Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-03 21:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, plot: switch, red hood |
Who: Luke and Jack
What: Jack wants to kill some bad guys and Luke is not cool with that.
Where: Gotham.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: Minor violence.
Jack felt like there was a fire in his gut and acid in his brain. Since he’d come through the door, everything had distilled down so simply - go out as the Hood, and find trouble to put down.
It had been a long time since he’d gone out and actively been a vigilante. There was that isolated moment months before, the one that had led to him being recruited to the CIA, but before that it had been years. Putting on the hood felt like second nature in a way he wanted to analyze, but didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to think too hard on. Everything in Las Vegas was complex, difficult, and cause for despair. In Gotham, however, everything was very simple. Going out and protecting people wasn’t even a choice, really. It was a necessity. It was something no one else was going to do. And while he struggled with that idea, tried to bring pieces of rhetoric to it that he’d managed to back in Vegas, every counter to it was louder inside him. Why shouldn’t he? How was it any different from the work the CIA had him doing? Who else was going to take care of it?
Still, despite the fact that it all added up to a forgone conclusion that made his fingers itch for the trigger of a gun, something about it made him feel sick inside, not quite right. He couldn’t name it, the wrong feeling, the off-balance tilt of it all, but it had only gotten worse after he’d talked to Max. As if that mattered. He should have told her those things years ago. She could call names all she wanted. He told himself it didn’t make him furious, and that it didn’t make him hate, because why would he waste his time hating someone who had jerked him around for so long and then tried to put it all on him? She was best forgotten. He’d wasted too much time on her already.
As he dropped through a hole in the roof of a house not far from Crime Alley, he wondered why he’d bothered to contact Luke, and that sickness twisted inside like a knife. Maybe it was about proving a point. Or maybe it was about an obstruction. An obstacle. Or maybe it was fair play. Some part of him struggled still with the inevitability of what he had to do. He hadn’t wanted this. He had wanted to be more, to try, to have a different kind of life. But something had changed.
The girl and her two male friends were down below. The boys had already been put up against the wall by the gang, and a few of the other men had circled the girl, in sight of her friends. The house was falling apart, and there was a large enough hole in one of the upstairs bedrooms that he could peer down and watch them. He stepped carefully, making almost no sound at all. There was a scattering of musty papers over the floor, plastered with clown faces in various states of water-stained and blackened decay. They marked this place as a likely hangout for the Joker’s men once upon a time. There was no way to know if the gang downstairs had ties, but did it matter, really? If they did, it would just make this even better.
All it took to break through the fragile, half-rotted boards was a quick jump. Jack grabbed hold of a rusting curtain rod, which screeched under his weight. Someone down below commented on the noise upstairs, and a few moments later the ceiling was raining down on him, as Jack dropped down, slamming heavy boots through and landing neatly on top of one of the gang members with all his weight. A quick look showed that the men with the girl had already cleared out of the room, and now the men who’d been holding their guns to the boys against the wall were turning their weapons on Jack.
Jack was firing almost before he hit the floor, aiming for the men with their guns trained on him first. He wore the Hood’s uniform: the jacket, the easy access belt of ammo clips, the multitude of weapons, and, of course, the red helmet, glossy as a puddle of fresh blood. It fit like it had been forged for him.
Luke knew that things in Gotham were wrong. However right it might feel to put on the Batsuit, to push himself beyond his limits hour after hour and hunt down the criminals contaminating the city streets, this wasn’t where he belonged. The two polar opposites clashed and banged within his mind, a painful struggle that was never really won, but he kept going, because that urge to act was simply too strong. He knew, too, that he was pushing away the people he cared about, but even that seemed to be an impulse that wasn’t his yet had an effect upon him all the same. Priorities had shifted. Every time he tried to rearrange them, they simply went back to the way they’d been before. He thought, maybe, sending Bruce through might help, but the other man wasn’t faring much better. Neither, it seemed, were well equipped to be the other.
But tonight, at least, he’d managed to have a firm enough grasp on himself to understand why he was roaring through the backstreets and alleys at top speed to get to the address Jack had given him as quickly as possible. It had less to do with saving the lives of the criminals, and more to do with saving his friend, who had obviously been far more negatively affected by Jason’s influence than anyone else had; he just needed help. That desire to help that he had in such strong force in Vegas was only amplified here, and Luke was determined to save Jack from himself no matter what it took.
