The Titans Tower was, in a word, big. Why they needed so many floors of rooms, Steph could only guess at. Maybe they'd expected more of those kids that had come and gone over the past year to stay, but this time, it was the Titans who were rejected. Or they had some huge parties and needed the place for people to sleep it off afterwards. There was no way of knowing and, as entertaining as the reasons behind it were to think about, it didn't really help any with her current problem.

More than just big, the place was near as twisty as Gotham's back alleys and also like those alleys, not very easy to navigate if one wasn't already familiar with the layout. A really good setup in the case of the intruders the Teen Titans had to deal with every other month, but not so welcoming to guests either. Not that Steph would have ever called them exactlywelcomingto her per se .

Taking all of that into account, it wasn't entirely Steph's fault that she got lost in the place on her way back to her assigned guest room. What she would, however, take full responsibility for, was that her rush to find that room resulted in her moving a bit too fast, resulted in her not paying enough attention to where she was going, resulted in... this.

Dozens of envelopes and sheets of paper fluttering down the staircase she'd been descending and a very confused... she thought this one was Kid Devil, on his but at the foot of those stairs with a near empty cardboard box in his arms.

"Oh my god I am so sorry." Steph said, hurrying to pick up some of the letters. "I was trying to find my room, and this place wassobig and I..."

"Wait, wait, wait." He yelled, waving his arms and leaping to his feet and startling Steph into dropping the letters she'd gathered. He flinched at her response. "Sorry, they're just, sort of old and fragile" he said more softly, there was a gentleness to the way he picked up the letters himself, tucking some of the well worn pages into corresponding envelopes they seemed to have escaped from in the fall escaped from in the fall.

"If I'm really careful?" She waved her hands on either side her face. "I got dainty, detective's hands."

"Yeah, sure." He offered her a shy grin, showing off the orange glow that was apparent even through his teeth.

"Cool." Steph replied, glad for the mask that hid at least some of how embarrassed she was and gathered some of the letters, careful as when she'd helped Batman gather evidence as Robin. "Again, so, so sorry. I was a little lost, and I didn't think anyone would be around here."

"Neither did I." He said. "It's kind of why I was taking this route."

"Oh." Steph nodded. "Don't want your friends to get a look at all of your love letters?" If her face had been visible, Steph might have waggled her brows.

Kid Devil snorted and shook his head. "Nah, these are all from a penpal I had when I was a kid." He accepted the stack of letters Steph handed him and slotted them back onto the box.

Steph might have left it at that, thinking he probably just didn't want to get run over by any of his more rowdy teammates like he had been by her. Then the next thing she picked up was a picture. An old polaroid, worn as the rest, of Robin posing as dead in the mouth of that huge t-rex down in the Batcave. The Robin wasn't Tim, and the picture didn't look like it could have been from when the first one was that small, it obviously wasn't Steph herself, and unless there was some other one she'd never heard about, process of elimination dictated it had to be... Oh boy.

"So, just a penpal, huh?" Steph passed him the picture, and looking at it turned his lips up in an amused smile before he tucked in into an envelope. "That's pretty cool, why hide it?"

"People..." he trailed off, looked up at Steph, then quickly away from her, his brows furrowed. "They say bad things about him now, and..." he picked up a few more letters. "he was my friend, I mean, if you asked me, he was cool." That made a little more sense, if Steph had been the Red Hood's penpal when she was a kid, she wouldn't exactly be shouting it from the rooftops either. "I always thought his family would make them stop eventually, but now..." he closed the box and pressed down the no-longer sticky tape along the middle. "I just, don't want to have to hear those thing's again." Now that, and the resentful tone he'd used, it made a little less sense, but it was kind of interesting to get another perspective on the guy. "Want me to take you by the kitchen?"

"Yeah, thanks." Steph brushed some of the dust from the letters off her knees when she stood. "You think they're lying or something?"

"I think, you shouldn't say stuff like that about someone who can't defend themselves anymore." He held the box carefully, like something precious and locked eyes with her. "And Iknowhe wasn't like that and they..." His fingers dug into the box, leaving dents in the cardboard. "They didn't even tell me when he died, I couldn't go to the funeral or anything, I didn't evenknowuntil after there was a new one, and I waited so long for another letter." Geez, harsh much? She knew Batman was cagey, but really?

"Yeah, I know those guys, they don't do much of the telling-people-things thing." She rolled her eyes, trying not to think about the way it stung to learn that she'd been kept out of the loop, that she'd only be included if she was part of a club that she'd never be let in to. "If it makes you feel any better, they never told me much eith..." Wait, if they didn't tell Kid Devil when Mister Dawn of The Dead was curtain called... Oh no "Bet you uh, would have liked to see him again.

"Well, yeah sure, " his face scrunched up at her question, not in that 'the girl I'm talking to asked a dumb question' kind of look, but this one made her feel almost as were assholes. "but I'm also kind of glad you know, that he's not around to hear what..."

"Jason Todd is alive."

"What?"

Yeah, maybe she shouldn't have blurted that out like that, but she was in it already, might as well swim deeper. "Your penpal?" Maybe he just didn't know the name, she hadn't until a while ago either.

"I know who he was, but he, is?."

"Yeah he is, crawled up out of his coffin - probably not literally - ," hopefully not literally, "and went Pet Cemetery on Gotham's underworld. "A little too late for Steph, but she had the image she'd gotten from the Batcave of Black Mask making like eggs and scrambling from a rocket launcher and nobody could ever take that away from her.

"And, it's really him?" He sounded, somewhere in the vicinity of hopeful, but there was something else there.

"I think so?" It sounded like a question, she hadn't meant for it to sound that much like a question.

"How long?"

"I really don't know much, but a couple years maybe?"

"A couple years!" He yelled, then looked at her for a couple of seconds, unblinking, and his eyes narrowed sharply. "That ass." He shook his head, his lips curled in a scowl that seemed very out of place on his face.

"Listen, I shouldn't have told you, he's..." She sighed and lifted up her face mask to actually let the guy look at her. "I just thought you deserved to know, but he's on Batman's 'do not engage' list, that's the list he putJokeron. You know what that means?"

"Can you hold my letters?" He pressed the box into her hands, then pointed down one of the halls. "Kitchen's down that way."

"Hey Kid!" She called after him, but he was already gone. Steph huffed. Batman hadn't been able to find Jason Todd in all this time, and she'd never heard of Kid Devil being some great detective. Then again, she'd never heard of Jason Todd having friends in the hero community either so, that wasn't saying much. Maybe it would be better to tell someone. She felt the weight of the box in her hands, thought of the way he'd held it. Maybe she'd just go after him herself instead. "Do not engage means donotengage!"

000

There were a lot of time, over the past four years, and even before, that someone saw fit to tell Jason he was going to hell, that they hoped a demon dragged him off. He doubted,sincerelythat any of those someone's had ever meant it literally.

Even with everything Jason had seen in his lives, of all the thing's he'd thought would happen to him, being tackled off of a rooftop by a very loud, sort of happy, sort of mad, very demonic looking demon guy was maybe at the last.

"A couple ofyearsJason?!"

The purple girl showing up to separate them minutes later was a very close second.