Who: Kal, Jason + Kara What: Jason comes for a sad visit Where: Sanctuary When: Recently Warnings/Rating: S for Sads
Jason had been moving nonstop since Damian’s death. He’d ridden his bike to Death’s place, then downtown, roaring through the streets like bad news. Others were helping those who had been injured in the chaos of Kara’s grief, getting them to hospitals and working to clear the streets of rubble and debris.
The criminals who had taken advantage of the chaos, now they were another matter. The police had their own worries, and Jason was only too happy to get elbow-deep in a fresh mess. He caught a man beating a shop owner who had tried to protect his livelihood. Jason, in turn, beat the looter so badly that he wouldn't be taking two straight steps in the next six months. He took on a decent sized gang in an alleyway the old fashioned way, and he cleared the side streets around the precinct with a vicious level of force. Every fight left him more tired, wavering closer to the razor’s edge. It didn’t make anything go away, but it felt good. He kept at it. He didn’t take his helmet off once, didn’t rest, didn’t eat. He worked, as if it meant something to anyone, as if it made some kind of difference at all.
By the time Jason ducked out of the door and back through it again, he was utterly unprepared for the sanitized, startling white of Sanctuary. The sun had only just been coming up in Gotham when he left, and he looked a complete mess. There was dried blood under his left nostril, and he carried dirt and grit from practically every part of the city. His leathers were stiff and his knuckles under the gloves were badly bruised.
But Jason didn’t take the helmet off. Not when he stepped inside, not when he took a look around.
Kal had been spending most of his time through the door with Kara, whatever she needed he tried to provide. He had a secret stash of books he was referring to to try and figure out how to get through something like this - and he hoped he was doing at least one or two right things a day.
He heard Jason before he saw him.. He didn’t know who it was at first so he dropped what he was doing but once he rushed to his location (and it didn’t take him long to show up just a few feet from him) he stopped and nodded once calmly. It wasn’t as if they had many visitors here, and he certainly hadn’t been expecting any. He hoped Jason wasn’t here with bad news. Given that he was standing around in his helmet, it was the slightest effort to to look him over (inside and out, for medical purposes only), he didn’t like what he saw through the layers, but nothing looked critical, and that was all that mattered.
“Jason? Is everything okay?” he asked tentatively. He didn’t know what the situation was, but he didn’t press him either. As far as he was concerned everyone had been pressed enough lately.
Jason had taken a few good hits while dishing out his own, but there was no fatal damage. There were a few cuts that might need stitches at one point or another, but nothing that was likely to kill him for a third time. No, underneath the clothes there were more weapons than injuries, guns he carried despite his professed non-lethality, sonic grenades, knives. His gloves were laced with enough steel to pack a serious punch, and it wasn't all that surprising, considering, that he'd managed to bruise the hell out of his hands.
He hadn't expected Kal to walk out. Kara had mentioned him, yeah, but it was still an abrupt surprise. He'd never met this Kal, and had only spoken to him a little. The guy he remembered from when he was a kid had been pretty alien, a goody two shoes with a weirdly abstract moral code. He'd see him butt heads with Bruce more than he'd seen them agree. This one, though, had a kind of open warmth and worry in just those first few words that it caught him off guard. Something was definitely different, there. "I'm here to see Kara," he said, suddenly only halfway sure.
Kal nodded, not wanting to ask if he was bringing more bad news, but stealing himself for it just in case. He hoped not, they’d had their fair share. More than anything he hoped it was a friendly visit, he knew he was doing his best to help Kara but he worried that her friends would help it all along even further.
Kal nodded, and thought it might be a chance to get out of Sanctuary for a bit, but he wanted to gauge the situation first. “She’s in her room, she’ll be glad to see you. It was good of you to come all the way here.”
Jason shrugged. It was strange, this feeling. Despite everything that had just gone down, he felt weirdly like a teenager meeting a girl’s dad on the stoop of their house. He hadn’t really had that as a kid. There hadn’t been much time for a normal dating life, between being a vigilante and training to be a vigilante and struggling through tutoring after missing years of school. There had been girls, sure, but mostly when he was older, and not the kind who took you to meet their parents. He didn’t know what he had with Kara, if he had anything at all. Whatever it was, he wanted to see her, right now. It was a simple desire, and he felt it keenly.