The sound of gunshots indicated that he was at the right location. Immediately he was seized by panic, an overwhelming sense that he was too late, but he shoved all that aside to focus on the task at hand. It was Batman, entirely unrecognizable as Luke, who came crashing down through the exact same route Jack had taken, seemingly unaffected by the gunfire. “STOP.” It was practically a roar, something he honestly wasn’t sure how he’d managed to even create at all. Distracted by Jack, those who hadn’t been hit were unprepared for the mass of black and kevlar that came barrelling at them, and their bullets aimed upward in a harmless spray that embedded itself in the floorboards. Bruce had been ruthless, but Luke was even more so, fuelled by his anger and the Bat’s, which snapped bone and broke vessels beneath skin, all without becoming fatal.
In this case, it was wrists that snapped like twigs. Luke had no problem taking two men on his own, yelling for the victims to run and take cover; the sooner these thugs were unconscious, the sooner he could focus on getting Jack out of here and somewhere else.
the ceiling, fear widening their eyes. One had been hit in the shoulder by one of Jack's bullets, the other grazed on the side of his head. Both were saved by their startled reaction's to the Bat's appearance, pulling them just outside the line of fire enough not to be struck dead on.
Jack cursed. Why had he put Luke in his way as an obstacle? In the heat of the fight, the decision seemed completely absurd. "Nice of you to visit," came the cool voice from behind the mask, as he took off running for the back rooms. The rest were in the back, with the girl, and his only chance to deal with them was now, while Luke was distracted with the men in the front.
Jack slid partway into the door to the back and narrowly missed being clipped by a burst gunfire from inside. He snapped back out of the open doorway, paused a moment, then looked up. Perfect.
He moved just into the doorway enough fire into the ceiling. As it rained down plaster dust, blinding the men inside, he sprinted through the door, landing the man closest to the girl straight in the chest with a full-body tackle to the ground. After that, it was a brutal free-for-all, Jack laying kicks, punches, and hard cracks with the butt of one of his guns. There was no time to get out a knife, and the guns were badly suited to close quarters combat, but it was still only a few short seconds before Jack was hopping up and kicking the one of the last men in the chest. The thug crumpled to the floor, ribs broken, heaving labored, strangled breaths.
Jack looked up. The last man standing was a mess He wore a ripped football jersey, and his short blond hair was matted with blod. His teeth were pink, one of the front knocked clean out by a short kick from Jack a few moments before. And he was grinning, with a gun to the girl's head, nestled in her hair.
Jack went very still.
Every life saved was a death Jack wasn’t responsible for, which Luke counted as a victory. He wasn’t so influenced by Bruce that he put the lives of strangers before his friend, and in truth, he was finding it very difficult to give a damn about the thugs just then. But he had to do this, because someone had to stand in Jack’s way. That cool voice from behind the mask made him want to scream, because it wasn’t right, but the other man was up and running before he could do or say anything. He had to settle for a snarl of frustration instead, left to finish off the men in the front, and it was all he could do to keep his blows non-lethal and leave the men unconscious instead of dead.
When he was done, rather than burst into the room blindly, Luke kept himself pressed up against the wall, silent, as sounds of an all-out brawl began to dwindle. He cursed under his breath, obviously too late, but the absence of gunfire was reassuring. Until, at least, he caught a glimpse of Jack’s still form, and beyond him, the last grinning thug with a gun pressed to the girl’s head.
Not good.
Luke backtracked. He needed the element of surprise, and so he went up, heart pounding in his ears, letting instinct take over instead of thinking. For Bruce, everything came naturally, and he knew if he tried to overthink this he was just going to panic and get the girl killed. As long as Jack remained still and didn’t do anything rash, at least not just yet, this could work. Maybe. The ceiling above was already precarious thanks to the gunfire, but he stepped carefully, silent despite the weight his suit bore on the plaster and splintered wood. He crouched, slid his grapple gun from his belt, and took aim. Below, the man began to speak, but he didn’t pay attention to the words and he intentionally shifted his weight so that bits of plaster fell and the ceiling groaned in protest.
