Chapter Text
Jason had done it. He’d fucking done it. Joker was dead. Oh, his plans were ruined. Totally blown to Hell. But holy fucking shit! Joker was dead.
Dead!
Jason finished pouring out the fuel over the corpse, then carefully, mindful of unexpected sparks, he overturned a few strategic barrels of the same fuel and opened their pour spouts. By the time he ignited them the fuel should be covering the warehouse floor. God, having a functional warehouse with actually correctly labeled product was nice. It almost made him miss Gotham. Except Gotham City was a shit hole that Jason had no functional plans for now that Joker was dead. Jason had to hold back a laugh at the thought. Joker was dead!
He trekked back to his equipment on the roof of a nearby building and setup his .308. As fun as explosives were, starting the fire by shooting the bastard’s skull open felt poetic. It did, however, mean after the warehouse lit up he had a whole ass sniper rifle to disassemble and pack away. It wasn’t anything he was concerned over. He was fast, willing even to bet he was almost or at least as fast as Deathstroke. But Jason hadn’t familiarized himself with L.A.’s local dress ups. He’d had no plans to catch their attention and any attention he did catch would be of the civic and governmental variety. If he had done his research he would’ve just wiped the gun down and left it for the pigs. Or set up a remotely detonated explosive.
But he hadn’t.
“You know, that’s good work.”
Jason dropped the gun parts in his hands into the case and turned, already throwing three knives. The asshole dress up was wearing a truly hideous flame patterned leotard with a vee almost as deep as Dickwing’s in his first Nightwing suit. Their black hair was extremely long, and tied back in an easy to grab low ponytail. Their appearance was the sort of casually attractive that took at least an hour of work a day to upkeep. Unless you were Dick Grayson and could pull off ‘effortlessly hot’ on three hours of sleep in three days after a fucking city wide battle. Asshole.
But Jason did know that this wasn’t anyone on the Justice League’s roster. Which meant they must be totally local. And this L A nobody melted his knives! He liked those knives! Jason kept his mouth shut. Best to assume this idiot had at comm in and it was recording. Bruce still had no idea he wasn’t dead and it’d be stupid to reveal himself from a random quip at a random nobody.
“Fucking rude. You know, I was complimenting you! Can you believe this bullshit?” They snapped out, Jason assumed the last comment was for their guy in the chair. Then they lit themselves on fire and Jason was in a fight for his fucking life.
They weren’t bad, either. They weren’t good, but they knew their powers well and knew how to use them in a fight. But based on their collateral damage and cursing whenever Jason dodged suggested they were new to non-lethal methods. And despite the fucking fire they weren’t actively trying to kill Jason. It was good, because Jason was not fire proof and did not particularly want to burn up yet again. Especially at the hands of some nobody dress up in L.A. Jason didn’t care if he killed this random dress up with more fight than sense in his head and it gave him an advantage.
“Oh, of course, of course you blame the fire guy for the fire! Fucking bullshit!”
Jason managed to clear enough space between them to draw his silenced Beretta. Why hadn’t he worn his Ruger? That beauty would end this immediately. But his Beretta against a meta? They might be able to tank a few rounds of 9mm, which meant this fight was going to last for longer than Jason wanted. Fucking ugh.
“If you’d do your fucking job, Loser Man, you would see that- hey!” the dress up complained into his comm then acted offended when Jason shot at him.
It’d been useless, apparently, as the bullets melted before they had a chance to do any sort of damage at all. Jason bared his teeth at them and re-holstered his Beretta. No need to get that melted, too.
“Naughty naughty! Trying to shoot Flambae!” Flambae, apparently, said with an annoying tsk tsk noise and wag of his finger.
“Who the fuck talks in third person?” Jason snarked back. Augh, dammit, he shouldn’t have said shit. It was just so stupid, referring to themself in the third person. Jason turned his attention on dodging fire blasts and fire covered fists and legs. Did he have the right kind of explosives on him to actually damage this idiot? Probably not. Not and still stay in one piece himself. He’d have to be close to get them to stick to Flambae, close enough he’d be in the blast radius for sure. With no guarantee that this asshole could even be damaged by explosions either.
“Aha! You do talk. You know, if you want to surrender I will happily accept! I could maybe even be persuaded to let such an accomplished connoisseur of flames get off easy, yes?”
“Are you trying to offer me a plea bargain? I haven’t even been charged with anything, asshole!” Jason responded somewhat incredulously.
“No. No I am offering you the chance to-“
Jason damn near didn’t dodge the disc of light. But they were going to need to be better than that to take him down. He’d spent the last three years doing nothing but training his mind and body and even soul.
“Damn bitch. How you see that?” a new dress up said, sounding impressed.
Jason just smirked and launched a kick their way. It was entirely to test the waters, so far all he knew about this new pest was they manipulated light in some way. Their ease at sneaking could easily be from the distraction of the warehouse burning merrily away. It was noisy, after all.
Unsurprisingly they dodged his kick. Jason rolled into a backward handspring and flipped in the air to land on his feet.
“Damn, you just showin’ off now.” The newbie said, no longer sounding impressed.
The fight ended quickly. And much to Jason’s humiliation, he hadn’t won it. The light user had snuck up on him because the fucking person he’d been fighting hadn’t been a person at all but a fucking construct of light. Jason had taken it out expecting to hit a body and needing to follow through. Instead, it shattered and fucked over his balance as he tried to punch through someone that was no longer there. Light chains secured his wrists behind his back and then his ankles. Goddammit.
Jason was pissed off and embarrassed but really, this would only an inconvenience. Breaking out of any jail not Blackgate would be laughably easy. Hell, he could break out of the squad car, and probably would if the stupid dress ups didn’t follow them to the station.
Jason didn’t go to jail.
The pigs and the dress ups didn’t bother hiding their faces so despite Jason being in the back of a squad car he understood their conversation just fine. His prints were flagged under the Justice League. But contacting the pigs’ J L contact only made everything more confusing, because there was no active J L mission but yes, definitely that was a secondary league member. Which was the nice way of saying ‘sidekick’ to outsiders. Made them sound official enough that as long as they weren’t face to face the kids didn’t have to deal with being ignored for being kids.
Jason was expecting to still be taken to the precinct and processed, this wasn’t Gotham after all. So when he was roughly grabbed out of the back of the squad car by one of the pigs he was a little surprised.
“SDN is taking you over. Don’t fuck this up,” the pig told him, irritated. Who the fuck was SDN?
SDN was apparently the two idiots’ employer. Jason was freed from the metal cuffs he’d been changed into (which he could have picked in four seconds if he’d wanted). Despite being relatively fine, he made a show of rubbing his wrists and glaring at the retreating pigs.
Jason was not looking forward to this. He new how to break out of a county jail or even a prison. He had no idea what kind of facilities this SDN place had. He was going to need to play it safe and feel things out. Jason hated playing it safe. He could, he was even good at it, but he still hated it. No, he was not looking forward to this bullshit one bit.