DC2 Nemesis Prologue: The Dark Knight

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?




Batman was dead.

That's what the plastic faced woman uttered with a hint of fear cowering behind her veil of professionalism. She was scared. She should have been.

Too many people had taken the Batman for granted. Too many cast his victories and defeats aside as an obscure news item, a clipping they could put on the bulletin board at work next to the water cooler a day later. In the age of superheroes, Batman stood alone as a man whose need for justice and a better society was unrivaled even by the gods he fought alongside. But when the clock struck midnight and the city woke up, at the end of the day, Batman was a man. That's it.

That was Bruce Wayne’s mistake. That was the reason he was a lifeless corpse and the Batman was a symbol. Bruce was dead and the people of Gotham City had every right to be scared because they didn't know the Batman the way Jason Todd had known the Batman. Jason had fought alongside the Batman. The Batman wasn't a god. The Batman wasn't a man. The Batman was a hungry dog of war.

Jason Todd wasn't scared like the people of Gotham were, because to him, the Batman had died far before Bruce Wayne had taken that leap from the top of Gotham Dam.

Jason was scared by a far different image on his TV screen. Unlike the people of Gotham, he understood that Bruce Wayne was dead but that the spirit of the Batman would live on in the hearts of the cowardly and superstitious lot.

Something else sent a shiver down Jason Todd's spine. Breaking news! An image of blue and gray. And was that a touch of yellow? The Batman didn't wear yellow. The Batman was a shadow. Goddamn. Good lord. And was that a boy side kick? A Boy Wonder? How cute. This was a joke.

The camera showed a crowd of people who reacted to the reappearance of the Batman with jubilation, with tears in their eyes like they had won the Superbowl. They saw a pointy eared caped crusader and they actually thought something had changed. He felt his face turn hot and kicked in the TV, glass and electricity cracking through the air.

Jason’s fingers nearly broke as he ripped off the leathers he adopted to counter the weakness that had filled Gotham's underworld.

Hurm.

From scraps of leather, patched-worked and riveted together the shape was born. He looked at himself in the mirror and no longer saw the Red X. He saw something that made him want to smile but he couldn’t. He saw the night. He saw vengeance. He saw Justice. He saw the BAT.

Hh, had the circumstances been different he would have felt like a fool. Like a child playing dress up while his parents were away. The costume was not nearly as comfortable as it should have been and he liked it like that. There were folds of leather pinching his skin to the point that the skin broke and he bled beneath the suit. The mask was too tight. The cape was too heavy. He had no idea how he was going to take a piss in this mess of a costume but the feel of it against his skin… he was beginning to like it. On his chest he managed to scrawl the outline of a bat in crimson.

Gotham was on its knees. Its protector was a boy barely able to fill his own shoes much less those of a legend. He was a formidable threat to the Gotham underworld as Nightwing and a target as Robin, but for as much respect Jason Todd had for Dick Grayson... Dick Grayson was not and could never be Batman.

Jason Todd could not be the Batman either.

But he would sure as hell die trying.



When Jason Todd was in kindergarten he was asked by his teacher to share who his hero was with the rest of the class. The class rattled off answers of a universal theme. They said their hero was their father, their mother, the police, the firemen… Jason Todd, anxious to fit in with the rest of the class said that his hero was also his father, and then said that he was a police man. He said this and sat down cross legged with his head sunk to the floor.

“Jason has no daddy.” A girl in the back called out. “Jason is a bastard!”

Jason (whose hero was not really his father because he was, as little Debbie Whitticker eloquently pointed out, a bastard) used all the strength he had in his five year old body to hold back the tears and urine from soaking him in the middle of class. It was then that another boy, Jason's only friend by the name of Johnny Bowers, spoke up. “Jason is not a bastard! I've met his dad!”

The boy fought back and stood up for Jason when he could not, and that would forever have a tremendous impact on Jason.

The next day, Johnny Bowers did not go to school.