The man’s gaze snapped upwards instinctively, and his hand, the one holding the gun, jerked. Not a significant amount, but enough, and with a low hiss the grapple gun was fired, the sharp point piercing the flesh between the thug’s thumb and forefinger, and then he pulled on the line, shouting for the girl to move and hoping Jack acted quickly enough. The man cried out, the gun went off, and in the midst of the action Luke’s weight was finally enough; wood creaked, snapped, and he dropped down, heavily, praying his little trick had diverted the gunman’s aim and sent the bullet into the wall.
Jack cursed and leapt forward when plaster began to rain down from the ceiling. The bullet grazed him on its way to the wall, but he hardly felt it. The most important thing was to get the girl out of range of the gunman, who'd begun to spit some useless and vile thing about Jack putting his gun down and watching him "fuck the bitch" before Luke had dropped through the ceiling.
Jack shielded her with his body, even as she screamed, then turned and fired two shots into the gunman's legs, cutting the cord and sending him to the floor, Luke still atop him. The thug’s hand, already weakened from the strike of the grappling hook, loosened on the gun, and it slid across the floor.
Jack lowered the gun, pointing it directly at the back of the man's head. The girl was in his arms, her face pressed against the leather of his jacket. She wasn't shaking, or screaming, but she wasn't speaking, either. He unwound his arm from around her and she gave him only a brief look before running. Her friends were already halfway down the hall, and she pushed them toward the door. Whatever happened next, they wouldn't want to be a part of it.
Jack's breathing behind the mask was heavy, but there was no expression to read. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking, with his gun aimed directly at the squealing thing on the floor. Inconveniently, Luke was inside his sight line, and he sighed, a sharp huff of breath. “Could you move?”
Fortunately for Luke, the armor protected him from the fall. Unfortunately for the gunman, that meant that a great deal of weight came down upon him from above, heavy and unforgiving, and it was obvious which of the two had a better likelihood of getting back up once they hit the floor. He’d found traction, then lost it, and for a moment he was left dazed upon impact. The gunshots were what got him moving, as he pushed himself up onto all fours, a quick shake of his head bringing him back into focus. He saw the girl, very much alive, and watched her take off for the door, relieved that his improvisation had worked and she’d managed to get away before the thugs could further traumatize her.
And then he noticed the gun.
He got to his feet carefully, gaze fixed on Jack, and ensured that he stood between the weapon and the fallen gunman, still sprawled out behind him in a heap of incessant noise and pitiful flailing. “No.” It was a quiet refusal, but no less firm for it. He brought one boot back and pressed his heel down into the man’s hand, all his weight adding pressure, which caused the thug to wail before tapering off into frenzied whimpers. Better. “This isn’t you. It’s not who you are,” he told him, hoping beyond hope that he might be able to get through to him. “Listen to me. Fight it, okay? Don’t let this place take you over. He won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore. You don’t have to kill him. Just put the gun down.”
There was little doubt in Jack's harried mind that the GCPD would be coming soon. The girl would call, or one of her friends would, and it wouldn't take long for the police to jump from picking them up to bursting into the house and arresting those already put down, those left. And he had no intention of the thug on the floor being one of those who remained to be processed and shoved into a system that would cut him free in a few years because there wasn't enough evidence to prove he'd really tried to assault the girl.
Luke's words were unpleasant, like an insect buzzing in Jack’s ear, like sounds filtering through water. It took real effort to drag his attention away from estimating what angle would strike the thug in the head the second Luke moved. When he started listening, his head tipped up a fraction. There was no reading where his eyes fell behind that mask. Like an animated doll, the only signs of life happened when he moved.
It sank in, though. Despite his best efforts to ignore him, Luke's words penetrated and dredged up ire, dragging him into a conversation he had no time for, like hooks in his skin. "Not who I am?" he asked. His hands didn't shake on the gun. "This is all I am, anymore. This is all that's left. I'm a husk." The muzzle of the gun twitched, suggesting that he was still waiting, like a gunslinger, for any movement from Luke that would give him an opening. He laughed, and the sound was like bone bouncing off asphalt. "Wren was right, you know. I didn't want to tell her. She was right, though." He lifted his head. "Two weeks from now he'll be out on bail, and he'll skip town and do this all over again." His head shifted again, and there was the distinct sense he was meeting Luke's eyes, then. His voice had gone cold through. "Tell me that won't happen."
