→ (signpost) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-15 15:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | cassandra cain, gwen stacy |
Who: Dolores and Thea
What: A meeting and talking Gotham
Where: Beanz
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Nope
Beanz was the kind of coffeehouse that catered to haters of consumerism. Small and quaint, it featured open mic night, local artists' work on the walls, and chairs made from recycled wood. Dolores didn't actually care about any of these things, though perhaps she was meant to. After all, it was very (airquote) American Youth (airquote) to picket and have causes. But Dolores was not made for causes, and she had none worth mentioning. If life was to be judged by causes, she would rate a 0.0 (out of 10), and that would simply be that. And so, no, it was not in support of her local shop owners that she'd ventured from her Turnberry Place apartment to Beanz. It was in support of girl gamers.
Dolores harbored no illusions that girl gamers were more put upon than, say, everyone else, but she did get slightly insulted when boys insisted that girls merely played at liking comics and games in order to get boys. As if boys were that brilliant to begin with. Much to the chagrin of her family, she had yet to meet a boy she couldn't live without, and she didn't see that streak being broken anytime soon, despite lovely ship parties and cute boys with designer shoes and dreams of sibling vengeance. But there had been a meeting, and she'd nothing better to do. Her shift at Showgirl had ended at midday, when the senior citizens toddled back to their rockers and pulled their sticky fingers from their pants, and Beanz was on the way home.
And so, Dolores had sat and listened to impassioned speeches, all while sipping her caramel latte and trying to network herself into a better guild.
The wedding had left Dolores' hair boringly brown, but she'd been disinclined to dye it again. It was a protest, as it were, because her sisters had insisted on informing everyone present for the nuptials that she would dye it again as soon as she could. Which meant that Dolores had to stubbornly wait. Her brown hair was wrapped up in loose Princess Leia buns, strands going here and there, and her tortoiseshell glasses (imitation, thank you kindly) were low on her nose. She wore corduroy pants in bright green, and her white shirt was too snug for her weight, which made the little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ironed onto the front stretch in a rather terrifying way. Her boots were canary yellow, and her backpack bore a yellow Batman insignia, and she was trying to determine if the guild belonging to the girl with the purple hair was higher rated than her current guild.
Smoothness was required for such undertakings, and luckily Dolores was sitting down. It was easier to be smooth when sitting, especially since her dreadful encounter with The Stag (trademark). Tripping entirely negated smoothness.
Thea did not have causes. She did not sign up to the clipboards cheerfully thrust in her face at the first week on campus (‘sign up to protest Israeli settlements in the West Bank!’ ‘sign up to show your support for freeing animals from testing labs!’ ‘sign up to prove you’re a human being with a soul!’) and she did not sign up to the scattered but determined clipboard-clutching boys and girls on campus long after the freshman had been absorbed into UNLV’s system, their fresh-faced, shiny all rubbed off and replaced by the shell-shock of papers and class and pop-quizzes. She wanted coffee enough that her pulse had begun to jam itself in her temples, to repeat her heartbeat to her loud enough that she could taste the copper of last night on her tongue and it was enough to stop at the nearest place that sold coffee in any form at all, even the kind of place that took itself earnestly and far too seriously for Thea at all.
The girl who came through the door looked like any one of the earnest types. She was a little too thin and a little too pale but there were no glasses, fake or real. She was thrift-store clothing, the kind picked out in neighborhoods were what was on the racks was not quite Goodwill-worthy yet but closets were cleared out on a monthly basis, coupled with clothing that Goodwill would have thrown right out. There was a hole in the knee of her jeans and the bare white skin of her knee showed through, worn-thin cashmere cardigan shrugged over a paper-thin shirt dug out of a thrift-store rack with an old Batgirl comic strip printed on the front. She had her fingers twisted into the draggled ends of her hair, twining mouse-brown around her thumb and forefinger, chipped-purple on her nails and last night’s eyeliner still smeared under her eyes. The coffee shop sold flavors that were sugar-free and environmentally friendly; Thea thought coffee came one way, brewed as strong as you could and laced with as much sugar as it could hold.
