Human, Or Something Like It

M hadn’t been intending to work with a partner tonight, especially not another of Nightwing’s brothers, but he’d pretty much resigned himself to the possibility the moment he realized the trail he was following was going to take him to Gotham.

He’s never met the Bat, but fucking his boys has been educational and M’s got a pretty good idea of the kind of man he is.

Not the kind of man to let a Meta work in his city without supervision, for one thing.

He was hoping for Hood again, or Nightwing. Instead, he gets a skinny little kid in red and black who looks way too fucking young to be out on the street, right until you see him move.

Hood’s the only one of his family who kills, the odd man out in a family of true blue heroes, and what M wants to know is why the fuck this kid moves like an assassin.

“I wasn’t looking for a partner, kid.”

The kid’s lips twitch, too small and gone too quickly to be called a smile. “My name isn’t kid. And I wasn’t intending to give you a choice about it, Midnighter.”

“You look like a kid to me. You know I could drop you where you stand, right?”

“I’m not an idiot. But I’ve given you no reason to.”

“Getting in my way is a good enough reason.”

“I’m not intending to get in your way,” the kid says. He flips up his staff and rests it across his shoulders, wrists hooked over the pole. He’d probably pass as relaxed to a civilian. To M, it looks like a threat. “As long as you don’t kill on Gotham soil, you’re free to continue your investigation. I may even be of some assistance.”

“You fancy yourself a detective, kid?”

“I’ve been called the world’s third-best detective, but that’s a very difficult thing to quantify.”

M doesn’t keep up on who the superhero major players are, but Hood had given him a pretty detailed description of this guy, all things considered. “You’re Hood’s brother, aren’t you? The one even he says is crazy.”

This time the quirk of the lips lasts long enough that it could, just about, be plausibly called a smile. “None of my family are famous for their mental stability. But yes, he almost certainly meant me. My name is Red Robin. Apparently, I’m a ‘psycho little freak’.” It’s not Hood’s voice, but the inflection and pronunciation are so perfect it’s creepy. “I think that means he likes me.”

He wants to fuck you but hasn’t admitted it to himself yet, M doesn’t say. “As long as you don’t get in my way, I guess you can tag along.”

Red flips his staff over, almost juggling it, and the tip hits the pavement hard. Despite himself, M’s looking forward to finding out what this psycho little freak can do with it. “As long as you don’t kill anyone, I won’t need to get in your way.”

“There’s a lot worse you can do to a man than killing him, kid.”

Red smiles, and it does nothing to make him look any less of a freak. “I know.”

As it turns out, the weird little fucker keeps his word. He doesn’t get in M’s way, and when the bastard with the information looks like he’s not going to talk even with M’s knife to his throat, the kid does a pretty passable impression of a good cop and they manage to at least get something useful, even if it’s not as much as M was hoping for.

“That was a remarkably uneventful night,” Red says, when M tells him they’re done.

“Disappointed?”

“Of course not,” Red says, and the thing is, even with all of the computer crap in M’s brain it would still almost be convincing if he didn’t know that Vigis are all adrenaline junkies deep down.

“I was made to read people, kid. People with a lot more control over themselves than any human will ever have. You can’t lie to me.”

“Well that’s acutely horrifying,” Red says, in the tone of voice another man might use when discussing the weather.

“Yeah, I just bet it is.” He wasn’t going to say anything, but he needs to know, needs to be sure. He doesn’t think Hood would be hot for someone with the wrong kind of crazy, but this kid is pushing a few too many of M’s buttons. “Let me see your eyes.”

The kid goes still, tense. To M’s very special eyes, he looks like a predator that can’t decide whether it’s the bigger threat, poised between flight and attack. “I wasn’t aware that we had that sort of relationship, Midnighter. Most men at least offer me dinner first.”

“Let me see your eyes, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

The corner of Red’s mouth twitches, so slight a normal human wouldn’t even spot it. “That’s what they call an offer you can’t refuse. Alright, although I think you’re going to be disappointed after Hood.”

He touches something on his mask, and the white-out lenses slide back inside the domino. M has no idea how the fuck that works, but he doesn’t much care.

What he’s interested in are Red’s eyes. They’re a cold slate blue, almost grey, nothing like as pretty as Hood’s. A nondescript color that wouldn’t make you look twice, unless you were trying to look for human feelings. Because there aren’t any on display, not even curiosity.

