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Red Hood was a killer, murderer, whatever. He's killed people. He doesn't do that anymore because he's reformed, redeemed, etcetera.He's working with the other Bats. They're something of a family now. He can work alongside Nightwing without either of them bringing up whatever the fuck happened in New York, their comms free from Oracle's clipped voice or Batman's growled, regular check-ins because they're both adults and Hood gets to experience some tenuous extension of trust, these days.Nightwing's mask gets snagged off his face by a scientist, one he was talking to in that low, gentle victim-voice, because they hadn't quite figured out yet if the scientists were evil or just coerced.So his mask gets ripped off because he was trying to project safety instead of danger, and the scientist says, triumphantly, "You're Grayson. You're the Wayne kid," and Nightwing seems torn, for a moment, between scrambling back and pressing a hand to his bleeding face, skin torn away with the mask.The scientist says, and his face is all predatory, toothy smile, "Oh, that sort of information would just ruin you, wouldn't it? If it got out?"Nightwing makes a sort of choked, aborted noise, eyes wide and skin raw where it isn't ripped to shreds, and Hood steps out from the darkened corner in the far end of the room and puts a bullet through the scientist's skull.The room is silent in the gunpowder-tinged aftermath. Hood realizes a few things:This is the first time he's killed someone in front of any of the Bats. He had left them the corpses, the already-dead to find, and then he'd stopped killing at all. But now there is blood on Nightwing's suit and a splatter of brain matter on the white office wall.He has killed someone in front of a Bat, after it has been made extremely clear to him that this truce with the Bats only lasts as long as he does not commit homicide. Last time he tried to kill someone in front of a Bat, it had not ended well for him or the structural integrity of his neck.The gun he used is not one of his own. It's from one of the guards downstairs, because he ran out of rubber bullets. Because the last time he brought proper live ammunition to a fight, it had ended with Hood nearly saying I should have blown you up in the fucking Batmobile when I had the chance in the ensuing argument, and revealing he was responsible for that particular car bomb would have been extraordinarily counterproductive.A rubber bullet, from this distance, aimed where it was without rebounding it off a surface first, would have killed the man anyway. So he did intend to kill the man, either way. He weighs the life of this probably-a-little-bit-but-not-that-shitty scientist against maintaining Nightwing's secret identity and decides that, yes, death was the intended and desired result here.The gun he used is not one of his own. He has gloves on. This is a murder that can be covered up, and he has put a lot of thought into how he might theoretically cover up killing someone while working with the Bats. Contingencies are good to have. The problem is, he had not accounted for the possibility that he would kill someone in front of a Bat.And then, this is when he realizes that Nightwing has not moved. He is frozen, staring at the scientist, at the mask resting between lax fingers, at the face marred with a bullet hole. He is barely breathing. Panicking? Dissociating? Experiencing a flashback?Nightwing was already working himself up to some anxiety induced freeze response before Hood pulled out the gun. Not for the first time, Hood acknowledges that he doesn't really know this man that is sort of his brother.Hood remembers how to use the victim-voice. Nightwing's capable of figuring his own shit out though, so instead Hood leaves, to clear the other rooms and manipulate the evidence, to stage it so it seems like the scientist was simply an innocent civilian they failed to save. That happens sometimes.Nightwing finds him on the rooftop, after the building is cleared and the GCPD called in. Nightwing is shaking, barely able to hold himself together, but he doesn't sit or lean on anything. Hood pretends he doesn't see the tremors.The mask has been reattached poorly. Cleaning up the mess on his face will not be fun."You killed him," Nightwing says."I did."Not for the first time, Hood remembers when he first crashed onto the scene in Gotham, filling in his gaps in knowledge by listening to stories traded in the bars. The whisper-hisses-gossip that Nightwing had killed Blockbuster.He never looked further into it, because Nightwing doesn't kill people. He saves people, even when they're being an antagonistic asshole and dressing up like him to kill people in New York. Even when they get kidnapped by some freaky mind-reading