Work Text:
Meet Your Mark
He’d first met Stephanie Brown when he was eight, and ran away from home for the fourth time. She’d been running, too. They’d both had the same idea of hiding out at school over the weekend while they figured out the next step.
They’d both used the same cracked opened window in Miss McClary’s classroom to get inside. They met when Jason threw his dufflebag on top of her sleeping form.
After she’d punched him – thankfully, her aim was off, or Jason was sure his nose would have been broken – they’d had a snack of non-melted s’mores made from her graham crackers, his marshmallows, and a bar of chocolate from Miss McClary’s desk, and exchanged horror stories. Only these ghosts were real: their parents.
“We could run away together,” Steph suggested, and Jason nodded before he thought. He had no idea what running away entailed after you ran, but surely company couldn’t hurt.
“We can’t stay here, though,” Jason told her. That was how he’d been ‘caught’ the other times; he’d been too young to realize that he should have stopped going to school. Sleeping there at night was okay, but if he showed up during the day, then, like the first time, his teacher, having a received a call from his ma, would have sent him home, or like the last time, his dad wouldn’t have even realized he’d been gone.
Now that his mother was so sick she barely recognized him, Jason didn’t think he had anything to lose. He was running away for real this time, and he was never going back. The only thing he was really giving up was school; Crime Alley wasn’t exactly a safe roof over his head.
He didn’t know how to get a better one.
“We could get someone to adopt us,” Steph said, wistfully. “I knew a girl in my last school; her parents died and some other parents took her in and adopted her.”
“How could we be sure the new parents’d be any better than the old ones?” Jason asked. He knew just looking at someone didn’t do any good; if you only saw the good half of Two-Face’s face, he looked like an all right guy.
Half the time his dad was an all right guy. It was the other half that led to his dad drinking and hitting his mom. At least he had it better than Steph; his dad never locked him in a closet.
Never mind that the front door was the only door in their crappy apartment with locks. Steph’s life sounded worse than his; at least his ma cared about him. And he’d never been left with a babysitter who was a pervert.
The spent the rest of the weekend trying not to eat all of Miss McClary’s chocolate – and only mostly succeeding – and hashing out their plans for Monday morning. Jason knew of some abandoned tenement buildings, and Steph wasn’t fussy enough to object.
“You get to kill the rats,” she told him, and Jason just shrugged. There wasn’t enough food for rats in those buildings; the roaches would be fierce, though.
So they set themselves up in the tenement. During the day, they wandered around, looking for dropped change near parking meters, and on days when they hadn’t found enough to buy food, they snuck into one or another of their houses and filched from the cabinets. They also used the shower, and took more of their stuff away.
It wasn’t exactly a way to live, and Jason was sure that they’d soon get caught.
“What else can we do, though, Jay?” Steph asked him, nudging their plastic milk crate serving as a table with one sock-clad foot. It had barely been a month, and she was already outgrowing her shoes. So was Jason. “Go up to some swanky couple’s house and ask ‘em to adopt us?” She giggled. “Yeah, right. No hoity-toity sorts’d look twice at punks like us.”
Jason, however, knew differently. “Maybe, they might…if we found the right mark,” he said, chewing on his lower lip in thought.
Steph looked at him funny, but didn’t ask questions. She complained some about him hauling her down to her house the next day to shower and making her put on a dress, but Jason had to wear his good suit – which wasn’t really all that good anymore, but at least it was clean – so she shut up quick.
Jason made sure not to make fun of the purple ruffles. The color suited her, anyway.
They had to steal some of her father’s stash to afford the bus ride up to the Heights, and once they started the long walk up the driveway, Steph grabbed his hand. The nervous, worried look on her face stalled his protest quicker than any glare.
Besides, it would be a good idea to present a united front. And they’d look cute, like brother and sister, which could only help.
Stephanie rang the bell, and they waited. An older gent answered the door, and didn’t even bat an eye when he saw them there, or when Jason asked to see the guy he’d heard about.
They waited in the entryway, and man, was the place swank. Steph couldn’t help goggling at the suit of armor in the corner; Jason just wondered if the spear in the guy’s hand was sharp enough to do damage.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably wasn’t, he arrived.
Dick Grayson was only six years older than them, but he was really really tall. Jason didn’t like the way Steph looked at him, almost like she’d looked at the suit of armor, but more like his mother used to look at his father, in those hazy memories of when times were good.
“Do I know you?” Grayson asked, and yeah, underneath the unfailing politeness was the hint of a punk. A guy who had an earring and rode a motorcycle way too fast and used to be a circus brat living in a trailer.
Until Bruce Wayne, richest of the rich, adopted him after his parents were killed.
“I’m Jason Todd, and this’s Stephanie Brown,” Jason said. “We were wondering…our parents aren’t dead, but they’re not good, so do you think Wayne’d adopt us, too?”
The expression on the d– on Dick’s face was priceless, but not as much as the excited expression Steph couldn’t quite hide. Yeah, she really liked the idea, Jason could tell.
Hopefully, old man Wayne would go for it. If he didn’t…well. Jason had never really had any kind of intuition, but somehow he knew Wayne wouldn’t turn them away.
And if he did, Jason could always find them another mark; he’d heard the Drakes were loaded and had a boy their age, and Selina Kyle was back in town, and even though she liked cats more than kids, it couldn’t hurt to try.
But still, Wayne looked like their best bet.