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Crossover fic idea where John Winchester leaves Sam and Dean in Gotham for a while as he chases down a lead in the Yellow-Eyed Demon which turns into him dealing with a bunch of cases so he's gone for months. Sam is three, Dean is seven. While he's gone, Sam and Dean stay in a shitty motel in Crime Alley, and one day while Dean is out exploring and mentally mapping Crime Alley out, he meets freshly orphaned and homeless Jason Todd who's so small because of malnutrition that he's barely any bigger than Sam and imprints hard, the parental instincts he's developed as Sam's only parent since John is literally never around going crazy at the sight of such a small child alone on the streets.

Jason is inclined to trust Dean because all he sees is another little boy in clothes too big for him and too small for his age, though they're the same age but Jason recognizes malnutrition when he sees it, even if Dean isn't as bad off as him. Dean looks at Jason, marches into the nearest convenience store and comes out five minutes later with his pockets full of snacks, some stolen and some paid for. He gives Jason half of what he got, the other half is for Sammy and that gets Dean some loyalty points. He asks Jason to follow him to meet his brother and Jason is a little skeptical he's being led into a trafficking scheme but Dean says he's staying at a motel and his room has two beds so Jason could have his own bed and access to a shower while Dean and Sam share a bed. And it's so tempting after a few weeks on the streets that Jason begrudgingly goes along with it.

He's so relieved when he gets to the motel room and sees it's actually empty save for a tiny itty bitty little lump on the bed farthest from the door. And then the lump moves and a little head pokes out from beneath the blankets to reveal the cutest little baby Jason has ever seen with a tiny little nose and chubby little cheeks and fluffy brown hair. And the itty bitty little baby just calls our for "Dee" and Dean without missing a beat walks over to the bed and scoops the baby up, revealing a whole ass toddler who clings to Dean immediately. Dean's whole demeanour changes, going from little boy trying to act tough to older brother soothing his baby brother and that earns him the rest of Jason's trust.

Jason ends up staying with Sam and Dean for months until John comes back to town. He sleeps on the other bed for the first week while Dean sleeps curled up around Sammy until one particularly cold night, Jason wakes up from a nightmare and Dean just sleepily looks at him and pats the empty space on Sam's other side. Jason crawls into bed with him and Sam, and itty bitty baby Sammy is stoked to wake up sandwiched between his two big brothers because Jason has basically been adopted atp.

Jason and Dean share clothes, and during the day Jason drags them all over the poor parts of Gotham, the parts he's familiar with, and shows them all the best spots, his favorite stores, the library. By the time John shows up to pick his sons up, Sam is beginning to develop a Crime Alley accent identical to Jason's, which sounds adorable with his clumsy little baby voice. As soon as Dean gets the call that John is on his way, he buys a burner phone and puts his number in it and gives it to Jason.

Even after Sam and Dean are back on the road, Dean and Jason talk damn near nightly over the phone and text throughout the day whenever John isn't looking. After the boys are dropped off at a motel and John fucks off for a couple of weeks/months again, Dean and Jason talk for hours over the phone wirh Sammy piping in and eager to talk to Jason too until he nods off. They keep each other updated on everything going on, Jason sends so many texts when he gets picked up by Bruce ranging from "Batman is kidnapping me HELP" to "ayo I think I just got sold to a billionaire start a GoFundMe to buy me back" to "false alarm guys I'm getting adopted, he's chill like that"

Dean almost finds a way to strangle him over text.

They continue their regularly scheduled texts and calls and then Dean, who is using a random credit card under a fake name to pay for the Gotham newspaper to be mailed to wherever the fuck he's staying at sees ONE picture of Jaybin and thinks "wait, I know those curls." and that night calls him like "YOU GOT ADOPTED BY FUCKING BATMAN??" Jason, who felt so guilty that he couldn't tell Dean is like half relieved and half incredulous because how the fuck did Dean know IMMEDIATELY.

Whenever John has any case in New Jersey, Dean pesters him into leaving them in Gotham, saying he wants a chance to see Batman. Jason just tells Bruce he's gonna be staying with a friend and moves into whatever Motel room Sam and Dean are staying in until John comes back; Jason still goes on patrol but returns to the motel with Sam and Dean at the end of it and refuses to say why to anyone until Alfred asks and Jason spills that he has these two boys he sees as brothers and they're rarely in Gotham so whenever they are, he stays with them to maximize time spent with them until they have to leave town again.