tentacle monster.New York was a special kind of fucked up.Nightwing says, "Batman will find out eventually," and that's as good a pact of silence as Hood can hope to get.Hood responds with a shrug and grapples off the building. He removes guns from his arsenal over the course of the following weeks, replaces them with crowbars, decides that's fucking dumb, looks for the kris that Talia gave him a lifetime ago. They don't discuss that night again.That was the first time. Signal is the only one that goes out when the sun is still up, costume bright and yellow in a way that the smog never allows Gotham to be. He's poking around Park Row, though, which means that word travels fast through the street.Hood asks, "Why are you telling me this?" and Elena smirks as she taps the ash out of her cigarette."He's a kid, ain't he?"And yes. He has told her to let him know if she comes across any kids that seem like they might need help. Getting food, getting shelter, not getting hurt. And sure, maybe a vigilante that happens to be a teenager falls into that third group.She has the uncanny ability to tell when he gives up on an argument, so she holds out her hand and he passes over a roll of bills for her trouble. She smirks at him again. He leaves.Signal is a kid, which means that Hood absconds up the tallest building in Park Row with his rifle and follows him through the scope. He loves this little beauty—killed two of his teachers with her back when Talia was offering him a proper education—but he's a bit out of practice actually using her.He practices assembling her parts as he waits, checking in every now and then to make sure the bright yellow costume isn't bleeding out in an alley somewhere.Signal seems to be here on some recon mission, because he swings up to a derelict concrete structure and stays there. It was supposed to be a new office building, but something about scandals and the locations and logistical mistakes in the contracting meant that it had been abandoned, a skeleton scraped of all its useful parts.There's a meeting taking place on the top level. Hood stops using the scope like it's a spyglass, instead snapping it onto the rest of the rifle and setting up so his view is stable. He keeps his hand away from the trigger because the crosshairs are on Signal at the moment and—yeah.Although testing if Batman cares about his latest adoptee enough to kill his murderer would be a fun experiment.Hood stops thinking about that. He adjusts the view, focuses on the faces. He recognizes some of them as Black Mask's people. Penguin's lieutenant is also there. Max is also there. Max, who defected from Mask about three months ago, around the same time Sionis started being a pain in the ass again.Huh.He's going to need to send Signal a gift later. A bag of cookies, or something. Hood should have figured out what was going on here weeks ago. Along with the realization that these sorts of meets are happening in the middle of the day—because the day shift is covered by one little metahuman vigilante instead of an ever-multiplying number of Bats.It's very obvious. Hood should have caught onto it. Good job, Signal.Maybe he can convince the kid to send him a recording of what these guys were discussing, later? Or he can bribe Oracle for it, do the remember when I was a high schooler and you tutored me in math charade again. You would do that kid a favor, wouldn't you?Signal's clinging to the wall like a spider.Penguin's lieutenant—this is an important name that Hood really should know—has pulled out a gun. Deal's going south. More guns are coming out.Because vigilantism is a stupid fucking career and all lives are sacred, Signal hops into the fray.He's good at what he does. Trained well, and he's using his powers to his advantage here, ducking in and out of invisibility in a way that makes Hood a little jealous. Kid can create his own shadows to vanish into.Soon, there's a lot of bodies on the ground, presumably alive and groaning in agony. Signal starts pulling out the zipties. The next step is calling the GCPD, although the cops really hate dealing with Park Row, and would be making things worse if they did step in.It means this is Hood's problem to clean up.It means Hood is already thinking about packing up his rifle and the fastest way to get down there, along with scripting out how the conversation with Signal is going to go. It means that Hood isn't quite thinking, when Max props himself up on one elbow and lifts a gun with the other, aiming it at the back of Signal's skull.Sniping is an activity that requires focus.And so. The bullet intended to cause a loud distraction, or maybe to pulverize Max's hand—man's left handed, shoots with his right, his life would have only been kind of ruined—instead streaks through his body and far too many vital