The kid’s whole expression is shuttered, careful blankness, and this hadn’t answered M’s questions about Hood’s taste, but it has made them a whole lot more urgent. This might be a scared or damaged boy doing his best to hide from a stranger he doesn’t trust, or he might be talking to someone completely lacking in human emotion and empathy. Psychopath if he’s lucky. Something not quite human if he isn’t.

“Well aren’t you a horror show.”

“So people have told me.”

Well, that tells him nothing. Time to try another route of inquiry. “Alright, we had a deal. What do you want to ask me?”

Red considers him for a moment, head tipped to one side in a carnival ghost train impression of curiosity, before he speaks. “What did you do with my brothers?”

Interesting. “You sure that’s the question you want to be asking?”

That gets him something the kid probably thinks is a smile. It’s hot and wet and involves a lot of teeth, and M’s fight computer kicks in automatically, planning routes away from this kid. Through him if necessary.

“Christ kid, you smile like me.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t meant as one.”

“I know. Tell me what you did with my brothers.”

M grins, and knows that this slender weapon of a boy will know exactly what it means. “I fucked them.”

“I had deduced that much. Tell me how.”

“Is your family all this incestuous, or is it just the three of you?”

The boy’s eyes have been hard, reflective glass that tells M nothing except that Red Robin doesn’t like to be known. Now they’re hungry, hollow and dark like the eyes of a Vampire that’s gone too long without feeding. He thinks this, this howling gulf of need so intense it’s making him instinctively reach for a weapon, might be the heart of this boy, the real core behind all the masks.

“What are you going to do if I tell you?”

Red blinks, and just like that he’s the normal boy he wasn’t even bothering to pretend to be earlier. M’s known some liars in his time, but not many who could lie with their souls. “Use it to build elaborate fantasies to masturbate too, mostly.”

That feels like a lie, but M doesn’t know if it’s because it is or just because he’s starting to figure out what this boy is underneath the shiny costume. “You don’t think this is a conversation we should take somewhere else?”

“To be clear, are you inviting me to have a conversation, or to fuck? Because in my admittedly limited experience of the subject, strange men one meets in dark alleys rarely want to do both.”

“I don’t fuck kids.”

“It’s been a while since anyone called me a kid who wasn’t trying to out-vote me at a board meeting. Are you hungry?”

“I could eat.”

“Bat-Burger gives us discounts if we turn up in costume. It was supposed to be a joke promotion, but the burgers actually aren’t bad.”

M’s about 87% sure that the kid is going to hit on him if he agrees, but going on the rest of his family he’ll probably at least be interesting about it, and M’s pretty sure he’ll take no for an answer. “Sure, why not.”

The teller in the burger joint looks pretty terrified when he sees them come in. It’s late enough that the restaurant is almost deserted, only a couple of kids who look like they’re probably homeless sharing a packet of fries at one table.

As they pass the table, Red drops a business card and fifty dollars on the table. “Give us a bit of privacy?”

The kids stare at one another, and then at the money, and then one of them grabs it and the two of them rabbit for the door without looking back.

Red Robin orders himself a burger and a cherry zesti, and M decides to call his bluff by actually ordering enough calories to constitute a meal. Red barely even blinks, so either he’s used to enhanced metabolisms or he’s not short of money or both.

They take their food over to a table in the very corner of the restaurant, where they won’t be overheard. M lets Red take the corner seat since he looks like the kind of person who gets freaked out by having their back to a door. M doesn’t love it either, but he trusts this kid’s work ethic enough to be sure he’ll warn him of anything in his blind spot, plus M can react to any sneak attack a hell of a lot quicker than an unenhanced human.

“What did you do with my brothers?” Red Robin asks as he unwraps his burger. M’s 89% certain the cadence and inflection on the words are identical to when he’d asked the same question earlier.

“I know the Bat doesn’t do Metas,” he says instead of answering. “So what’re you, some kind of cyborg?”

“Just a human,” Red says. 

“Bullshit. Analyzing human behavior is what I was made for, kid. I know how to spot a fucking ringer.”

Red gives him another of his not-smiles, although this one is less openly aggressive. M might even go so far as to call it genuinely amused. “Welcome to a little presentation I like to call, ‘Childhood trauma; it’s a hell of a drug’.”

That might even have worked if he’d tried it on someone with a less intimate knowledge of his family. “That was Red Hood.”