Bruce just heard 'father abandons his two young sons in a motel in the most dangerous city in the US' and goes "😧🧐" and convinces Jason to invite Dean and Sam into the manor. Dean is so excited to be meeting Batman but trying to act chill about it and Sam has no such restraint. Bruce is genuinely baffled when it comes out that they know his identity and Jason immediately swears he didn't tell them but that they figured it out by themselves. They stay in the manor until John calls Dean that he's coming back, at which point Dean and Sam head back to the motel room. While they're staying in the manor, Dean joins Alfred and Jason in the kitchen and Alfred damn near has tears in his eyes to finally have grandsons who prefers to stay at home instead of going out at night to beat up criminals. Dean is SO domestic when given a chance that he and Jason literally just clean all day. For fun. Before they go with Sam to the library to read for hours.

Dick comes to visit while Sam and Dean are there and deadass almost has a heart attack because "Bruce when DID YOU GET TWO MORE KIDS-" and Bruce has to explain that they're not his, he's just watching them for a little while. Dick is so wary that those two little babies are gonna end up in suits but they just join Alfred in the cave during patrol, not even on comms but just looking over case files for fun. It's so baffling but so relieving that they don't want to be vigilantes, and Bruce, Dick, and Alfred all get insanely attached to Sam and Dean and are actually sad to see them go whenever John picks them up again.

In the years Jason lives at the manor, literally the second he catches wind that the Winchesters are coming back to Gotham he's telling Alfred and Bruce, even though after their first stay both Bruce and Alfred had Dean's number and he had theirs. Dean and Alfred also regularly keep in touch and half of their conversations are sharing cooking and cleaning tips and the other half is discussing classic literature. Alfred, Jason and Dean have a book club, just the three of them. Sam and Dean have their own room in the family wing (they can't sleep apart) and have their own couch in the library right next to Jason's armchair. They have their own seats at the table. They're Waynes in all but name. Bruce was super wary at first when he looked into John until Dean told him about the monsters, how some appeared human, how some required grave desecration. Bruce wasn't happy about it but at least it wasn't humans they were killing.

Since Jason was adopted, he was never spotted without his burned phone. He always had it on him unless he was on patrol, in which case he kept it in his room for fear of dropping it. That phone was his most prized possession. Dean was across the country when Jason had his argument with Bruce and ran away to Ethiopia. Dean was spamming the phone but couldn't do anything but tell Bruce where Jason was going and even then it was too late. When Dean hears that Jason has died, his heart absolutely broke. Sam, who has known Jason for as long as he could remember, is absolutely inconsolable.

The grief is a wound they learn to live around. Dean texts Jason's number even knowing he won't get a response. They go to Gotham still, to visit Alfred and Bruce which both hurts and helps because Dean is so similar to Jason but Sam and Dean are family and Bruce would never turn them away. In the cave, Dean sees the memorial case and actually loses it on Bruce that Jason was more than a good soldier and to take that shit down immediately, that tormenting and hurting himself like that won't teach him anything and that if he doesn't take it down Dean will smash it to pieces so Bruce puts it away begrudgingly.

When Dean is allowed to go on his first solo hunt at seventeen, he makes a detour through Gotham. He was trained and raised by an ex-marine and has insider knowledge on how Batman operates and surveils the city and the rogues in Arkham. He knows how to avoid getting caught and breaks the Joker out; he makes it seem like the clown broke out by himself and left town for a scheme. Meanwhile, Dean kills him without remorse and burns the body, makes sure nothing remains of the Joker. Bruce knows who it was but is both relieved and angry; angry only at himself that Dean's hand was forced.

Jason comes back to Gotham as the Red Hood, Talia's poison in his head. He starts laying down the groundwork to become a crime lord only to realize the Joker is gone, confirmed dead. He's confused because he had been told so many times that no one bothered to avenge him. Jason, confused and lost, goes back to his grave and digs it up; he finds his coffin empty save for his precious burner phone. He goes through it and finds dozens of texts from Dean over the two years that he was gone, the last of which includes a confession to killing the Joker.

Jason temporarily abandons Gotham to track Dean down. Dean was sent to Sonny's at sixteen but I'm pushing it back until he was seventeen, so he was at Sonny's when Jason first went looking for him. It takes Jason the better part of a YEAR because, despite him being a trained assassin and a detective, now that Dean is hunting on his own it's harder to track him because he only stays in a town or city for a week at most to complete whatever case he's on before moving on. Jason goes through everything that sounds to be connected to hunters but can't differentiate what could be Dean vs what could have been John. Even going through Hunter channels is hard because Dean rarely is in contact with anyone but Bobby and even that's sporadic.

