Who: Ra's and Death What: Talking Where: Ra's compound in Africa When: Shortly after Plague time Warnings/Rating: Death being death, Ra's being Ra's.
Tim had gotten much closer than Ra's had expected him to, but the young man had never quite made it and until this particular base was given up, he was staying. It wasn't sentimentality that kept him here, though he did like the desert dunes and the occasional animal that came past searching for water or food. Nor was it his addition to international wanted lists. He had the ways and means to travel without altering international authorities if he truly wanted to.
Ra's didn't. Clicking off the TV in his office and thus relieving himself of the news, Ra's left the large room in favor of his bedroom. It was late enough. Leaving Ubu to stand outside his door, Ra's entered and shut it behind him with a quiet click of the lock. It was easier to enter and leave the door from this room. No one got a look at Leo that way and Ra's had a vested interest in keeping the man alive. Let Crane complain about finding a new person, Ra's had already found the one he wanted to keep.
Leo could be brutish, no sense of refinement at all, but he had the ability to decide on something and carry it through. That determination appealed to Ra's. That he cared little for human life was another point in his favor. His footsteps were quiet and measured as he walked through the room, turning off lights as he went.
The desert was different than Gotham in nearly every way, and though she didn’t need to, Death took a deep breath of the dry air. It carried with it dust and flowers and far-off scents that seasoned the air into something low and mellow, but even that was tainted by the sharp bite of glowing green on the back of her tongue. She couldn’t escape it, especially not when she placed herself in the rooms of one that had known more of the Pits than anyone else.
She perched herself on the crossbar of the headboard of the bed in the room where Ra’s was already moving and lowering the lights. Sitting there, her heels just catching the wood, knees high, she rested her hands on her ankles in a position that was (according to the laws of physics) impossible for anyone to hold without succumbing to balance and gravity. She didn’t seem to acknowledge that impossibility though, and simply watched him. The man that had unleashed the virus that had ended in her escorting so many from this world. He was not the first perpetrator of mass genocide that she had ever encountered, and she knew at her core that he would not be the last.
She sighed as she shifted, one knee dropping off to the side, still an impossible pose, and tipped her head to rest on her still-high knee. The new position made the wide neck of her black t-shirt slip off her shoulder and catch half-way to her elbow. She was an anomaly in the room, casual clothing too dark for the soft creams and tans of the desert decor. She was only half-hidden by the shadows and the light fabric that hung as curtains around the bed. And for all that she could have kept herself from being seen, that was not her goal. She was there, visible, and waiting.
It wasn't until he was nearly to the bed that he realized she was there, perched as she was on his headboard. He did not jump, did not startle, did not gasp at the sight of her impossibly balanced there. Ra's did not ask who she was -- he did not need to. He'd been avoiding her for centuries, like an ex-wife that was still beloved after a cruel divorce.
One time Death had caught him, but those memories didn't have her in this form and Ra's didn't think of them often. He wanted to forget that particular time. Stopping at the footboard, he leaned against the one of the tall posts of the bed, remarkably relaxed for a man that was wanted by most major countries and facing a very real personification of the same thing he sought to avoid. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
The doors behind him had been shut to the desert, but the windows remained open, making the light linen pants and button down shirt he wore drift whenever a breeze came through them.
The same breeze that moved his clothing caused her hair to catch on the air and lift away from her face just enough to reveal the eyebrow that quirked ever so slightly. It was barely a flicker of motion, but her expression was clearly unimpressed. She had been greeted in every way possible, from flee and flight to open arms. His cool politeness was nothing special. “Just visiting,” she replied, her voice low and pleasant, something husky to it that any number of past poets had given ode to. She could likely seduce a person to their end if she had the mind to, but she never did. And besides that, it wasn’t Ra’s time. Not yet.
She knew his history as she looked at him, knew every turn and twist of the too-long life he’d lived, and even knew that time that crossed his own thoughts of his last brush with the her that wasn’t her. Her gaze on him, it peeled back years of time, events so far past that he had likely forgotten them. It wasn’t to intimidate him - it was to learn him - and when she was done, she sighed. “So I’m guessing you’re awfully pleased with yourself, then?”
Lesser men might have been intimidated by her gaze, but Ra's was not. Once he had been at Napoleon's side and while the man was short, he had a certain intensity that Ra's had enjoyed. Her gaze reminded him of the short-statured self-styled emperor. Those years were far behind him now, but they were remembered with more fondness than those of his physical demise.