Red gives him a look like M’s threat level just rose a whole fucking lot. “Yes, it was.” He takes a mouthful of his burger, staring at M thoughtfully while he chews it, then he swallows and asks, “Who taught you to be a human being, Midnighter?”

“No one taught me, kid. I figured it out through trial and error just like everyone else.” Red was right, the burgers are actually pretty good although the fries are under-salted.

“No. Most people are taught, at least the fundamentals, by their parents.”

“I had parents once. Presumably they taught me something, but I don’t fucking remember it, or them. But I was modified, not grown, so I guess someone laid the groundwork.”

“Do you know who taught me? Who laid my groundwork?”

M has a nasty suspicion he does. “You did.”

This time the smile is 100% pure homegrown Nightwing, and it’s fucking horrifying seeing it on this lying little bastard’s face. “Give the man a prize.”

“So what, you were grown in a lab somewhere?”

“If my mother could have arranged it, she almost certainly would have done. I was, so far as I know, conceived and born in the usual way. I grew up with my parents, in their large house. I went to good schools. I received a generous allowance, and there were always gifts at Christmas.” He sighs. “There were a lot of nannies. None of them that I remember lasted more than nine months. Most of them quit, I understand. Some were fired. Consuela, who lasted the longest, was dismissed for buying me a copy of Goodnight Moon in Spanish.”

“That’s some fucking top tier racism.”

“The Spanish wasn’t the problem. The book was. My mother set out from the start to create someone who could turn my family’s moderately successful company into a rival for Wayne Industries or LexCorp. Sentimentality of any kind was not part of that plan.”

“So you’re saying your parents wanted a robot for a son, and instead of just getting some mad scientist to make them one they decided to try and turn a human boy into an unfeeling machine instead.”

Red eats a fry. “It’s the inefficiency that bothers me the most. Even quite a small amount of research would have shown my mother that manufacturing psychopaths probably isn’t possible and certainly isn't advisable. I would be the youngest member of my family if it were, and the League of Assassins would have a good deal more power. But psychology is one of the soft sciences, and my parents both had Views on that subject.”

“At what point did they decide to try turning you into a weapon?”

“Oh, that’s almost all my own work. Batman helped, of course, and Lady Shiva. Ra's al-Ghul would like to take more credit than he is due for the person I have become.”

“Kid, I want you to know that I’m saying this as someone who has watched two of your brothers fuck their own inner demons. You are fucked the hell up.”

“Yes, I know.”

It shouldn’t be possible for someone who sees the worst shit people do and is still somehow proud of turning himself into a weapon to look like a sad puppy, but Red is managing it. What’s worse is that it’s all micro-expressions, nothing an unenhanced human would be able to spot, which just makes it all the sadder.

“Hey, I didn’t say that was an insult. I agreed to sleep with the Red Hood, fucked up clearly doesn’t bother me like it used to.”

“You still haven’t told me what you did.”

M considers pointing out that even if they’d done a shit job of it, his brothers had at least tried to pretend they weren’t into any family members, but decides against it. The kid probably knows. “Spanked him hard enough to bruise and then fucked him until he passed out.”

“And?”

M rolls eyes. “And he decided that rape roleplay and getting choked would somehow improve his evening.”

Spotting micro-expressions has kept him alive this long, so he notices when Red’s eyes flick between his mouth and his hands, notices the way Red’s fingers tighten ever so slightly on his cola. “You’ve thought about doing that to him.”

“Or him doing it to me.”

M snorts. “Yeah, you’ll get him to top you right around when Hell opens its first ice rink. You should give pushing him around a bit a try though, I think he’d be into it.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“You know, he told me you were the weird one in the family, and I didn’t fucking believe him.”

“I do my best. Tell me about Nightwing.”

“God, you’re not even ashamed about getting off on this, are you?”

“You have seen them both. And given my background, unhealthy attachments to the family who actually care about me was probably unavoidable.”

“You sure it’s a good idea to know this shit?”

“No. Tell me anyway.”

M thinks about refusing, but the kid isn’t as young as he looks, and if he’s old enough to be out on the street without supervision he’s old enough to decide how much he needs to know about his sibling’s sex lives. “He wanted me to keep the cowl on.”

“And tell him what a good boy he is?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you fuck him?”

“No. Body like that, I made him rub off on me so I could watch him move.” He looks for a reaction. “You’re not as into that.”

