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This wasn’t the kind of case Aaron’s team worked. Nobody thought Jason Todd had been killed by a serial killer. Handing his team the case was nothing but politics. The case had been mishandled, and the public wanted answers. There was no evidence to reinvestigate, but the FBI had to be seen doing something, so the BAU was shipped off to Gotham with a heavy hint that, if they didn’t find the real killer, the FBI would choose one.

It was a podcast that did it. Jason Todd was well known in Gotham. He was their modern Lindenburg baby, the dead heir to Gotham’s crown, rags to riches to ashes. His name was on more Gotham buildings than Washington’s name, which took doing on the East Coast. There was the Todd Children’s Research Wing, The Jason Todd Library room, the Todd housing complex, and the Jason Todd Memorial Family Shelter.

The story never really left Gotham, and Garcia’s early work said somebody had killed it on purpose. Jason Todd, dead in a kidnapping gone wrong, thousands of strangers mourning at his vigil and less than a handful at his funeral. The story wasn’t questioned. In Gotham, it was deemed a predictable tragedy. They seemed to see kidnapping as something that ‘just happened’ to people like the Waynes. It was bound to go wrong eventually, especially in ‘that sort of country’, somewhere foreign that was on the news.

For almost a decade, the case had been considered solved. Then City by City put out season fourteen.

City by City, a True Crime Tour of America went to a new state each season, picking one case to spend the season on. Their fans were quite surprised when they announced they’d be covering a high-profile ‘solved’ murder from Gotham.

Gotham was big and high crime, but nobody in the city wanted to do a true crime podcast; it was too easy to get noticed by the wrong people. For people outside the city, Gotham was just too much of a pain to research. The FBI knew better than anyone that Gotham was where information went to die. If people did bother to piece something together, it was all historical stories about the mob. There were a few brave, stupid souls that covered the rogues. Jason Todd was not considered a cold case, so there was no mystery to solve. The details were sparse, and the tragedy was recent. A few minor podcasts covered it, but nobody big. There was nothing much to cover.

The City by City team were some of those serious journalist podcasters, the kind who had articles and books and awards under their belt. They flew to Gotham, talked to locals about the crimes that stuck with them, and realized that there was suspiciously little on Jason Todd. No group was held responsible for the kidnapping. There was no explanation of what, precisely, had ‘gone wrong’ that caused the kidnappers to kill their hostage. There were no public reports from the morgue, so the team turned on the recorders and started digging.

There was plenty to dig up, odd coincidences, holes in the story. They interviewed the classmates, none of whom could claim to be his friend, his mother’s landlady, who saw him just before he left, a woman from a soup kitchen who knew him on the streets. It was their most popular season yet, and suddenly everybody was asking how this had happened. How had the son of one of the richest men in America been murdered, and nobody had cared to figure out how? If the heir to a fortune couldn’t get an investigation, what did that mean for everybody else?

Alicia Rivas, host and lead researcher of City by City , was sitting in one of the BAU’s meeting rooms, trying to look confident, but she was all tells, fiddling with her purse, glancing around.

“We had to leave a lot of stuff out. It, uh… we didn’t want to cast too much doubt on the Waynes.”

“Because they’re a grieving family, or because they might sue?” Rossi asked.

“Both. And they’re surprisingly private. They’re all over papers for parties, but we asked around, and apparently all the local journalists know Jason Todd is one of those topics that’ll end your once in a lifetime chance at an interview. You don’t ask Bruce Wayne about his dead parents, you don’t ask him about his dead son, and, honestly, you don’t pry too much about his living kids either.”

She looked around.

“This is for investigation, right? None of this goes to press?” she asked.

Aaron nodded.

“We talked in the show about how Jason never really made many friends at his new school. He was a good student, but… Gotham’s one of the most class divided cities in the world, and Jason went from the bottom to the top. The teachers talked about him fondly, but even his report cards- well, you listened to the episodes. They didn’t treat him well until he died.”

She sighed.

“But they knew some things. He came to school with a lot of bruises. Could be bullying, but we didn’t want to put some teen bullies in the national spotlight either. We talked on the podcast about him having a fight with his father, but he apparently had a rocky relationship with his foster brother too.” All her body language screamed discomfort, but she clearly cared about the case. “Look, we didn’t want to put suspicion on them. Mr Wayne’s always seemed like a grieving father, and I’ve never bought the nastier allegations.”

“About him taking in a new, similar looking boy every time the last one becomes an adult being more than coincidence?” Prentiss asked.

“That’s… yeah.” Rivas laughed.. “We actually dug up one story where he went to meet some business partners. Somebody sent a boy to his room to bribe him, and he went on the warpath and got half his host’s company arrested. ”

“Everything we heard made it look like he was in some deep grief,” she continued. “Like… the tabloids were even noting how much weight he was losing. His stocks fell, he stopped making public appearances and attending parties for a bit. I always got the impression he really was a grieving parent.”

“It isn’t uncommon to regret a crime of passion,” Rossi noted, “but Jason’s death was not that.”