Nor did he, the day after that.

And the day after he was still gone.

He would never be seen again. This would also have a tremendous impact on Jason Todd. People left. People vanished. At the end of things, Jason would be abandoned. Just as Bruce had left him to the tender ‘mercies’ of The Wrath. Just as he was right now. Alone. He could only really on himself. The emptiness in his heart began to grow the day that Johnny Bowers vanished.



Aw geez.

Aw crap.

Eleven thirty and Ralph wasn’t home yet. Joleen was going to be pissed. The white-beef-stuff-over-rice that she made especially for him was no doubt cold and stale now but he could not resist the primo job offer he was given earlier that day.

Drive your moving truck to an abandoned warehouse wearing a goofy looking mask and play henchmen while some muscle men did all the heavy lifting and dealt with Batman. All you got to do is drive there and back.

That’s what his buddy told him on the phone. That's all he had to do. Five grand to drive his own truck plus the dough to cover any gas charges or whatever other monetary obstacles that may present themselves over the course of his ‘mission’. It was a damn sweet deal. Joleen threatened to divorce him if he kept dealing with the big bad super secret society of super villains but five grand plus the cost of gas? That was too much to pass up and even Joleeen had had to see that! With that kinda scratch he could probably get that washer and dryer she had her eye on and she wouldn't have to go all the way down town to use the good laundry mat where the detergent machine doesn't eat up your quarters.

He went to click on the radio and the similarly masked man in the passenger seat gave him a look that told him you-better-keep-quite-and-turn-that-goddamn-radio-off-or-else. He abided by the look and kept his hands off the radio, shrugging and backing his hands off the wheel to show his subservience.

That's when he felt the back of his truck shake. That's when everything went to hell.

Shivers raced up his spine as he heard men in the back of the truck scream Bloody Mary. He felt his stomach tighten. “Drive this piece of shit truck!” His shotgun passenger said, brandishing a shotgun now against his temple. The strange irony wasn’t lost on him as a smile crept on his face and stomped the gas pedal.

He used all his might to keep the swaying truck under his control. The banging and screaming in the back of the truck persisted as he broke at least fifteen Department of Motor Vehicle regulations. “Keep driving, you load!” The cool barrel pressed harder against his head, now pushing his cheek toward the window.

Luckily for Ralph, the docks of Gotham City were quiet that night. Ever since Batman and Robin came back the utter recklessness of the underworld had tamed itself. How he got this job and why he took it ran through Ralph's head. What was it? The money? Was that the only thing? Or was Joleen right, was he just trying to prove he was still a man by doing something stupid? Was this just a mid-life crisis? None of the answers to his questions really mattered at that particular moment, he understood that sure, but it didn't stop him from dwelling on it to keep his mind off of the gun at his head.

“In that warehouse! Go!” The man at his side roared into his ear like a bullet through his head.

“The door’s closed!” He mustered the chutzpa to shriek back in defiance of the order.

“Drive through it then!”

The door splintered into a billion pieces as the careening truck slammed through it. Ralph smiled. The pure adrenaline surging through his veins reminded him that he was still alive and that the possible divorce he was facing seemed a little less important in the moment he was stuck in. The warehouse was filled with men in blank shiny white masks and Ralph leaned back and loosened his grip on the wheel, a bit more secure with his current situation. The screaming stopped and for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he was able to take a deep breath of the cool moonlit Gotham City seaside air.

The passenger slapped Ralph on the back of the head. “Get out.”

“What do we do?”

“Shut up, Pawn.” Ralph had been instructed to refer to his accomplices as chess pieces and himself was given the name Pawn when he picked up the Rook at the bakery on Wrightson Way.

He did as he was told and they moved to the back of the truck. He was hesitant to open the door and see the horrors that lay waiting within but the gun wielding man didn't care and instructed him to open the goddamn door. So he did. Ralph pulled from his side a heavy flashlight and shone a beam of light into the abyss that was his rented U-Haul.

