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hemostasis

I can reveal my fic I did for the 2025 @jason-todd-centric-exchange!! It was a gift for the lovely @celosia-starfall

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Summary: Dick finds Red Hood after his confrontation with Batman and the Joker, saving his life. Thing is, no one told Dick who Hood was beneath the helmet.

Word Count: 3,587

hemostasis

~~~~~~

Hemostasis [noun]: 1. the process of keeping blood inside a damaged vessel to stop bleeding. 2. the first stage of wound healing

"Master Richard, if you could be so kind as to head towards Crime Alley, it would be appreciated."

Dick perched himself on the ledge on the edge of his current rooftop and lifted a hand to tap at his com.

"Sure thing, A. What am I looking for?"

There's a moment of silence where Alfred hesitates. Dick frowns; Alfred isn't one to mince words.

"A? Everything okay?"

"Truthfully, I am unsure. Master Bruce has just engaged the Red Hood there after turning off his com and cowl footage."

Dick's heart gives a lurch in his chest at that. The Red Hood is the reason why Bruce tried to chase him back to Blüdhaven with only mild success. He's well-trained, well-informed, and has been giving the Bat the old run-around for the last month. The two of them together weren't enough to corner and catch Hood the one time they were able to engage him in a chase. It's just as impressive as it is infuriating.

"You know as well as I do that he likes to pretend he has everything under control at all times," Alfred continues, "but it would bring me peace of mind if you could make your way over and ensure that everyone comes out alive and in one piece."

He frowns a bit at that. Alfred has plenty of reason to worry for Bruce. If there's anything Bruce's time spent hunting the man has taught them it's that the guy loves to set traps, and, though Hood has his hands in pies all across the city, his seat of power is the Alley. Hood has had plenty of time to prepare for any kind of chase there. But why would Alfred also be concerned about the crime lord?

"Yeah, A. I can start heading in that direction. Got an address for me?"

Alfred gives him Bruce's last pinged location and Dick's frown intensifies, wondering why it's familiar before he turns and starts heading for where he left his bike.

"Rodger that, A. Keep me updated if anything happens?"

"Wilco, Master Richard. Godspeed."

-_-_-_-

A building explodes when Dick is still multiple blocks away from his destination. He flinches and swears, causing the bike to swerve for a second before he jerks to a stop.

"A, please tell me that the building that just exploded isn't the one I'm heading to."

A moment, then, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Master Richard. Master Bruce's trackers indicate he is alive, but still on location."

Dick swears again and kicks his bike back into gear, racing towards the billowing smoke. His com crackles once before Bruce's voice comes down the line.

"Joker is secure, but has sustained injuries. Alfred, alert Arkham that they have incoming and to prepare a bed in the med-wing."

"Of course, sir. And what of Red Hood?"

There's silence over the line. It feels pointed and anxiety begins to roil in Dick's gut.

"Still at large. Joker takes higher priority."

"Master Bruce—"

"He's gotten out of worse situations, Alfred. He was still in the room with the Joker when it went up and wasn't there when I went back in. I'll find him later."

"For God's sake, Master Bruce, leave the clown to the authorities and go after him!"

"He is not a priority now." Bruce's voice has deepened, taking on that non-nonsense growl it gets when he's made up his mind and won't be changing it for any reason — no matter whether he is actually right or not.

"Or," Dick cuts in. He's arrived on-scene and starts poking around for traces of the crime lord's escape. "I can track him down while you get the mass murdering clown back to his home-away-from-home."

A moment, then, "Nightwing. I thought you were in Blüdhaven."

Dick rolls his eyes. "I was, until Alfred gave me a call to tell me you were being extra obtuse about this whole thing with Red Hood. I've been covering the rest of the city while you wandered about looking for clues and getting the run-around."

"I have this handled. You can retire for the night."

"No can do, B," he replies, injecting the sort of cheer into his voice that tells Bruce he's not willing to give ground. He ignores the resulting growl and continues looking, frowning when he spies a few drops of blood near the outskirts of the ruins and starts following the trail.

"I'm serious, Nightwing. This does not concern you."

"If I may interject, Master Bruce." Alfred sounds very much done with the both of them. "You have clearly had a very emotionally impactful evening. That you have chosen to waste your time with that horrid clown instead of making sure that Red Hood was not injured and in need of medical attention in the wake of the explosion tells me just about everything I need to know."