organs. Organs like his heart and lungs and so on.Yeah, actually, the GCPD can probably handle this on their own.Hood fucks off.A week later, Hood shows up in the Cave for a debriefing. Batman doesn't interrogate him about guns and murder any more than usual, and Signal waves when he turns to leave.This is not the first time Signal has waved at him, so Hood can't tell if this is a promise of secrecy or a demonstration of ignorance.He gets the kid cookies the next day, anyway. Red Robin chose a really fucking stupid hero name. There's a Red Hood and a Robin and he pulls a Red Robin costume out of the trash and runs with it. Through mere process of elimination it means he has to be Red Robin, which has far too many syllables, or Red, which runs the risk of leading to confusing comms.RR, maybe."Pretender," Hood says, because Hush was pretty on point when he suggested that nickname. They're both standing on a rooftop, across from a warehouse that has seen better days."Hood," Red Robin returns drily."Fuck are you doing in the Alley?""This is the Bowery," Red Robin says, like he has any idea where the unofficial boundaries for neighborhoods are nowadays. Still, he's nice enough to give an actual answer, and Hood can appreciate that. "Scarecrow's goons are stockpiling fear toxin in there.""You have a timeframe for when he's getting out of Arkham, then?" Red Robin does that, laying out all the patterns in the choices rogues make, with the hope of predicting when they'll next act. It works at least some of the time.There's a pause. "I'll tell you if you leave me to handle this alone."Hood has access to the Batcomputer and could likely liberate all of the data and analytics for himself within an afternoon, but he's not really in the mood for that or dealing with fear gas tonight. Doesn't mean he'll back off easy, though. "I'll supervise. I won't intervene unless necessary.""Just say you'll be my back-up like a normal person—supervise—I'm not a child. Don't kill anyone."The grumbling continues but Red Robin grapples off on his own.Hood follows, because he likes being an asshole sometimes, but he sticks to loitering around the roof while Red Robin goes in to harass the building's occupants. The skylight Red Robin drops through doesn't have any glass in it, and Hood remembers, vaguely, that Spoiler had taken this entrance over a year ago.Has it really not been repaired in all that time?He entertains vague thoughts about the glass industries and warehouse owners and insurance contracts with specific sections for vigilante-related damages. A fear gas canister gets dropped at some point. Everyone stops to put on their rebreathers. The synchrony is impressive.He's on some tangent about the costs of safehouse upkeeping when Red Robin grabs a gun out of a goon's hand, and he doesn't really process what's happening until after the gun falls and a shot goes off.And then there's a goon on the ground with a bullet that definitely went through his lung. He's tearing out his rebreather to choke out the blood rising in his mouth. Red Robin apparently doesn't know the first fucking thing about gun safety, and he stutters a bit looking at the guy before his attention gets pulled back to the firefight.Hood drops in through the skylight to look at the goon. He's already shaking, his pupils dilating. Yeah, between the physiological effects of the fear gas and a hole in his lung, there's nothing that can save him.Hood picks up the dropped gun—still loaded, safety off, just laying on the floor—and puts the guy out of his misery.Red Robin clears out the rest of the warehouse, eventually. He ends up next to Hood, breathing hard, with his eyes fixed on the dead guy. "Does Batman not teach the birds how to handle guns anymore?" Hood asks."What?""The gun discharged when you dropped it. That's—that's basic shit that you should have learned how to avoid doing in like—like the first week of training.""I—yeah, I did learn how to handle guns, but—" Red Robin's voice stutters a bit. His gaze has not moved at all. "Did I—""Nope," Hood says. "You're hallucinating the corpse, or, well, whatever it is you're seeing right now. Your rebreather filter was broken and you got exposed to the gas, it's not real, etcetera, let's get out of here and get you the antidote. And even if it was real, you weren't responsible for the bullet that actually killed him, so you're fine. You didn't kill anyone. You have not failed Batman."Red Robin looks up at him, frowning. "Did you—""One of his friends probably nailed him in the head, by accident. Come on, it's time to go, and you still owe me intel." Hood grapples back up through the skylight without waiting for a response.Red Robin catches up to him in a couple of blocks, says, "Two months," as he swings past Hood, and then splits off.Hood immediately stops