Scanning the back of the truck proved futile, if only for a moment, as they saw nothing to be afraid of. He shined his light back and forth across the dark space and saw only large wooden crates and a bloody mass of men who were beaten to a pulp… but not the monster that perpetrated the attack, the one he expected to find. From the sounds of it, he had assumed The Wolfman had stowed away in his truck but there was no savagely dressed creature of the night at all…

Then... then, the flashlight stumbles upon the shape of a red bat. A demon, perched on the edge of crate, looming proudly over his prey, splattered with blood. Ralph looked to his supervisor who was equally stunned and dropped the flashlight. He made a bee-line for the door and ran as fast as his bloated physique would allow, he felt his heart beating up his throat and his vision went white with fear. Not here! Not tonight!

Ralph exited the warehouse, not looking back for fear he would see the beast again. He heard gunfire. He heard screams. He heard laughter. He heard in the back of his head Joleen telling him she told him so and he heard himself saying she was right, before he trotted off to bed with his tail between his legs….

…but that was all in his head.

He was about two warehouses down when he heard something following him. It was two more men. No, three. No, four. Had some of his other chess-themed compatriots escaped…? But then he saw it again. In his peripheral vision, he saw a black figure with wings stalking them on the rooftops, hunting them. Hunting them down for sport. Oh, God, no. He was done with the others, it was only but a few minutes and he was done…

Ralph ran into an open cargo container and saw a few men pass him by from a crack in the door. One of them flew backwards landing on his face and onto the unforgiving cement. Another one shortly followed suit. Ralph sucked in his gut and prayed to his God and Superman that he could keep from bursting into tears. He wished his phone was out of battery when his friend called him earlier in the day. He wished he was at home eating that white beef gravy stuff that Joleen made and he loved so much. He wished he could smell her hair and touch his fat fingers against her pristine shoulders.

For a moment, Ralph thought he had gotten away with something. Then he heard the rip of a chainsaw chord.



“… Injuries are so severed that doctors inform me that they may have to amputate…”



“…Are there two Batmen running around? Are we seeing an epidemic of copycat vigilantes? Only time will tell on Gotham To…”



“…Warehouse full of children in boxes, surrounded by their crippled criminal captors…”



“…Apparently the victim was found repeating ‘it’s only a handbag’ over and over, with his fingers broken at each joint…”



“…Batman is out of control! Even you have to see that! Clearly, his short absence has made him more bloodthristy and violent then ever before! I mean, I mean, did you see that footage from the docks…?”



“…Someone has to put to justice this… this… ‘Batman’ once and for all before more children start thinking it’s groovy to go around using chainsaws and other gardening tools on each other!”



“…caught my son doing this morning? He was running over his kitten with a lawnmower with a towel around his head! And my son's a Christian for god's sake! I…”



Jason Todd watched TV with a smile on his face, cold pizza in his stomach, and a leather Batman cowl draped over his tattered sofa exploding with piss yellow stuffing.

“Jason.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small girl dressed in a red hood. He turned his head for a better look and she was nowhere.

The black pointy eared hood watched him from the arm rest. Jason sat there, getting soft, watching the news instead of making it. His pulse raced and he sweat a cold unhealthy sweat as he grew more and more anxious.

“Jaasssooon.” The soft girl's voice made love to his ears as the soft whisper escaped her ruby red lips. Her haunting chant sent a shiver up his spine. He hesitated to look at her in fear of her going away again. He looked and she did.

The hazy distorted colors dancing out of his TV screen hurt his head. Outside there was poverty and disease. The city was falling apart, there was no time for rest. Evil things were being done, of that much Jason Todd was sure.

“Jaaaasssooooo--” He turned his head and the girl was devoured by a white wolf smiling as he coloured his lips with the girls blood. Jason tingled.

“I’m going mad.”