And, wow, Alfred is upset about something. It's not often that he hears the man use that particular scathing tone with the man he raised. What is it about Red Hood that has the two of them so torn up?

It's then that Dick stumbles on an absolutely insane amount of blood. It's splattered absolutely everywhere and forms pools on the ground. He chokes on the stench, bringing a hand up to cover his face to try and block it out. His eyes track over the scene, trying to piece something together. There's enough blood here that whoever it belongs to should not be up to standing up, let alone disappearing into the gutters of Gotham.

"Jesus Christ, B. I thought you said Hood wasn't injured?"

There's dead silence on the line. Dick's pretty sure he cut one of them off, but he'd stopped listening as soon as he saw the blood.

"B?"

"Hood was gone by the time I went looking. He was injured before the explosion, but that he was able to vanish means that he was in good enough health. Joker took priority."

Dick can't—

Jesus Christ, what the hell has been happening in this city? Dick kicks a piece of rubble in frustration.

"B, I'm looking at enough blood here that he should be a goddamned corpse, not up and running around! What do you mean, 'Joker took priority'?"

Bruce doesn't reply. Dick waits a second, then two, and then there's a click as the man disconnects from the com line. The Bruce-related rage that lives in his gut starts to spark and roil.

"Fine, be that way. Jiminy Christmas, what's crawled up his and died?"

Alfred speaks up, sounding uncharacteristically shaken. "Master Richard." He stops, seemingly unable to continue.

Dick takes one last look at the bloody crime scene before backtracking to follow the blood trail out of the rubble. Anxiety and anger continue to bubble at the bottom of his throat, making him feel uneasy and off-center. He hates feeling like he's out of the loop, and there's something big here that everyone's dancing around.

"I'll find him, A. Don't worry."

"That's what I'm afraid of, my boy." The older man sighs. "Master Bruce asked me not to say anything before he had a chance to tell you himself, but I ask that you take care to hear M—Red Hood out before you take any drastic actions."

That uneasy feeling pulses again, starting to make him nauseous. "I'll update you when I find him, A."

The line clicks off and Dick takes a breath to center himself before setting off in pursuit of the injured criminal.

-_-_-_-

The man is barely conscious when Dick finds him more than five blocks from the destroyed building. He's half-collapsed in an alley, tucked into an alcove that puts him out of sight to any passersby. His whole left side is soaked in the dark wine of lifeblood and he's trying his best to keep pressure on the side of his neck. The wound continues to, unbelievably, pump out more blood every couple seconds. Dick's pretty sure the guy has some kind of healing factor or something, considering the blood-loss at the explosion site alone would be enough to put anyone on the ground, let alone the amount he's lost since hauling himself from the rubble.

Dick sighs and carefully approaches.

"Hey, Red Hood? Can you hear me?"

The man startles a bit and his left hand jerks for the empty gun holster at his side before he just curls up instead, trying to protect his neck. He lets out a weak groan and slurs something out.

"Hood? It's Nightwing, can I help you?"

Dick comes a bit closer, trying to get a better look at the man's face. Hood responds by turning more away from him, doing his best to hide his face. All-in-all he makes for a kinda pathetic picture. The Red Hood, bane of Black Mask's existence and personal tormentor of Batman, curled up and slowly bleeding out in an alley.

"I'm not gonna hurt you, Hood. Trying to do the opposite here, actually. You willing to let me help you?"

He mumbles something again and his hand tightens its grip on his neck. Dick slides closer still until he's standing right next to the other man.

"—kam. Please, 'wing. N't with the clown. N't A'k'm." Hood slurs out, blood bubbling up from his neck between his fingers. It takes a second for Dick to figure out what he's saying and his eyes widen in horror.

"No, God, no. I won't take you to Arkham, Hood. Blackgate, maybe, but we need to get you some blood and stitches first."

The man stills for a few seconds, thinking, before he finally raises his head as much as he can. It lets Dick catch his first look at the crime lord's unmasked face. He's young, is the first thing Dick notices. Definitely an adult, but he'd bet good money on Hood not being old enough to drink. The second thing Dick notices is that the man has the torn remains of a domino on his face, and that his one visible eye is actually glowing. It's a bright, unnatural green and the glow pulses almost in unison with the pulses of blood still leaking from the man's wounds.

