Who: Jason and Babs When: 6/11 Where: Behind Gotham Main Library What: Hanging out at the library, Jason gathers intel. Babs interrupts. Rating: NSFW because Jason's a potty-mouth "Y’know," Jason remarked as he ground the street tough’s face a little harder into the crumbling bricks of the library’s back wall, “this was actually looking like an okay day. Hotter than hell - shit, and it’s not even mid-June, isn’t this supposed to be the mild Eastern seaboard?” The unsavory element - who’s sweat smelled rank in the humid, close air of the alley - muttered something, and Jason shifted his weight; there were were thirty main pain points in the shoulder and arm, and he figured the twist of the man’s arm up across his back and towards his opposite ear was getting a good two-thirds of them, going by the little whimpers that trailed away. “But generally an okay day.”
He meant it, too; his days were generally spent in quiet preparation for the night, full of sleeping off the night before, tending to his gear, figuring out where his boots were going to hit the ground when night came. And - during the long stretches of impatient waiting for the sun to go down so the Red Hood could come out - prowling the streets, listening to the chatter on the corners; there was no better place for information than the library, and not just because it was a place of books and computers.
He’d always liked the library as a kid, even if he’d rarely had a library card that had actual borrowing privileges; it was cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and no one cared about one extra kid tucked away in a corner, reading something that took him away from Gotham. Great sweeping chunks of Gotham’s underbelly apparently felt the same thing; he could hear all kinds of things lurking in one of the many blind spots in the rambling building.
Including things that had his guns metaphorically coming out to play. Darkness be damned, he didn’t have a ritual around this shit; someone was an idiot under his nose, he’d take care of the situation.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, almost conversationally as he pressed a thumb into the wrist’s pulse-point, wrung out another sweet whimper. “The part that really gets me: you had options. Option one was return your motherfucking library books on time and in decent condition. Not all that hard. Calendars are on sale down on Broadway.” The thug’s shoulders moved under his dirty wife-beater tank, and Jason jerked his arm, felt the bones strain and protest through the skin. “Option two was you don’t be a motherfucking dickhead about your late fines to the library clerk who was just doing her goddamn job.
“Which means,” he continued, almost conversationally, “that I have options, too. Option one is where I break every bone in your motherfucking arm, wrist bones included, and leave you whimpering in this pissy alley. Option two,” he leaned in, made sure to scrape the man’s cheek down the brick, give him a nice abrasion along with the pain up his shoulder, “is you tell me who’s running the drugs along 12th, and I only dislocate your shoulder.”
And people said all he did was kill people: even he didn’t kill someone over library fines. Kill them over running drugs near Gotham Central High, that was another matter entirely.