“I’ll be glad to see her,” he said, with a little less steel. He didn’t have any bad news to bring. He didn’t even really have anything to say. He just wanted to sit with her a while, and feel as if the world was still going forward and there were still people he cared about on it.
Clark stood there just a little awkwardly (he was doing that a lot lately it seemed), and now he wasn’t sure what the next part of this strange ritual was supposed to take place. Surely he felt responsible for Kara, and wanted to know all she wanted to share with him, but he wasn’t sure of the boundaries for letting boys into her space with all she’d been through.
And more than that he didn’t know if there were some strange rules he was supposed to be following regarding boys showing up at the super secret fortress. He contemplated calling Bruce later, but he was pretty certain any of the parenting conversations they used to have were an indefinite hiatus. Diana. He would call Diana once Jason had made his way back to talk to Kara. Yes. Good plan. “She’s in her room,” he said again. Then cleared his throat, “Jason, with everything that has been going on - it’s good of you to be around to keep Kara company. And I hope that its a bit more peaceful of a meeting than what you seem to have been getting up to recently,” he said nodding a bit at Jason standing in front of him. “If you need medical attention, let me know.” He tried to be stern, yet focused, and calm, yet serious. He tried to be a source of comfort, a safety net really - just in case he needed the reprieve from his own life for a bit. He wondered if he should offer him a snack (did they even have snacks here?), or some kind of sustenance. But he supposed Kara might think of that.
More peaceful. Jason stood a little straighter, gaining rigidity. What did Kal expect from him? He would have thought he had enough of a reputation by now that people knew what he was like. And he would have hoped they knew he didn't bring that violence into, say, hanging out with Kara. It struck him strangely, and made him bristle a little.
It took him until a few moments after Kal was done talking to realize that the guy was actually trying to be nice, not imply he was going to knock Kara out, or something. He was suggesting he ought to tone the violence down. Well he definitely didn't know him, then. "Yeah," he said, sliding past him. "I will." He probably did need medical attention, though just a stitch here or there, and he could take care of that himself. More important was seeing Kara, tending to her, making sure she was okay.
Kal was still a weird anomaly, and he gave him a brief look before he awkwardly broke away and made his way to Kara's room. He didn't know what to say to him, really, how to respond to that kind of fatherly kindness. Was it better than the old asshole he'd known growing up? Yeah. Did he know how to respond to it? Not really.
Kal nodded and watched Jason head away. He certainly didn’t press the issue, and he took the opportunity of Kara having some company to go back to the surface. Giving her privacy, and getting himself some much needed reprieve from Sanctuary. He’d been tolerating it well enough, and he didn’t take the opportunity very often, but having it presented to him was lucky as far as he was concerned.
Kara wasn't in her room, which was down countless white halls the length of city streets, hidden a full five minutes into Sanctuary. But there was a note on the door, since she'd known Jason was coming. Well, it was the Kryptonian version of a note. A sunstone was tucked into the place where a doorknocker would be on a normal door, impossible angled into the endlessly smooth wall. A scan of Jason's body - if he picked the sunstone up - would trigger a hologram map of Sanctuary's interior, most of the rooms shaded out, with a blinking arrow that led him to a room in the middle of the structure.
If he followed that blinking arrow, mazes later, he would come to just another wall, as everything in Sanctuary was a seemingly continual and seamless wall. But the doors slid open, after a begrudgingly British, "you are expected," from Sanctuary's disapproving AI.
Open. Then closed, and the AI chirped up again. "If you will permit the suggestion, Jason-Todd, perhaps you should make yourself presentable."
Jason didn't like Sanctuary. That couldn't be stressed enough. When he had nightmares, some of them took place in settings like Sanctuary, empty voids without end, cities so clean they sparkled filled with hollow people. He liked reality, despite all the grit and misery that came with it. But today it felt strangely like a reprieve, despite its continual creepy, open-ended whiteness. Gotham was nothing but misery right now. Every street corner, every fight he threw himself into held a reminder of Damian. One of the last times they'd seen each other had been here, in Sanctuary, but it held none of the same longstanding associations, none of the same ghosts.