“Unless he lost his temper and set the explosion to hide the evidence,” Reid said.

“There’s another thing we didn’t mention. The older brother, Richard Grayson? He was hiking across southern Asia, right?” Rivas added. “Well… we couldn’t find any records of it. There’s some pictures on social media, but you’d expect somebody would have taken a photo or mentioned seeing him. Nothing we wanted to bring up, you know? But it might be worth looking into.”

Barbara had protected the city as Oracle and Batgirl, but she doubted even Bruce knew how much Oracle protected the Bats.

The younger Bats often thought of her as a hacker first and foremost, but information wasn’t always a matter of hacking. Information was about people first and foremost, on forums or phone calls. She massaged timelines to avoid connections between Bruce Wayne and Batman, she oversaturated Richard Wayne sightings to keep the paparazzi away from his work in Bludhaven, and she spent time on conspiracy theory forums, leading conversations away from inconvenient truths and towards convenient ones. 

She’d done basic cleanup on Jason’s case years ago. Dick’s ‘overseas vacation’ was booked on flights with extra seats. Leslie’s notes were carefully edited and uploaded to legal databases. Most importantly, she erased every trace of the Joker in Ethiopia. The Joker wasn’t good at ordering events, he wouldn’t remember exactly when he was in Ethiopia, but he wasn’t stupid. If they left up that he killed Robin in Ethiopia the exact same time Jason was killed in Ethiopia, he would make the connection.

Now that the issue was getting national attention, she realized how sloppy the job had been. Sheila Haywood was still listed as Jason Todd’s biological mother in a record. The Joker knew he had killed Sheila Haywood’s son, Robin. With Jason’s amused blessings, she made sure any possible source listed his mother as Catherine Todd.

She deleted an old account of a Batman sitting in Ethiopia by making the blog domain, already not seen by anyone including the writer in years, expire early before somebody stumbled on it. She gave Dick’s travels a plausible transaction and phone record.

It wasn’t a pleasant process. Jason was back. She could Venmo him a few bucks and ask him to bring take-out, and he’d be there with food, ready for a TV binge.

But it had happened. While she’d been in a hospital bed, overdoing physical therapy and getting into screaming matches with her equally traumatized father, the Joker had beaten him to death. The first time she wheeled off the sidewalk and across the grass was the path to his grave. One of Oracle’s first journeys into government records was finding the morgue notes her father wouldn’t show her.

She hated being around Jason sometimes, because they were both frozen in those few months. A part of her would always be laying on the floor of her childhood home with a bullet in her guts. A part of Jason would always be choking on blood on a warehouse floor, waiting for his father. It was disgusting, how much of them the Joker still had. It was embarrassing, the moments where they were just two bleeding teens, frozen in time.

That’s what that podcast had made her. It’s what it had made all of them. Jason was only going out as Red Hood, withdrawing from public life. Bruce was on another overprotective streak and had tried to pull Stephanie off patrol over some nonsense, Dick had gotten in a screaming match about it, and Tim was running from the manor to the clocktower to Jason’s safehouse, trying to fix everyone. Cass was hiding in the clocktower, and Damian, who even Dick didn’t have the energy to handle, was acting out for the attention he desperately needed.

Barbara did what she always did when bad memories kept rattling the door; she threw herself into her work. She ignored Cass on her floor, trying to navigate a family dynamic that was shifting back to a time before her, an old grief. She didn’t respond to Dick’s texts as he tried to find support. She didn’t reach out to Jason and try to pull his head out of the bloody warehouse.

She stayed where she knew what to do. She stayed where she was powerful. She rewrote the past. Jason Todd’s body had not been found next to Sheila Haywood’s. Dick Grayson had been in the mountains, not space. Jason Todd was dead, not breaking down in a shitty safehouse near the docks.

At least there was only one body to look at in this case, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. Penelope hated that she knew how to read this stuff, all the little formal notes that meant horrible, horrible things.

“The kidnapping story doesn’t make sense. This wasn’t a beating,” she’d told Derek. “This boy was tortured. And… not by somebody who planned for him to survive. There was a lot of internal bleeding, including into his lungs. Even without the burns, he probably wouldn’t have lived long. No sexual trauma, but the coroner did note the clothes had been put on post-mortem.”

“We’re gonna find who did this, babygirl,” Derek said.

“What did you find about the travel records?” Hotch asked.

Penelope shifted uncomfortably. If she was wrong about this, she’d be causing a lot of trouble for no reason.

“There’s the trip photos, but the podcast team was right; there’s no photos or articles, which is weird, but not, like, weird weird. There’s other records. You know, some money transfers, plane tickets, but… okay, this could just be me being paranoid, but that stuff, the money and the tickets? It doesn’t look right. Not obviously. If I’m right, whoever planted this is very good. I can’t even prove it, but it’s too clean. If you asked me to plant data, this is exactly how it would look. And I can’t prove those photos were edited, but they’re all in locations that have running cameras. I went to check the weather to make sure the background matched the dates they were taken, and I could confirm exactly how the sky looked on every single date. That’s not normal.”