She took her mug in both hands, the bag on her shoulder as ballast but every table was jammed full of people, knitting or talking like they could save the world over a peppermint latte. There was one empty, a chair drawn up to a table occupied by someone who didn’t look threatening and didn’t look like they had pamphlets on animal testing to shove at her. “So if you’re doing the alone time thing I’m not going to bother you,” Thea began; it was a given most people sat alone at a coffee table would prefer to be left that way, “But can I sit here? There’s no space and if I don’t drink this, I’m going to go homicidal by lunchtime.”
Dolores decided, as the girl approached her table, that she would pass no judgements. And then, of course, she proceeded to do precisely that. She rather thought the girl looked like, perhaps, goblin. Definitely Horde, because no one who intentionally donned Goodwill would be Alliance. No, that was just out of the question. But orc would be too crass, worgen too trendy, tauren and troll too steeped in offensive stereotype. No, goblin, certainly, until she reached a level to be a death knight. She thought the girl looked very much the death knight type. "I'm a human paladin," she said proudly, motioning to the chair beside her with typical Alliance camaraderie. Well, typical Alliance camaraderie unless someone was looking to group for futa. "Have you come to be motivated?" she asked in a stage whisper. It was possible that the girl wasn't into MMORPGs at all. Comics, perhaps, based on the shirt she wore. Dolores reassessed. Arkham Origins had just come out, and Dolores had beaten it in one sitting (that resulted in a very sore backside). "Origins?" she asked, motioning at the Batgirl shirt, figuring it was quite safe ground. Even if the girl didn't game, it would tee up a conversation about comic books, and Dolores quite adored the subject. It might be worth losing her potentially coveted and improved guild bank for, she decided, cardboard coffee cup almost teetering itself right out from between her fingers. But Dolores was brilliant at last-minute saves, and she laughed as the rather unexciting americano righted itself.
Thea didn’t do games. Games required other people, and the people Thea liked were a small and limited pool, primarily composed of one semi-flippant boy who was older than he appeared to be and who had better nail polish than she did. She was thinking of Lin when she smiled. She was not pretty, the composition of her face was angular and sharp and her mouth was too thin for prettiness. She had a look that would have been highly flattered by the Victorian age and a devotion to looking consumptive, but now she was pale eyelashes blinking at anything to do with motivation. And then she looked down at her shirt.
“Yeah. Not my favorite Batgirl,” faded cotton gazed back up at her, creased 1980s (faux 60s) comic characters gazed back up, “But you know. It’s Batgirl.” Thea hadn’t been a comic person either. She liked books that had weight and chapters, books with hard covers that you could flip open and luxuriate in, books that could have been around for centuries, just sitting on a shelf somewhere. But Cass did not dig books. She liked to hit people in the middle of the night, and to deal with the fact her family had basically broken on her by finding out all the stuff that had happened before her. Thea had a collection of comic books now, still in their sleek plastic.
The bag slid to the floor with a soft crumple, and the coffee mug clicked onto the table surface. “I like the, you know.” Thea waved a hand, all chipped nail-polish and uncertainty, toward the girl’s own bag, “Thing. Pin or whatever.”
Dolores wondered what made her new companion smile. She wondered it in the way she wondered about the motivations of quest givers when she saw their arrows lighting up her screen from a ways off. She didn't ask, because smiles, like quest givers, generally explained themselves. If they didn't, one was simply not at a high enough level yet. Eventually, if she went back, the quest giver would give it all up in one go. Unfortunately, Dolores was perpetually impatient when it came to the quest givers. They droned on and on about backstories and storylines, and Dolores very much wanted to live in the now. Perhaps it came from so much not living. The party on the ship hadn't helped; it had only made her impatient for a taste of something that didn't happen on a screen or in the pages of a comic or popular novel. Dolores didn't read old things. She'd read them in school, of course, but she rather liked pop and trash, and she found much more merit in Jane Austen with zombies than in Jane Austen without zombies.