Definitely a meta of some kind, Dick thinks as he takes the rest in. He's got a few small scars scattered around, almost invisible under the bruising, scraps, and grime covering his face. The shape of his cheekbones and the line of his jaw have a nagging familiarity about them, and Dick frowns, trying to place where he knows the face from.

Hood seems to also be waiting to be recognized, and deflates a bit when Dick doesn't outwardly react. In fact, he seems to lose the fight against consciousness altogether, collapsing with a wheezed out "Patch me up, D'kie."

He panics, just a bit, because the Red Hood is a crime lord, and a new player at that, and it's bad news that he seemingly knows who he is, but then the nickname actually registers.

And—

And that—

There's no way. The last time he heard that nickname was…

"Jay?"

The Red Hood, who just might be Jason Todd returned from the grave, lays there, unconscious from blood loss.

-_-_-_-

Dick finally lets himself sit down, almost falling into the wooden kitchen chair that's one of two places to sit in his Gotham safe-house. He's placed it right next to the old, slightly dusty bed that currently houses one unconscious Red Hood. It was a hassle getting him there, let alone patching him up. The man woke up several times in the process and did his best to try and fight Dick off until he realized who exactly was handling him and stopped fighting, only to pass out once again.

Currently, he's hooked up to a blood line in an attempt to help him replenish the insane amount of blood that he's lost. And still very much unconscious. Dick finds himself once again reaching for his arm to check his pulse just to make sure he's still alive and not a hallucination. Hell, he still might be. Maybe Dick really is crazy and is imagining that the crime lord that's been terrorizing Gotham for months is his little brother back from the dead.

Dick shakes his head and huffs out a breath, then leans over to put his head in his hands. He still feels nauseous, having thrown up after recognizing maybe-Jason's neck wound as one caused by a batarang. Every little comment, every stray piece of evidence that he'd been cataloging is putting itself together in his head to form a picture he hates.

Possibly-Jason, back from the dead and taking up Joker's old name. The Red Hood, a highly-trained and well-informed criminal ascending to crime lord status in a mere month from nowhere, giving the Bats the run-around, seemingly able to predict how they think. Bruce's weird behavior since the man's appearance, how close he played everything to his chest. Alfred's strange level of concern for the criminal. The demand for Dick to get the hell out of the city alongside sending Tim to the Titans. If Red Hood was just another ambitious up-coming crime lord, albeit one with weird vigilante tendencies, then why the secrecy?

It all only makes sense if Red Hood really is Jason. Back from the dead with a vendetta and all the stubbornness, passion, and sheer grit he had when he was Robin. Willing to kill.

Dick might be sick again.

He just, he can't understand. Jason was good. He loved and raged and had such a strong sense of right and wrong. He loved Bruce and being Robin and, yeah, things were going not great at the end, but it just doesn't make sense. He never believed that Jason killed Garzonas, not like Bruce might have, or the others. Did he not help him, let him fall? Maybe, but Dick is confident in his belief that the fifteen-year-old Jason Todd was not capable of murder. That he's back and killing people just doesn't make any sense. What could have happened to him?

He finds himself looking at the slightly-stained bandages around his neck. and shivers at the memory of the sheer amount of blood that Jason lost. He remembers how his eyes weren't blue anymore, how they glowed that unnatural green. Whatever happened to him, whatever had a hand in bringing him back, what effect had that had? It must have given him some kind of healing factor, or increased resilience. There's no way he'd have survived the wound otherwise. Did whatever it was change him? Was that why he was killing people?

Dick's vision goes blurry and he realizes he's crying. He wipes at his eyes and chokes out a breath.

God, what a mess.

He has no idea what happened in that building, how Jason got hurt, and why Bruce seemed so unconcerned that his son, returned from the grave, was in danger of bleeding out. He has no idea who set the bombs, if Joker masterminded the whole thing.

(A small voice in the back of head whispers the worst case. That Jason, willing to kill, would ask the impossible of Bruce. That Bruce, unable to bend, abysmally bad at reading intent behind words unless it's perfectly within established parameters, wouldn't do something drastic to try and save everyone and end up doing the worst thing possible instead. He recognizes the shape of that wound, how the batarang would have been thrown, not held and dragged, and wonders.