“I couldn’t do that for him. Not easily.”

M has never met the Bat, but he knows what sort of man he is, and he thinks he knows what ‘easily’ means. “You’re the heir, aren’t you?”

“On my sixteenth birthday, Batman made me believe that one of my family had gone rogue. Had become the worst kind of monster. He wanted to know what I would do, how I would react when the culprit was someone I loved.

“When it was over, and the worst of the horror was behind me, there were three Batsuits in my size stored with the other spare uniforms.”

“Jesus fuck.”

Red looks down at the table, and M knows him well enough now to be certain that it’s deliberate but that doesn’t mean the hurt it’s hiding isn’t real. “And then he got a new son. I have no idea if the suits are still there. I haven’t been able to bring myself to check.”

“The more I talk to you boys, the more I think maybe someone like me needs to have a long talk with your dad.”

“He didn’t make me. He didn’t break me.”

“But he sure as fuck didn’t fix you either.”

“I never asked him to.”

“He’s your dad. You shouldn’t have to ask.” Red looks at him like he’s speaking in tongues, and M didn’t sign up for that kind of heartbreak, so he changes the subject. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what damage translated into Nightwing and Hood’s weird kinks. What about you?”

The person wearing the red domino is abruptly someone completely different. Possibly female, and he has no idea how the kid is doing that with nothing but expression and body language. The girl wearing Red’s face winks and says, “Try me and find out, big boy.”

“Are you trans?”

The girl shrugs. “I’m not a woman, which is probably all to the best since I’ve been told I can be somewhat sexist.”

“Not being a woman isn’t the same thing as being a man.”

“Yes, I know.” The girl fades, leaving behind the face Red’s been using most often tonight, the idealistic but world-weary professional. At least some of it is as much a lie as the girl had been, but M hasn’t got enough evidence yet to be sure which bits. “To be honest, and this may be the most honest conversation I’ve had since my sister moved to Hong Kong, I try and avoid the entire subject of gender identity whenever possible.”

The kid might be able to lie with his soul, but M’s the very best killing machine money can buy. “Being a woman feels just as much like playing pretend as being a man.”

“Only when I compare like to like. Being a female civilian is significantly stranger than being a male vigilante. And male-ness has a comforting familiarity to it.”

“Why do you even have a civilian identity?”

“Because it is convenient, if never precisely comfortable, and because there is work that can only be done in the daylight.”

“You’re not a daylight person.”

“You would know, Midnight er. No, I’m not. I don’t think I ever have been, even back when I had no idea I would ever have more than one identity.”

Hood had talked about the family personality disorder. “How many people are there in your head?”

That gets him another smile that looks like it belongs on his own face, not Red’s. “I contain multitudes.”

“You’re not even slightly ashamed of being a lying little snake, are you?”

A flash of something that might have been pain, and Red’s face is back to being blank, his eyes empty. M’s pretty certain now that this is the defense mechanism of someone terribly damaged and not the true face of a psychopath, but it’s still creepy as fuck to watch Red just turn off his humanity like that. “I am trying to learn not to be.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.” He hadn’t been entirely sure that the kid had any to hit.

“I enjoy the freedom. I enjoy the skill and art of it. I’m not so keen on the fact that sooner or later everyone I love comes to distrust me.”

Jesus. “How old are you, kid?”

“Eighteen.”

“That's too young to think like that.”

“Not by the standards of my community. The life expectancy of unenhanced vigilantes isn’t great, and it might even be worse for the enhanced ones. I resigned myself to dying before my thirtieth birthday a long time ago.”

“Well that’s fucked.”

Red shrugs. “It still gives me a better life expectancy than many residents of Burnley. At least I chose this life.”

“Did you? Because the Bat starts you kids real young from what I’ve heard. No other community expects kids to pick a job for life before they’re shaving.”

“I… alright I wasn’t shaving at thirteen, because I look like this,” Red says, with a pretty good impression of a self-deprecating smile. “But other kids were.”

“And that’s when you chose?”

“No, that’s when Batman chose me. I made my own choice when I was four.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better is it?”

“Some children know from a young age they want to be doctors, or firefighters. I knew I wanted tights and a grappling hook.”

“And did you know then that it would kill you? That it would fuck you up beyond recovery? That it would leave you feeling like everyone you love distrusts you?”