It surprised Dolores that her coffee companion had a favorite Batgirl, though she couldn't truly articulate why. Perhaps it was that enviably consumptive thinness and that Goodwill sweater. Dolores had always been on the chubby side. She'd lost quite a bit of her excess jiggle with blessed puberty, but she had the unfortunate luck to be heavy up top and heavy down low, which generally made everything heavy between, unless you were Marilyn Monroe, and she suspected even Marilyn would be pointed toward Weight Watchers these days. "Which one is your favorite?" she asked, no judgement in her voice. Any Batgirl was a good Batgirl, and any conversation about Gotham was a good conversation.
That bag slid to the floor and Dolores watched it go. Thing, pin, whatever, made her look back, and she lowered her expectations immediately. And, alas, no Origins. She felt like she spoke a language that had gone extinct ages past, and that could only be found scrawled on walls with the edges of nonfunctioning game controllers. "The batsignal thanks you. Or it would, if it could speak."
“Cass,” Thea laced the fingers of one hand in between the fingers of her other around the coffee mug and took a long, appreciative inhale of the steam scudding on its surface. Cassandra Cain didn’t need a ton of introduction, especially if you knew the books, this girl with her mutant turtle shirt who looked comfortable hanging out in a place where a cadre in the corner were knitting Doctor Who scarves, looked like maybe she’d know the comics as well. There wasn’t a lot of crossover. Cass was stubborn about it, in the way Thea had always liked being stubborn herself. If you just refused to argue, if you weren’t even around for the argument, then there wasn’t a lot anyone could do. The air-conditioning frittered past her, and Thea shivered, wrapped the cardigan a little more tightly over the shirt.
She admired instead, the fact that her companion managed to make the whole geek-chic thing chic. Thea didn’t think of Marilyn, she thought of the way people looked at you when you stripped off and all your curves were plastic giblets shoved inside your bra, what it would be like if you could make a t-shirt look sexy. “I mean. She’s the one I know, so she’s my favorite. Cass Cain. But I like Stephanie Brown. Do you read them?” The kind of people who read comic books on campus sat in tight-knit clusters, little barriers erected of knowledge and in-jokes and canon. Thea didn’t bother trying; in-jokes were in-jokes, whether you were mean girls who knew where to buy the best lipsticks, or comic nerds celebrating the latest release.
Cass was informal enough that Dolores stared a moment, deep blue eyes curious. "A Black Bat fan," she said, surprised that the girl in the cardigan even knew who Cassandra Cain was, really. Normally, novices gravitated toward the better known heroes, and Dolores very much thought her coffee grasping companion was a novice. As for Dolores' comfort. Well, Dolores wasn't truly comfortable anywhere. She could laugh at herself along with the best of them, of course. In fact, that was rather one of her very special skills. She was all thumbs with two left feet. She'd never quite fit in with the Cuban public school children in Florida, and she'd never fit in at all with the uppercrust British students in England. She was too old for herself, really, and being a geek was never easy. She passed better now that her hair was normally colored, but she'd made a life of being different, and being different was never easy; she would have laughed uproariously at any notion of chicness. Chicness didn't bulge out from beneath the shirt at the waist, and chicness didn't trip over everything ever. Perhaps, had she known, she would have endeavored to sit for the entire remainder of her days.
"She's the one you know," Dolores repeated, curious as a cat and a question in the statement. "I adore Stephanie," she said honestly. She hadn't thought much of her before Addy, perhaps, but she did now. She'd gone back and read nearly everything to do with Spoiler, and she was quite the expert now. "I've read comics all my life," she said truthfully. Thin books with paper covers had always been better friends than people. She'd never had clusters on campus, but the internet had helped her find a social circle that didn't realize she blundered and bumbled, and they liked the same things she did. Vent was her door to the world, and there she could be quite smooth. "You look like you read better books," she finally said, because it needed saying. Not that Dolores didn't read, but she unapologetically liked books on the bestseller list. The girl at her side seemed much more likely to be a fan of very dead writers.
