The Hazards of Dating Red Hood (Past Tense)
The third time it happened, you were genuinely starting to take it personally.
Not the kidnapping, exactly. You'd made a kind of grim peace with the kidnapping. What you couldn't make peace with was the look on the goon's face when you explained — calmly, reasonably, with your hands zip-tied behind your back — that the whole operation was fundamentally flawed.
"I'm telling you," you said, from your position duct-taped to a chair in what appeared to be a condemned warehouse in Crime Alley, "this is not going to work."
The man guarding you — big, bored-looking, a tattoo of a serpent crawling up his neck — squinted at you. "Shut up."
"I'm serious. He's not going to come for me. We broke up."
Serpent-tattoo looked at the other guy across the room, a wiry nervous one who kept checking his phone. They shared the particular look of men who had not been briefed on this possibility.
"We got good intel," the wiry one said, defensive. "You're his girl."
"Was. Past tense. Three months ago." You flexed your wrists experimentally. The zip tie was cheap, at least. "Look it up, if you have some kind of database for this sort of thing."
"Red Hood will come," Serpent-tattoo said, with the conviction of a man repeating something he'd been told in a briefing.
You sighed at the ceiling.
The first time, you'd almost found it sweet, in a horrifying way.
You and Jason had been broken up for three weeks. The wounds were fresh, the kind that made you stare at your phone at 1 a.m. wondering if you should text him. (You hadn't. You were proud of this.) You'd been at a corner store buying ice cream — the emotional support kind — when four men in masks had bundled you into a van.
When the Red Hood had crashed through the skylight forty minutes later, guns blazing, body moving through the space like violence given shape, you'd had one complicated second of oh before the familiar exhilaration and terror of watching him work collapsed into something much messier.
He'd gotten you out. He'd cut the zip ties. He'd made sure you weren't hurt, hands checking your face, your wrists, all business except for the way his jaw was set like he was holding something back with his back teeth.
"You didn't have to come." You said quietly, your voice cracking slightly with emotion.
The helmet had turned toward you, unreadable red lenses where his eyes would be. "Yeah," he'd said. "I did."
And then he'd been gone, and you'd stood in the dark street with your pint of melting ice cream and felt about seventeen things at once.
The second time had been more embarrassing for everyone involved.
A different crew, apparently uninformed of the update in your relationship status, had grabbed you outside your apartment building. You'd had more warning that time, enough to get a solid elbow into someone's ribs before the numbers overwhelmed you, but the outcome was the same. Warehouse. Chair. Zip ties. The waiting.
Jason had been angrier that time.
Not at you — he never did that, never once made you feel like your existence was an inconvenience even when it clearly was — but the carefully controlled fury radiating off him as he'd worked the knot at your wrists had been palpable even through the armor.
"You need to move," he'd said firmly, his tone controlled.
"Apartment. Different neighborhood."
"Jason." You'd turned to face him, which put you extremely close together in the dark, close enough to see the tension in his throat above the collar of his jacket. "We broke up. You don't get to tell me where to live."
He'd looked at you for a long moment. Something had moved through his expression that you hadn't been able to name, or hadn't wanted to.
"No," he'd said. "I don't."
And then he'd handed you your bag, which he'd apparently retrieved from the scene, and walked away without another word, and you'd gone home and sat on your floor for a long time.
"Okay," Serpent-tattoo said now, checking his watch. "He should've gotten the message by now."
"Told him we had you. Sent proof."
You blinked. "What proof? You just grabbed me twenty minutes ago."
The wiry one held up a phone, showing a photo of you in the chair. You looked annoyed in it, which was accurate.
"He'll come," Serpent-tattoo said again. He seemed to need to believe this.
You were about to explain, again, the fundamental error in this logic, when the high window on the far wall exploded inward.
He moved the way he always moved — like the room owed him something and he was here to collect. Two of them were down before you'd fully processed the entry. The third caught a kick to the sternum that sent him crashing into shelving units. Serpent-tattoo, to his credit, put up a decent fight. It lasted approximately eight seconds.