Richard Grayson had been a boy himself. She wanted to believe the smiling boy in the pictures wasn’t somebody who would hurt his foster brother, but this wasn’t a job about things being how you wanted them to be.

“I hate to say it,” Prentiss told them, “but there is a motive. Richard Grayson was never formally adopted. Jason Todd was, about a year before he died.”

“To a boy who already lost his parents, that could be a stressor,” Rossi noted. 

“We need to be on the ground in Gotham,” Hotch said. “Garcia, look into Grayson’s other trips and see if there’s a pattern.”

While the team packed and boarded the plane, Penelope went through the boy’s many, many overseas adventures. There was a pattern. For a world traveler, it was very hard to find anything besides plane tickets to imply the man had ever been overseas. 

During her research, she was also becoming an expert in the celebrity gossip around Richard Grayson. He was charming, less of a trainwreck than his father, but prone to high profile flings. Two weddings, one to a socialite and one to a model, no divorces, but never made it to signing the papers. 

She dug deeper, going from public information to government records.

Old foster records where placements only lasted a few days, reporting a furious child out for vengeance, a child who snuck out at night with a kitchen knife to find the man who murdered his parents.

A brief stint as a cop in famously corrupt Bludhaven, written up twice for ‘use of unapproved methods’, the actual reports seemed to involve a volatile temper and dislike of authority.

Endless hospital records of injuries from impulsive and wild stunts. 

Tell-alls from exes about a boyfriend who lied about where he’d been and made promises he never kept.

And people around the Waynes… tended to disappear. Bruce Wayne’s lovers turned up dead (and he would never say what happened the night Vesper Fairchild died, even to keep himself out of prison.) When Timothy Drake began to bond with his recovering father and leave his foster situation with the Waynes, somebody hired a hit on Jack Drake.

The Waynes were a perfect little family, and people that threatened that tended to disappear.

Against all odds, the BAU may have been going to Gotham to catch a serial killer after all.

Emily had taken this job to get away from politics, as if the FBI wasn’t nothing but. It should be about where they were needed, not where it looked best to put them, but there were federal politics, local politics, even office politics. She was lucky her team, at least, put lives over data.

They were needed in Gotham. The city was ravaged by serial killers and mass murderers, but too many agents had died here. They eventually decided Gotham jobs needed Gotham training, and left the city to vigilantes and locals. The FBI team that worked in Gotham was federal only in name, generalists trained on how to handle local killers, but often left without a specialized hostage negotiator or profiler.

After years of pushy outside investigations that were ignorant of local politics, then years of neglect, she hadn’t expected them to be welcome in Gotham, but there was a genuine hostility in the eyes of the local officers.

“Sorry about them,” Commissioner Gordon said, leading her team away. “There was an Arkham breakout just before that damn podcast came out, and now the whole country thinks we mishandled a case on the other side of the world. Not what grieving people want to hear.”

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Emily said, “and we don’t want to step all over your work. We want this case solved, same as you. Think of us as an asset, not competition.”

“I’m well aware this is no game. I met the boy, you know. I don’t care what those teachers said, you couldn’t ask for a sweeter, more sincere child. Came right up, shook my hand, and thanked me for a local initiative I’d been working on. Everyone else at the gala congratulated me on the political win, but that boy thanked me.”

“Told him it was nothing, of course. No more personal heroics once you get promoted, and this kid, twelve years old mind you, starts talking about specific parts of speeches I’ve given, bills I’ve promoted. Then he starts asking me how I’d feel about doing more for harm reduction for addicts and throwing out statistics.” Gordon sighed. “When I heard what happened to him- well, Gotham lost a bright light. With that compassion, he would’ve used being a Wayne to do a lot of good. I damn well thought we might lose Bruce too.”

“Do you have any insight on the missing parts in the case?” Emily asked. “Why Jason might have left the country or why the kidnappers would have killed him?”

“From what I heard, Jason was a very independent kid. It doesn’t surprise me that if he decided something needed to be done in Ethiopia, he’d find a way to get a ticket. Honestly, all Bruce’s kids are like that; they just do what they want. Last time I talked to Cassandra, she walked off mid conversation.”

“And what needed to be done?”

“No idea. He was found near an aid caravan, right? Maybe he just wanted to do some good.”

That didn’t sit right. There was plenty of good that needed to be done in Gotham. Jason would know that. Wouldn’t a child want to help other kids like him?

“What else do we have on the case? Why was this never pushed?”

“Politics, I assume. Ethiopia’s a bit out of GCPD’s jurisdiction, but the Waynes mean a lot to this city, and Jason being a Park Row kid meant more. If they didn’t know who did it, the city would be calling for blood.”

Like they were now, but at least they wanted government accountability, not a foreign war. Was it as simple as that?

“How bad does this get, if they don’t get answers?”

The commissioner sighed.

“Honestly? It gets bad. A lot of people in this city feel like the world’s turned its back on them, and a dead Wayne boy is the perfect nerve to hit. I give it a week before we see a riot.”