His brain ached. Rising to his feet, he squeezed in his hands the bundle of leather, holding it up to his nose as he did so. It reeked of sweat, and blood, and justice. It hurt. It was too tight on him. He didn't bother looking out the window before jumping out. It wasn't with luck or skill that he didn't plummet to a concrete death, but sheer will.

That was always what Bruce admired most about Jason. He was not the strongest, nor was he the fastest, and he was definitely not the smartest, but he had an iron will to survive despite both nature and nurture working against him.

First on his agenda was to fit some puzzle pieces into place. It wasn’t hard finding a truckload and warehouse full of kidnapped ankle biters, anyone with their eyes open and looking could do that, but the punch line remained a mystery. Who wanted a warehouse full of stolen kids?



Hidden within the projects of Gotham City was an extravagantly over-decorated high rise apartment. The velvet wallpapered halls were crammed with gold recreations of Classical Greek statuary and plastered with stolen canvases, mostly by the artist Caravaggio. In a dark room at the end of this hall, two men were sitting at a chessboard. Light gently bounced off the players hands and pieces from the light bulb hanging from a chain inches above them.

Sitting on one end, playing with ivory pieces was a fat man and on the other with ebony pieces, a thin man.

The white king died.

The thin man rose to his feet gracefully and walked across the room to a mirror.

“I hear on the news that the Oysters failed us. A whole shipment lost, and probably returned back to their loving homes... it sickens me to my stomach, it does.” He looked past his shoulder in the mirror to the large man near comatose in his chair, “Lovey, do believe in the youth of Gotham? Hush. Don't answer. Just remember the wager placed over this game.” The man, whose milky white skin clung to his ribs, talked to himself in the mirror, his eyes aged like a cliff side by the tides of time and his body draped in a blood-stained black vinyl apron. This was The Carpenter.

The man whose overripe gut exploded from his waist was seated upon a recliner, vacantly shoving oysters into his mouth. He shook his head slowly. The Carpenter's declarations were not infrequent; The Walrus' ears had eaten as much of his frail partner's words as he had oysters.

“The answer is yes. Yes, you do.” The Carpenter turned away from the mirror and looked across a series of bright green tubes glowing in the darkness, their precious contents obscured by the cloudy formaldehyde bubbling furiously behind the glass.

The Walrus delicately placed another oyster between his lips and gulped it down. He was indifferent to his companion’s speech. He had heard it all before.

“You believe in them because they believe in you. You create for them as God created mankind or mankind created God; to secure your legacy and to give your creation a secure tomorrow… a more perfect tomorrow. A tomorrow where their pitiful, crime-ridden city, overrun by rats, roaches, and robbers, will to them become a land of milk and honey.”

The Walrus' eyes slowly closed. An oyster fell from his finger tips and gently bounced as it hit the floor.

“They will thrive. They will raze Gotham. They will rape Gotham. They will taste Gotham's blood. And they will do it in my name, our name even!” He continued to speak to himself, a series of contradictions waging bloody war deep beneath his pasty white skin. The scientist fighting the poet. The fascist warlord fighting the benevolent peacemaker. He was The Carpenter, and he looked at The Walrus, and picked up his tools.



Ralph lay in his stiff gray hospital bed with a spring pushing against his spine, and the soft beep-beep-beep of his heart beat reminding he was still alive. He watched a woman talk about the amazing cleaning power of UrineGone on his flickering TV set. He was intrigued. That night in the Narrows he had fainted, and it wasn't until the policemen searched nearby warehouses for more children the next day that they found Ralph spread across the wet asphalt like a bear skin rug. He was an equal mix of horrified and embarrassed, but at least during questioning he was able to convince cops that he was not with the other criminals that they’d hauled in, and transferred straight to Blackgate Penitentiary’s hospital ward. He was half way through that thought when the TV shut off. Then the lights. Then his heartbeat.

“Tell me a story.”

“Wh-wh-who- are you?” Ralph nervously tapped the buttons on the remote calling for a nurse or a doctor or... anybody.