Cass did not consider herself Black Bat. She was Batgirl, even if her fingers were unwound from the title and from the hood, even if she was costume-less and nothing to a cluster of Bat-people who were a confusing glut from all kinds of times. Thea didn’t think she’d read a single one separately in the proper canon, and trying to untangle them all gave her a headache, like when it had been fashionable at boarding school to take up knitting. Black Bat made Cass bridle, very far away and Thea winced, a pinch of fingers to the pale temple beneath the limp hair. She needed coffee, not a headache. Thea was very aware she was a novice, to comic books and all the culture that came with it. She was stared at, in the comic book store she’d gone to, all lights and deep bins of comics for a couple dollars each, and she wasn’t stared at the way Thea liked, when she’d gone out of her way to be stared at. It made her feel small, and new and on the edge, and even if she knew Cass better than the guy behind the counter earnestly arguing the merits of a Tim Drake Robin over all others, it didn’t feel like knowing when the seam between Vegas and the Doors was exposed, rucked up like a carpet.
She had looked wrong. Thea knew she had looked wrong, thrift-store odd, the kind of odd found in libraries and sitting under trees, with books that didn’t care what you looked like. Books so old they didn’t think anything at all of fashion, the fashions in them so out of date they weren’t part of anything. She liked old books. She liked the smell of them, and the thick feel of the pages in between her fingers, pregnant with years of moisture and people turning them, absorbing the stories. “I never found comic books when I was a kid,” Thea said, knowing most people had. Most of the internet forums she had dug out, they debated hotly who was the better Batgirl and they talked about knowing, from children. When Thea had been little, her mother had given her Greek myths to read and her father had forgotten he had a child, much of the time. She pulled at the ends of her hair, wrapped dishwater-colored brown around her fingers. That curiosity sounded worrying, like she’d said something wrong, all her newness exposed. “But I like them now.” She could believe it, that the girl who looked like she didn’t care if people looked at her with her turtles and her breasts (Thea thought she looked like maybe the puberty Thea had waited for had come to her twice, instead), was someone who knew comic books. Who was confident, the way people said it made them.
“I like Stephanie. But I like her as Spoiler.”
Dolores was not observant enough to notice far and away bridling and quiet pinching of temples. She was rather the sort that noticed the very obvious, as she was seldom still enough to notice the very small. Before her adoptive parents died, she'd been the strange and quiet one in a family that was quite loud and boisterous. After, in England, she was different. It had begun intentionally enough, perhaps, but it had stuck like gum to a shoe. The Murphys had been quiet dignity, and being quiet there had seemed like fitting, when she'd never fit with the people who'd loved her since birth. Ever since, she'd been different. She had no life to speak of, but she lived bright and falling all about, and she was very good at not caring that she was often a laughingstock. With that, came not noticing small things. Oh, she was dreadfully honest. There was hardly any wall between her and what the world saw. She tripped and fell and spoke with a heart pinned loosely on her sleeve. Genuine, Queen Mum had said, her nose turned up as if it was ever the travesty.
"I did," Dolores said of comic books and being small. "My papi let me stay up late to watch Superman, and I'd nightmares for weeks, but I fell in love." She didn't bother hiding her adoration, her wistfulness, none of it. "I've loved them ever since. I'm rather faithful, though we have an open relationship with video games and various movies and television serials," she explained, tongue to the back of her lower lip and teeth tucked against the pink. "I've never met anyone who likes Stephanie best as Spoiler," she said, interest and her elbows on the table as she leaned forward. "Stephanie's under-appreciated. They even cut her entirely from the New 52. They cut Cass as well, but Stephanie's returning, which was a surprising announcement." She was in her element now, and her blue eyes were bright. One of the goblins shushed her from down the table, but she didn't care in the slightest. "I think Damian is the best Robin, and Babs is the best Batgirl, but I like the rest too. Well, Tim's rather a pompous ass, but he can be forgiven," she conceded.
Thea noticed small things. She noticed the smudges on a very old page in a very old book in the bookstore, right on the back of the shelf. She found seventies bowling shirts and fifties full-skirted dresses in secondhand stores that people admired, as if it were clever to find things that were there to be found, usually buried under a mount of someone else’s crap that no one wanted. There were all kinds of walls to Thea, constructed with small things, with looks and with the small, furled up feelings that were kept carefully, thin as onion-skin pages in books, locked up tight. But there was truth, in the striped stockings and the thrift-store sweaters, truth in the noticing. And that was almost genuine, especially when you didn’t quite know what genuine was or who it would make you, beyond scars notched up to the elbows.
