Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-07-28 21:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | damian wayne, door: dc comics, red hood, supergirl |
Who: Kara, Damian, and Jason
What: Sparring at Sanctuary goes pear-shaped extremely fast.
Where: Sanctuary (DC Door)
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Sadness and beatdowns?
The hallway looked nothing like it normally did. As soon as the stairs were left behind and the corner rounded, the walls of Passages became cool ice, shards of blue and the sound of water. The walk led to one door, arches of sunstones that looked like icicles to human eyes. The ground underfoot before the door was sand, hard-packed and ocean-floor pale, and the walls moved like water. It was like a parted sea, and at the end of the steps a door hissed up, open. No doorknob, no place for a key, no indication a door was there at all, save for the parting of the smooth surface.
Beyond, there was only white. Smooth, uninterrupted white. Walls and floors and ceiling, and Kryptonian symbols in recessed blue. A large entry foyer, circular and spoked, leading into more halls of endless, unbroken white.
Once inside, the doors hissed closed, and the silence was deafening. There was humanly breathable air, and the temperature was controlled to a comfortable 70 degrees. The voice that greeted them wasn't Kara's. It was male, older, English-speaking and slightly European sounding. "Do not proceed," the voice warned, as a ray of blue light scanned the newcomers from head to foot and contacted some database before speaking again. "Damian Wayne, Earth. Jason Todd, Earth. You are expected," the older male voice said, a hint of strange threat behind the smooth veneer. "Kara is in her quarters. Follow the lights to your pre-approved destination," Sanctuary said, and a line of blue chased along one of the halls, flashing soothingly, but no less insistently. "Weapon search in progress," the voice added pleasantly, and another soothing blue light began scanning them, more slowly this time. "If weapons are present, you are required to disclose them now."
Damian looked up at the ice blue archways and reached to touch a nearby edge curiously. It was a childlike thing to do, but he did not know it was so he couldn’t suppress the urge to touch an object he hadn’t seen before. Inside, he looked up at the ceiling and around at the different symbols he didn’t understand and thought how different this was from the cave. There were no holes to hide in. No dark unknown tunnels to explore when he needed to clear his mind. How did Kara managed to live in a place like this? Even the most solitary person would find the space maddening.
He was dressed in a black t-shirt and pants, looking like an average teenager. At first. When crisp voice asked for him to turn over any weapons, he paused a moment and then in good faith took out a couple knives he had hidden under his pants and a handful of throwing stars from under his shirt. He considered keeping a couple of them concealed, but he suspected Kryptonian technology could detect it on him anyway. “That’s it.” He looked back at Todd and suspected he had about just as many hidden away, too.
Jason didn't know what he was expecting from Kara's home, her 'sanctuary' that he'd her mention so many times over the past few months. He'd expected something alien, something strange and unique. But this was beyond the pale of what he could have dreamed up on his own, and Jack was taken aback by the way the walls of Passages moved and rippled, unlike anything he'd seen in the hotel.
As soon as Jason walked through into the weird white voice beyond, he felt a little off his footing. He didn't show it, of course, because he'd learned very young that weakness was not a thing you paraded for other people, but even though he knew this was Kara's place, and the voice telling him to disclose his weapons belonged to her, he didn't like it.
After a moment's pause, he pulled back his dark jacket to display the paired guns and knives on his belt, one of which had a wicked curve. Then there were the throwing daggers in his sleeves, and the shoulder holster. Oh, and he tapped his heel hard against the pavement, and knife unsheathed from the tip with a small, vicious scrape of metal on metal. He tapped it again and the knife retracted.
And if there were more, he kept that to himself. "Fair enough?" This place with its white on white creeped him out. Give him a cave or a quiet little room any day over all this void-like space.
"Please be aware that any unauthorized use of weapons will result in terminal failure of Jason Todd and Damian Wayne, Earth," Sanctuary stated after a moment, sounding almost pleased at the possibility.
Kara rounded a smooth, uninterrupted corner at that point. She was dressed in her Kryptonian clothing, because she seldom bothered with Earth attire in Sanctuary. The fortress was so far below the ocean that sunlight wasn't even a promise. The structure had gone undetected because humanity hadn't managed to dive to these depths, and they had no way to detect anything there. The only thing outside of Sanctuary's walls was perpetual night and fish that had no need for eyes, and that (therefore) had never developed them. If leviathan existed, they lived here, and the girl that called the huge fortress home couldn't make herself feel human there by wearing jeans and a hoodie.
