Way Back to Now pt. 1
Summary: I was rewatching the Arkham Knight game and talking to myself as if I were a Gotham citizen and went, "What if there was a y/n fic where reader knew Jason Todd before he was adopted and finds out that he's alive again through a public announcement?" and made this. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the way I've written this yet, but regardless, I hope y'all enjoy!
Word Count: 1888
(Also this is my first time writing an x Reader fic so please bear with me)
Part 2
⟡🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁⟡
“No- okay, listen guys,”
You’re cut off by the sound of your own laughter as you manage to read a few of the chat messages that whizz by. You’re a fairly well-known streamer, at least in the Gotham community, your popularity coming from your rants and complaints about the city itself. At present, you’re giving your personal rankings of the four Wayne boys: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Damian Wayne. No matter who you placed at the top of your list, you knew your chat would have exploded. But you didn’t expect that placing Jason at the top would be so… “controversial.”
“Yes, I know Dick Grayson has a nice ass chat. I don’t care. He was a nice kid and all, but it can’t be helped, he’s just not my favorite.”
You sit quietly for a second, smile still present on your face, as you read through the chat, scouring for the next interesting message.
MaryBerry: why jason tho? he wasn’t around for long iykyk lol
You couldn’t help the way your brow furrowed at the message and the many similar others that pierce through the other kinder ones, smile turning into something more incredulous than anything else.
“Well, that was a bit disrespectful, no?”
You let out a small tsk before continuing.
“You coulda asked a bit more tastefully, but to answer your question, Jason’s my favorite because I actually knew him before he got adopted.”
You shifted in your seat, feeling a bit uncomfortable with yourself for bringing up a topic that you weren’t as comfortable with breaching as you thought you would be. But you push on anyway.
“I know that everybody and their mothers claim to have known at least one of the boys before their eventual adoption, or uh, in Damian’s case introduction. But I actually did.”
You let out a scoff.
“Did you guys see that one lady who claimed to be Damian’s mother? She doesn’t even look remotely like him!”
You shake your head at the absurdity of the whole situation. You’d have to do a full reaction to it some other day.
“But anyways, yeah. I did actually know Jason. As some of you already know, I moved here to Gotham with my parents when I was about five years old or so? The price of living here was and is way cheaper than the place we had originally lived. Despite that, we were still dirt broke once we got here. Yeah, turns out moving across the country isn’t as cheap as my parents had originally envisioned it would be. I think we lived in an alright house in the suburbs for about, 3 months before we got evicted for not being able to make rent?”
You pause for a moment as you try to recall the timeline through your memory alone, but quickly give up with a shake of your head.
“I don’t know, I was five, so my memory of those details is fuzzy. But anyway, we thankfully ended up finding this shabby little place in Crime Alley for real cheap. It was then that my parents started really throwing themselves into work, trying to make enough money to get us up and out of there cause, I don’t know if you guys know this or not, but it’s not what most would call an ideal place to raise a child.”
You let out a small, airy chuckle at your own joke before continuing once again.
“But as a result of this surge in their motivation, I was left home alone a lot. They set me up with a couple of ground rules. Y’know: ‘stay quiet indoors,’ ‘don’t open the door for anybody,’ that whole thing. But I was five, and we were poor, so the TV almost never worked, and the few picture books I had were falling apart. I mean, I did have a few crayons to draw with some times, but what good is drawing when you can go out into the world and play with real kids? Well, at least that’s how I felt.”
You shrug.
“So one day, when the TV cut out again, instead of going to see if I had lost any crayons under the couch or maybe a pen somewhere around the house, I marched myself up to the door with one of the dining table chairs, undid the chain and bolts, and opened the door.”
You gave a self-assured nod alongside a “hmph” as you let yourself drop back into your seat with your arms crossed.
“Yeah. And then I felt so scared and guilty that I closed it right back.”
The chat was flooded with similar answers. A lot of “lol”s and “LMAO”s. A few people wrote exasperated sentences, clearly not interested in the you part of YOUR backstory. Okay, whatever.
“Okay, Jesus, now I know how interested in me.
You laugh again before moving on for real.
“So the setup is done. I’m in Crime Alley, I don’t have adult supervision, and I do eventually make it outside. Unsurprisingly, there were lots of kids in similar predicaments to me, and we’d all play outside together. Jason just happened to be one of those kids. We’d all go running around playing tag and hide and seek. Exploring old buildings, getting yelled at by adults, catching dogs.”
