#oracle probably knows before alfred tells everyone bc She Knows All

[redjayson]

I just thought about what if Jason accidentally fakes his death? Like the batfam thought his still in a warehouse or something when it blew, and his comms destroyed so they can't call him, and he just went to a safe house after to sleep and like he doesn't know until a few weeks later when he shows up at the manor to meet up with Alfred for tea.

would it be better or worse if he wasn’t even really getting along with the rest of the family at that point? either way you play it, jason has a bunch of redundancies for his safe houses, and he was trained just as well as any of them. there has to be at least one or two he’s managed to keep secret from the rest of the bats. 

jay doesn’t really make a habit of carrying explosives in his helmet anymore; that was really more of a one-off when he first came back to gotham. since then, he generally just carries more explosives with him to make up for it. because of that, and because he’s usually fighting standard-grade humans, it’s not all that likely that he tosses his helmet aside in the middle of a fight.

a warehouse blows. red hood was in it, they know that (it all but had “This Is A Trap For Red Hood” written all over it), and when searching it, the bats find the badly burnt remnants of hood’s shattered helmet. no body, but –

it’s easy to assume the worst. it’s already happened once, after all. they hold on to hope for a week, but they haven’t been able to find any sign of jason. he can’t be raised on his comms, he hasn’t been in any of the safe houses that they know of, oracle couldn’t find any sign of him on cameras. 

no sign of him in a hospital or even leslie’s clinic, no body matching his description in the morgue. (that last doesn’t mean anything. no body at the warehouse, but someone had set the trap – they could have easily dumped it somewhere else.)

there’s no sign of him, living or dead, anywhere in the city so far as they can tell.

red hood’s been throwing himself into ever-escalating fights since he came back to gotham, and finally they have to assume that this time, his luck didn’t hold long enough for him to get out. 

the family sinks into some kind of shock. it’s impossible to believe that they lost him again.

it’s not something that can even be explained to the public. how do you explain that you’re in fresh mourning for a son and brother that was declared dead over half a decade ago? 

then again, all the bats are good at hiding how they feel. 

they mourn quietly, but they mourn.

what happened is this: 

jason walks himself straight into a trap. he usually ascribes to obi-wan kenobi’s philosophy regarding them, but this time –

it wasn’t a good idea to spring the trap.

there are more men than jason realized there would be. one of them gets a lucky shot, glancing off his helmet and leaving him staggering long enough for another to slam his head down against the concrete floor. jason sweeps his attackers legs out from under him and rolls away, taking cover behind a crate, but his helmet is cracked and partially shattered all along one side.

jason really regrets not having explosives in his helmet anymore, though given all the different kinds of explosives he can see scattered around the warehouse, that might not be a very good option right now anyway.

(why in the hell do they have so many explosives–? but he doesn’t really have time to think about it.)

jason pulls his helmet off, because blood is dripping steadily down from a cut above one of his eyes, where the helmet splintered inwards, and at this point it will only hinder him. 

these henchmen, though. they were just paid to make sure that he stayed in the warehouse long enough. as soon as he walked in, the timer was counting down. when jason ducks back around the crate he sheltered behind, they’ve scattered. 

jason swears when he sees the flickering red numbers. it’s not a scream; he can’t waste the breath. it’s one quiet invective and then he’s running for it, the way that he hadn’t been able to in ethiopia. 

he grapples up and slams through a window, scattering glass everywhere, just as the timer hits zero. the bomb goes off. the very edges of the explosion catch him, flinging him away.

a moment of free-fall, a terrifying reminder of ethiopia when he feels the heat of the blast, a brief thought of no, please no, not again–

jason rolls over onto his back, coughing. blood is still trailing down his face; he has to rub it off one of the lenses of his domino mask. he’s pretty sure he has a concussion. he tries to sit up and he definitely has cracked ribs. 

jason gets up carefully, trying to make sure nothing is moving around in his body where it’s not supposed to, and then he staggers away. he’s not staying around to give them a second shot at him. 

it’s instinct to avoid the cameras. there aren’t as many in this part of the city anyway, and jason likes it that way. it’s near one of the few safe houses he’s sure hasn’t been compromised, and he’d like to keep it that way.

he’d definitely like to lick his wounds in peace. 

it’s not that he thinks any of the bats are going to come after him. he doesn’t even think about the fact that they’ll probably know that he was at that warehouse. he just doesn’t want them butting in on his business, which they’ve done a couple of times at some of his other safe houses.

jason does cursory first aid when he gets back to his safe house. he pays more attention to re-arming his security, and by the time he gets around to dealing with his body, he can tell he’s probably about to pass out. he’s got a bunch of scrapes – nothing too bad, though a few are deeper and bleeding more than he really wants to deal with right now – and he’s pretty sure none of his ribs are out and out broken. he should probably get medical attention for the concussion.

he’ll drop by leslie’s clinic tomorrow, if he really needs to.

jason gets his armor off, makes sure all his guns are unloaded, and then he’s in his bed and unconscious.

he’s pleasantly surprised to wake up in the morning. looks like he didn’t overlook anything life-threatening. 

he’s still kind of a mess, though. the ribs alone are going to take a week at least before he’ll be able to go back out on the street. he could push it, but between the threat of breaking them for real and how much pain he’s in just getting up and going to the bathroom, he’ll allow that in this case, healing is the better idea. 

he doesn’t even think about the bats. their relationship is still rocky at best, though at least it no longer involves any murder attempts. he was given comms to talk with them, but he hasn’t used them very much. 

