spiderverse AU

[jesses]

[ so.

so!

tim did warn him about this, right before jason left on his dimension hopping roadtrip of self-discovery. that maybe he needed to be careful about meddling. that maybe there were things he shouldn't try to change. everybody knew that time travel had Rules and stuff, but making little edits across dimensions? jason hadn't seen the harm.

well. hadn't thought very much about the potential harm. it wasn't like he was staying long enough to enjoy the fallout. the whole point was that he would bounce in and do a beneficial murder or a rescue, and then bounce back out like a ghost before anybody could catch on. practice for when he finally got the courage up to make a real decision about his home reality, and what he owed the people still trapped there.

easier to think about the invitation that tim left him with. 'come by any time.' like an old friend coming back into town, no strings attached except the prospect of good company. he holds onto that when he's fighting mobsters in some random dimension to keep them from swarming the next room over, when he leaves a bomb in a warehouse for the clown, when he's an anonymous hand in a dark alley pulling somebody out of the way of a knife or a bullet. he watches a red robin or two from a distance, a little wistfully.

but he knows better than to try and make contact. the rooftops of gotham aren't neutral territory. he'd just be seen as a threat or a mystery to investigate, wasting everybody's time.

dimension hopping has really, uh, put paid to the idea that he was some kind of special snowflake. a lot of the jasons mirror him in all the wrong ways. too stubborn, too angry, too insecure. watching somebody else make the same bad decisions over and over again has really shoved some perspective down his throat.

it's a little weird that his own set of circumstances seems to be out of the ordinary. he's usually older than the jasons he stalks. most of them go the grave and lazarus pit route, although there are a couple worlds that don't seem to have the ensemble cast at all.

he's. he's pretty sure that none of those jasons ever gave up b's secret identity under duress, which is an extra spicy hot coal of shame that he gets to carry around. apparently being susceptible to torture is his own special quality. apparently every other fifteen year old across the multiverse is better at holding on than he was at his own advanced age.

anyway, he thought he was being pretty careful about concealing his tracks. there's always mob money to steal (it's not like a vault can keep him out), and he knows how to keep a low profile in a city. his newest favorite is to set up shop on a rich person's private tropical island while they aren't there, enjoying wifi and hot showers and absolute privacy. he can commute to work. it seems much better than trying to pick out some shithole in crime alley and squatting there with the roaches, hoping not to attract oracle's attention.

which is why he's not expecting to see somebody sitting on the end of the frankly ridiculously sized bed in a billionaire's bedroom, just as jason's coming out of the shower and not wearing a goddamned thing except for a towel tied loosely around his waist, scrubbing his hair dry with another. the arc reactor gate embedded in his chest is fully visible, glowing a faint blue.

his gear is, thank christ, not in this room, which means all he has to do is bounce to get it rather than trying to dive for a weapon. he's become really avoidant in his old age, that his first instinct isn't to pull a trigger when something startles him these days. ]

Uh.

Did I order room service?