dark comedy au where dick is suicidal and depressed after jason’s death to the point where he eventually decides to just put out an ad so he can hire a merc to assassinate him, fully open on the ad that this is dick grayson hiring to kill dick grayson, except tim finds the ad before anybody else takes it and figures out it’s dick’s suicide attempt, and as much as this is a clear cry for help that tim does intend to address at some point—he’s kinda got his hands full trying to make sure an equally grief-stricken bruce makes it to the end of the week without sticking a gun in his mouth. so, like a responsible teenager, tim decides to not put too much on his own plate, and he temporarily delegates by putting out his own ad looking for a highly trained criminal for hire to protect somebody from being assassinated. he keeps the identity of the potential victim anonymous until after hiring somebody, because he doesn’t want dick to notice the ad and realise somebody’s trying to stop his attempt for fear he abandons the idea and does something even worse. both dick and tim are using bruce’s card to fund their ventures.
meanwhile, fresh outta the league and looking to make some quick freelance cash on the side while he builds up his crime lord business, a slightly confused jason has somehow managed to pick up both contracts, and now has to put his whole revenge plan on hold because he’s stuck trying to figure out if he even wants dick dead or not, because after meeting with his severely broken-inside client as the red hood-former league of assassins member for hire, it becomes very clear that things within the batfamily are not as he thought they were after he’d ‘left’.
and to make things entirely more difficult, he has to figure this out while trying to regularly fake both assassination attempts on dick’s life, and protection of dick from said attempts on his life; and he has to do all of this while not tipping off either tim or dick as to what he’s doing because if either of them realise that jason isn’t just straightforward doing his job then they’ll just hire somebody else and then the situation will be out of jason’s hands, which jason does not want because he’s still on the fence about whether or not he wants his family dead.
there’s one singular occasion where jason decides to ask for advice from his most current family, except when he calls damian back at the league all damian says is ‘just let me put a hit out on drake, even it all out.’ and jason has to hang up on him.