He walked down the hall, growing more and more unsure that he was headed in the right direction and hadn't been turned around entirely. It was only the sunstone, as he spotted it down the hall, that made him feel as if he might be in the right place after all. He slowed to a stop, then glanced up and down the corridor before picking it up. The map was a little startling, but somehow made perfect sense. Kara - or Sanctuary's ornery AI - was pointing him in the right direction. Fair enough.
He tucked the sunstone into his pocket, unsure of whether he ought to leave it. Best to give it to Kara, just in case. Yet again came winding hallways and sharp corners, and not for the first time he wondered just how big Sanctuary actually was. It seemed to stretch on for ages. Even after seeing a map of it, it still seemed somehow continuous, always.
He was about ready to turn around and go back for the map when he turned a corner and came to face the doors. Or he assumed there must be a door there. He'd come far enough, judging by his offhand counting of steps, and this was the first corridor to dead end. Unless Kara was playing a trick, of course, but no, the door slid open. Then it slid closed again.
He tipped his head up toward the AI, brow narrowing inside the mask when it chastised him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
The door across the hall snicked open, though door was an overstatement for the smooth wall and it's knobless state. Within, the same kind of white shone, but there was a grating on the floor, recessed and almost unnoticeable, and circles dotted the roof. Beside the door, a white bench, smooth and curved and as unobtrusive as everything else in the space, and above it a set of white-on-white shelves, stacked with fabric in grey and white. The tunics and pants were new, pristine, and obviously intended for a different purpose than a little girl living all alone beneath the sea.
"Might I recommend a shower?" The AI asked from overhead, his displeasure coming through in the nasal Britishism that it had adopted for its human voice. "There are articles of clothing on the shelves. The water will initialize when you step beneath the streams. The dryer will initialize ten minutes after the initialization of the water." There was disapproval at the mention of water, as if the AI was displeased to make the concession that would permit for a human shower. But the unit was equipped and ready, and (presumably) in regular use.
The door remained open, and the AI could almost be heard to tap something in approximation of an impatient foot as he waited for Jason to make the decision he deemed appropriate.
Whatever it was, it stood to reason that the miserable son of a bitch in the machine wasn't going to open the door to where ever the hell Kara was unless he acquiesced and made himself presentable. "Ornery metal bastard." He pulled his helmet off with real reluctance, setting it down well clear of the offending nozzle and its spray.
If this was just about an arbitrary bar to entrance to see Kara, he would have told the AI to fuck himself. But it did cross his mind that Kara might just get more upset if he showed up dirty and bloody. There was nothing in the room to use on his cuts or bind his hands up, but he could at least get them clean of sweat and dirt. He wasn't going to be much use to anybody if he got an infection, and he wasn't too keen on the idea of being turned away from the door to whatever inner sanctum Kara was holed up in. The things he did.
He stripped off the rest of his leathers, dropping them next to the helmet. The note about the dryer was particularly weird - what the hell was this, a beauty parlor? Also, not that he was shy, but the idea he was being spied on while naked by an AI that hated his guts wasn't all that appealing. "If you're looking," he advised the AI, stepping under the spray, "I'm going to come find your personality core and give it a lesson on sexual harassment." It was half-hearted criticism, though, with nothing of his usual fierce enthusiasm for banter. When the best thing he could think of doing for Kara was taking a shower and rinsing the blood off, it wasn't a good day.
"If you remain still once your shower is completed, your injuries can be sanitized and protected," the AI replied cheerily, seemingly pleased by both the acquiescence and annoyance of its guest.
And, as promised, a heating light passed over the shower after the allotted time, followed by a localized antiseptic and a cold spray that formed a protective layer over the injuries. "I have improvised to perfect imperfect and archaic forms of medical treatment, since humans seem to find that most comforting," the AI explained, sounding both pleased and disturbed by the entire concept.
The doors opened then, as did the ones across the hall.
