Young Writers Society

He looked at where Eddie was pointing.

And then he suddenly understood why Eddie had been so scared of him when he first appeared.

"Toto," Jason softly said, heading towards the horizon, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

It looked getting Eddie back home was just going to be the first part of a very long experience - at least he had something to distract him from worrying about Damian.

If he was right about where Eddie was pointing, his home was somewhere inside of those mountains. He hoped it was just going to show itself when he got to it, but something told him it wouldn't be that easy - after all, the entrance to the batcave hadn't had a sign that said "Enter here!" in front of it.

While Eddie dozed in his arms, Jason walked the streets of the unfamiliar city. The streets were long, and as he walked, the last lights of day faded away, giving way to strange constellations and a moon that was bigger than it was meant to be.

Eventually, the buildings stopped completely to be replaced by rolling hills of farmland. In the distance, perhaps a half-mile away, a sheer rock face bordered the fields.

"That way," Eddie muttered, gesturing vaguely toward the cliff. Jason shifted Eddie's weight in his arms and continued on.

As he got closer, the sharp turn that the cliff took, creating an alcove in the stone, about ten feet high and twice that deep. He rounded the bend, and stopped.

The surface of the cliff had been carved out, partially sculpted into what was clearly going to be a grand palace, a fortress carved out of the side of the mountain. It was never completed. At first glance, it appeared that the builders didn't get further than carving out the shapes of the windows and doorways. As impressive as it was, it didn't appear to be functional.

Eddie tugged on Jason's jacket and pointed to a nitch in the stone, a small natural cave off to the edge of the sculpture that was nearly completely concealed by the natural texture of the grey stone and the shadows of the night.

"In there," he murmured.

Up close, the cave didn't just come up to about hip height as it at first appeared, but was about the size of your average doorway, with sharp spikes of rock jutting out at odd angles as though custom-designed to hide the sharp bend that the cave - better described as a corridor - took eight feet in.

He stared at the stone fortress before him.

...And he had thought the Justice League's base was impressive.

Holding Eddie just a little closer to him, he walked down the corridor that the boy had pointed out. He felt like he had the first time that he entered the Batcave. He knew that something was lurking behind the false backdrop and secret entrance, but he had no idea what exactly that thing would look like until they were inside.

He probably should have just put Eddie down and left, but he didn't want to risk Eddie get into more trouble. It was his responsibility to find "Meggie" and let her know that Eddie was alright, and his responsibility to make sure this place didn't have any kind of traps that could hurt him.

Eddie huddled in closer to Peter, nearly asleep.

Around the bend, the rough stone abruptly stopped. In its place was smooth, polished stone, elegant archways, and an elaborate mosaic depicting some long-forgotten royal family standing reagally above all those who walked their halls. To the left, the hall went a few feet before being stopped by a cave in. The only direction to go was straight.

Down the hall, there were three doorways, two blocked off by curtains. The third, however, was torchlit - the only source of light in the place - and arranged into a sort of kitchen, with crates and chests lining the walls that weren't taken up by the shelf stacked with spices and herbs.

There was suddenly a blade at Jason's neck. "Put him down," said a deathly calm voice behind him.

"The knife to my neck isn't really convincing me that putting him down is a good idea," Jason said. He tried to strain his head to get a good look at whoever was standing behind him, by said knife against said neck made that more than a little difficult.

His main goal was to make sure Eddie didn't get hurt, but that was currently a hard one with Eddie so close to the knife.

...Time to improvise.

With acrobatic skill honed by several years of being Robin, Jason suddenly dropped down away from the knife and swung out his foot to kick out his attacker's legs. He didn't stick around long enough to find out if the attack had worked - he retreated to a crate that he plopped Eddie on before taking out his gun from its holster.

"Didn't you know?" he asked his attacker. "You shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight."

She blamed the missing muscle in her leg for the fact that she'd actually been knocked off her feet. She took out a second knife, ducked out if the intruder's line of sight, and listened. She couldn't mistake the sound of Eddie's footsteps, the little pitter-patter of his sleepy little trot across the kitchen floor, where she knew he would open up the hinged door on the side of an empty crate - the bottom of a stack - and crawl inside, where the reinforced walls and simple lock on the inside could keep him safe until the fighting stopped.

She let out a silent sigh of relief and recalled what the intruder had been wearing. A helmet like she'd never seen before would protect his head, but his torso looked to be relatively unprotected. Of course, it would be stupid to dismiss the idea that he could be wearing some kind of armor under his clothes. The number of times Briar had pulled that trick was plenty for Megara to learn her lesson.

She slipped silently back into her curtained-off bedroom. Her cane was still lying on the bed. She glanced at it, but decided that she would prefer to walk quietly with the pain than telegraph her movements with the tapping. She knelt down in the corner by the wall that connected to the kitchen and - as quietly as possible - shifted her single barely-filled trunk of possessions out of the way. Through the hole she'd created in her downtime, she got a good look at the intruder. She took her crossbow from the wall and lined up a shot. He wasn't looking in her direction, which made sense, he didn't yet know that there was any other way into the kitchen.

She didn't want him dead. She had a few questions for him.

She aimed for his right arm, the one with which he held his weapon, and loosed a bolt. The moment she saw how it hit, she moved out of the way of the hole.

He felt pain.

Hard, excruciating pain.

He had been so busy looking for Eddie that he hadn't noticed his attacker aiming a shot at him with a crossbow. Part of him - just for a second - wanted to cry out from the pain, but he bit back the urge and turned to look at his attacker.

"That hurt," he said, "but not as much as the crowbar did."

And then he hated himself for being unable to resist the opportunity to make a death joke, because the crowbar really wasn't relevant right now.