They weren’t welcome in the GCPD, and, hell, Derek was used to hostile locals, but this was a level of territorial you expected from small town sheriffs who’d never had to cooperate in their lives. He was glad to finally get out of the precinct and start driving, but that took him right into Bristol.

The car ride up to the rich neighborhoods felt claustrophobic. Hotch and JJ were still at the station, so Rossi and Prentiss had the front seats. He wondered how Jason Todd had felt making this drive for the first time. Had he felt like he’d been raised out of hell, or had he been grieving the world he’d left behind?

“This bugs you more than usual,” Reid said. “You usually do well with the locals, but you didn’t, and you’re standing more tensely than usual.”

“Do you have to do that?” Derek asked.

“I can’t help what I notice.”

Derek could point out that he could help what he said, but he knew it wasn’t that easy. Besides, it wasn’t bad to talk about this stuff.

“I just hate how people talk about this kid, you know? Either they talk like he had this perfect life because he lived in a mansion, like money negates the trauma of being homeless and his mom dying, or they act like… like his background means something’s wrong with him.”

“Are you worried people see you that way?”

Derek sighed. He knew Reid didn’t mean to be blunt.

“Nah. I’m used to it. I can defend my reputation, but… what’s a dead kid supposed to do?”

If it turned out Wayne was a predator, Derek might have to stay back at the hotel. He knew how it felt to be the kid who got handed a future and ended up strangled in the strings attached.

“I’d have hated moving out here as a kid,” Derek said, looking.  “You can’t even see the houses.”

Just iron gates and trees. No neighbors to overhear if anything went wrong.

The Wayne Manor didn’t look like it belonged in America. It should be some tourism spot in Europe, or a set piece in a vampire movie. Hotch buzzed them in at the gate, and a fucking butler met them at the door.

“Who still has butlers?” he whispered.

“Around twelve thousand people in the US,” Reid told him. “Though most of us picture a butler as a British man, Swiss butler training is more common these days and about half of them are women.”

“Right this way, gentlemen,” the butler said. They were led back to an actual parlor. The whole thing, the butler, the chandelier, felt like a joke.

The first image of Richard Grayson Derek got was the man storming out of the sitting room, his father looking exhausted behind him. He didn’t even look at them, shoving his way past and going deeper into the house. Grayson’s body was tight with fury, nothing like the smiling boy in the papers.

“I’m sorry about my eldest,” Bruce Wayne said. “This whole thing has been difficult for all of us.”

He didn’t look much like the media image of Bruce Wayne either. He had deep bruises under his eyes and stubble across his chin. Seeing clips of him, you wouldn’t think he had the presence to be ‘somber’.

“I can’t imagine,” Rossi said gently, coming forward to shake his hand. “You trusted us to handle this case, and you were failed. If this had been handled properly, you wouldn’t have to be going through all this again, and I am so deeply sorry for that.”

There was no accusation in Rossi’s words, even knowing Bruce might be an accomplice.

“It was a politically difficult situation. Pushing too much on a foreign investigation was bad for international relations,” Bruce said. “Jason never would have wanted his death to be used as a justification for war.”

“Of course,” Rossi said, taking a seat. “You know, I never actually understood what brought Jason to Ethiopia.” 

“Honestly, I still don’t understand it. We’d been arguing and he wanted to go to his Mom’s old apartment, and then he just… took off.”

“What was the fight about?”

Bruce sighed heavily.

“He wanted to go hang out in the city at night. I suppose, for a boy that had been living on the streets for years, it sounded absurdly restrictive to have a curfew, but Gotham isn’t a safe place, especially for a Wayne boy. Letting him wander around Park Row during the day was hard enough on my nerves.”

“That’s a familiar argument in the BAU. The things we see can make us a bit overprotective of our own kids. I’ve met more than one agent that can talk down a gunman, but can’t figure out the first thing to do with a teenager.”

Bruce smiled, drawn but fond.

“Yes, I find myself regularly quite unable to out-stubborn any of my children.”

Looking at Bruce, Derek really couldn’t see anything other than a grieving father.

“And with so many of them too,” Rossi said. “I heard Dick and Jason clashed quite a bit.”

“At first,” Bruce admitted. “Dick and I had been arguing about his future. I was quite worried about him dropping out of college, and here was a new boy who took his education quite seriously. I haven’t always been the best at speaking to my children, and I think Dick felt replaced. And Jason, of course, wasn’t willing to put up with that sort of treatment, even an older brother he was quite starstruck by, but they sorted things out between them. They were just starting to really learn to be brothers when-”

He trailed off, looking at the back of his folded hands. Derek could see Reid looking at Bruce’s hands too, examining the scars. Derek wondered what he was seeing.

“How did Dick handle it?”

“Very badly, especially since I couldn’t contact him to come to the funeral. He had to find out at an internet cafe. It took a long time for us to be able to sit through a peaceful dinner after that.”