He hated Jack’s mask. It was an almost childish reaction, but he was frustrated, and he was angry-- and, most of all, he was worried. Worried that he wouldn’t be able to reach him, because he didn’t quite have a concrete plan just yet if that failed. At least with the cowl, Luke’s eyes were visible, but it was like the man holding a gun was a stranger and not someone familiar at all. He wondered how much of what he was saying came from him, and how much came from Jason, but either way he was certain the latter’s influence wasn’t helping matters. “You’re not a husk,” he protested, immediate and instinctive. “You’re more than this. You always were. Don’t you remember? You stopped. You lived beyond this.” The laughter made him wince, visible behind the cowl as a frown around his eyes and a slight curl of his upper lip. Wren’s words had cut deep, even though she hadn’t been in her right mind when she said them, mostly because he feared they were true. He felt like somehow things had taken a turn for the worse; sometime before, maybe, and Luke hadn’t been there to stop it for one reason or another, and now he was scrambling to try to fix the damage before that was no longer an option.
“She wasn’t right.” In the back of his mind, he knew their time was limited, but still he pressed forward. “You’re not some dead man walking. You can’t take anything she said while she was insane seriously.” Jack didn’t seem inclined to lower the gun, but Luke desperately wanted to avoid a physical confrontation. If it was a choice, however, between disarming him and keeping him from doing something he would regret, and letting him kill the thug, then he would choose the former. For a long, long moment he stared, and then he sighed. “I can’t promise you anything,” he admitted. “He’ll be arrested. He’ll be charged. Maybe he’ll get out on bail, maybe he won’t. But killing him won’t fix the system. Once you start, it’ll never end. You know that. I know that. There’s always going to be men like him, and you can kill them all and it still won’t be enough.” He rolled his shoulders back and took a step forward, keeping the thug covered in the process. “I didn’t come here for him, or his friends. I came here for you, because I think, deep down, you want to stop. Why else would you tell me where you are? If you kill him, and you keep killing, you’ll look back when this is over and regret it,” he told him.
He didn’t know if it was enough to get through to him, but it was all or nothing now. “If our roles were reversed, you’d do the same for me,” Luke said. “You saved the girl and her friends. The cops are on their way. Let’s just go, okay?” There was no verbal ultimatum, but he wasn’t Bruce, and Jack wasn’t Jason; he refused to act like they were.
More than this? Jack had a difficult time remembering when life had ever been different, when it had been more. A fog of anger covered everything over, and beyond that there was nothing. "I stopped, but it didn't mean anything was different with me. It didn't mean there was something worth living for. I just kept going because I had to. A body in motion stays in motion."
Jack wanted to ask what he was if he wasn't a dead man walking. What did that make him, then? What was he worth? But Luke kept going, began to reason with him. Of course killing this man wouldn't fix the system - it was an act intended to augment the things the system failed at, to pick up the slack it left behind. "You're right," he said, staring at the man on the floor. "You're right about one thing. I could kill every single one of them and it wouldn't make things alright. But it has to be better than nothing at all. It has to."
Luke's step forward made Jack jerk to the side, leveling the gun at him, now, without thinking. Then, as if he had only just realized what he was doing, he lowered it a little. It was difficult to tell without seeing his face, but some kind of struggle seemed to be going on in the way the gun's focus wavered. "If I stop," he said, "There's nothing." His voice was empty, deep and hollow as a well.
In the end, what finally commanded his attention was the 'let's'. 'Let's just go.' That meant the two of them, together, with no cops. That meant Luke, unlike Bruce, wouldn't just ask him to flatten down on the ground and let the police take him away. It meant Luke wouldn't leave him to drown on his own. He hesitated, looking at the man on the ground. There were so many like him that a lifetime wasn't enough to track them all down, kill them all like dogs.