“Do the kids who want to be doctors know about night shifts and breech births and being held up at gunpoint for methadone? Do you think someone is out there telling the kids in firefighter costumes at Halloween about how burning human flesh smells like barbeque?”

“You really think that’s the same?”

Red sighs. “Batman thinks of us as part of law enforcement, albeit an independent and unconventional part. I don’t agree with him, the law has little enough to do with morality, but superheroes and vigilantes are certainly part of the emergency services. If there’s been a burglary you call the cops. If there’s a twenty-foot ape attacking, you call Superman. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about whether that should have been allowed to happen, but the fact is that it did, and that means we need idealistic kids, just as much as medicine and the fire service do. More, in fact, because no parents are recommending their kids become a vigilante for the good benefits.”

“Kid, look at what I’m wearing. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be heroes, however I feel about those Justice League types. I’m saying they shouldn’t start at thirteen, or however the fuck young Nightwing was when he started out.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“No, I don’t. You really think that’s a good thing?”

Red takes his time, taking a bite of his burger and chewing it thoughtfully before he replies. “I’m damaged. I know that. Maybe it could have been repaired if I’d just emancipated myself, got some therapy, and avoided any events which had the potential to retraumatize me. But I don’t think so.

“You thought I was a psychopath, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted to see my eyes.”

Midnighter shrugs. It had been an entirely justified fear.

“The truth is I am rather closer to that diagnosis than most people are comfortable with. I don’t know if that’s nature or nurture, but that doesn’t ultimately matter. If I hadn’t joined this community, if I hadn’t met my family, built connections and friendships, my peers wouldn’t be people like you and Hood and Nightwing. My peers would be the Trump children and whichever members of the Bush clan are currently being groomed for politics. My peers would be psychopaths, and people conditioned to such callousness that they might as well be psychopaths. I would never have learned how to love, how to compromise, how to relate to people. And since I’m not actually a psychopath, the isolation would almost certainly have driven me some degree of mad.

“I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that I have the potential to be the next Lex Luthor. My parent’s company isn’t especially successful, but it’s successful enough to give me contacts and seed money. After that, it’s just a matter of being ruthless enough to strike it big, and then ending up in the kind of moral echo-chamber where either there’s no one you care about enough to listen to, or the people you do care about are too scared or morally bankrupt to disagree with you. Given the right ground to grow in, the seeds of my mental illness could have grown into something terrible.

“But instead I have people like Nightwing and the Titans, who between them have bribed, bullied and pummeled me into something approaching a real human being. Not the best one, and certainly not the mentally healthiest one, but undeniably a largely stable human being.”

“Kid, you’re creepy but that fact that you could have been a whole lot creepier really doesn’t justify the use of child soldiers.”

“Not even when I have personally been involved in saving the world twelve times?”

“Not even then.” He sighs. There’s really no point trying to convince him, not when the kid has clearly built his whole self-image around vigilantism. “I don’t know why I’m arguing with you about this. Everyone knows there’s no point in preaching to a zealot.”

“I tell people I have no interest in religion, but I’m not unaware that my feelings towards Batman are very close to how people of faith feel about saints or prophets,” Red says.

“He’s just a man.”

“My father is just a man. Batman is something more.”

“And your brothers?”

“You probably don’t want to know how I feel about Nightwing.”

“That bad?”

“He hugged me. Just once, when I was four years old. In that moment, he became the brightest star in my personal constellation, even though we didn’t speak again for nine years.”

“You stalked him, didn’t you?”

“From when I was seven until Batman took me in. Much of what I have learned about healthy human psychology was remarkably strange to me since I was coming at it, as it were, from an outsider’s perspective, but I never had any difficulty understanding the importance of touch in childhood development."

One hug. One hug was enough for a lifetime of obsession and doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about his parents. "And now?"

"He's my brother. The brother I didn't even know I wanted. The teasing and occasional wet willy has done wonders for my hero worship.”

The kid might be able to lie with his soul, but M is the very best that dark money and evil genius could build. “You’ve got a shrine, haven’t you?”

Red grins at him, and M doesn’t hold the fact that it’s too small for most people to recognize it as a grin against him. “As long as I continue to keep the photographs and souvenirs in different safe houses, it’s not technically a shrine.”

“You keep telling yourself that, kid. How has he not noticed? I thought Bats were supposed to be trained in spotting the bad crazy?”