Derek half listened from the doorway. Rossi began to divert the questions back to the day Bruce landed in Ethiopia, walking him through getting off the plane to arriving too late at a burning warehouse. Bruce admitted to dressing the boy in clothes as what he was wearing had been shredded. It could be a father trying to give his son’s body dignity, or an excuse to remove DNA evidence.

Derek caught a glimpse in the hallway. As quietly as he could, he slid back out the door. In the hallways was another Wayne boy, Timothy Drake, who’d clearly been listening in, even though he fixed Derek with an innocent tilt of the head.

“It’s fine,” Derek told him. “I’d be curious too.”

“Bruce didn’t do it,” Timothy said.

Derek wanted to ask how he was so sure of that. He would have never even met Jason. He’d moved in years after the boy died.

“We don’t think he did. Why did you feel like you needed to tell us that?”

“Because of the questions you were asking? It was obvious you think-” Timothy looked at him, eyebrows pinching, then shooting up. “Wait, you think it was Dick ?!”

“We don’t think it was anyone,” Derek assured the boy, trying not to show how close Tim was. “Just trying to clear things up. Was there anything you wanted to share?”

“Look, I get you guys are probably under pressure,” Timothy said. He spoke with surprising authority for a teen talking to a federal agent, “but you’re just picking open old wounds for no reason. We’ve got enough grief in this place.”

Timothy Drake had lost his mother and his father in the last few years. 

“There’s things about the official story that don’t match the documents. We have to look into that, even if it’s just to get a clearer image of what we already know.”

“Just watch what you say. Dick and Bruce are the types to blame themselves for everything.”

The teen glared him down and walked out without another word.

They’d initially thought JJ would be the right person to speak to Dick. He might underestimate a pretty girl or get a bit loose-lipped. After meeting him, they’d called in Aaron. 

Thankfully, Dick agreed before they had to take him in. With the current tensions, bringing a Wayne boy to the station would heat things up. He didn’t meet them in the sitting room. Aaron had to meet the boy in the gardens.

Richard Grayson was looking up at the clouds. He didn’t turn his head as Aaron approached.

“Gotham must like you guys,” he said. “Nothing but sunshine, the whole time you’ve been here.”

“The people don’t seem as fond of us.”

“Gothamites don’t like anyone.”

Aaron took a seat. 

“I’m Agent Hotchner. I wanted to get your view on things, Mr Grayson.”

Grayson finally met Aaron’s eyes, his expression cold.

“Well, Agent Hotchner, my little brother died.”

“And I’m deeply sorry for your loss, but we need help. Do you have any idea why Jason Todd was in Ethiopia?”

“None. We hadn’t talked in weeks. By the time I got back, Jason was already buried. I imagine you know more than I do.”

He was too flat, too avoidant.

“Do you believe the story of a kidnapping gone wrong?” Aaron asked.

“Yeah. Lord knows I’ve been kidnapped plenty of times,” Dick said with a shrug.

“For ransom? This wasn’t the work of somebody looking for ransom.” Aaron set down the photos from Jason’s autopsy. “We’d expect the rope abrasions and burns, but this here? His skull’s cracked from being struck with something. We’ve got a broken femur, broken wrist, and three broken ribs. Blood in the lung, pre-mortem bruising. Doesn’t this look more like torture?”

Richard was staring at the autopsy photos.

“God, Jay.”

He reached out to touch the photo and Aaron wavered. There was a lot pointing to Richard Grayson, and a killer could act, but that look in his eyes-

“What do you think you’re doing?” Bruce Wayne asked, striding across the grass. He took one look at Dick’s hands and snatched away the photos. 

Dick was already on his feet, but Bruce pushed himself between Aaron and his son.

“You have no right, no right, to use photos of Jason’s body like that. I made sure Dick never had to see those pictures.”

“Bruce, calm down,” Dick said.

“I have put up with your ridiculous insinuations, but this is over the line. You are not welcome here, and if I see you near any of my children, I will take action.”

He walked back to the house, arm over his son, and Aaron stood there until the butler came to escort him to the gate.

“Unfortunately, Wayne does have the power here,” JJ said. “He has a lot of influence in the press, and we’re already on thin ice.”

“That boy is a politician,” Emily said, watching the tape of Grayson talking to Hotch. “I know those expressions. He’s lying.”

“Not here,” Rossi said, tapping the screen where Dick saw the photos. “That’s genuine distress.”

“You think he’s innocent?” Emily asked.

“No, I think he’s capable of guilt and hired the hit. We know the League of Assassins works out of the area he claimed to be traveling through. We’ve been working on the assumption that he’s a remorseless killer, but what if he genuinely thought killing Jason was necessary?”

“Maybe that’s part of why his Dad’s protecting him,” Morgan said. “Garcia’s been calling in about the Ethiopia end of the investigation. A ton of local coverage from the area has disappeared in the last few months, even blog posts from the area.”

“So what’s our in?” Emily asked. “If we can’t press the family, who does that leave?”

“Rena Hernadez doesn’t know anything that wasn’t on the podcast,” Reid said, sounding apologetic. Rena had dated Jason Todd for a few weeks about a year before he disappeared. 