and locates the nearest gargoyle to drop down next to. It's not Jason's favorite—he doesn't quite remember where that one is located anymore—but it's a close enough approximation that he lets himself relax ever so slightly.This—whatever the fuck this is—is becoming a pattern, and he doesn't like it. Robin sends him a text message with coordinates.Hood was not aware that Robin had access to this phone number. He's pretty sure the last time he was alone with the kid, Robin had driven a bar dart two inches into his leg. And prior to that he shot the kid in the chest with an actual bullet.He shows up at the coordinates, anyway. It's an alleyway in the Narrows, and that—hm. That's a dead body.Robin is standing next to said dead body, his hood on and katana brandished. He's desecrating the good name of Robin with that blending into the shadows, creepy demon gremlin look. It hasn't been the same since the cape stopped being bright yellow and it gained pants.It's like how Red Robin got rid of the cowl on his current suit. He just takes these symbols and ruins them. Pretender. Yeah, Hush was definitely onto something with that. Hood should figure out where that guy went and let him know. Did Hush die? He probably died.Hood refocuses. Robin, holding a sword. Corpse on the ground, sporting a suspiciously sword shaped wound. "Holy shit," he says. "Did the blood son of the fucking Batman kill someone?"Robin shifts his stance, sword tilting in a way that suggests he wants to produce another corpse with a suspiciously sword shaped wound. "I have killed before, Hood. You know this.""Proud of you, kid," Hood says. "Is that what you wanted from me? A thumbs up, congratulations, maybe a sticker?"Robin scoffs. "Hood. I intend to dispose of the body without attracting Oracle's attention.""You can just leave him here. People die mysteriously in alleyways all the time."The look Robin levels at him manages to be unimpressed, condescending, and annoyed all in one glance behind the mask. "Don't be ridiculous."Hood looks over the scene one more time. The man is dressed in dark fabric that's starting to resolve into what looks like typical League of Assassins attire, and it is very hard to argue that anything other than a sword was responsible for killing him. "Huh. The League's still after you?""He was a member of a defector cell," Robin begins, and Hood decides that he actually doesn't give a shit. "They initially—""Great, yeah, let's go dump him in the harbor."Body disposal was a skill he touched on in his time with Talia, and one that he continued to explore after returning to Gotham. Robin's mom is great. Probably a top two mother figure, although the competition isn't particularly tight.Hood talks Robin through the steps and how to cover their tracks. Hiding a body is the kind of thing you don't want to have an accomplice for, and certainly not more than once. Robin's on his own, from here on out.They bundle the guy up, take him over the rooftops because cameras generally aren't pointed there—Oracle's network can only ever be as good as the infrastructure it relies on, and that infrastructure tends to be pretty shit in some of these neighborhoods—and get him to the docks.The corpse disappears into murky waters tied to a cinder-block. The pollution will take care of erasing evidence from there.Hood leans over the edge of the rickety fishing boat he's temporarily borrowed, watching the waters until he's sure the body's gone. He steps back, then goes to steer the boat back to shore. It's an old thing. It probably hasn't been maintained since the water's been clean. "There we go. Good job, Robin, imagine I'm giving you a gold star."Robin, standing tense in the middle of the boat, says, "Father knows I killed before we first met."And this sounds like a conversation Hood is not at all equipped for or in the mood to have. "Little baby assassin."Robin wrinkles his nose at that, but he doesn't snap back with a retort at all, which is truly not ideal. "He has forgiven me for that. I do not think he will forgive me if he learns I have killed again."Forgive the kid for what? For killing people Batman didn't know about and had never met before? Being in an assassins cult as a baby was something that needed to be forgiven? Hm. Not the point. Moving on.Robin probably doesn't realize how they're in the same boat here. Hood has also killed again, and he is also relying on other people to keep their mouths shut about it. Maybe Nightwing's guilt complex will make a reappearance. Maybe Red Robin is just biding his time and planning vengeance for… the time Hood stabbed him in the chest with a batarang, maybeWow, he was not doing well after Batman died. He mortally wounded two minors when not hurting kids is supposed to be his whole shtick.