Inside the second set of double doors, a living room waited. It was white walls and white floors, but there were comforting things too, signs of a house that was lived in. Rugs lined the floors, and photographs hung on the wall. A musical instrument with strings stood in one corner, and a tablet with a game still running on it sat on a soft white sofa that was covered in a bright pink blanket. In the distance, a dog barked, and outside the living room windows a world of gleaming tall buildings and sunny skies was visible, with hovercars flying around the top of structures and laughter carrying from nearby homes.
"Replicate," came the soft, muffled Kryptonian voice from beyond the living room, through the archway there and into a room that was obviously a kitchen, despite being devoid of the cooking appliances that would be familiar on earth.
Kara was in front of the replicator, a frown on her features. She was dressed in a white tunic and pink leggings, and her feet were bare. Her hair was up in a Kryptonian bun, loose and with a few curls refusing to stay in their rightful place.
The shower was hot and the spray was intense, bordering on paint-stripping pressure. For a brief moment, he almost forgot that he was standing completely exposed and being watched by a creepy AI. He didn't forget that Damian was dead, though, not for a moment. He got the wounds as clean as he could, and when the spray dropped over his body and lightly sealed the injuries, he felt uneasy, but vaguely grateful. Sort of. It was too weird to be enthusiastic about, but at least he wouldn't bleed all over Kara, now.
He picked up a set of clean clothes. What else was there to do? Stripped of his uniform and his helmet he felt much more uncertain. Perhaps he should have left well enough alone, let Kara be, let her grieve on her own time. She had Clark around, and a creepy AI. She didn't really need him butting his head in.
When the doors opened, though, he didn't hesitate before stepping through them. He wanted to see her. Maybe that was a selfish thing, but at least he could own up to it. He wanted to make sure she was alright, and all the other people around her in the world couldn't make him feel sure unless he saw her himself.
This place...was eerie. In his current mood, the laughter felt manufactured, and the glinting sunlight seemed much too bright. He was utterly out of place in the clean gray clothes, skin cleaned but bruised. There was a blue black crescent under his left eye, and a mottled, darkening stripe over his nose, along with a variety of assorted cuts and bruises. He had his clothes in a bundle under one arm, and his helmet under the other. Still had his boots on, though, freshly laced as soon as he got out from under the weird shower. There were some concessions he just couldn't make.
He heard Kara's voice in the doorway, and he edged around it to see her. There she was, as light and collected as ever, standing in front of her...kitchen replicator. It wasn't exactly the scene he'd expected to walk in on. He didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. "Hey."
She didn't turn right away. "It cannot make ice cream right."
She said it sad and soft, anger bubbling beneath the harmless brokenness of her voice. She sounded young, and she sounded angry, and she sounded near tears.
"It is either too hard, and the spoon does not work and breaks. Or it is too soft, and it is a drink instead of something you eat. The replicators are made for protein supplements, but I have been trying to alter them." She frowned. Even without turning, that frown was evident. "I am very bad at being in the science caste," she she admitted. With enough training, she would have been able to program the replicators to do anything she wanted them to, but everything had fallen apart before she had a chance to learn. She could still remember her last days on Krypton, which were spent playing around with her friends and avoiding all the reviews for her trials. She'd only wanted to have fun then, and now she couldn't even make an Earth treat that required no real skill.
The laughter sounded again from beyond the living room. "There are no people here. Sanctuary takes them away if I try to run their program too often. He gives them back, but not yet." And the laughter was real somehow, somewhere, but nowhere that could be reached by stepping outside. Argo City would be empty, and that laughter would always be just out of reach, ambiance until her ability to run people into the program had replenished.
Still, she didn't turn.
Jason listened to Kara talk. When she started in on the ice cream, he didn't notice her words so much as her tone, the sweet softness he'd come to expect with real anger laced all through it. It felt wrong, and he stepped up beside her in front of the machine. He wanted to see her face while she talked, while she critiqued herself for not being good enough with the stupid machine that made ice cream, but obviously this wasn't about that. Even he could tell that much.
The warm, empty laughter from outside rang out again, and Kara's words chilled him. It sounded like ghosts out there, and she only confirmed what he'd thought when he walked in. It seemed like a much worse torture to have something forever out of your reach than to have it totally out of your sight. He expected that had been some of the reason that Ra's had him brought back from the dead, whatever he said about charitable inclinations to the enemy. The dead should stay dead. They shouldn't linger at the edge of your hearing, or the corner of your eye, or in front of you, but not there at all.