Finally, Dean and Jason reunite and obviously Dean doesn't believe Jason came back from the dead so he's put through every test under the sun while Dean quizzes him on things only they would know. Jason passes, obviously, and Jason is worried Dean might not accept him anymore because he's changed so much. Dean has literally no such qualms and after hugging Jason within an inch of his life, he drags Jason back to the motel he's staying at to tell Sam the good news. A tearful reunion later and Jason decides to stay with Sam and Dean for a few months. Later that night, he tells Dean the whole story; why he ran away, how Sheila sold him out, how he got thrown into a Lazarus pit and the side effects of that, everything Talia told him. Jason spills his guts and doesn't spare a single detail.

Dean listens, and when he hears about what Talia told Jason, he's shaking his head and setting Jason straight. Bruce's grief drove him to nearly kill himself, and he did try to avenge Jason. It took Superman holding him back because Bruce almost killed the Joker with his bare hands, and in his grief Bruce was so much more aggressive that it's a miracle he was putting people only in the ICU and not the morgue. Dean has receipts, pulls out texts between him and Dick, him and Alfred, him and Bruce, he even pulls out texts with him and TIM because of course Dean is keeping in contact with the new Robin. He pulls out newspapers of one of Gotham's darkest periods, where the city mourned Jason and Robin and Batman became a shadow to fear instead of a hero to look up to. Dean is grim faced as he lays out exactly how much Jason's death tore his family apart before pulling out receipts of everything Bruce has done in Jason's name since. More shelters, more libraries, huge donations to construction in Crime Alley, frequenting small Crime Alley businesses and letting the press see him to get the businesses more attention.

Dean also points out that the pit must be clouding his mind more than he realized because the Jason he knew would NEVER try to hurt a child. Jason is flabbergasted as all of the lies he's been told completely unravel. He still stays with Sam and Dean, joining them on hunts as he fixes his worldview and comes up with a plan on what to do. Like a year and a half after he left Gotham, Jason parts ways with Sam and Dean and returns home, at this point he's almost 20.

He continues where he left off, still becomes a crime lord but has completely left Batman and Robin alone. He wants to return home but doesn't know how. The one big change is that Jason doesn't cut those heads off in a duffle bag, he cuts off hands. He uses rubber bullets. He doesn't kill, as much as he really wants to; he wants to do things his way but he also doesn't want to lose a chance to go home. He sets up his bass, builds a gang, established territory and the number one rule is to keep Robin safe. Protect the sex workers and no dealing to kids are rules #2 and #3.

Bruce thought for a split second Dean might have become a crime lord before he got in touch with Dean who was working a case in another state and realized it wasn't him. He doesn't approve of the rogue and his violence but he's also not as aggressive when fighting Red Hood as he could be. Jason as Red Hood comes to Robin's aid literally every single time he catches wind that Tim might be in danger.

Jason looks at Tim for the first time and gets hit with parental instincts so strong he almost doubles over and it hits him this is what Dean must have felt when he first saw him.

Jason falls into a tentative alliance with the Bats. Sam still has his blowup argument with John about wanting to quit the hunting life and Dean backs Sam instead of playing peacemaker. John disowns them both for it. Dean isn't quite ready to leave the hunting life behind but he takes Sam to Stanford and stays in California until Sam has found an apartment with Dean's help, has moved in and is starting his classes. Dean promises to keep in touch and call him nightly, and Sam is a little sad Dean won't join him right now but has hope it might happen eventually. Dean hauls ass to Gotham and as soon as he's in the city, Jason demands Dean move in with him.

Jason will always appreciate how Dean let him stay with him when they first met, how he gave him a bed and clothes and food when he barely had money or food for himself. Dean moves in with Jason and despite Jason having a two bedroom apartment they share a room because Dean isn't used to sleeping alone and needs to hear someone breathing to be able to fall asleep and Jason agrees because Dean helps the nightmares go away.

Dean settles and demands to work for Jason. Jason doesn't want to get Dean involved in his gang activity and Dean is like "I literally killed the Joker. I killed a wendigo last month. I killed a poltergeist last week." And Jason is like "FINE 🙄" and makes Dean his lieutenant/second hand.

Dean bullies Jason into signing up for online school to complete his GED and Jason bullies Dean into the same so that's what they do during the day and some nights. They alternate. On nights Jason is in class, hurt, or studying, Dean takes over as Red Hood since by this point they have similar builds. When Dean is studying, exhausted, or busy with case work since he's basically a detective too, Jason is out as Red Hood. His gang and the Crime Alley residents get good at telling who's who.

Alfred, Bruce and Tim know that Dean moved to Gotham finally, though Jason hasn't announced that he's back yet. Dean goes over to Wayne Manor weekly to catch up with Alfred, help Tim with his English homework, and help Bruce with his casework. He'll raid the library and leave the manor after dinner or maybe the following morning with a backpack full of text books he and Jason need for school and books they've been wanting to read and he'll return them to exchange them on his next visit.