“Which has fuckall information from her,” Morgan confirmed.

“But I did find something,” Garcia said. “The official Ethiopian investigation is a complete dead end. Jason Todd visited in the middle of a war, and the government’s changed hands multiple times since then. They said everything left should be with the FBI.”

“And we have nothing,” Morgan said.

“But I started thinking, the cover-up’s mostly been online,” Garcia continued. “Jason’s autopsy records are from a hospital in Chiro, so I had my translator talk to the local libraries to try to find hardcopy articles from the time that couldn’t be erased. There isn’t much on his death, but one article did mention the body was found in a storage facility along the A19 that was being used by Doctors Without Borders.”

Maybe it really was just a charity mission, Emily thought. Maybe a scared kid with too much money and freedom ran into a warzone and died, simple as that.

She thought about the fractured skull and rope burns. She thought about the landlady describing him running out of his mother’s apartment. She thought about how much had been deleted.

“We find an angle,” Rossi said. “We talk to people who knew Dick Grayson at the time. Hell, we try to talk to the damn flight attendants.”

Because this, this wasn’t politics. They weren’t in Gotham to keep the media happy anymore. This was a dead boy. This was a coverup. This was why their team existed.

After avoiding the mansion since the podcast started releasing episodes, Jason was finally in tonight. Tim wasn’t surprised. Since that agent had shown Dick the photos, he’d been getting that Vigilante Look they all got before they did something really stupid. As much as Jason liked to pretend he didn’t care, once Babs dropped that Dick was ‘in a bad way’, he’d caved to dinner.

Jason was in the kitchen with Alfred while Tim and Duke dragged Dick in to watch a dumb action movie and dumped Damian next to him. After all, Damian was a constant source of problems and Dick loved fixing problems.

When Bruce got back from a JL meeting they all gathered around a table.

“So,” Dick says, “the feds think I murdered Jason, and I’m pretty sure Bruce confirmed he’s part of the coverup by kicking them off the property.”

“Why?” Tim asked. “I thought we agreed Bruce would be playing oblivious.”

“They were showing Dick Jason’s autopsy photos,” Bruce said.

There was an awkward silence, everybody not looking at Bruce, Dick, or Jason, then Jason leaned back.

“He got to see them? C’mon! I haven’t gotten to see those yet.”

“You won’t be seeing them ever,” Bruce told him.

“It’s my corpse,” Jason said, apparently trying to explore new, exciting angles of his  already pain-in-the-ass PTSD. “Ugh, this whole thing. I thought this would blow over and it just keeps getting worse. Do you know how many dead kids in this city don’t get their murder solved?”

“We need somebody to direct them towards, somebody already dead,” Tim said.

“Fuck no. Only one person killed me,” Jason said. “I’m not putting that on somebody else’s name.”

“If we don’t pick somebody,” Tim said, “the FBI will, and they might pick a living person’s life to ruin. Besides, how long before somebody decides to excavate your grave?”

“Please tell me we don’t have to put a fake corpse in there,” Duke said, with the dread of a student hearing a horrible homework assignment.

It would be pretty much impossible. They’d need bones of the right size and age, then to recreate the right injury pattern, then manage to get it into the coffin without the FBI noticing. Even if they wanted to commit a bunch of pretty heinous crimes, they wouldn’t pull it off.

Somehow, the argument over how to handle things ended up being Damian and Tim yelling across the table, but neither of them had an actual plan. Damian had dug his heels in for the fake body plan, Tim was supporting plan ‘frame a dead guy’, and Dick occasionally jumped in to remind them that they wouldn’t be doing either.

“Well what are we doing?” Tim said, and he knew this wasn’t as personal to him. He hadn’t been there, he had just dealt with the fallout, just like he was doing now, just like he always did. “Because last time one of us got accused of murder, it was a disaster.”

‘Bruce deciding to stop talking to anyone, abandoning Bruce Wayne, and becoming Batman full time’ levels of disaster. ‘Dick breaking Jason’s memorial case trying to punch some sense into him’ disaster.

“I tell them the truth,” Jason said.

“Obviously out,” Bruce said.

“Give me some credit. Not the Robin part. The ‘I’m alive and my killer’s still out there’ part. Maybe even ‘my shit bio-mom sold me out to my murderer’ part.”

That was… not something Tim had heard about. Nobody had ever mentioned Catherine not being Jason’s bio-Mom. The Joker was in Ethiopia, Bruce told Jason not to go, Jason ran in. That was the story. 

Nobody, not Bruce, not Jason, ever implied they were there for something other than a mission. Duke wasn’t able to hide his surprise at all.

“If Joker connects Sheila Haywood’s son Robin to Jason Todd-” Bruce began.

“-we can talk about exactly what to tell them,” Jason said, “explain why they can’t mention Sheila.”

Tim knew what Jason was offering. Being legally dead gave him safety, from the media pressure of being a Wayne and from having to protect his identity. Coming forward to the FBI risked that. Jason didn’t trust the DMV, let alone the FBI.