You again shrug, trying to make the recollection of these memories seem to be more insignificant to you than it actually was. The wound of your friend's passing wasn’t fresh by any means, but your chest still ached with regret at the thought of all the time you could have shared with him had you been more confident and outspoken.
“If I’m being honest, Jason was my best friend when I was a kid. All the way up to the day he was adopted.”
Grizmo8630: Why didnt you keep in contact then
“Well, I wasn’t exactly the most outgoing kid that there was. It’s part of the reason why I was so close to him back then. That and he was always really kind to me. To everyone else, too, of course, but I can't speak for them, so... When he was adopted, well, I just assumed he’d be too busy with his new life to remember me. I’d been a pretty annoying kid, always clinging to him. Seriously, if my parents weren’t at the house, I could almost guarantee you that I was probably wherever he was. I bet it was a weight off his back if anything. Literally.”
You laughed at the memory of your past self.
“I thought he was soo cool back then.”
You feel a little bashful as you continue to speak; you’ve never talked with anyone about your childhood friend, or more appropriately, your childhood crush, much less.. 7.9 thousand people?!
“He had a lot going on at what felt like all times. He always tried to act so tough. I honestly really admired him back then. I suppose I still do even now. But uh, anyways. My family moved not too long after he was taken in. So, even if he had gone back to Crime Alley to reconnect with the friends he had there, I wouldn’t know.”
YESmen95: oh so you LIKED him
You give a noncommittal shrug as you lean forward in your chair, suddenly more than willing to move on from the subject.
“I suppose you could say that. I was a kid and- bleh, whatever. Yeah, I liked him.”
Your face felt warm as you searched the chat for an easy segue onto a different topic, which thankfully happened pretty quickly, as someone had started talking about Red Hood, the vigilante who had appeared and now watched over your old home. You make a few comments on how you appreciate what he’s done for the area and how you’d like to stop by and see how things are now, since you hadn’t been there in quite some time. This allows you to easily segue into one of your well-known “Reasons I’m moving out of Gotham City” rants, which you’ve made for well over a year and a half now.
⟡🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁 ⟡ 🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁 ⟡ 🍁༄˖°.🍂.ೃ࿔*:･🍁⟡
It’d been about a week since you had last pressed the Go Live button on any of your accounts. In part because you were genuinely busy doing things that pertained to your real life instead of your online one. But also because it was just a little too embarrassing right now. You hadn’t expected your little story to blow up so much online. Everything you said was true, so you didn’t feel ashamed because you were in an awkward position now or anything. No, you were embarrassed because the one clip out of the entire stream that the internet had decided to run with this week was the clip of you admitting to having the smallest, tiniest little crush on the second Wayne brother way back when. It’s not even like people were making fun of you(for the most part anyway), a lot of them had just been really sympathetic towards you. It made you feel gross, having a part of you kept buried away brought up to the light.
But you couldn’t stay offline forever. Streaming had become a large part of your income over the last year, so you needed to regularly make an appearance to keep up with everything.
You make your way to your desk with your metal water bottle. The thump of you placing it down is the only sound that precedes your computer coming to life. You're quick to make your usual rounds, checking your microphone, background music, webcam, and social tabs(you don’t wanna accidentally leak something about your life by accident).
The whole process only takes you about 3 minutes, and before you know it, your screen says “Live” in the corner, and you’re giving your usual intro. Normally, viewers are slow to filter in. It’s why the start of the stream is your favorite part. It’s just more personal that way. “Like a FaceTime call,” as many of your early bird chatters say. But today, almost 6k people were in the stream in an instant. The chat was already whizzing by, and you couldn’t help but stare in almost apprehensive confusion.
“Well, hey. I didn’t realize that so many of you had missed me so badly after just a week. I hope you’re all doing well.”
You smile as you start to see some chatters reply to you, though you’re still a little disappointed that you can’t talk one-on-one with a few chatters at the moment, you decide that you’d make do with what you have in front of you.
Or well. You were going to. But the majority of the chat is washed out with messages of ‘have you heard the news?’ ‘i don’t think they have’ and other various messages with similar ominosity.
“What are you guys talking about?”
You let out an awkward chuckle, mentally preparing yourself for the worst. Every online personality gets cancelled at least once in their life; whether the accusations are true or not varies. Anything that you may have done in your life starts to roll through your mind as your eyes scan the chat to distract yourself from the ever-growing pit in your stomach.
That’s when you see it. One message that sends you reeling.
cCranberryjelly: Jason Todd’s alive!!!
