Fic: "You Only Live Twice"

[redbrunja]

TITLE: You Only Live Twice
AUTHOR: redbrunja
PAIRING: Stephanie Brown/Jason Todd
WARNINGS: canon typical violence.
SUMMARY: Stephanie Brown finishes up the year with a few good deeds. Well, at least one.
NOTES: This was my batfam_exchange fic, for Mari.


Stephanie Brown shoved her way off the crowded (and stopped in gridlocked traffic) bus and bolted towards the nearest fire escape.

Okay, maybe three inches of snow and an icy, cutting wind wasn't the ideal weather for racing across rooftops in civilian gear, she admitted to herself as she clambered to the top of the fire escape and started to do just that, but her English 340 final was in ten minutes (worth 60% of her grade). Her compact was in for repairs, the bus was going to get her to Gotham U in about two months, and she was not going to miss a final because of stupid winter weather. Crazy supervillian? That was one thing. Bad weather?

"Not going to happen," Steph told herself and leapt across the gap between two buildings. Her boots skidded a little when she landed, but she kept her feet, kept running forward.

She was eight blocks away from campus and ten minutes away from the start of her final, when she leapt over an alley in which a fight was taking place. Steph pivoted as soon as her toes touched the ground, lunged back to peer over the roof's edge, the rough brick catching at her fuzzy purple gloves.

Red Hood was "cornered" by three thugs right at the back of the alley, the alley's mouth blocked by two other mooks. She used quotation marks around the verb "cornered" because she'd noticed that Red Hood had a fire ladder just behind and to his left, plus he didn't seem to have any trouble with the three guys in front of him. Steph caught the tail end of a taunt, right before Red Hood executed a very nice shoulder throw that sent one of his opponents into a dumpster.

She also noticed the other two people standing at the alley's mouth, that one of them was pulling a grenade from his belt. Steph didn't have Cass's jaw-dropping ability to predict what people were going to, but this bad guy's plan was pretty obvious. He'd clearly sent in his henchmen as a distraction, as sacrificial pawns, and now he was going to lob a grenade into the middle of them. Maybe he'd manage to take out the Red Hood, maybe not, but those three mooks were definitely not making it out of the alley alive.

If Steph was forced to explain her actions, she might mention that pretty much the whole basis of being a vigilante in Gotham was saving people, even if they probably didn't deserve to be saved. Or she could express some curiosity about Jason "Horrible Warning" Todd and her 100% certainty that she hadn't gotten the whole story there (because no one ever told her the whole story, first go around.) Or, and this was the convincing argument, she could mention how Babs' mouth pursed and her eyes got sort of soft and hard at the same time when Jason's name came up.

But (fingers crossed), she wouldn't have to justify this to anyone, because this wasn't a story she planned on sharing with the other bat-children.

Stephanie took two running steps across the rooftop's edge and jumped on the trench-coated, grenade-wielding bad guy.

She landed perfectly, her right foot hammering down on his collarbone, breaking it with a loud crack. He collapsed under her, losing his grip on the grenade.

Steph snatched it out of the air, realized that she hadn't gotten to him before he'd pulled the pin (just her luck, really). She hurled it at the nearest (empty) parked car. It broke through the window, tumbled down into the passenger’s seat.

"You bitch," Bad Guy #2 (the one who didn't have a broken collarbone) snarled at her, and pulled a knife.

The grenade went off.

Steph ducked her head, shielding it with her forearm, but the explosion hadn't done much damage; the car was totaled, of course, there was broken glass (from the car she'd thrown the grenade into, from the cars next to it) scattered across the grimy snow-strewn sidewalk. There was a momentary delay, and then car alarms started shrieking.

A couple of pedestrians halfway down the block darted into the nearest store they could reach.

Bad Guy #2 lunged for her. She blocked his knife with her book bag, the fabric ripping open and spilling her notebooks, a couple of pens, two granola bars and a bottle of water across the ground.