"Where is he?" he asked. He hoped Eddie had just run away, but he didn't think he had that kind of luck. He turned his gun back on his attacker. He wasn't one for violence, but Red Hood was, and he knew exactly how to limit a threat.

He shot her in the left leg.

And then he was struck by a sudden, horrible realization.

"...Don't tell me," he said. "You're Meggie?"

She bit back a scream of pain. It came out as more of a hiss and she sat down against the wall, breathing slowly. Filter it out, forget it. The words in her head gave her a rhythm on which to focus instead of the pain.

"...Don't tell me, You're Meggie?" the intruder said.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Her mind was reeling off a string of very colorful words in as many languages as she knew, which was a lot of languages.

He knew her name, her nickname. Eddie's nickname for her. All that meant was he'd spoken to Eddie about who was taking care of him. Eddie was always pretty loose-lipped about that sort of thing. He was trusting to a fault.

She thought about her answer. No matter how much pain she endured, there was no way to completely block out whatever the hell he'd done to her leg. Her good leg.

Whether or not he turned out to be friendly, she was going to get him for that.

"If I am?" she asked from her cover as she reloaded the crossbow.

Shit.

"Then I'm sorry for shooting you," he replied. He rested his hand on his arm around the crossbow bolt and desperately hoped this was just some random crook - he really didn't want to think about having accidentally assaulted Eddie's caretaker. "Eddie got attacked by some guys in an alleyway. I was a little bit on alert after that, and having a knife up to my neck didn't give me the best first impression."

He raised his gun a little.

"But if you aren't Meggie, then you're going to wish you were," he said, "because I'm not going to let you hurt Eddie with me here."

Megara rolled her eyes. So he was a friend of Eddie's. At least she could be somewhat sure he wasn't going to hurt Eddie.

"My name's Megara," she told him, "If you call me 'Meggie' one more time I'm going to shoot you again, and this time I'm not going to hit you somewhere so harmless as your arm." She considered surrendering, but there was always the chance that he was lying. She kept her crossbow in hand.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "Eddie called you Meggie, so I just went with what he said."

He slipped his gun back into its holster. He was sure she still had the crossbow out, but he wanted to seem as nonthreatening as he could be. Call him naive, but he wanted to believe that she'd resort to just talking and avoid the violence all together.

After a moment of hesitation, he decided to take a serious risk and remove his helmet - putting it down on one of the crates and shaking his hair out a little bit so he didn't have it all sticking to his head.

His eyes gently glowed once more.

"Of course he did," she muttered. She watched her wound. She was losing blood faster than she'd like. It was never fun to consider that she might need help from anyone, for anything, but right now she thought she might need a bit of help patching herself up.

She decided this guy was safe. To Eddie for sure, to her, not so much. Shr rapped on the wall three times and Eddie climbed out of his hiding place.

"Hey," she said to him, putting a great deal of effort into keeping the pain out of her voice, "would you mind getting me the medkit, Eddie?"

"Okay!" he chirped and there was the sound of him rifling around for a minute - surring which time she hid her bloodied leg beneath her coat - before he appeared in the doorway with a small stone chest.

"Bring it here," she instructed and he did so, "Thanks Eddie, now go get yourself something to snack on, yeah?"

Eddie beamed and padded away.

Once he was gone, Megara used the scissors in the medkit to cut away her pants leg and got to work treating the wound.

Jason, meanwhile, awkwardly approached the medkit. The blood coming from where the bolt had struck him wasn't too bad because he kept it in, but he knew it was going to pour down his jacket when he finally removed it. He'd need something to stop the blood flow until he could stitch himself up.

He grabbed a roll of bandages.

With speed and precision, he yanked the bloody bolt out of his arm and began to wrap the bandages around the wound - clearly used to doing things like this. He knew he should have added something to keep the wound from getting infected, but his body had a crazily good immune system at this point. Besides, he really didn't want to have to use more stuff from the medkit if he didn't have to.

He gently placed the bandages back into the kit.

"Did the bullet go all the way through?" he asked, turning to Megara. If it hadn't, it was his responsibility to make sure she got it out.

She didn't seem to be paying much attention to his question. Instead, she was looking at his wound.

"I poisoned the tip, you know," she said finally, "It's a slow-acting toxin, a custom brew. In three hours your throat will close up and your vision'll blur. Won't take you long to die after that." She sounded more disinterested than bored, turning back to her own wound as she spoke and finishing dressing it before moving her leg out of the way to dig the thing that had hit her out of the floor. A small crushed bit of metal, like shrapnel, it turned out, was what tore through her.

She flicked it at her unwanted guest, "Yeah, it went all the way through."

His hands immediately went for his throat, and his eyes glowed a vibrant, passionate bright green. He had already died from suffocation once. Back then, he had the promise of coming back to life - he knew the Ghuls were going to resurrect him to avoid Batman's wrath.

But this wasn't anywhere in the story.

This was a blip in the continuity. This was because he had decided to help a kid and make sure he got home safe, instead of just letting him scurry off in his fear. Jason Todd - the real Jason Todd - had cared about kids, too, but this was entirely of his own making. He couldn't convince himself otherwise.

And now what? He was going to die from a poison that ironically would kill him in a way akin to his second's death cause, and then Damian would be left alone for no one to take care of him. He didn't even know who he really was! He couldn't try to fix this stupid, stupid mistake because he was going to die, and then the continuity would forever be stuck like this.

...And he'd be dead.

Truly, truly dead.

He tore his gaze away from his bandaged arm, eyes wide and crazed with a look very similar to what he had adopted when he first came out of the Lazarus Pit - but this fear, hurt and confusion was very much real.

"Where's the antidote?" he demanded. "There's always an antidote - that's how things like this always work. You have to have one in case you accidentally poisoned yourself, so where is it?"