He wasn't much good at comfort, and he really didn't know what to do for grieving people, since he personally just avoided doing it whenever possible. Even now, his instinct was to avoid the subject of Damian entirely, to get her to leave Sanctuary with him in search of distraction. But that wasn't going to happen, and maybe it wasn't even what she needed. He looked at her, and he reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. It was unsure. He hadn't been to many funerals, not even his mother's. There were always other things to be thinking about, and his own survival to focus on. But now, here, in front of the machine that wouldn't make ice cream right, this felt like a funeral. This felt like Damian's body might as well be right there. His fingers tightened a little against her back, but he didn't say anything. She could just keep talking. Seemed like it might do her some good.
She knew he'd come closer. She didn't need any of her powers to realize that. She was used to hearing everything people said for miles, but she could still hear footsteps in the replica of her mom's kitchen without any trouble. She kept waiting for him to say something joking about the ice cream. Jason did that, he joked about things, so she waited for it, and she waited, and she waited. She wondered if her holofamily would like him. They remembered things from one visit to the next, whenever Sanctuary let her have them. Her dad would think Jason wasn't good enough, because her dad never thought anyone was good enough. She wondered if that was because of all the money he'd spent on genetically perfecting her, even beyond what the council permitted. It made her think of those pods off the main entrance to Sanctuary, and she had to shake her head to get that thought out of her head. She wouldn't go in there; she wouldn't. No, it was better to go back to thinking about that holofamily that looked and acted just like hers. Her mom would like him. Her mom liked everyone. She was brilliant, and she was kind, and dad had killed--
His hand on her shoulder cut the thought off, and she was glad for it. She was so very glad, and she didn't move until his fingers tightened.
She turned quick, but only as quickly as a real girl would turn, a human girl, and at least she had that in this fake world that she'd created beneath the sea. No powers, nothing to make her different, and all the loneliness ever to keep her company. She looked at him a minute, confusion at what he was wearing. The bruises didn't surprises her, the cuts either; she expected him to be beaten up. He joked, but he dealt with really big things with his fists, and she knew losing Damian was a really big thing. But the clothes surprised her, and he reminded her of the young version of H'El a little, the one from Kandor, before his scars and before he went crazy. He looked like any boy from Krypton, as long as she didn't look down at his boots.
But she looked down, and that broke her. She sobbed, and she threw herself on him, arms around his shoulders and her own shoulders shaking and shaking.
Jason didn't have the faintest idea what it was she'd seen when she turned, and looked at him, and then started to cry. He was pretty sure it wasn't about him at all, at least, he hoped not. There was nothing on him that should have kicked the floodgates down, but of course it didn't have to make sense. Grief didn't tend to.
When she threw herself on him he braced, wrapping his arms around her, holding her up. She was shaking him as she cried, trembling under his fingertips, even as the people in the distance laughed and laughed. He wished the AI would just shut the people up. It was eerie, hearing nothing but that and the manufactured sounds of life outside and Kara weeping. But he soon forgot about the other sounds, his arms clasped tightly around her. It made him remember when she'd been like when he first came across her, when she'd killed someone, still fresh to the world, because she didn't know what she was capable of. She'd seemed utterly alone then, and he wouldn't have her be that way now.
He let her cry all she wanted. Somebody ought to, and if she needed to, then good. Damian deserved that much sadness, that kind of grief. He didn’t have that in him. No, he’d spent way too many years shoring up the defenses for that. He allowed himself a moment, just a second, to really think about the fact that Damian was never coming back - not out of the Laz pit, and not walking in to say it was all a horrific joke to see whether they were all strong enough to withstand it.
He didn't tell her it was going to be okay. He felt as if all his words had dried up, clotted and insignificant. He rested his chin against her shoulder while she shook him with sobbing, and he remembered what Damian's face looked like, and he didn't shed a single tear. He just held on, feeling a little outside himself, like he had sometimes when he was a kid.