(he didn’t notice the earpiece getting busted at the warehouse the night previous. he varied between carrying them around in his pockets in case he needed them and actually wearing them, even if he didn’t use them, but he’d been more concerned with saving his damn life than thinking about where he had placed fragile machinery. 

when he finally notices, a couple days later, he figures he can ask barbara the next time he swings by the clocktower. she’s infinitely easier to talk to than any of the other bats are.)

jason’s safe house is well stocked. he doesn’t need to leave for a good while yet. there’s a reason this is his favorite – and most well hidden – safe house.

after a few days, though, he starts going stir crazy. he can’t go out and do anything, but he’s dying by inches in here, waiting to be able to draw a full breath that doesn’t leave him wheezing in pain. there’s only so much daytime tv he can watch, and even when he concentrates on combing through gotham news and networks, it’s to find that a) there’s nothing big happening because b) the bats have been coming down hard on criminals this past week, and c) on top of that disappointment, jason can’t get at his damn contacts to tell him what’s happening on the street level but d) it looks like bats have been prowling along his patrol routes anyway, damn them, and e) apparently it was a good idea to hole up in his best safe house because f) he’s gotten alerts from at least two of his safe houses that they’ve been broken into by people who can only be bats. he assumes more than just the two of them were broken into, but the last one they must have been able to disable his security. 

he spends a pleasant time trying to redesign his security systems when he can’t see what the bats avoided or tripped up on. it’s something else to pay attention to, anyway.

he wonders why exactly they’re trying to find him, but since they’re the ones that broke into his places, he’s not really inclined to give them a response. they can call him if they really need to get into contact with him.

(it’s about then that he realizes the comm was destroyed, and that the only phone number he gave them was to a burner that hasn’t been charged in a week and is currently lying abandoned in his second-favorite safe house.

he doesn’t care that much. 

they’re not a real family. they haven’t been for a long time, if they ever were.)

“fuck,” jason hisses on the ninth day, staring at the date on his phone and the reminder that’s popped up. 

tea with alfred, because that’s one relationship jason is willing to cling to, and it’s fun to hack into bruce’s schedule and figure out what times he’ll be out. jason doesn’t want to have to chance running into him at the manor. he sets the most likely dates in his calendar and goes if he’s feeling up to human company.

jason is definitely up for human company after this week. he’s so damn bored. and honestly, he would love nothing better than to drink tea with alfred and talk about books the way they did when he was younger. 

(being laid up means he’s been reading a bunch of books in his endless free time. he’s just finished frankenstein and he has opinions.)

jason cleans himself up. he tries to make himself look presentable, not like he’s spent a week convalescing after a stupid mistake. he doubts it will fool alfred, but he has to at least try. 

it’s a slightly uncomfortable ride to the manor, but jason grits his teeth and bears it. he parks his bike in its usual spot just outside the manor boundaries, and then he sneaks in. he could blatantly show up, let himself get caught on camera and everything, but that would defeat the whole purpose of constantly hacking bruce’s schedule and only swinging by when he was gone. 

jason walks into the kitchen to see alfred dismally staring down into his tea cup. alfred looks up, something tired and old and sad in his eyes, and then he stands so abruptly that he actually knocks his tea cup off the table. 

jason automatically tries to catch it, but his ribs yell so loudly at it that all jason accomplishes is an aborted motion and a barely-stifled sound of pain. 

“master jason,” alfred said. 

ow, fuck, jason thinks. “you need company for tea time?” he asks, only in part trying to cover that betraying wince. tea and company is what he’s here for, after all. 

“you,” alfred says severely. “need to answer your comms when you find yourself in a bad situation, young man. at the very least, you might find it in yourself to tell us that you are still amongst the living!”

then alfred’s stepping around the table and grabbing jason in a hug. 

“ow, fuck,” jason says, out loud this time. it’s kind of the only response that he can make to that statement. and the hug. 

alfred draws back, eyeing him narrowly. “how badly are you injured?”

“it’s fine,” jason says dismissively. alfred gives him a look. “i busted up my ribs, but i should probably be fine in another week or two.” most everything else has healed up, or at least healed up enough that alfred can’t question him about it.

“the warehouse was quite obviously a trap,” alfred says. 

you might find it in yourself to tell us that you are still amongst the living!

“oh,” jason says. he understands now. his shoulders hunch a little, defensively. “it’s fine. i’m fine.”

“yes, so it appears,” alfred says. “however, we did not know that.”

jason hunches even more defensively. he doesn’t say anything. he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. 

alfred sighs. in that moment, he looks all his years. “please,” he says. “we lost you once. don’t make us believe it’s happened another time.”

“sorry,” jason says. his eyes drop to the floor. there’s some kind of skewed humor, being back here and apologizing like nothing has changed in the time between, even if the apology is for accidentally faking his death rather than stealing cookies when he thought he could get away with it. it’s not very funny.

“would you care to join me for tea?” alfred asks, after a brief pause. 

“yeah,” jason says. he looks up. “i would.”