She kicked her water bottle into the guy's knees and when he yelped, she twisted the knife out of his grip, and then dislocated his elbow. While he shrieked, she tugged him forward and into a lamp-post. His forehead hit the metal pole with an echoing twack and he slumped to his knees. Steph slammed his head into the pole once more for good measure and then tied his wrists together, pole inside his arms, with the strap of her former book bag.

Her first bad guy, (the one with the broken collarbone) was scuttling backward, trying to get to his feet, the whites of his eyes showing.

Steph super-casually tugged an electro-batarang out of her coat pocket, tossed it on him, and he was out for the count. Or at least, until the police arrived.

Red Hood was standing at the mouth of the alley, watching her. He was holding a gun next to his leg, loose in his grip, like he'd forgotten it was there. Behind him, there were three limp figures.

He was wearing his helmet, so Steph couldn't see his face and his body language was giving her no clues.

He gave a low whistle, and Steph couldn't tell if it was appreciative or mocking. He was probably mocking her. Jerk. See if she ever saved his bacon again.

"I feel like I should applaud," he said. Okay, that sounded weirdly sincere.

"Well, I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself," she quipped, tipping her head towards to gun in his hand before realizing that pointing out that he was way more armed than she was probably wasn't a smart move. She walked over to her note books, peeled them off the sidewalk. They were soaked and grimy. She tried to flip through it, saw enough to realize that the pages were practically glued together, the ink from her notes running into illegibility.

"Hm, I don't think that's the party line," Red Hood shot back at her, leaning against the mouth of the alley. He'd holstered his weapon, though. Nothing like probably-friendly banter to defuse a potentially hostile situation.

Steph gave him a droll look over her shoulder and tapped her right ear with her gloved fingers. "Tin ears," she continued, "I swear I asked the wizard for common sense, but..." she trailed off, swiping her cell phone off the ground and checking the time.

Steph felt her face contort into an expression of sheer, unmitigated horror. The blood drained from her face, her pulse hammered in her throat.

In her peripheral vision, she saw Jason's posture change. His gun was back in his hand, his feet shifting into a fighting stance, weight balanced lightly on his toes.

She'd be worried, except a bullet would be a mercy at this point. A gunshot was an actually decent reason to skip a final. (It was an in-class essay, had she mentioned that element of horror already?)

She was ten minutes late to her English final.

She was going to fail English 340, kill her GPA, and have to explain the whole situation to her mother. All because she stopped to help a former-Robin, current black hat (...maybe?) who hadn't wanted her help and probably hadn't needed it anyway (story of her life).

Steph dropped her notebooks (they were of no more use to her anyway), left the granola bars and water where they had fallen, and bolted for the Gotham U campus.

She cut across the street on the diagonal, narrowly avoided a cab, vaulted over a parked car, shouted over her shoulder, "You're welcome, by the way," and continued running.