She was blonde hair, braided and tucked away, because she suspected Damian might be the kind of boy to tug pigtails in a fight. The leggings she wore were bright pink, and the tunic she wore was cream with pink trim. The sides of the tunic were split from beneath her arms to her thighs, and her feet were bare.
"Lawrence, stop being a-" Here she paused, because H'El's translator, the one that allowed her to speak Earth languages, didn't have the updated OED software; she'd only managed to integrate that into her holographic communicator and into Sanctuary's mainframe.
"I believe the word you're looking for is jerk, Kara," Sanctuary helpfully provided.
Sanctuary clearly had a better grasp of contractions than she did.
Kara rolled her eyes, and she smiled and came to a slap-foot stop in front of Jason and Damian. "He will not to do anything if I do not tell him to," she assured them, and then she turned and pointed down a long corridor on the opposite side of the room they were in. "The physical training room is this way," she told them.
Damian grimaced up at the Sanctuary voice, one eye squinted to tell it that he did not approve nor was he afraid to cut some circuits up if it tried to do anything funny. One of his throwing stars rolled between his fingers, a trick one of mother’s assassins had taught him out in the desert before that man was knifed in the throat for not paying attention during a raid. Damian did his best not to think about his time before Gotham and Robin, but he couldn’t eradicate the influence out of his system. It was embedded in him.
When Kara entered the room, he glanced down at her, the throwing star vanishing between his fingers. Even though he had recently made small amends with Jason, Damian didn’t want his brother there. He liked Kara. He liked her enough that he wanted to fix the disaster he created back when he was on the toxin. What was worse was that he suspected that part of the reason why Kara brought them both over was to make the brothers like eachother again, so competing for her could have an even more awkward result than how it was now. All of this including how hot Kara looked in that pink outfit she was wearing was distracting and Damian knew he had to stay on task if he actually wanted to win.
“Jason and I should spar first. Then, whoever wins gets to spar you. It’s only fair, since you are a woman and also the hostess.” Damian said, no irony or humor in his voice.
Jason had already put his thoughts together on how this thing was going to go. He liked Kara. There was no getting around that. He'd liked her since he'd first found her. There was a purity of being to her that he couldn't explain, and would have sounded stupid if he tried articulating it out loud, particularly to himself. It was all basically dumb at its core, but it didn't change the fact that it was there, and it hadn't gone away. He'd waited a while after he first met her, and he'd checked, and yep, still there.
But something was obviously going on with her and Damian, and if that was the case then it wasn't Jason’s prerogative to ask her out. They were closer in age, and Damian was a brat but less of a mess. The kid was decent, underneath all the layers of Talia's carving. He was a better fit. Jason could accept that and walk away.
It didn't mean, though, that Jason didn't want to beat the crap out of Damian in return. It might just make him feel better about the whole thing - and about Damian being a little prick. "You're just scared because she's going to kick your ass," Jason offered as he pushed past, walking in the direction Kara had pointed despite how much this place really did get under his skin. Christ, did all Kryptonian girls wear tunics slit up to the armpit? That was fundamentally unfair.
Sanctuary's halls were uninterrupted white. There was no sign of doors or openings down the long walk toward the physical training room. The distance made it obvious that the structure was huge, and the unbroken walls of the hall made it impossible to tell what lived behind the smooth and indestructible whiteness. When a door snicked open to their right, it did so without them being close enough to trigger it, and there was no indication that a door had been there at all. "Thank you, Lawrence," Kara said, tone polite, even in her native Kryptonian, and she didn't acknowledge Sanctuary's annoyed correction of its designation. (I am Sanctuary, Kara.)
Inside, the training room was whites and greys. There were no windows, and the only thing that could pass for furniture was a line of white shelf-like benches along one wall. In the center of the room, a square of soothing blue designated a practice space, and a training robot slumbered, awaken by Kara's footsteps as she entered the room. "Greetings, Kem, please collect Damian's and Jason's weapons," Kara asked of the robot in English, and she waited for the robot to move toward the boys.
"You may spar first," she said, agreeing with Damian's suggestion, though she wasn't sure she'd be able to kick either of their asses (or any part of them), now that it came right down it. She didn't understand why kicking his ass was so important, either. There were more dangerous places to kick. She had never paid her physical training as much attention as she should have, but even she knew that. "No weapons," she reiterated, though her command to the training robot should have indicated as much. She expected them to protest, and she was willing to allow them staffs if they did, but she thought hand battle might be better for their anger issues. That was why they were here, after all.
