immolation on prominent kingpins such as Roman Sionis, monikered Black Mask, of the Sionis Crime Family, also known as the False Facers. At the scene of the standoff was Batman, who had neutralised the attempted burning but failed to account for both the Joker and the Red Hood.

Devon skimmed the rest of the article, struggling to parse the words before her, a cold feeling digging a hole through her gut. A sharp reverb rang through her ears, drowning out the droll droning of her professor, the hushed chatter of the students a couple rows down.

With the Joker re-incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, Gotham has grown much quieter on this terroristic front. Now, the question remains: where is the Red Hood?

And what becomes the fate of Gotham's criminal underbelly in the wake of his vacuous disappearance?

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

to explain:
Jason is in the midst of transitioning from this Red Hood:

to this iteration of the Red Hood:

In this fic, his transition begins several months after Batman: Under the Red Hood, where he's gone dark, and manages to operate very discreetly which is uncharacteristic to himself. He's laying low and it's destroying him. He's still reeling from Batman's betrayal and it's killing him. He has all this anger and he doesn't know where to put it down. He wants to do right but he's never been done right by and it's tearing him apart.

Soooo this fic is an exploration into a post-Lazarus pit identity crisis where Jason is trying to figure out what he stands for, what he wants to fight for. And Devon is here to put him on his feet (or keep him on his toes lol), to remember that there are people in Gotham who need help.