Thea had never loved anything like the girl had loved Superman and comics, characters colored bright and glossily more than human. She loved old things, things other people didn’t love and things other people had loved so much it didn’t matter if you loved them too. She liked Austen and Bronte, and she liked Pepys, because she’d pulled them off the shelf of books her parents bought for themselves and read to herself when no one else did. She watched that wistfulness with her chin cupped in her hands and narrow elbows on the edge of the table, and she leaned in to enthusiasm warm as the coffee on the table. “Cass isn’t coming back?” she said, sounding like someone not invited to the party without realizing there was a party to begin with and she turned around, whippet-quick when someone shushed, and shushed them back.
“I like Damian. He’s evil but he’s the good kind of evil. Tim just seems nice,” Thea explained, in a way that made nice sound equivocal with something very boring. “They can’t bring Steph back without Cass. It’s not fair.”
Dolores wasn't really expecting much interest in her commentary about the Batgirls and their erasure from everything DC. It has been quite a thing in her world, once it had been announced. Not because she related to the Batgirls terribly much, and not because she'd been born with a feminist agenda and a picket in her hand; quite the contrary. Her papi had told her she could do anything she desired, but she'd still been raised in a very patriarchal culture. Her mami had run the house and worn the pants, but it was all very hush hush, and it had been terribly important for her papi to believe himself man and master. And his houseful of women allowed it, perpetuating the myth out of love for a gruff man that was quite soft beneath his machista exterior. But the Batgirls going, that had signified the end of something; Dolores hadn't liked it.
"Why isn't it fair?" Dolores asked, leaving the matter of what the good kind of evil was, for the moment. "They don't have anything to do with each other. Cass goes off and becomes Black Bat, and Batman Inc. is a sad affair since Damian died. Though Jason's run has been quite interesting, if one can excuse Kori. But since Babs isn't in the chair, then neither girl was needed. I can only assume that something will happen to put her back in the chair, and hence a new Batgirl would be required, though I am surprised they didn't use Harper." She paused thoughtfully, as if coming to a conclusion. "Stephanie did come before Cass." Which wasn't to say she liked Stephanie better, but there was some logic to the choice. But none of that explained why it seemed so important to the girl who looked like comics had been foisted upon her and unwillingly found herself liking them. "Why do you care?" she finally asked, direct and to the point. "And what is the good kind of evil? Damian's ten. I don't think he can be evil at that age. Even Mister J wasn't evil at that age. Or, I should hope he wasn't."
Thea knew nothing of canons beyond furtive forays into the bins at the comic store and some desperate wikipedia-ing. She knew Cass was Batgirl and she knew Stephanie was after her and that Cass was both unhappy and resigned to the fact she was not where she was in her own timeline. That there were many timelines, and many canons knotted tightly together had become apparent but she knew nothing of Damian dying or who Kori was and the look of marveled amazement at Babs being anything but a woman in a chair (as Cass thought of her, the two were one and the same) was wide, pale blue eyes over the coffee she had completely forgotten to drink.
“She doesn’t - wouldn’t - think of it that way,” she said, all uptilt of chin and fingers loosely woven around the coffee mug, of Stephanie and Cass and precedence. Cass was Cassandra, she was black and white and rules and logic and nothing made sense otherwise. As a guide to her world, she was very clear and she was distinct, but Thea was beginning to gather that her clarity was sometimes not clarity at all. “She becomes Black Bat? Who made her that?” It was a little like someone brushing past the air near you, not a touch or contact exactly, but something close enough to it that you felt it. Thea felt that, blurred comic canon and Cass’s interest. The girl across the table stopped telling her everything that was interesting, like reading all the books at once, and looked at her like she’d said something wrong. Thea often saw that look, but this time it pinioned her to the chair and she wriggled around it. “No reason,” she said, “He just looks drawn that way,” as if it were anything other than Damian himself.
“What’s your name?”