“Jay, are you sure?” Dick asked.

“I want this to be over,” Jason said.

They’d been getting tips since they entered Gotham. Since the actual murder was overseas, it was mostly people bragging about their celebrity encounter with Jason Todd or peddling bullshit. This message was different. This message went right to Garcia.

[I can tell you what happened in Ethiopia. I will meet Agent Derek Morgan at Hallowed Grounds Cafe at 10:30 AM.]

Garcia had worried it was a trap, but Derek pointed out it was a cafe in broad daylight. Besides, the investigation was stalled. He wondered if it was one of the younger Waynes. He’d talked to Tim in person, and the boy was clearly very perceptive. Duke might sympathize with Jason, another kid from the bad part of town. Damian, small for his age, could easily have overheard something he shouldn’t have.

He showed up at nine, taking a seat towards the back. At ten, somebody sat down across from him. It was not a young Wayne. The man was large and well muscled, thin scars across his lip, nose, and brow, and a streak of white in his hair.

“Hey. Coffee’s good here, huh?”

[Is that him?] Garcia asked in his ear.

“Yeah,” Derek told the stranger honestly. It was damn good coffee. “Are you the one who emailed Ms Garcia?”

“We can talk once you’ve got the comm and camera out,” the man said, pointing to his ear and top button. Which was damn creepy. He’d spotted them in an instant. That or he had inside intel.

The man set a water glass in the middle of the table.

“I have all the answers you want, but not if you don’t drop those in here.”

[I’m leaving it up to you Morgan,] Hotch said. [You’re the one in the field.]

[We need an eye on you, handsome,] Garcia told him.

Derek looked at the man in front of him. He was younger than Derek had thought at first glance, maybe mid-twenties. His accent was the same as Derek had heard in the poorer parts of Gotham, and his scars spoke to a rough life, but he looked tense.

“It’s fine,” Derek said, but he still winced when the electronics hit the water. “So, what did you want to tell me?”

“Well, for starters, what do you know about people returning from the dead?”

“Rare,” Derek said, “but more common by the year. Mostly involves capes and such, but us normal folks get caught up too.”

They'd had a case in New Mexico that hadn't broken until some Flash related nonsense had brought back a victim. She wasn't from the timeline where she'd died, but, faced with her alternate self’s murder, she admitted to cheating on her boyfriend. They were able to finally put together that the unsub worked at a hotel and targeted people having affairs, which explained why none of his victims had been known to go there.

The man grinned.

“Well here I am, the loose end nobody knew to tie up.”

Morgan studied the blue eyes, the strong nose, the shape of his ears. If this man was claiming what Derek was pretty sure he was claiming, he was the real deal or a damn good forgery of what an adult Jason Todd might look like.

“Got any proof of that?”

“Happy to give you a DNA sample to prove it. My grave’s empty too, and I can show you pictures of me with various associates of the Wayne family going back half a decade. Yes, they know. They've been respecting my wish to stay legally dead, and I'm taking my chances that you agents will do that too.”

Corpse or con artist, he'd get the most out of this if he went along with it.

“Why? I imagine being dead makes life a lot more difficult.”

“Cuz I’m not a Bristol kid. You’ve seen how Gotham feels about that dead kid. You think I could go walking around Park Row?”

The mannerisms were dead on for the interviews where Todd had been less camera shy. Same accent, same playful cadence, same wide gestures.  (Same caution, back to the wall, eyes on the exits.)

More than the similarity, it was the phrasing that stuck out ‘That dead kid ’, like it wasn't him. That would be a stupid slip for a fake this good, but a normal way of distancing for a trauma survivor. Or… not survivor. Trauma reviver?

“There’s more to it than that,” Jason said. He pulled out a folded piece of paper. “But I’ve gotta explain Ethiopia. Take a look.”

Morgan unfolded the paper carefully. It was a birth certificate, Jason Todd, born to Willis Todd and… and S.

Jason Todd’s mother was Catherine Todd.

“Had a fight with B and was missing my parents something fierce. Remember the landlady saying I came to look at their stuff? Well, this is what I found. I had no idea Catherine was my step-mom. Maybe they'd been planning to tell me when I was older. Looked into who S could be, tracked her to a medical camp in Ethiopia.”

He gave a long sigh, smile turning wry.

“Well, turns out she was part of a good old Gotham drug trade, taking opiates off the top. The kid she never wanted shows up, sees more than he’s supposed to see, and she hands me right over. And there we go. Beaten and exploded. It was a crowbar by the way, the blunt object in the morgue report.”

Jason talked about it casually, confrontationally, waiting for Derek to flinch. The shock of white hair was directly where the crack to the skull had been.

“See, here’s the thing, the guy that did me in? He’s got no idea he killed Jason Todd. I was just S’s dumb kid, and the mess around the investigation meant he didn’t connect the dots. He’s behind bars, but that doesn’t mean shit in Gotham. If it comes out why I was in Ethiopia, there’s a target on me and my family. I’ve been having a friend on the local vigilante scene clean up the net to keep people from making connections.”