From the dark shadows, a red bat became visible. Nothing else.

“Tell me a story.” The voice repeated itself in the same tone.

“What do you-” Before he could finish his question, the Bat-man had flown toward him, his hands opened and reaching for the bedridden man's bloated jugular. Ralph tried to roll to the ground as if it would help his situation but it did not. He was lifted out of his stiff bed by the collar of his powder blue hospital gown. He felt a surge of pain spread throughout his entire body.

“I ask the questions! Tell me everything you know about the people you were working for!” It wasn't a question but Ralph wasn't about to correct the man whose hands were wrapped firmly around his throat.

“I dunno.”

Batman punched Ralph in the face.

“WHO?!”

“I was hired because I had a moving van rented under my name I swear I swear I don't know a thing about who I was working for I just for a phone call and and and--!” How he got that much out, Ralph will never know. Batman flung all 230 pounds of Ralph against the wall.

“Give me names.”

“I don't have any! We used codenames!”

“What?”

“Yeah, like, I was Pawn and there was Rook in the front seat with me and I'm assuming somewhere there were Bishops and Knights or something but…”

“But WHAT!?!” Batman said, forehead to forehead with the fat sweating man.

“I don't know who or where they were! Honestly! Please! You gotta believe-”

“I don't have to do anything. You said there was a man in the front seat with you?”

“Yeah, Rook. All I know about him is that he waited for me at a bakery.”

“…Go on.”

“Yeah, on Wrightson Way. It was called Saint James or something, I think it was a Filipino joint. He was eating one of those things, what do you call 'em um..” The lights and TV turned on and the Batman was gone. He turned to the sleeping man beside him and looked past the plastic curtain divider outside to the hospital room. Nothing.

“…Buko Pie.”



Jason Todd's bones ached as he trounced along the rooftops of the burning city beneath him. It was warm with anger, with fear, with tears. He raised his arms out to grab a handful of cape in both fists as he sailed to another roof.



As he landed, his body folded up like an accordion and pain rushed through him like magma through a volcano with nowhere to go. It was a pain he'd never get used to, it was a pain he never wanted to stop.

Jason was able to find out a lot of good, useful information by knocking on the right doors, asking the right questions, and violently persuading anyone that was unwilling to cooperate.

That led him to 1706 Pulpit Street, apartment number 13. Jason looked at the building from the rooftop of the building across the street. There was nothing unique about it. It was a low rent set up just like every other low rent set up in the Narrows. For a second he second-guessed his leads. Nah, they wouldn't be stupid enough to lead him on a wild goose chase.

Whoever was rich enough to traffic and store those kids, and more impressively, rich enough to cover their tracks, should have been rich enough to live in a nicer building than the one he was led to, Jason thought as he looked at the building's broken windows and blinking lights.

Enough detective work.

Jason shattered a window with a line to be sure he could secure his hook and leaped off the rooftop and through another window. He covered his face but still felt glass get caught in his chin as he fell to the floor. No one was in the room.

…Or to be more exact…

…Nothing was in the room at all.

Jason made his way past the empty room into an empty hallway. Like the exterior of the building, the hallways and rooms were not the accommodations of someone who was running the Gotham underworld. Slowly, he pushed open creaking doors until he made his way to the end of the hall, until he came to what appeared to be an elevator door, the kind that Droopy used to operate.

He stepped into the elevator and looked around. He felt a breeze on his stubbled chin, the damp beads of blood that had been shed by the shattered glass of the window felt cool for a split second, and his gloved fingers traced the edges of the back of the elevator. That's when he pushed the right door to find the right wrong. Through this secret passage there wasn’t nothing. Instead of empty crates and walls, the room he had located was an extensive laboratory, full to the brim with technology, generators, and most importantly, he thought, as he went low from the punch thrown at him… something he could punch.

Or more importantly, somethings.