“I have, with some persuasion, come to accept that Nightwing loves me, but there is no hiding the fact that he also finds me extremely creepy much of the time.”

Well, anyone as keen to fuck his own demons as Nightwing had been probably doesn’t find that kind of creepy as off-putting as normal people. “That’s because you are. What about Hood?”

“I never worshipped him.”

“You stalked him though.”

“Not at much as Nightwing. Initially it was largely incidental to my stalking of Batman, but that didn’t last long.” He doesn’t smile, because M’s pretty certain now that he only ever smiles deliberately, but his expression goes soft in a way M wouldn’t trust one bit if he wasn’t talking about his family. “You know when you see someone you are attracted to in an entirely unromantic, unerotic situation, and you realize that maybe you’re more serious than you thought?”

Apollo, wearing yesterday’s boxers and a deeply unsexy ‘I ♥ NYC’ shirt, with plaster in his hair because he’d tried to close the door while he was half asleep and he’d accidentally punched the damn thing right out of the wall. “I do.”

“It was the BTM, three of them, all with guns. The alley smelled of urine and trash, and there was nothing showy about the fight, none of the tricks or quips I’d learned to appreciate from watching Nightwing. He was fighting for his life, and it was quick and brutal and silent.” He pulls an amused expression, and M’s certain that it was planned beforehand, but he’s also sure that with this enigma of a boy that’s no measure of how genuine it is. He’d probably have to stop and think about whether pain was the right reaction to getting stabbed. “It seems very strange that there was a time when brutally efficient violence wasn’t attractive to me, but at the time I was still quite squeamish about it. But I watched him fight and... “

“And started building another shrine.”

“More or less. It’s somewhat less creepy I think, because while he’s my brother by law, and my brother-in-arms, he was dead for much of my early career and so he’s not my sibling in the same way that Nightwing is.”

“Probably all to the good, considering.” Red gives him a smile that says that he’s absolutely fantasized about Hood being his brother for real, because he’s just that kind of fucked up, and M isn’t even surprised. “So why haven’t you made a move?”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“Because I know people, kid. He talked about you a lot. If he knew how you felt, I’d have seen it.”

Red looks at him, and that hollow empty look is back, that look of yawning painful need. A vampire starved of blood. A child, starved of love.

M might be a bastard, but he’s not a monster. “I like him. Hood, I mean. He’s messed up but he’s a good man. And you built your own foundations and we both know you fucked it the hell up.”

“I was a child.”

“You’re not a child now.” He looks like a kid, and he’s still too young for M, but he’s no child. “What assurances can you give me that you won’t hurt him?”

Shutters. Fast as blinking the shutters come down, all the emotional openness Red had been showing disappearing so fast it’s hard to believe it was ever there. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“He’s stuck on you, kid. I don’t understand it, but not even you two would talk about one of your relatives that much during sex if you weren’t hot for them. And I’m prepared to grease a few wheels for you, ease things along, but only if you can promise me that that black hole in you isn’t going to swallow up all the good in him. Because it could, and we both know it.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Midnighter.”

“Assurance, that I’m not about to make an unforgivable mistake.”

“I have been in relationships before.”

“And how much damage did you do?” Red’s expression doesn’t change, but M’s brain is already starting to compensate. He thinks he can see the shape of what the blank mask is hiding. “That much, huh?”

“I think it’s fair to say we hurt each other. But I won’t claim to be blameless.”

“Not what I was looking for.”

Another moment of stillness, and then Red reaches for his belt and pulls out, of all things, a slim wallet. 

“I don’t want your name, kid.”

“Prepaid cards and cash only, Midnighter. I am a professional.” He pulls something out, a photo, or rather part of a photo carefully cut out. It’s dog eared and creased, which seems out of character from what M knows of him. An unexpectedly human touch.

He slides the photo across the table, and M takes it. It shows a boy of maybe twelve, grinning at the camera. His red-brown hair dwarfs his head and flops into eyes of a curious golden color M’s never seen on a human.

“He was called Impulse then. He was going by Flash when he… when he died. He was my best friend. The fastest speedster there’s ever been, but it came with a price. He was only four when that photo was taken. When he was three, he was taken from an artificial environment designed to socialize him as fast as he grew and dropped into a strange time, where everything moved slower than he knew how to cope with, where he knew no one and no one wanted him. He adopted me.”