She sat on one of the benches, legs criss-crossed, ready to be a spectator.
“I only want her to feel less bad about being defeated.” Damian said simply, handing off all his weapons before taking off his shoes. He looked over to Kara and gave her a thin almost smile and walked over to the far side of the mat. Since the little bird was actually very keen on beating Jason in a hopefully embarrassingly quick amount of time, he stretched his arms and legs to loosen himself up for a real fight. A glance up to Todd that said I will destroy you with Wayne intensity flickering through his light blue eyes.
“What are the rules, Todd?” Damian asked pulling his arm to the side so it stretched out just under his chin. “Whoever yells for mercy first?” He started to focus on Todd’s height, his fighting style, the size of the mat under them and whether or not he planned on breaking anything to make his brother cry. “Kara can decide who she thinks is the winner before I critically injure you.”
Jason removed all of his weapons. His shoes went last, given to the robot instead of merely tossed aside. There were, in fact, one or two extra off the list he'd given Sanctuary, but they didn't appear in the cache he laid with the robot. The room was just as strange as the rest of this place, just as off-putting. At least the space had the recognizable feel of a training room, though, and that got his head back in order.
Jason left his jacket with the robot last, since there wasn't much sense in wearing it if he didn't need to worry about fending off bullets and knives. He caught that little look from Damian, and he could see, just for a second, a flash of someone he hadn't seen in over a year. He met it with a small smirk.
All the Robins had their particular set of skills. Dick always had the acrobat's grace and flexibility, and Jason heard tell that Tim was a particularly sharp detective. Jason wasn't so good with either. Tracing the dots and doing research was never his thing, and he hadn't been raised like Dick to backflip his way out of trouble. What he had been raised with was the tenacity and brutality of someone who'd been forced to fight for his life as far back as his memories stretched. Training had come later, but the roots lay in fights of practicality. There was a reason he liked knives so much. You didn't have to reload them, you didn't need a license to own them, and there were nearly always some easily on hand. Damian had been trained by assassins to be an assassin. Jason had been trained by necessity on how to end fights as quickly after they got started as possible to make sure you didn’t have time to get shot. "That's not going to work," he said, wrinkling his nose. "Because that would mean I'd have to yell for mercy if I lost, and that isn't going to happen. Let's let Kara be the judge and call the stop before somebody loses an eye. Fair?"
“Fair.” Damian nodded in agreement and walked to the middle of the mat. He, being the tiny bird trained by ninjas that he was, actually gave a rigid bow in respect to Todd before taking a bouncing step back. He was always smaller than all of his opponents and usually had to make up for it with knives or acrobatic tricks. This kind of thing didn’t work in a ring against someone who was used to an entire brood of birds flying the same way. So, Damian fell back on classic training dating back to what his own mother taught him. He started to move in a circular motion, one foot precisely behind the other in a pendulum before changing up and circling in a looser, larger circle.
Todd was accustomed to taking down street thugs, so Damian stuck as closely to a formal stance as he could. Knees bent, hands straightened out into hard lines, feet slowly changing position and grounding as if to prove he could wear his opponents out before they even threw the first punch. Damian rarely fought on the defensive, but everyone in the room knew that so it was best to keep them guessing. Plus, taunting Todd’s lack of skill and training was always entertaining.
No, Jason didn't have the training Damian did. He had the training he'd given himself, and the training he'd gotten from Bruce when that phase of his life started. He'd trained, too, before he'd come back to Gotham, made sure he was fully prepared to mount a one man war on the city. All things considered, he'd been pretty successful. If his own grudge hadn't gotten in the way - but when did it not?
When Damian struck a sharply practiced pose, Jason simply...didn't. He stood the same way he'd been standing, and gestured to Kara. "The lady's waiting for you to make a move," he said. "Unless you want to stand there all day." He wasn't going to rise to the bait of a full-on charge toward someone better prepared. That wasn't how he fought. His tone was mild, and nothing at all seemed to have changed, but he had his eye tied tightly to Damian’s every move. And he waited.
Damian moved back and forth on his toes, a traditional kung-fu stance melting with a white man’s interpretation of taekwondo. “You scared, Todd?” The little bird asked with a fierce smirk and a glint in those Bruce Wayne blues. “I can’t say I’m surprised you realized how out matched you are right at the beginning of the fight.” A harmless shrug of his shoulders, feet still moving in a practiced tap-tap-tap against the mat. He took the bait, though, the youngest of the Bat family not mild enough in temper to turn down a challenge and too full of energy to wait any longer.