No decisions. Not now, not today. This dog, though, could live long enough to get repeatedly assaulted in jail. "Fine," he said, finally. He lowered the gun, and started to think there had been a reason he'd called Luke, a reason he'd asked him to come. He couldn't remember what it was, but there had been a reason.
Luke had never dealt with the truth very well, not when it was something he didn’t want to hear, something he would prefer to deny rather than accept. Being alive wasn’t the same as living, he knew that. Finding reasons not to end one’s life and finding reasons to actually live, to find purpose, weren’t the same either. He could give Jack reasons to not die; himself, Gus, Wren, even Max. But giving him a real will to live, to find meaning in his life, that was a losing battle he couldn’t seem to stop fighting. For a long, long moment, he didn’t know how to respond. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he managed. “You stopped, and that means there was something worth stopping for, or you wouldn’t have been able to do it.” Maybe there was something selfish in his desire to keep him alive, not wanting to face the prospect of losing him, but he couldn’t just let Jack give up when he had so many years and potential ahead of him.
He felt a faint spark of hope when Jack agreed that he was right, because that was progress, wasn’t it? Small, tiny, but there. “It’s not,” he said quietly, almost sad. “I thought the same way, once. But it’s not better. Killing them kills a part of you, every single time. The lines get blurry, and then they disappear entirely, and it’s too easy to lose yourself, to go too far. It’s not better,” he repeated.
There was no fear when the gun was levelled at him. It had nothing to do with the fact that he’d had weapons in his face before, and everything to do with an unwavering trust in the fact that, no matter what, Jack wouldn’t shoot him. “There’s never nothing,” he said. “There’s always something. Always. You just have to find it. You can’t give up. I’ll help you, but you can’t give up.” It didn’t matter if Jack believed him, not just then; he could have enough belief for the both of them. He was stubborn that way. And then he lowered the gun, and Luke barely managed to bite back a sigh of relief. Okay. It was fine. He’d take him back to the Manor, and for now, at least, everything would be fine. The thug at his feet had stopped whimpering, and it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere, not until those distant sirens showed up. “Good,” he said. “Good. Thank you. Let’s get out of here before the cops show up. You can stay at the Manor, I’m the only one there. Wren too, sometimes, but mostly it’s just me.” He looked at him for a moment longer before moving towards the window.
"I don't think there's anything left to kill," Jack said, the words bleak from behind the metal mask. But they could put this argument off. He could leave to fight another day. Who knew how long they would be through this side of the door? While most of his brain was screaming that he was failing anyone this man might hurt in the future, some small part of him still jammed the lock, wouldn't let him do it. Not when Luke was offering a path out that didn't go through Gotham Central.
"Alright," he said, tone still dark. He didn't know how he felt about staying at the manor, but it would be fine for now. He hadn't made any promises, had he? He could recollect, there. He did satisfy the baying hounds in his brain, though, with a sharp kick to the man's side. His ribs audibly cracked. There. A little blood to slake the insanity.
Jack went to the window and dropped into the alley outside, heading for the fire escape on the building opposite. Every inch of him wanted to turn around, but, yet, again, the outside world shoved him on, as the sirens drawing ever closer forced him to leave with Luke. And that was good. Because he could only account for himself so long as there was some obstacle in his way stronger than the compulsion to surmount it.
“There is,” Luke said simply. “There is. Enough of you has died already. I know. I’ve killed parts of myself too, but you can come back from it. You can keep going with what you have left, and it can be okay.” He didn’t expect Jack to believe him. Not now. Maybe not ever. Maybe this was only temporary, an interlude, but he pushed that thought from his mind and focused on getting back to the Manor instead. He’d stopped Jack for now, and he could stop him again if he had to; he hoped he could, at least. If he was lucky they could both hold out until this was over, however far away the end might be.
He said nothing when the man’s ribs cracked. He didn’t even bother turning around, not with the sirens drawing nearer. He only paused to ensure Jack was following, and once he was sure he was, and he wouldn’t fall behind, he kept going.
Gotham was exhausting, and he still had a real fear of losing his best friend to its madness. For one of the first times since seeing Wren, he felt the sharp, painful ache of homesickness.