Dolores felt like she'd fallen headfirst into some kind of Wonderland rabbit hole. It wasn't that she minded, because she didn't mind at all. She was rather easy-going enough to take things as they came, but she wasn't born yesterday. Still, answering the questions seemed more pressing than letting the cat out of the bag, and so she nodded about Cass becoming Black Bat. "Bruce did. He formed something called Batman Incorporated after he came back from having his back broken by Bane. It was his acknowledgement that Batman couldn't be everywhere and do everything. He handed out suits, and the Bats spread out all over the world. They stopped being Gotham fixtures, and Cass was the Bat in Tokyo." She shrugged. "But then they rebooted the universe, and while Batman Incorporated remained, Cass was wiped from existence. She was never born, at least until this day. That might change in future." Things always changed in canon. Damian would, undoubtedly, return one day, just as Jason Todd had before him. As for Damian, Dolores merely shook her head. "Damian is lovely. He's a pain in the ass, but he's lovely. Also dead, and Alfred had to keep his animals, and Dick left a video game on his grave, and Bruce lost his mind with grief. It was all very hard."
Thea was regarded a moment longer, and then Dolores shoved her hand across the table. "I'm Dolores. You're from Passages," she said, just like that, as if there was nothing odd about it, and as if there was no arguing to be done. "I've work to get to soon, but you can contact me there, if you like. Dolores C. You have Cass?" she asked, though she clearly didn't need to. It explained everything, including why this reader of better books was here, trying to talk comics in a Goodwill cardigan.
Thea would have preferred Wonderland once. She knew where she was, with Alice. Wonderland had been a childhood comfort, something to read under the blankets to the symphonic rising sound of her parents’ arguments after dark. But she was attached now, to the topsy-turvy comic book door with its threat of something more malevolent than childhood and the litany of all that had gone wrong in that world (all that could go wrong still, Thea was uncertain) was in turns worrying and terrible and yet the idea of problems dealt with more widely than the tightly focused lens of Gotham made a sense that did not translate easily to what she knew from Cass.
The hand across the table was shaken. It was a neat thing, schoolgirl-smart and firm in the way of someone who had probably been talked to about how a handshake ought to be. Dolores. It was an old-fashioned name and pretty and Thea was used to Jessicas and Amys and no one who carried around a moniker that tasted as old and dusty as her own. “Thea,” she said, withdrawing her hand and she didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no, because it didn’t need confirmation if Dolores knew. “Who do you have?”
Dolores had always found her name dreadful. Who named their children after pain? And she was still certain, to this day, that it was a joke on her mami's part. But there was no changing it now. Even having learned her birth name - a much more preferable Olivia - hadn't made her change it. Perhaps it was ridiculous, thinking a name had helped to shape her, but she did believe it. Doloreses- Dolori? Dolori tripped and fell and were terrible around real, non digital people. It was just the way of it, and she gave Thea a handshake that had belonged to her papi, too strong and too gruff, but full of something genuine. "Thea is a lovely name," she said, because she meant it. It was old, like the books she expected this willow-wisp of a girl preferred to read. Books with words and words and no grand a glorious twist that existed just for shock value. "I've been all over the Harry Potter door," Dolores admitted, reaching back to run an unthinking hand along her spine at the memory of hospitals and trees and horrid pain. "Now I've Gwen Stacy, from Marvel. She was like Jason Todd. No one liked her, and so they killed her off in favor of J. But now she's back, thanks to a new movieverse, and so here we are. She's new, but I like her thus far," she admitted, pushing back her chair with a shriek of plastic on floor.
Lifting the bag wasn't Dolores' grandest moment, but she managed it, and she gave Thea-of-the-classic-name a grin. "Be in touch," she suggested. Thea could either take the offer or not; Dolores was accustomed to quest givers that didn't show their face again during a game. The tip of one shoe battled with a nothing on the tile, but Dolores emerged victorious, and the Ninja Turtle on her shirt stretched its victory stretch. It was slow progress to the door, but the hot desert air wafted in as Dolores left, and then the air conditioning was safe once more, door closed and conversation victoriously ended.