His feet slid forward suddenly, right foot making a sudden strike at Jason’s shin and then another at his knee before hopping back out of arm’s length. With each strike, Damian stayed low. Even though he was considerably taller than himself at ten, he was more comfortable fighting as if everyone still had a couple feet height advantage on him. This made fight a lot more like a Robin than a bat.
Jason wasn't sure he fought like an anything, since Robin hadn't been the beginning of his experience with violence and certainly hadn't been the end. The low strikes came fast enough that he didn't catch the first to block it, but by the second he'd changed stance and shifted his weight to swing his leg out of the way. Damian was out of arm's reach by the time he'd begun to carry that momentum forward again, but he closed the gap with a shuffle of feet, step and drag to keep from losing his grounding, and then a short, sharp punch to Damian's middle, head tipped out of the way of a strike from the other direction.
Damian’s feet shifted, one suddenly moving behind the other as he sidestepped Jason’s punch and circled to his left. “Come on, Todd. At least throw more than one punch when you attack me.” He didn’t sound like a Wayne anymore. His voice hit a cold viper taunt of an al Ghul. He slapped his foot down hard on the mat to make a shocking, sharp noise through the room before he returned to a silent bounce just out of Todd’s reach. It didn’t take him long to strike again, this time rushing forward with a fast, elegant kick aimed towards Jason’s stomach but swept up towards his head in a deceptively fast movement.
Jason wasn't quite as fast as Damian, so while he'd begun to pull back when that kick came up, he didn't get out of the way quickly enough to avoid a glancing blow to the head. He continued moving back and out of range, despite the disorienting strike to the head, and lashed back with a low blow, anticipating Damian would move in closer to follow up his successful hit, tipping low to avoid another strike.
A rush of air came out of Damian as Jason’s awkward, low hit landed and he rolled back to his feet in a crouch. Using his hands as leverage, he snapped a kick from below at Jason’s middle before spinning his legs in a rapid sweep at the older Robin’s shins. The little bird had intended to show off for Kara a little bit before he beat her, too, but efficiently putting Jason in his place was a lot more gratifying somehow. Each movement was faster than the last, each kick a little harder. A building, escalating force that would not stop until Todd was defeated.
There was no doubt that hand to hand combat wasn't Jason's area of expertise. Put a weapon in his hand and he could end a conflict faster than almost anyone. But non-lethal fighting without a weapon? That wasn't what he'd learned how to do growing up, and it wasn't what he was good at. Jason hit the ground when Damian knocked his feet out from under him, and it was raw strength that got him up on his hands. He pushed up and swept both legs around, pistoning toward Damian. It wasn't finesse, but sometimes power could work as a replacement in a pinch.
Damian waited for the connect, the sound of Jason hitting the mat, before spinning around on his hands and bouncing back to his feet. The movement, flawlessly graceful and almost alien to the otherwise hard striking poses of the little bird, was Grayson influence through and through. A Robin couldn’t afford to stay still for very long. A Robin didn’t rely on tools of death. A Robin was airborne, impossible to catch and full of endless energy. Jason was supposed to be a Robin, too. He was supposed to move like all the other Robins could. “You’re not thinking!” Damian yelled, cartwheeling past Jason’s attempt at a strike. Anger expanded in his chest like a balloon.
“At least Drake has an excuse for being a terrible fighter.” Damian was suddenly moving twice as fast as he was before, stomping his foot hard into Jason’s middle focusing strikes on the ankles, kneecaps and head. “What’s your excuse? You were trained by the best and this is all you got?” The true Robin in the room was sharp, painful and efficient. He never stayed in the same place for more than a second. He wasn’t just trained by the best, he was made of the same blood.
Kara had done this so they'd mend their fences. Back home, the only fighting she ever saw was in preparation for the trials that every upper caste Kryptonian went through when they reached their age of maturity. These were not the fights of the obsolete military caste, who were bred for wars that were no longer fought, and who lived apart from society in anticipation of their own extinction. No, the trials were about science and art, and not about the weight of fists against skin and bone. Training was conducted in brightly lit rooms with happy chattering, and all jibes were good-natured, intended to make the fighters work harder. The Kryptonian caste system was competitive, as only a caste system belonging to a world that based their survival on altering the genes of their offspring could be, and the trials were no different.
She had thought Jason and Damian could fight and end up as she and her friends had done after arguments, both sweaty and tired and hugging at the end, no longer remembering the cause of the dispute. But it had only taken a few minutes to realize she had misjudged this situation. It reminded her of her father's arguments with Jor-El, the ones from when she was small and didn't understand why the two brothers hated each other. She thought then, too, that they could mend things. She'd thought that until her very last day on Krypton.