Maybe her English professor would grade on the curve?

~~~~

"I could really go for a nice robbery right about now," Steph sighed to herself. She was perched three stories above the street, arms wrapped around her knees, her heels hooked on the roof's edge and nothing but open air beneath her toes. She'd pushed her cowl back off her face, and the chilly wind tugged at her loose hair, the edges of her cape.

It was 4:37 a.m. on December 25th and she was wishing for a nice fight to get her blood moving. But apparently, even criminals took Christmas off. Or at least, they were talking this Christmas off.

Personally, Steph wasn't a big fan of Christmas. In her experience, Christmases involved her dad committing crime or trying to break out of prison to commit crime, and her mom going heavy on her pills. Before that, it had involved her dad committing crime, and screaming, violent fights between her parents, after which, her mom went heavy on the wine.

It was better now, her mom was better, she was better, but around December it was really hard for Steph not to think about the fact that she hung her coat and kicked her boots into the same closet her dad had used to lock her inside.

She really didn't blame her mom for volunteering for a double-shift on Christmas Day.

She tucked a bit of hair behind her ear, wiggled her toes to prove to herself that they hadn't frozen off. She- Steph wouldn't say she heard something, exactly, but one second she was debating between going home and making chocolate chip waffles or heading a few blocks East into Crime Alley and the next, she spun to her feet, baton extending with a snick.

Jason was standing behind her. He was clearly wearing body armor under his heavy leather jacket, combat boots. If it came to a fight, the two of them throwing down on a slick rooftop, all that mass would probably help him way more than it would hinder, seriously, he wasn't joking around with those shoulders. He'd left the helmet behind, was just wearing a red domino mask. He was also, bizarrely, holding a cup of coffee in his gloved hand. Better than a gun, Steph guessed.

"Shouldn't you be tucked up in bed like all the other good boys and girls?" he asked, the streak of white in his hair catching the ambient street lights.

"Only according to Santa, and he's always creeped me out," Steph said, heart galloping in her chest. She continued, because she could quip all the way to death's doorstep, "plus, he never got me any good presents, so screw him. And there were at least three years I belonged on the nice list. Well, definitely two."

Jason laughed and suddenly - suddenly, despite all the stories she'd heard about him, despite how dangerous he was, despite the people who wouldn’t talk about Jason at all; Steph couldn't imagine being afraid of him.

"I was not once on the nice list," he said.

Steph felt her mouth twist wryly. "Probably because Santa doesn't grade on the curve," she said, and hopped off the edge of the roof, retracting her baton and tucking it away.

Jason stepped towards her, slightly obliquely, and handed her the paper cup. He pulled a package of gas station donuts out of the pocket of his jacket and tossed them to her.

"It's not exactly frankincense and myrrh..." he said with a shrug.

Steph didn't hesitate. She tore open the packaging on the donuts, chomped down two, and then gulped about half of what she discovered was hot chocolate. Which was also clearly from the gas station and kind of watery but also warm and chocolate-ly and thus absolutely delicious.

"Better, " she said after a moment, realizing that she hadn't actually had anything to eat since lunch, technically yesterday. "Sugar and chocolate totally trump gifts of incense. Thanks." She finished the hot chocolate, shoved the cup and the remaining donuts into her utility belt.

He shrugged, shifted his weight. "You too," he said.

Steph's momentary confusion must have shown on her face, because Jason mimed pulling the pin of a grenade, the motions of his fingers and wrist sure.

"Oh, that," said Steph, getting on the same page, and wishing she hadn't already shoved the cup and donuts away, so she had something to do with her hands. But pulling a half-empty pack of donuts out and then putting them back in her utility belt would be weird, right? Yeah, that would be weird.

"I hope it didn't get you into too much trouble," he continued.

Oh, damn, that probably meant that that he'd followed her, seen her English professor refuse to let her take the test and then chew her out in the hallway. Along with about a dozen other rubber-necking students.

"If I wasn't in trouble, I wouldn't know where I was," Steph said lightly. "Besides, who could pass up the chance to smack some bad guys around?"

"Obviously not Batgirl," Jason said easily.

Steph knew she was cheap when it came to approval, and it wasn't the first or fifth or even fifteenth time someone had called her Batgirl with no hesitation, but she still had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning too widely, feeling warm all the way down to her numb toes. She felt pleased, and slightly off balance, and Jason was standing right next to her, and if she was going to feel off balance–

"Merry Christmas," she said brightly, resting one hand on his shoulder and then kissing him. She had to go all the way up on her tippy-toes to reach his mouth, his lips chilly against hers. He inhaled sharply, surprised, and then kissed her back.

His mouth carried the faint taste of smoke, like the boys Stephanie really shouldn't have been kissing, back when she was Spoiler, but his hands were light on her, one cupping her elbow, helping keep her balanced on her toes, the other curled in her hair.

She nipped his bottom lip playfully and then sank back onto her heels. She was grinning wildly, lips tingling, adrenaline singing in her blood.

Jason blinked at her, looking faintly disconcerted and also like he didn't realize he was smiling at her.

"There's a meth lab, two blocks West of Madison Park," he said. " 'M pretty sure they're spending Christmas with their drugs and their money."

"Let me guess," she said, pulling out her grapple-gun. "They're solidly on the naughty list, right?"

Stephanie's Christmas was looking up.