All Their Fault (The Mini-Shadowpact)

[shauds]

Title: All Their Fault

Fandom: DC Comics

Prompt: #025 Hero

Character/Pairing: Jason Todd, Eddie Bloomberg, Zachary Zatara, Danny Chase, Darla Aquista

Rating: A

Word Count: 1222

Author's Notes/Disclaimer: Had to fudge up some timelines for this, but it works out fine.

Summary: The formation of a not-team of semi-heroes led by a former robin who neve got the chance to become a feared crimelord. Alternatively: Jason gets friends and it's all Eddie's fault.

If someone had asked Jason, he would have told them that he would never involve himself in the whole hero game again. He'd be a vigilante, maybe, eventually, because cops were less than useless and heroes were too busy forming teams with too much drama and being moral paragons to make enough of a difference. But he'd never run around in goofy tights fighting other people in goofy tights over vats of of acid that were not in compliance with industrial safety standards. He was going to go back to Gotham, raise some hell, and leave with the Joker's head that was all.

If that same someone had asked anyone else... well they might concede that he wasn't wearing goofy tights.

It was Eddie's fault, and maybe a little bit Talia's fault that it was Eddie's fault, because she decided, during Jason's training, that he needed regular contact with someone outside the of his teachers and babysitters .Sure she phrased it as building up a contact in the hero community for future use, but Jason knew from the start that was bull. And okay, maybe it was a little Jason's fault to for actually giving in and writing the letter, and the next letter, and the next letter, and all the other letters despite the fact that they'd somehow derailed things just a little bit more each time.

And it was Jason's fault for getting pissed off and ditching the Acres of All for that weekend because the Titans wouldn't believe Eddie's penpal existed and showing up in San Francisco and getting involved in all of... whatever that was with the Terror Titans - god awful name. But it was Eddie's fault for getting involved in whatever that was in the first place.

After that, the damage was done, and Jason figured, as long as he didn't go near that tower again, he could afford to take a break in his training every now and then to do some sightseeing with Eddie, because breaks were good, they kept you focused, that was what just about all of Jason's teachers had said and that was why he did it. Only the breaks were never very restful - who'd have thought there were so many haunted, possessed, just plain weird things scattered around everywhere. Every one of those things, Jason blamed on Eddie, nothing like that ever happened when he traveled alone, he'd never caught so much as a glimpse of a ghost or a monster - of the non-human variety - in all his travels infill he started doing those travels with Eddie. A weirdness magnet, Eddie called himself when he apologized, but he was always laughing, so Jason wasn't very forgiving about it, even if he was laughing too a lot of the time.

It was also Eddie's fault that they were at that show, because Eddie wanted to support his friend, his friend who Jason had only spoken with once or twice before, who was the self-proclaimed 'World's greatest teen Magician' and probably perfectly capable of pushing back a simple kidnapping attempt on his own if that was the case. But no, Eddie and Jason had to get involved, and then they had to get involved when it turned out the kidnappers were involved with the Terror Titans and more kidnappings, and that was maybe the least restful of Jason's vacations.

The thing in New Azarath, Jason would take the blame for, he'd started out blaming the both of them for. Because apparently they'd both gotten stuck there once and it had been bad enough that Zach had tried to cut himself off from the hero thing entirely. Jason knew better than most the kinds of things that would lead to that, and for reasons he wasn't willing to think too deeply about, he'd agreed to check it out. From that point on the blame was Jason's. He'd checked it out, hadn't expected what he'd found, and freaked himself out a little. And it had been his own fault that he wouldn't let it go, and that he'd dragged the many beings of the Phantasm out after him.

It had been Eddie's suggestion that they asked for help from the Shadowpact in dealing with it though. And it was Eddie's fault for befriending the Warlock's Daughter and forcing Jason into the conversation because 'oh, she was from Gotham too', and that was apparently grounds for bonding. Never mind that her father - her real father - was someone he'd probably have killed if he'd gotten back to Gotham yet. Then she was taken by a filthy, mind-altering creep Jason had to put down, that nobody had any problem with him putting down other than that they thought he was too young for it. He didn't know whose fault it was she tagged along with them to pull one specific being out of those many beings of The Phantasm, he'd been too busy... checking that Danny wasn't going to die after everything they'd been through to separate him from that amalgamation, to notice.

And there he was, stuck with four magically-inclined, magical trouble attracting kids who couldn't stay out of trouble, depending on who was asked, they were all stuck with him, and the Shadowpact decided that it was stuck with all five of them. Talia was stuck getting someone to drag Jason back to the All-Caste every time something came up that had Jason away long enough that Ducra said it set his training back, but she wasn't very speedy about it.

So Jason's training was set back over and over again, with more and more thing's he'd never planned for getting in the way, it was like under every rock there was another screaming person, too late to save, but still suffering that he needed to help, or the monster under someone's bed was real, or he almost had his face eaten off by a folk tale, or the CBI tried to drag off one of his not-teammates.

Eventually, he didn't have much time for thinking about Gotham, and when he finally did, it was because he caught a random newscast that the Joker had blown himself and some beady-eyed crime-lord up together. He was too busy beating the crap out of the Calculator and getting himself stuck with yet another magically-inclined kid to give it the weight he would have otherwise, but this magically-inclined kid let him talk to Jane Austen, so he was okay.

If you asked Jason, he still wasn't a hero - that wasn't to be heroic, Darla - , he didn't dress in a goofy costume - no Eddie, his helmet was not goofy - , he didn't chase after Supervillains, - Zack agreed that magician's didn't count, but he disagreed with Jason on everything else - and no matter how many dictionary definition's Danny threw his way, Jason definitely wasn't part of a team. Kit didn't say anything about it, but he was new and Jason had a feeling he'd side with the rest of them.

Not that it mattered anymore what people called him. The time had come and gone to do anything in Gotham without him even noticing, and when he noticed it, he was too busy making waffles to shut them all up to even be properly pissed about it.

Okay, so maybe it was a little of all their faults, but still mostly Eddie's.