Dean, working as Jason's lieutenant, has a red muzzle type mask along with a black domino like this -

Also, Jason teaches Dean everything he learned in the league of Assassins and Dean teaches Jason everything he learned from his dad so they share skills. Since Jensen Ackles voiced Jason in Under the Red Hood, I headcanon that Dean and Jason sound identical and their voices are impossible to tell apart because Dean learned how to mimic Jason's accent the first time he was in Gotham and just used it whenever he's back in Gotham. Another headcanon is that because Dean has been in every state before, he can mimic each accent perfectly to better blend in and draw less attention to himself.

At this point, Dean only hunts when there's a case in or surrounding Gotham but no longer seeks them out. His and Sam's relationship is closer than over because they're bonding over the stress of studying for college since Dean completed his GED and applied to Gotham University. Sam and Dean go visit each other pretty frequently, and Jess and Dean get along like a house on fire. I headcanon Jess as a literature nerd so she fits right in with Dean and Jason, whom Dean and Sam Skype nightly. Jess is added to Jason, Dean and Alfred 's bookclub. One time that Jason joined Dean on a visit to Stanford, he clocked Brady immediately and used the All-Blades to kill the demon and free Brady. Jess witnessed it and had to be told about the supernatural. She took some time to adjust but that was the last secret Sam kept from her and after that, she moved in with him.

Back in Gotham, Black Mask ambushes Red Hood and his gang. In the ensuing shootout, Dean died by Black Mask's hand and Jason goes apeshit, killing any enemy in his path before calling Sam, hysterical, to break the news. Sam hauls ass to Gotham, Jess in tow. Jason says they're burying Dean just in case he comes back, and Sam agrees, says he would have suggested it if Jason hadn't. Jason enlists Jess and Sam's help on how to plan for Black Mask's downfall, and the three scheme how to tear down his criminal empire before Jason executes him for killing Dean.

Jason calls Bruce to tell him the news about Dean, which is how Bruce finds out Jason is alive. The joy of his return is stolen by the grief of Dean's death and that breaks Bruce all over again. Jess and Sam move to Gotham, into Jason's spare room and transfer to Gotham University. Tim and Sam get along like a house on fire and Alfred loves Jess like a granddaughter, being playfully pointed to Bruce about how she's going to medical school while SOMEONE dropped out...

Someone is at Dean's grave every single day just in case he comes back. All Jason knows is that it took six months for him, but it takes four for Dean, who crawls out of his grave one rainy night after Sam left. He goes to his and Jason's apartment to find Jason, Jess, and Sam scheming and he's like "what'd I miss" and immediately coughs up some dirt he swallowed when he crawled out of his grave. After every test under the sun, the four go to Wayne Manor and Alfred actually cries when he sees Dean because he would NOT have been able to take the grief that Dean wouldn't come back. His hope that Dean would return was so tentative but it was rewarded. Dick, hearing Dean died, had moved into the manor and Tim had been adopted ages ago when Alfred got an "anonymous" tip (it was Dean) that Jack and Janet Drake were gone for months at a time.

Everyone settled into a routine again, there are weekly family dinners that lead to movie nights. Sam, Dean, and Jess still stay out of the vigilante business but help on the detective side of things and work on the cave with Alfred while the others are on patrol. After Dean came back to life, Sam and Jess moved out of Jason's apartment and moved into the apartment across the hall rent free because Jason owns the building. Both are unemployed but taking classes, Gotham U's tuition is stupid cheap because Gotham's water is contaminated with so many toxins it's almost glowing green and rogues escape every other week.

Jess is taught a bunch of moves and how to use weapons from everyone, though. Everyone has different skills to teach her. She goes home exhausted and bruised to the bone every night but also super proud of what she's doing and all she's learning.

Because Sam and Jess hauled ass to Gotham when they heard Dean died, neither were in their apartment at Stanford when Azazel came to kill Jess. Frustrated, he tracks them to Gotham and as soon as he's in Jason and Dean's apartment since the four were having dinner together, Jason kills him with the All-Blades.

Sam and Jess both end up working for Jason too because they loved scheming with him on how to take down Black Mask and get hired as his tacticians, given the same muzzle type mask + domino as Dean. Jason ends up not killing Black Mask but letting Dean do the honors instead. Bruce knows Dean did it and Jason orchestrated it but also can't bring himself to be mad when he has two miracle boys that came back from the dead to him.

Dean almost finds a way to strangle him over text.

Jason looks at Tim for the first time and gets hit with parental instincts so strong he almost doubles over and it hits him this is what Dean must have felt when he first saw him.

Dean, working as Jason's lieutenant, has a red muzzle type mask along with a black domino like this -

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