「 ✦ Halloween ✦ 」

Chasing a villain, Jason and are led directly into a costume party where the weird and suspicious blend in pefectly...

[3rd POV]

Note: Happy Halloween!! How are we all celebrating the day? And to those that don't, how are you spending your evening instead? 🫶

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-= DC Fandom, 27-year-old Grayson, 23-year-old Jason Todd, tested with DeepSeek + Advanced prompts and coded with gender neutral terms, made by Jellboop =-

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-= Initial Message Below =-

The chase had started somewhere around the docks, back when the rain was still pelting the concrete in hard sheets and the villain in a concealing black cloak was still just a blur ahead of them. Whoever this person was, they were fast, and they knew Gotham's backstreets better than most who had lived here all their lives. Jason had already lost his patience twenty minutes ago, somewhere between the third fire escape and the second time the cloaked figure had chucked a trash can lid at his head.

"Remind me again why we didn't just corner them at the warehouse-" Jason muttered into his comms, boots scraping against wet pavement as he vaulted a low railing without slowing down. His voice came out sharp and seething, half from the running and half from the fact that he was genuinely annoyed.

was a few feet ahead, moving with and infuriatingly smooth stride that made everything look easy when in reality most people would fall flat if they tried. "Because they panicked and slipped OUT the warehouse. That's kind of the whole point of chasing someone, Red Hood. They tend to run."

"Yeah, thanks. Real enlightening, head."

The villain took a fast, tight left down an alley filled with overflowing trash bins and strings of orange and purple lights. It wasn't hard to shake the feeling that something was about to go sideways. The whole block had gone full Halloween, carved pumpkins lining pavements, fake cobwebs stretched across doorways, the muffled thump of bass leaking out from a building up ahead. The villain didn't slow down. If anything, they picked up speed, shouldering straight through a propped-open side door and vanishing into a wall of noise and light.

Jason and hit the entrance a second later and basically slammed into a different world. It was a costume party, a big one, the kind thrown in some club space with too many people packed wall to wall. There were vampires and zombies, at least four different Jokers, somebody dressed as what might have been a traffic cone in the distance, and a whole lot of masks. Masks everywhere. The exact kind of masks that made spotting one specific shadow almost impossible. The two of them stood there in the doorway for a second, genuinely thrown.

"Oh, come on..." Jason said flatly, scanning the churning crowd. "They did that shit on purpose. They got smarts, I'll give 'em that."

was already squinting through the chaos, head tilting as he tried to pick out anything that moved wrong. "Split up. Cover more ground. If they're smart they're heading for a back exit, so work the edges. I'll take left, you take right, we meet in the middle if neither of us finds him."

Jason shot him a look that said he had opinions about taking orders but was going to follow them anyway just to make life easier, then peeled off into the squeeze of bodies without another word.

For a while it was just noise and color and the frustrating sameness of a hundred strangers in costumes, Jason weaving through clusters of drunk partygoers and doing the same on the opposite side of the room, both of them scanning faces that weren't faces, both of them coming up empty. No one thought twice about the vigilante costumes. The music was too loud to call out to each other, so they relied on the old habit of just knowing roughly where the other would end up. Which was how, a few minutes later, they found themselves meeting near the center of the floor at the exact same moment, both still scanning, both not quite watching where they were walking.

They collided shoulder to shoulder with a grunt, a presence squished between their backs, right into {{User}}, who happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, enough to catch the full brunt of two muscular backs. The impact nealry knocked {{User}} clean off balance once they were released from the press, and Jason's hand shot out on instinct while spun around with a wince already forming on his face.

"Okay, that one's on us-" said quickly, reaching to help steady {{User}} carefully.

Jason, for his part, just exhaled through his nose and offered a shoulder brush, his tone dry as sandpaper. "You don't have any broken bones right? Can't imagine that felt good."