She knew now, too late, that there was no mending her uncle and her father. If they had both lived, they would never have seen eye-to-eye.
She stood when Damian insisted that Jason wasn't thinking. She knew what Damian was trying to do. She suspected this was how he had been trained, with goading insults. And, Damian was not wrong, Jason did not have a fighting style that would allow him any chance in this fight. She'd thought they had both been equally trained, but she was wrong about that, too. She had no idea who "Drake" was, but it didn't matter. Jason was, she had decided during the fight, was not emotionally resilient like Damian was. This was only going to make things worse. "Kem, Jason is done fighting," she stated, loud and firm, and the robot moved forward to break the boys apart.
Jason blocked, and blocked, and soon he was exactly where he didn't want to be, in a defensive position with blows hammering into his weak points. He tried to get a blow in, but took a kick to the ankle for his pains, and went down on one knee. Anger cracked open, but there was no time to sort it out. If he'd been able to lash out and connect, if they'd been more evenly matched in hand to hand - but they weren't, and he could only grit his teeth and try to get back up without being knocked to the ground.
Kara stepped in then, and the anger that had sparked at Damian's words roared higher with the shame of it. That someone had to intervene to keep him from getting his ass kicked just rubbed salt in the wound. The robot got between them to keep the fight from going any further, and Jason rubbed away the copper trickle of blood from a split lip with his thumb, flicking little red dots onto the floor when he shook his hand out. He was still half staggered at standing, getting his breath back. Maybe if the fight had gone more than five minutes it would have been a little less humiliating. Maybe, maybe. Who the fuck cared, anyway? "Yeah, Jason's done," he said. He looked at the robot, then at Kara. His jacket was still in the robot's storage, so he took that back, along with the knives he'd left with him. He palmed one of the knives, spinning it across his palm and sheathing it. "You win," he said, refusing to look back or let anything but casual defiance come through his voice. "So you two get to fight. Have fun, I know my way out." Damian had won, fair and square. If nothing else, it had made a strong point. If he couldn't even keep himself from getting beaten down in front of Kara, then he probably wasn't the right person to go chasing after her. She and Damian had more in common than he ever would anyway.
Damian was intent on continuing his assault on Todd and barely even heard Kara when she tried to end the fight. The rest of the world was underwater when Damian felt fury rise in him. Righteous, unrelenting fury bred of al Ghul and dignified by being chosen to join one of the most elite crime fighting families ever known. Todd didn’t know what pride was, he didn’t know about dynasties or care about a legacy. If he had he would have trained harder, maybe he could have lasted more than a couple minutes against the one true Robin. Maybe he could have impressed Damian a little bit. Truthfully, the little bird really did want to see some merit in his older brother beyond blood thirst and the ability to shoot a gun.
The robot moving between them snapped Damian out of his battle mode and he looked at it curiously before glancing back at Kara and then around at Jason. The air felt awkward and heavy all at once and Damian honestly couldn’t tell if he had done something wrong or how severely Jason was hurt. “You’re leaving?” Damian asked, voice young and thick with confusion as he got to his feet unhurt and unwinded. He teetered a little, rolling his shoulders like a fighter looking for more and then walked the opposite direction of Todd. There wasn’t going to be some brotherly moment of comfort from the little bird. He wasn’t Grayson or Brown. He didn’t know how to make things right, he only knew how to make himself better.
Kara watched Jason attempt to collect his pride along with his jacket, and then she watched confusion make its way onto Damian's features. "Sanctuary, close the door, please" she said in quick Kryptonian, and the door to the training room snicked shut immediately. She stood, hands on her hips, looking from one boy to the other, trying to figure out what to say or do. She had no siblings she had ever fought with, but she had the feeling that things would only get worse between them if Jason left this room.
"Why did you not say you would not be okay with losing?" she asked, and it wasn't clear who she was asking. Maybe she was asking both of them, because she didn't understand sparring without realization that there was a good chance of loss. "During practice for trials, I would spar with the same person twenty times, and we would each win half. There is nothing wrong with losing," she said, and it was almost thoughtful, as if she was trying to piece it all together just by hearing her own voice.
She walked around the designated fighting area. "You will not get better if you do not practice," she said to herself, an echo of her mother, who had always thought Kara didn't pay enough attention to her physical training. "And there is no better way to improve than to practice with someone who has different strengths." It was obvious, after watching them, that Damian was a trained fighter. But she'd seen Jason on the street, and he was good with his weapons. She had made the playing field uneven, without even realizing it.