…He's getting distracted.They're at the shore. He docks the boat.Hood looks at Robin. "Yeah, he probably won't. If he finds out, just blame me. You were my unwitting accomplice, or whatever. I blackmailed you. I was the one who sent that League guy after you. Make something up."Robin blinked. "You will… shoulder the blame yourself?""Yeah, sure. If you ask why, I'm rescinding the offer.""Tt."A beat of silence, then:"Thank you, Hood."There's the slight swoosh of a cape as Robin leaves, and Hood steadily ignores the burst of emotion in his chest. Black Mask is dead. He'll probably be back in, like, a year, because the world's fucked like that, but he's on the more permanent-ish side of dead, so Hood will call it good enough for now.This is the first intentional, premeditated kill Hood's made in a while. Sionis and the trail of dead henchmen Hood left behind to get to Sionis, but the rest of those guys were in the way, so their deaths weren't premeditated in quite the same way.The bullet to the heart wasn't premeditated, either, but it's nice and quick and gets the desired end result.This is for Max, sort of. Some spiteful biting part of Hood that wants to go look at what you died for, you fucking loser. Max is dead, though, so it's not like he's capable of giving a shit.Mostly, Sionis has not learned his lesson from when Hood ran fucking circles around the guy when he first came onto the scene. He's been consolidating and trying to creep back onto the scene for months. After he progressed from mildly irritating to a genuine concern, Hood decided to actually deal with him.There are ways to deal with someone without actually killing them though, but Black Mask is dead. So.There's also the fact that Batman's out of town—Batman's off-planet—on a Justice League mission, so Batman can't stop Hood from cutting off the head of the snake, so to speak. The fact that Batman is gone and Red Robin's predicted Arkham-breakout-courtesy-Scarecrow is on the horizon is…That's not something Hood is thinking about, at the moment.Because thinking about that and what that might entail means admitting that this? Black Mask's detached head in his hands? Yeah, this?It's for Stephanie Brown. Blondie. Spoiler, Robin, Batgirl, whatever she's going by these days.Maybe he shouldn't, but he sees himself in Steph, just a little bit. The reckless Robin narrative. Getting fired. Getting tortured and then dying. Steph's got a murderer, just like him. A murderer, that if she is anything like him, she'd want dead.She can't ask for that, though. Who would she ask, anyway? Batman?Yeah, right.There's a pretty clear precedent for what Batman will do to you if you ask him to kill your murderer. It's not something that Hood has ever talked about, but the entire confrontation is uploaded to the Batcomputer—he checked—so she's probably at least aware of it. And it's not like Hood can just ask her if she wants Black Mask dead, because the answer will be no, because she's part of the fold.It means that maybe she does want Black Mask dead. It means that maybe she doesn't, and he has no way of knowing.Doing this for her, as a result, is not the most stable of justifications.So he's doing it because Sionis was really fucking annoying. He's doing it because of Max. He's doing it because Batman's off-planet and Hood's got plans.There aren't many Bats in Gotham, due to whatever the Justice League's up to.It means he has time before anyone notices. Before anyone comes searching for him. He crushes his comms underfoot and starts working the trackers out of his gear. Oracle's going to be a problem.She'll look at this trail of death, and retroactively go hunting for hints that this was going to happen. The narrative that he just snapped is a convenient one, but she's not going to accept it until she finishes looking through the evidence. And she will find evidence, in gaps in the case summaries and wiped or corrupted footage.That tenuous extension of trust all those months ago has let him get away with a lot of shit so far. That'll be gone, quick, and she'll find out what he's been doing in front of the other Bats.It'll be a mess, but it hopefully won't be his mess to deal with, at that point.He's done a lot of killing for other people's sake, lately. It's about time he does something for himself.Batman's out of town, an Arkham breakout's imminent, and Hood has unfinished business. Hood is sitting on top of the ferris wheel in Amusement Mile. He has one arm slung across the Joker's shoulder and the other hand is pressing a gun to the clown's temple.Joker's still in his Arkham straitjacket. He's still gagged, but some of those inane giggles manage to escape anyway. Hood's okay with that. He has a dinky little pistol in his hand, one bullet loaded in the chamber.He spins the chamber. Puts it to the Joker's temple. Pulls the trigger.