Fleshy pink bodies with exposed veins bursting through the thin transparent skin that wrapped around bulky Michaelangelo physiques like saran wrap pushed forward, blind eyes sensing his presence even if they could not see through their thick cataract infected eyes.

Bruce had always taught Jason to look for clues as if every crime was a big puzzle that needed to be pieced together but that was not how Jason saw crime. It wasn't through clues that evil would be brought down, because evil wasn't logical, not true evil. True evil was transparent and you didn't need to find it at all because it would sure as hell find you.

One of the bodies lunged at Jason but his natural reflexes guided him out of the way and the massive body crashed through the wall. Jason heard the bones of the creature crumble beneath its spongy flesh but didn't look back. Instead, he reached for his utility belt and pulled out a vial of acid. He tossed it at the floor in front of the lurking behemoths and slowly one of them stupidly fell through the hole and he heard it crash through at least two more floors beyond that.

Jason couldn't count on the rest of them to be so dumb. He got a running start towards the gap into the floor and leapt over it, pulling his legs to his gut before whipping them out towards two of the mutants before him. His feet sunk into their chest and he felt the rumble of their impact against the hard wood floor beneath him up his spine. Momentarily caught, he rolled over onto his stomach and twisted his way out of their flesh when he felt a massive blow on his back. It felt like someone swung a sledgehammer into him but the wet shwooshing sound that followed the pain indicated something much scarier to Jason.

These bastards were strong.

One of them grabbed onto a flap of loose cape connected to the back of Jason’s neck and lifted him with an ease, tossing him into a wall. Wincing in pain, he tried to pull himself up quicker than he was engulfed once more, but wet, hard fists slammed into his guts and face, causing him to loose coherence for a moment longer. He was able to pull himself up, winded, but not without his fight still boiling inside him.

Jason felt another punch skin his arm and he ducked away from it, backing into a wall. What were these things? For the first time, Jason tried to analyze what he was fighting but he was unsure. They were much larger than he and had translucent gray skin covering their massive frame. Sharp rows of teeth like a shark filled their lipless mouths that snarled wildly below their small puggish noses. All of them bald, save a few odd spikes placed oddly around their scalps. Jason smiled at the freaks. He began laughing and they backed away from him confused as if they had never heard laughter before.

“You,” Jason slowly rose to his feet again. “You, you bastards. That's where the children were going, isn't it? Into you all?” Jason laughed harder, turning red.

His fist tore into one of them as he punched it. While they were strong as oxes, their flesh was still in early development and they had been constrained like baby calves raised for veal. His vision turned red with blood , he couldn't control himself as he tore into the moaning monstrosities that had been sicced on him. They. Had. Eaten. Children.

“What have you done, you fiend?!”

Jason raised his head up at the sound of the deep voice emanating from behind a doorway.

Jason smiled like the devil, “You're under arrest.” He felt weird saying it, alien even.

“Under arrest?” The man said laughing, stepping out of the darkness and into the light. Jason fell back at the sight of him. The face that appeared was not the one Jason imagined in his head when he heard the words spoken. The man’s face was thin and corpse-like, with stringy hair falling over a massive pair of silver goggles with neon yellow lenses. His upper body matched the face too, no muscles or an ounce of fat on the old man's skeleton but below his waist, where his groin and legs should have been, was yet another neck, a bloated, fatty neck that cascaded like rolling hills into a massive body that stomped ferociously swinging its thick tree trunks of arms as it walked towards Jason. There was a head, lolling dead where the man’s groin would be. Thick, bloated lips dribbled a viscous fluid down onto his multiple chins. “On what grounds?”

He swung one of his four arms at Batman, knocking him against the wall. Jason looked up through blurring eyes.