“So why come forward now?”

“Because I hate this. I don’t want everyone gossiping about my murder. And as funny as it is to make Bruce squirm, Dickie’s like a reverse Grinch, heart five sizes too big.”

“If he’s got nothing to hide, why’d he fake his vacation photos?”

Todd laughed.

“Damn, you noticed that? What gave him away?”

“All of them were taken near weather cams so they’d match the local weather.”

“Good catch. He is hiding something, but it’s not about an alibi. He does it for every vacation because he’s got a shit-ton of stalkers. Fakes the route a little, messes with the timeline, occasionally slips in a real one and signs some autographs. If you can find the trail cams, you’re definitely good enough to find some of the stalker forums people use to follow him.”

Todd got a bit more serious.

“Besides, it’s not just for that. If you kept digging, you’d find the empty grave on your own, and eventually, you’d find the real story and my shit would be on the front page and somebody would get killed. Agent Morgan, I’m asking you, for the sake of that dead kid, just let him rest in peace.” He handed over a manilla envelope. “The Waynes will back this story. And-” he pulled out a vial and pricked his finger and let a few drops run in, “here’s a DNA sample. If it proves Jason Todd is alive, then make sure the world thinks I’m dead, and make them stop digging.”

Todd stood up. Morgan got the impression he simply couldn’t talk any longer. He walked out and left Morgan sitting in the cafe with a half finished latte and a vial of blood.

The Bruce Wayne on TV looked better than the Bruce Wayne David Rossi had met. Last time Rossi saw him, he looked like every other grieving parent. Now he was a celebrity again, somber, but clean shaven and fresh-faced.

“-that this brave soul came forward and helped me find answers of what happened to my son. Though the people that targeted the medical supplies are long gone-”

It had been quite an argument between the team, then with the higher ups. They had a blood sample and some photos, but was that enough proof to risk letting Jason Todd’s killer go free if they were wrong? If it was somebody he called family? Because it was nice to believe Jason Todd was alive, nice to believe the Waynes were good people, and you could do a lot of damage if you listened to what you wanted to believe.

Jason had given them photos to prove a long term connection to the Waynes, a selfie of ‘Jason Todd’ and Dick Grayson pulling party poppers on new years, ‘Jason Todd’ playing with kittens with a much younger Damian Wayne. Looking at those… wasn’t that as happy as an ending got for their team? No dead boys, an actual happy ending. When their team was called in, the best they got was less victims, not none.

They’d quietly looked into who ‘S’ could be and gotten a DNA sample from Sheila Haywood’s brother. The DNA backed what the birth certificate said. From there, it was essentially a witness protection case. 

In the official report, a witness had come forward from the aid caravan. They kept the drug theft in the story, but fudged the timeline so Jason was there after Haywood’s death. When the drugs had stopped coming from Haywood, they claimed, the people she’d been supplying came to take them by force and caught Jason.

A boy with a ton of heart, rebelling against his father by helping out in a war zone, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I am so thankful for everyone in the American and Ethiopian government who handled this case for the work they put into solving my boy’s murder. I’m thankful to my surviving children, who kept me sane during this investigation. If people wish to honor Jason’s memory, please look into what you can do for children in your own community. Jason was a boy who never stopped fighting to make life better for kids like him.”

“Do you think we did the right thing?” Prentiss asked. She couldn’t hide her dislike for the man on the TV, but she’d agreed to the plan once the DNA evidence came back.

“I damn well hope so.” If nothing else, this press conference showed Bruce Wayne was an excellent liar.

“The Waynes are still hiding something,” Prentiss said.

“What rich family isn’t? But their secrets are their business.”

When Dick stepped into Jason’s current safehouse, he was hit with the earthy smell of a greenhouse. There were flowers on every surface, stuffed into cheap vases, marigolds, chrysanthemums, lilies, roses, and a few carefully arranged bundles of wildflowers and pretty weeds.

“Did you take these from your memorial?” Dick asked. He’d ask Jason what the hell was wrong with him, but he actually knew most of that list already.

“It’s my memorial, so they’re my flowers.”

Dick could tell him that memorials were for the living, not the dead, but here Jason was. He’d probably say the apartment was his memorial, and Dick didn’t want to deal with his sense of humor right now.

“I can’t argue with that,” Dick said, looking at a bundle of thistles and chicory set in prize position on the mantel. He imagined the child who must have picked it, walking through some scrub lot and trying to find something beautiful for a grave.

“You hear to critique my interior decor, or is there a case?”

“Can’t I just be here to see my little brother?”

“I dunno. Last I heard, you arranged to have me murdered.”

Somehow, Dick managed to laugh.

“Well, I come bearing Alfred’s scalloped potatoes, and, if that’s not enough, I’ll let you pick what we watch.” 

“A risky move. Ready to binge Upstairs, Downstairs ?”

Dick groaned, not really meaning it, and took his place on the couch while Jason heated up the oven.

Perhaps, Dick thought, flowers were for the dead, just a bit. Maybe it was nice to be remembered.