Click.
He does it again.
Click.
It's been like this for a little while, now. He's not entirely sure how long. Long enough for the sun to start rising, bleeding red and pink and gold into the gloom of the sky. That's one thing the smog tends to get right—catches all the colors just right.Scarecrow's probably been caught by now.
Click.
Feather-light feet land behind him. "Red Hood.""Hi Orphan," he says, as the Joker shakes with another burst of buried laughter. "We're playing Russian Roulette. He hasn't won yet."He holds up the pistol and spins the chamber again. He sets it against the Joker's temple, but keeps his finger off the trigger this time and flicks on the safety. He knows his gun safety.He's breaking about half of the rules, right now, but the point still stands.She shifts behind him. "You're going to kill him.""Yes. Are you going to stop me?"She doesn't respond.The sunrise is nice.He's counted to three hundred when she finally speaks. She times it; he's about to open his mouth, unsure of what he actually wants to say. "You are going to kill him, but you haven't yet. Why?"The Joker's laugh is burrowing a little too painfully into his skull. He sets the pistol aside, lets it scrape against the iron frame of the ferris wheel. "Maybe I just wanted to know if you'd let me do this."He wants himself, Batman, and the Joker in a room alone again. He wants to recreate that confrontation, again and again, until it finally goes right. He wants Bruce to understand. Hah. As if."I can stop you," she says."I know that. Will you?"He gets her philosphy, on a surface level: that killing is wrong, that everyone deserves a second chance, the basic bullshit. It's meaningful to her in a way that he'll never be able to understand, though.She says, "It's not fair of you, doing this.""Doing what?""This, like with Batman."He's sure she can read the way he carefully doesn't tense. "What does that mean?""You are going to kill him. You haven't. Instead you wait. You demand I watch you kill him."He picks up the pistol and spins it around in his hand before tossing it away, watching it fall, with a distant thunk, to the ground. "Eh, I'd say I just got unlucky.""You put the choice in front of Batman. Kill you, or let you kill him. You are asking me the same thing now."She doesn't need to kill him to stop him. Surely she knows that.His voice is level. It has to be level. "Look at him, Orphan," Hood says, shaking the Joker by his shoulder. "You don't want people dying, right? Can you really look at him and say that letting him go won't lead to more deaths?""That is not why you will kill him."He swallows. "No, it isn't, is it? I'm doing this for a fifteen year old kid who died knowing his dad would be too late. Just because I came back doesn't change the fact he was murdered. He was a victim. And there will be more. There already are more, because I couldn't make myself kill him the first two times I had the chance. Let me do this, for the kid that died."Even as he says this, it burns him. She's right. Every time, he has been alone with the clown, and every time, he lets himself wait for someone else to arrive. Someone who can stop him. Is he seeking absolution? He shouldn't need it.She says, "It's not fair."The air is full of hitching, laughing breaths. Then there is a rustle of fabric, and she is gone. She won't watch.That's fair.The pistol is gone, on the ground below. It's still loaded, he knows, a single bullet in the chamber. He's been shooting a lot of people, lately. He wonders if Orphan knows, if she can see the blood on his hands, the splatter that's landed on the other Bats.The kris is a comfortable, familiar weight.It's an easy slice across the neck from there, back to front, across the left side, letting giggles fade into gurgling. The Joker slips—or perhaps Hood pushes him—and then he's a crumbled body at the bottom of the ferris wheel, orange-bright in his jumpsuit.And it is done.Just like that.Hood looks up at the rising sun. There is blood on his gloves, on his jacket, on his knife.He takes off his helmet and basks in Gotham's presence, alone.