“Our benefactor has made his intentions clear. You and yours, the fat and bloated misers of the world, they say the meek shall inherit the Earth. My kind has been defeated by truth and justice and benevolence for eons, but now it is our turn. He wants an army of black angels forged in the darkest pits of mans soul... and he came to the right place didn't he? When once, my intellect allowed me to create magnificent O-Bots to commit petty theft, my vision is now quadrupled. No scientific concept is beyond my grasp. No philosophical argument. No, the lobes of my brain are finally functioning at their fullest capacity and where I once used to manipulate computer chips and circuitry to build my creations, my children, now I just as easily play with cells and organic human material too. Of course, as any newborn, they require special attention, special love, but I can provide that, can I not? My name is The Carpenter, little man. I challenged a friend to a game of chess, and I won. I mounted myself atop his body like a king upon a throne. Do you like me?”

Jason smiled slowly, and looked up from where he knelt. “You… you asked me… ‘on what grounds’…?”

“I do believe I did,” replied the Carpenter, enjoying the moment to share his platitudes with someone other than the mirror or his now dead compatriot, The Walrus.

“Because you’re too damned ugly to be walking the streets.”

He threw his homemade batarang squarely at The Carpenter’s goggle, and the yellow lens shattered as the razor sharp metal popped his eye like a water balloon. Jason stormed forward, his fingers tensed and ready, and grabbed The Carpenter by his highest head, and yanked it down to his level. “You were never going to get away with this.” He slammed his knee into the Carpenter’s second head, and saliva sprayed over the grotesquery’s flabby chest.

“They promised me the world, and you believe that you shall stop me? You aren’t anything, whilst I, I am a--”

Jason thrust his hand into the Carpenter’s mouth, and then wrenched it back out, holding a slab of meat between his leathered fingers as he did so.

“Mrrrrffff!”

“You were never going ot get away with this. And you were never going to leave this place alive.” He took two small devices from his utility belt and threw one at the generators at the side of the lab and then pushed the other inside The Carpenter’s mouth. He spun the pins of the grenades in his fingers before throwing a line up high and soaring into the rafters.

“NNNNNRRRRRRRHH!”



Jason watched as the flames danced below him, as the smoke billowed up and soft translucent flesh bubbled and boiled over on skeletons not designed to bear such heinousness upon themselves. He watched and he felt his smile return. Then he suddenly remembered how much pain he was in, and stumbled toward the roof exit. It was a nice feeling whilst it lasted.

Jason was hurt, he could tell that much from the shooting pain in his gut as he climbed toward the steady moonlight permeating the sky up above. He dragged himself into the cool night air and rolled onto his back, short, sharp breathes escaping his mouth as he tried to catch them.

"You're sloppy."

He struggled to his feet, and looked around. There was no one there. So the answer to the question in his head: ‘Who was that?’ was easily answered. "Dick Grayson. I know your voice, and I know the trick you're playing. Bruce teaches us all the same old tricks."

Dick Grayson, the Batman, stepped out of the shadows. "Don't say his name. Not out here. Not now."

"That some idea of pride, Robin? You not letting the man we both called daddy by his real name?"

"No, because it's unprofessional and dangerous and you know better. He trained you first, but he trained me too, Redwing. We don't bring civilian names into this."

Jason Todd grunted as he gripped his side. He was in pain but he didn't think anything was broken. Splintered. Torn. Bruised, sure, but not terribly. "Why are you here? To lecture me? Or to take me down? Because I could take you with one hand tied behind my back--"

Dick walked up to Jason, and leaned forward. "Quit with the bravado act. You used to care about this life, Jason. You used to follow Batman's word without question."

"You aren't Batman!" hissed Jason.

Dick didn't let the sentiment linger in the air, striking back with his own retort: "And you are?!"

"No, I--" Jason hesitated. "…I would have followed Batman to the ends of the earth… Nightwing. I would have. But the Wrath, and what he did… four years… I prayed for death for four years and I came out of that wanting nothing but pain and hurt to be inflicted upon Bruce and Godammit, Dick…" he clenched his fists. "He's gone and I don't know what to do."

