It Takes One to Know One [Jason Todd x Reader]

1 // An Unfortunate First Meeting

You were new to Gotham City, to say the least. Unawares of the dangers it held and the secrets if harbored, you signed on for the deal of a lifetime, packed your bags, and set off for the Unites States' second most sinful city, right after Vegas.

You were from a semi-suburban area of Colorado, bunking it out with your mom and two brothers while enrolled in community college, when you found your calling: mathematics. In high school, you'd nearly failed your math courses through the years, barely scraping by, and oddly enough, you passed physics with almost an A. Now that, that was a weird coincidence. Nonetheless, you'd started college in hopes of being a biology major, finding some sort of passion for cytology or microbiology.

Instead, all you learned was how to draw the structure of glucose over and over, and how methionine is the scientific beginning of life, and how DNA is one hell of a compound that was technically made of sugar. Your studies were tedious, and you found the open ended mess filled with weird rules that made up the science of biology a bit much, and that's when your love of math kicked in finally. Your little spanish professor started the first class saying math was a language, and since then you'd been digging into it as much as you could.

You practiced problems and even on the online homework you had straight 100's, maintaining a solid 98% in the class. MAT 121 was a breeze for you and you loved every second of the homework.

It's how you got your full ride scholarship to the prestigious school in the middle of Gotham, a post secondary school for those rich enough to have gone to Gotham Academy for their K-12 years, aptly named Gotham College of STEM and Arts. You'd come to find most people referred to it GCSA, or even Gotham University. You'd been invited, your tuition being funded through both a scholarship and the J. Todd Memorial Grant from the school in helping you pursue astrophysics, and you were only a college freshman at the time. How you got selected was partially luck, except you didn't believe in that fully. Luck is self made, and karmic destiny is truly karmic up until a point. It's up to the people to push the world.

So here you were, bundled in a hoodie and cut off sweats made into shorts, ratty converse on, crammed in the front corner of the classroom, right by the wall. The wall with no windows, you just liked leaning against it. The sizes of the classrooms were small, much like the ones from high school. GCSA prided themselves on their small class sizes, it allowed for better comprehension and a more rounded education in terms of student to teacher understanding, and for someone with severe social anxiety, you loved it.

You had your earbuds in, zoning out a bit, possibly dissociating, while the room filled up. First day of GCSU's higher math classes, a hellish mix of calculus and physics, and damn were you ready.

A composition notebook lay in front of you, open, it's pages filled with equations and your work on problems. Deciding to actually give a damn at the gross time of ten in the morning, you flipped to the nearest blank page, and took out a pen, labeling the top with the date and the word "lecture," just to stay a little organized. By the time you looked up, your GCSU math professor arrived, and class began.

You stopped by your dorm after class, switching out what you needed for your next class, and grabbing one of the many cheese danishes you had crammed in the tiny fridge in your room. Your scholarships and grants funding allowed you to be one of Those students who had their own bathroom in their room, and since the dormitories were mixed gender, you were living with a rather obnoxious redhead who was studying engineering, who had a love of pyrotechnics, and a bad habit of choking on smoke when he tried to look cool with cigarettes. You shut that down real fucking fast, telling him to do it outside or you'd throw his computer out of the window. He had no qualms, and listened.

His name was Roy, and you liked him. He was goofy and sweet, and underneath that he had a heart of gold, although severely cracked. He'd been through some shit, but so have you, and pain isn't a competition. The two of you bonded over cooking shows on Netflix, and talking about trauma, because to be honest? That's one of the best ways to work through it. Find someone who understands, and simply talk about it. You two had been living in the same dorm for about a week before your classes started, classes in general were oddly spaced throughout two weeks for start dates, partially to help students adjust to the workload, as well as the living arrangements.

Two weeks and one day, and you could easily call Roy a best friend of yours. He was from Colorado too, growing up in a more rural area of the Boulder valley, with a love for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science that rivaled your own. He liked baked goods, and once he found out you did too, he started bringing back boxes of them to your shared space. He called it home, you called it base, and from then on you jokingly referred to is as headquarters for your scheming. Roy was nice, and you were nicer.

Roy was out right now, most likely in class, although you didn't really know his schedule. It's not like you didn't care, he simply didn't share. At least not about his whereabouts. You didn't mind though, it was a nice surprise to come back to find your HQ empty. You scuttled about, unawares of the shower in your room running. How you missed the noise was a mystery, or maybe not, because you still had your earbuds in.

Having switched out your books and grabbed your laptop, you swung your backpack covered in FFXV and NASA patches over your shoulder, and turned around. Then you stopped, your mouth falling open.

Having just stepped out of your bathroom in your shared dorm with Roy was one hunk of a man, whose skin was littered in scars, his dark hair having a white streak in the front, and a smug look plastered across his face. He looked like a total bad boy, and unfortunately, you had a Thing for bad boys. And also femme girls because let's be real, girls are great.

"I don't mind being your eye candy, but maybe close your mouth, the only time I like anyone making that face at me is when they're on their knees between my legs-"

He didn't get to finish, seeing as though you threw one of your shoes from beside your bed at him, nailing him in the forehead before you slipped past him, and ran out the door frantically texting Roy.

«Holy fuck Roy there's a naked dude in our room WHY IS HE THERE ??????»

A minute passed before he texted you back. «ah that's just a friend, he's using the shower»

«Your friend is fucking ripped» you replied quickly, tapping on your phone as you slowed down from speeding through the halls like The Flash on meth. Random naked men in your room is something you can't really get over quickly.

Your phone buzzed, and you looked back down. «hell yeah he is. wanna go get pizza with me tonight, i'm your favorite ;)»

«Don't you have an exam to study for?»

«ah shit ______, way to ruin my buzz»

«You don't even do drugs»

«let me pretend... .. ......»

You rolled your eyes at your roommate, and set off to astronomy, all the while again once unawares of the secrets Gotham held.

A little secret called Roy's friend is actually dead and not at all a student, and his very memorial fund is paying for your college.

Jason Todd, the one and only.