She stopped in the middle of the room, looking from one boy to the other again. "Fighting is not everything," she added. "You do not want to part like this. I do not want you to part like this," she said, her voice turning young and pleading.
Jason stopped halfway across the room when the door shut in front of him.. He hadn't answered when Damian asked if he was leaving, because that much should have been obvious. And when that was no longer an option, he turned back to face them both. His jacket swung down from his shoulder, where he had been carrying it, and he glanced between them.
His gaze settled on Kara. Damian was no longer facing him, so it seemed that end of the conversation was closed. He didn't say what he was thinking, which was that he was okay with losing, not getting his ass kicked. That hadn't really been what he'd signed up for, and the idea that he was just a sore loser chafed. "I didn't lose, I got beat," Jason said, which he knew wouldn't make it through Kara's translators in a way that would make sense, but Damian would hear it. He kept his voice light, because it didn't do to get all pissed like your pride was stung even when it was.
When Kara suggested he practice, Jason smiled a little. Practice? With Damian as his teacher? Yeah, he could count on one hand the things that would be more humiliating than that. Maybe a better man would have agreed to be taught by the person who'd kicked his ass, but Jason wasn't that person. It would have been the smart thing, sure, but history had shown he never walked that way. He went with what his emotions said, and right now is emotions said he wanted to go lick the wounds on his pride somewhere private rather than catch Damian looking at him with such contempt and disappointment again. He hadn't expected that. Maybe he should have, but he hadn't. "No," Jason said, gesturing in the direction of Damian's turned back, "It's not." It was clear enough who it was he thought needed to get that particular message.
When Kara pleaded, Jason sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Well, Damian? Any thoughts? How do you want to part?"
Damian pressed his hand against the bare wall, knowing that locking the two birds in a room would have been a much worse idea if Kara wasn’t there to keep the both of them from really hurting each other. Damian thought about how long it would take Todd to get to his weapons. He wondered how good of a shot he really was and a rumbling part of him wanted the older bird to just try it. Even with all his toys and tools, Jason was no match for Damian Wayne.
The little bird turned to look at Kara and then stared straight ahead at the bird who was at the other end of the room. “Jason relies on his weapons of death like a crutch. He intends to kill every opponent he takes on in battle and is never prepared to fight someone that he can’t murder.” Damian stood up straight, arms crossed, face expressionless. “Luckily for him, he picks his battles against weaker fighters. Thugs. And, when a trained assassin comes after him he fails. He will always fail against anyone who actually knows how to fight.” The little bird slipped his shoes back on and decided that he didn’t want to be here any longer, either.
“Kara, when are you going to learn this isn’t your freaky Krypton planet anymore? I don’t fight because it’s fun or it builds character. I fight because I believe in honor and justice.” Damian snapped a sharp look at her, disappointed that he seemed to misjudge her, too. “Jason fights for blood.” The little bird took his hotel key out, intent on leaving this place before Kara could try to get them to hug it out. “Brother,” Damian looked at Jason again, this time actually speaking to him instead of about him. “You need to train harder if you wish to be a murderer while I am still alive to stop you.” Damian stuck his key into the wall, a portal to the hotel suddenly opening and the little bird flew away.
Kara stood there, trying to figure out what she'd said wrong.
She was hopeful, when Jason asked Damian how they should part, that things would work out. She thought Damian might turn and they'd talk to each other, and that her plan would work. But she was wrong, and now even Damian was looking at her like he was disappointed in her. That look made her wilt in a way that only a girl who lived alone, and who had finally hoped to have somewhere to fit again, could. It lasted a moment, the wilting, and by the time Damian was opening his portal, she was telling Kem, in Kryptonian, to open the door.
Right then, she was every bit the sixteen-year-old girl she'd been before her father had shoved into a pod months earlier. She ran out of the training room, eyes already going unattractively red with tears, and she ordered the door closed behind her, before Jason could follow. She bypassed her room entirely, with its flat sleeping surface and cold walls. She didn't stop until she reached the hologram chamber, where she wetly sniffled out a number for a program she'd been spending most of her time in lately. "778394-A. Open."
Inside the chamber, Krypton was warm and bright, and the bustle of Argo City was unmistakable. In the distance, her friends called to her, and she sniffled as she smiled at them.
"Sanctuary, allow Jason Todd to leave," she said as she moved forward and let the false Argo envelope her.