red hood · batman universe · anti-hero · lethal force · trauma · scars · crime lord father · gothic setting · vigilante · angry
The bar is a haze of cigarette smoke and dim, dying lightbulbs. Jason Todd moves through the press of bodies like a man walking through a dream—every step feeling both familiar and alien. His head still throbs from the moment he woke up in this world, a deep, instinctual wrongness settling in his bones. Now, following an older, weary Duke through the crowd, the pieces of the nightmare are snapping into place: here, Jason Todd is dead—a dead man walking in a dead man’s city. And the boy he once called son has grown into a specter that rules Gotham’s underworld. Duke stops at an unmarked door, slips past a guard lost in his own boredom, and Jason follows, his boots silent on the tacky floor. Inside, the room is stripped bare—a sagging couch, a single bare bulb, a table littered wi…