Jason was perfect in death. He could do no wrong, and Bruce could use his memory in whatever shape he needed. Dick remembers the argument they had the first time he caught Tim saying that Jason got himself killed, after he learned where the boy had heard it from. And now here's Jason back from the dead, doing everything he can to shatter that perfect memory. What would Bruce think? What would he be willing to do? Could he really have—)

Dick clings to the desperate belief that it was an accident. Things happen in the field, and in the kind of volatile situation that was Jason in a room with Bruce and the man who murdered him, well...

He needs to talk to Bruce. He needs to talk to Alfred, to figure out why the hell they didn't tell him that it was Jason. That Jason was back. All this could have been avoided if Dick had known, if he'd been able to just talk to him. They weren't that close before he died, but Jason had called him before he left for Ethiopia. He was someone who grew up under Batman's shadow and did his best to escape. He knows they could have come to an understanding. They still might be able to.

He wishes Jason would wake up. He's so happy he's alive and so devastated with what's happened and everything is twisting together in his gut and in his heart and he doesn't know what to do. He needs to talk to Jason. He needs to spill out everything that he's held in all these years to someone who understands.

God, he wishes Jason would wake up.

He wishes Jason hadn't died in the first place.

He wishes he'd died instead.

-_-_-_-

Dick wakes up with a hell of a crick in his neck.

He's still in the rickety kitchen chair next to the bed in his safe-house. A bed that is very empty. A bed that should not be empty.

Heart suddenly racing, he leaps up and starts searching.

"Jay? Jason?"

But the apartment is empty. The blood-stained remains of Red Hood's gear are gone, along with a set of clothes and the extra blood bags he had laid out just in case. There's some bloodied gauze and a set of bandages in the bathroom trash, and the kit has been left open with more of the fresh stuff missing.

Dick runs his hands through his hair and then buries his face in them. He allows himself one noise that's somewhere between a scream and a sob before he collapses back into his bedside chair.

Jason's gone.

He takes a couple shaky breaths to center himself and it's only after that that he notices a folded piece of paper left on the bed. He blinks a few times, almost expecting it to disappear like his maybe-brother did before he carefully reaches out and picks it up. His eyes burn. He takes another breath around the lump in his throat and opens it, then begins to read.

Hey Dickie, I wanted to I wish You didn't I guess I owe you one, huh. You really didn't have to patch me up. I would have been fine all on my own. I'm real sorry I couldn't stay and chat, but, I think it's best if I get out of town for a bit. Things didn't exactly go as planned, and I really don't want to stick around. I know you've got questions. You and Bruce and Al. The long and short of it is, well, I died, and then I woke up. No one I've talked to knows why, exactly, but I woke up and crawled my way out and ended up wandering around for a bit, or, at least that's what T I wasn't aware of things for a while there, and ended up in a Lazarus Pit. I'm sure you noticed my little light show, and B has probably already guessed, so I'm fine with telling you that much. It put me back in my own head and gave me a little extra, so, I'm really not lying when I say that I would have been fine even if you hadn't been there to be my white knight. One thing it didn't do was drive me crazy or whatever you think it did, so don't you go blaming it for my choices and actions. I've killed people and I am gonna continue to kill people who deserve it. I'd appreciate it if you took a look at who I'm actually killing though, instead of just taking B's word that I'm some kind of indiscriminate mass murderer. There's a lot more, obviously, but I didn't tell anyone I came back because How could you I'm not ready to talk about the rest of it, yet. I said a lot of things to B over the course of the past couple months, but I doubt the old bastard put together anything meaningful about it. But I think you deserve to learn it from me. I got Bruce and Joker in that apartment. I put a gun to Joker's head, gave Bruce another, and then gave him three options. One: kill the Joker like he should have years ago. Two: Stand there and let me do it for him. Three: shoot me instead. I really was gonna shoot him, Dickie. If Bruce couldn't, I was gonna end the nightmare. And then Bruce So yeah, I'm leaving town for a while. Gotta heal up and I'm not gonna be up to talking much while that's happening. I don't know where I'm gonna be or what I'm gonna be doing, so don't look for me. I'll reach out when Tell Bruce I'm sorry that Why the fuck did Take care of yourself, Goldie. —Jason

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