Then there was just Jason, standing in the wreckage, helmet sweeping the room, and you in your chair with your hands behind your back.
He crossed to you in four strides and crouched behind you, and you felt the zip tie give way with one sharp pull.
"Hi," you said, a tired smile on your face.
"Hi." His voice through the modulator was even.
You stood, rolling your wrists, and turned to face him. He was still crouched, which put him slightly below eye level for once, and something about that felt significant in a way you didn't want to examine. Get your mind out of the gutter girl.
"Yeah." He said, not quite meeting your eyes.
"I told them we broke up."
"I heard you telling them. Through the door." There was something in his voice that wasn't quite amusement but lived in the same neighborhood. "You were very thorough."
"I was trying to save everyone some trouble."
He stood then, slow, and you were back to having to look up at him, at the inscrutable helmet. Neither of you moved.
"You know," you said, because apparently your mouth had decided to handle this without consulting the rest of you, "this is getting ridiculous."
"Which part." He quipped.
"All of it. The kidnapping. You showing up." A pause. "The part where you always do show up."
The helmet tilted, just slightly. The gesture was so Jason — that particular angle of his head when he was thinking something he didn't want to say — that it hit you somewhere behind the sternum.
"What do you want me to do," he said. "Not come?"
"That's not—" You stopped. Started over. "That's not what I'm saying."
"Then what are you saying?"
The warehouse was very quiet. Outside, somewhere, sirens were starting to wail toward you, still distant. You had maybe four minutes before this got complicated in a different way.
"I'm saying," you tried, "that you keep coming. And I keep—" You gestured, uselessly, at the space between you. "And you've done it three times now. You didn't have to. We're not—"
"I know what we are." He interrupted you.
The flatness of it stopped you.
"Do you," you said, eyebrow raised.
A long pause. Jason reached up and pulled the helmet off, which he almost never did in the field, and you were suddenly looking at his face — tired, jaw shadowed with stubble, eyes that had always given him away whether he wanted them to or not.
He looked awful, honestly. Not injured-awful. The other kind.
"I'm miserable," he said. Like he was confessing something that had been extracted from him through considerable effort. "If that's what you're asking."
Your throat did something inconvenient.
"I wasn't asking," you said. "I'm just — I've been—" You stopped again. Pressed on. "I'm miserable too. For the record."
Something shifted in his face.
"Why did we break up," he said tiredly.
"I know what we said. I'm asking if it was real."
You thought about the last three months. About staring at your phone. About ice cream and warehouses and the way he always, always came, and the way you'd always, impossibly, known he would.
"I don't know anymore," you said honestly. "I think we were both scared and we called it something else."
The sirens were getting closer. Neither of you moved.
"I want to try again," he said. It came out careful and certain in equal measure, the way Jason said things when he'd made a decision and was done second-guessing it. "I know that's — I know it's complicated. I know what being with me costs."
"I know what it costs," you said. "I've known for a while."
You looked at him — at his face in the low light, at the careful way he was holding himself still, waiting — and felt the last three months dissolve into something much simpler.
"And I'd like to stop getting kidnapped by people who are better informed about our relationship status than I am," you quipped back.
The corner of his mouth moved.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
He crossed the last bit of distance between you, and when he kissed you it was like something settling back into place — not frantic, not desperate, just right in a way that you'd been refusing to think about for ninety-three days.
You were both smiling when you broke apart.
He tucked you under his arm as he steered you toward the exit, helmet under his other arm, the easy familiar weight of him against your side.
"You should still think about moving," he said, conversationally.
"Different neighborhood. Better sight lines—"
"I will zip-tie myself to that chair—"
His laugh, rare and real, echoed off the warehouse walls, and you walked out into the Crime Alley night together, and behind you Serpent-tattoo was starting to regain consciousness, and the sirens were close, and none of it touched you at all.
Later, when a fourth crew grabbed you outside your — admittedly same — apartment building, they would report back to their employer that the target had laughed for almost a full minute before saying, with great satisfaction, "oh, he is going to think this is so funny."
They did not find this encouraging.