There’s that sense of age again, so at odds with his youthful appearance. A child and a weary old man and a man in his prime all at once. No wonder people find him upsetting. “He was your son.”

“He was my best friend, and one of the first people I ever loved in daylight. And yes, I had a large hand in raising him.”

“And he’s your reassurance? Another child soldier?”

“No. Flashes aren’t like that. He’s my reassurance because he grew up brave and strong and kind and because I let him go. At the end of every weekend, I let him go home. I only ever bugged his rooms with his permission. He had friends and lovers and family who weren’t me. I loved him, and I let him go when I knew he needed it. That’s my reassurance.”

It’s not enough, not really, but Apollo always did say M was too much of a romantic for his own good. He’s a sucker for young love. And, against his better judgment, he likes this weird little fucker. He wants him to be happy, and Hood as well, and they could work. The odds are stacked against them, and if it does go wrong it will go really wrong, but he wants them to have a chance. “When other people say ‘hurt him and you’ll die’, they don’t really mean it.”

“He means that much to you?”

It had been one great night and a pretty awesome morning. Nothing love songs would be written about, not even by M. But he remembers Hood asking him, so open and vulnerable that the wrong world would have shattered him like sugar-glass, ‘was I good?’. “He does.”

“I don’t want to hurt him, except in purely sexual ways.”

“Well, the good news is that he’ll probably be up for all of those.”

That gets him a smile, one that doesn’t look like a threat even a little bit. “That doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

“And you really think you can do that for him? I’m not doubting your skills, but he’s twice your size and whoever made him was fucking thorough.”

This time the smile Red gives him is one he knows from the inside, and he’s certain that that’s deliberate. Creepy little spook is trying on his mannerisms. “I asked about you, kid. I already know I can’t.”

M’s still not sure what it is about Red’s body language that reads female when he wants it to. It’s not as pronounced this time, he’s not doing it to freak M out, but there’s something undeniably feminine in the way he’s holding the knife that’s appeared in his hand. “I think large parts of me were made just for this.”

M settles back into his seat, and doesn’t worry about the fact that this kid is more than good enough to see that this is a ready position. There’s a knife out and despite the unprecedented honesty on display, he doesn’t actually know this kid well enough to leave himself trapped by the table when weapons are in the mix.

Behind them, there’s an undignified half-scream from the counter, and M guesses the teller just spotted the knife. Poor kid.

“You done anything like that before?”

“Not in the interests of orgasms.” He’s being played with, but he doesn’t think it’s malicious. In fact, it might actually be a genuine attempt at companionship.

He grins. “You’re not supposed to torture the guy, Red.”

“It’s not torture if they enjoy it. And to actually answer your question, no I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it and researching it since I was old enough to understand what it meant that sparring works better than porn for me.”

“And what does it mean?”

“That I should be very careful who I train with.”

“Don’t get a kid sidekick.”

“Batman never went looking for any of us. We found him.”

“Well, that makes me hate the guy slightly less. Doesn’t change the fact that someone who thinks about violence the way you do shouldn’t be training anyone you can’t either fuck or maintain a professional distance with.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“You’d already figured it out, hadn’t you?”

“Of course. Like you said, spotting the bad crazy is what my family is best at. I have no interest in kids, truthfully I didn’t even when I was one, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be a danger to the development and mental health of any child I was exposed to for any length of time.”

“What about Robin?”

This time the smile reaches all the way to his eyes. The knife disappears as quickly as it had appeared, and M can follow the movements involved in putting it away, but most unenhanced humans wouldn’t be able to. “Robin always transcends, but he, or she or they, are not always the same person. I have no doubt that if I ever do don the black, there will be a new kind of Robin waiting for a new kind of Batman. That’s just the way it works.”

“It shouldn’t.”

“Perhaps. But coulds and shoulds are ultimately meaningless. There will always be a Robin, whether or not there should be. But you have my word that I won’t ever be the one raising and training them. Hood on the other hand…”

M pictures it, a fucked up little vigi family, how gentle Hood would be with a kid, how Red would hover, wanting to get involved, knowing it would be better for everyone if he kept some distance but unable to ever go far. The two of them and some kid in red and green building a family. “You’re that serious about him?”

“You spent one night with him, and here you are threatening me to protect him. He’s the kind of man anyone would be serious about.”

M relaxes. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

“Did you ever doubt it?”

“I needed to know you didn’t. Alright, give me a contact number and a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know when to make your move.”