"You do. You're doing it. You fight." Dick looked around. "For the city. You keep fighting till you fall, just like Bruce did. It's in our blood. We couldn't get away from it if we tried. We're different to the others, Jason. We fight and we fight and we don't stop."

"Have you tried?"

Dick watched Jason's face as he finished asking his question, and then sighed, sliding down the side of the wall they stood near and sitting down. "I think about it sometimes. 'Settling down'. But it's not for us, I don't think…"

"I've done the same. In-between the fighting and the healing, I think about not being me." He sat next to Dick, and pulled off his cowl, to feel the cool Gotham air. "I don't know who I am, without a mask on."

Dick looked at Jason, and then disengaged the security protocols in his own cowl, and breathed in as it fell behind his neck. "We're who we need to be. When Bruce found me I was broken. My parents had been murdered right in front of my eyes. I wasn't who I had been the moment before and I wasn't who I am now. He helped rebuild me. Into something… someone… better. It sounds so artificial and I've never admitted it to anyone before--"

"But he did the same to me. It's our family heritage. Bruce helps us pick up the pieces." He knocked his head back against the concrete, and gazed up at the stars. "I would be dead without him today."

"The same thing crosses my mind every time I go down that path."

Jason straightened up, and Dick took a bottle of water from a compartment behind the back of his utility belt, and handed it to the Dark Knight. "I'm not going to defend my actions. I have killed. I have murdered in cold blood. But only those I thought deserved it. And they did deserve it." He opened the bottle, and sipped it, before handing it back to the Caped Crusader.

"That's never for us to decide. That's for the courts."

"Ah, too obvious, too easy an answer." Jason laughed. "But I've stopped. I'm pulling back. I won't defend my past but my present is something I'm trying to improve. We can fight, right now, and we could beat each other bloody because I'm not even sure who the better fighter is, or we could talk this out."

"I thought that's what we were doing. That's why I've not beaten you unconscious and dragged you into Arkham. Because I could, Jason. We both know I could beat you."

Jason smiled. "Even so, you know I'd escape."

"It would be an exercise in the pointless."

"Just like it when we take the Joker there. Or Scarecrow. Zsasz, Riddler, Stirk, Calendar Man, the Mad Hatter, they get out every time."

"That's not justification for murder."

"I've not done that for a long time. And I don't intend to start again." He tapped his chest, the red bat insignia across his costume. "This means something to me. This is a position to attain to. I know I'm not the favourite. I know you're who he'd want to be the Batman after he died. But I want to try and be something. Part of his army. Dick, you're the closest thing I have to a brother. I'm completely aware that I've tried to beat you to death, but those are things I hope we could overcome…”

"You know if you dare go over that line wearing his shield I will break you into pieces?"

"I'll break myself."

Dick pulled on his cowl, and looked around. "I'll be keeping my eye out for you. You might want to do something about your uniform by the way; I can see twelve points where someone with a sharp enough blade could get in there deadly enough."

Jason shook his head, and wrenched his cowl down over his head, the thick leather stifling against his skin. "This is just a stop gap. Go beat up a Dress-Up, I'll deal with the ugly stuff."

Dick looked around. “Should I ask what happened in the building that’s burning underneath us?”

“I stopped something awful from coming to fruition. Don’t press me, Dick. Trust me.”

Batman looked over to the Dark Knight. “I’ll try.” With that Dick fired a line and vanished, and Jason breathed in deep, becoming very aware of the smoke that slowly began to float up to meet him.

“Jaaaaason.” He refused to open his eyes. That voice… he refused. The gut wrenching honest truth of it all was that if he opened his eyes he’d see her, and if he saw her, and what the big bad wolf had done to her beautiful little face, he’d weep. He’d truly weep.

Jason’s eyes slowly opened. The girl was a mess of blood and teeth marks, gouges of her flesh hanging from strands of muscle and fat, behind her, the white wolf pawed along the edges of the building, snarling and dribbling red from his matted red jaws. “No…” whispered Jason, “go… away…”