"It needed to be done." Human life had little value to him, even when it belonged to those he cared about. Every once in a long while though, there was something that shifted that balance for him, with the most recent case being one Jason Todd. Whatever the young man felt about it, Ra's had no regrets. "The world was a much different place a few hundred years ago. Do you remember? Or are you subject to the same cycle of life and death?"
“Darling child,” her Arabic was liquid and warm, but her tone was cut with the edge of sarcasm, and she quickly switched back to English. “Of course I remember a few hundred years ago, it was hardly a breath for me. I’m not subject to the cycle. I am the cycle.” She looked at him again and shook her head. “And different, as you should well know by now, doesn’t mean better.” Rolling her eyes, she unfolded from her position and stepped down from her perch to trod across his mattress, leaving no sign of her passing in the expensive sheets. “And need is not the same as want. I don’t for a second think that you didn’t want to kill off a sizeable portion of the world’s population. But did you need to do it?” She shook her head, now at the foot of the bed and looking down at him. “No. You didn’t. So don’t lie to me.” Her voice had taken on steel as she crossed the bed toward him, to the point that she would accept no arguments or self-delusions of his.
"Except when different does mean better," he said blandly, watching as she crossed his bed. It had been better then. Thick smoke had not clogged the air, contaminants had not turned water to poison, and the Earth was not a ticking time bomb being slowly warmed from the inside to kill them all.
It took a certain amount of confidence to look up at her, unyielding steel in gaze and voice and answer, "Yes." Only someone who was absolutely sure of themselves, in their mission, in every thought and word and deed could answer her as he had. "It needed to be done. Let them draw in together and huddle beneath the broken bones of their societies and know that they reached too far, destroyed too much, and this was the price to be paid for their wanton debasement of the one home we all have."
Death’s eyes were dark as she continued to look down at Ra’s. It took a moment, but then she slowly shook her head. Her expression shifted, still touched with anger but now also edged with sadness and (most of all) very easy to read pity. “My sister has touched you too much.” For even without their presence, her siblings were obvious enough in this world. Especially in the twisted mind of such a man. “You no longer understand.” She didn’t clarify any more than that, finally hopping down from the bed to stand next to him on the floor. It caused her to need to look up at him to meet his gaze, but her demeanor didn’t change with being shorter. “Your methods are flawed, but you will not or cannot see.” She reached up and cupped her hand along his cheek, her touch soft and forcing a rush of memories all the way back from his childhood. Truly a moment of his life flashing before his eyes, but she stepped back after those hanging seconds, his memories not culminating in her taking him as it normally would. It did cause his heart to pound and skip for several seconds before settling once again into a steady rhythm. And still, she looked at him, gaze intense.
"Save your pity for one that needs it," Ra's said sharply at the look on her face. He did not need nor want it, not from her and certainly not from anyone else. The only thing that he wanted less was for her to be patronizing, that kindness cloying like he was a child and clutching at her thigh as he hid behind her leg. He had not been a child in centuries, no matter if her touch brought back memories to that time, when he had been little enough to learn how to ride on camels and horses from his father. "The world was better then," he said as soon as the memory, the exhilaration of being on horseback for the first time alone, not pressed into his father or his brothers, faded and his heartbeat slowed. "And tell your sister to save her touches for someone else."
“Better for you, perhaps,” she said, eyes still on him, “not for all.” After another hung-moment of caught breath, she stepped back, the chunky heel of her boot silent and again leaving no sign of its pressure. Then another step. Then without another movement, she was across the room near the window, again perched, but this time on the sill, the desert breeze causing her shirt and her hair to blow forward around her. “She touches who and when and how often she sees fit. She wanders her own realm, and anyone would be foolish to tell her how to conduct herself.” She shook her head with a last sigh that was cut around a whisper. “You’re different than I expected.” Then a great fluttering sound filled the room and she was gone.
The sound of wings was not unknown to him, but this was like a whole flock taking off in his room and for a moment, he was silent, eyes closed to enjoy it. "Then perhaps you should have different expectations," he said to the air when his eyes opened again. There was no trace of her, but Ra's did not expect there to be. With her gone, he finished the rounds he needed to make and stepped through his door and into the desert that was not his.