cv (ephemeras) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-03-29 02:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, gwen stacy, jason todd |
Log: Gwen/Jason
Who: Gwen Stacy and Jason Todd
What: Stowing Carnage (AKA, a very bad decision)
Where: DC Comics, Jason's warehouse with the kidlets
When: Now
Warnings/Rating: None
Stowing Carnage in Midtown wasn't really an option.
Gwen knew that Doc Ock was intelligent enough to have some kind of tracking mechanism on the symbiote's container, and any hiding place within her door would call back to the body thief like some kind of amplified broadcasting beacon. She knew that Peter had taken a big risk in order for her to get her hands on the symbiote, and she wasn't going to invalidate that risk by failing. Her choice of Gotham was two-fold. She had a key to the door that was two years old, and Helena's description had made it sound like it was a nightmare. Storing a nightmare within a nightmare seemed like a good idea, and she knew the containment unit would hold. Carnage's new home was much more dependable than the one she'd made for him had been, and she would just build-in some kind of failsafe to destroy the symbiote if containment failed. It wouldn't be hard, and she'd considered it when she'd had the symbiote at the lab. She hadn't wanted to admit then that it was dangerous enough to need the failsafe, since Flash had handled Venom so well. But she had a different opinion on the matter now.
Once Carnage was settled, she would find a way to destroy him-- it. But for now, the main thing to do was get it away from Ock.
She tried not to think about what Ock's reaction would undoubtedly be once he realized he'd been played. She tried not to worry about how much harder it would be for Peter to breakthrough, now that the doctor knew that he could breakthrough. None of that mattered. Instead, she concentrated on the door she'd just walked through.
It was daytime in Gotham, but it looked nothing like mid-day in Manhattan. Gwen stepped out onto a filthy street, and the world looked like grayscale. She knew that was an illusion caused by smog and the sun's inability to filter in and lend the false blues the eyes perceived in the daytime sky, but it was still unnerving. She was a girl from New York, and it was still unnerving.
She looked left, and she looked right, and she opted to go right. She thought she could smell water in that direction, the telltale ozone in the air that indicated some kind of water supply.
She was a bright blonde thing on the dingy street. She didn't understand how Gotham's burroughs worked, but she was fairly sure this was a slum that she was walking through. She stepped over the legs of someone passed out in a drunken stupor, and she wove her way to the other side of the street to avoid a drug transaction on the corner. But the cop's daughter wasn't scared. She just knew she stood out like a sore thumb. Her pleated skirt was seafoam and her thigh highs were pale grey. Her sweater was a matching grey, and the peacoat she wore over it all was a sage green. She cursed the genetics that made her hair so blonde, and she considered rolling in the dirt before continuing on her journey. In the red bag she had slung across her body, Carnage sloshed in its container, and she talked to it without thinking, an old habit from the time spent in the lab with the symbiote. "Calm down. We're fine. I still remember how to throw a punch if I need to, but maybe it would be kind of smart to invest in a taser."
The further she walked, and the more eyes that turned in her direction, the better the idea of rolling around in dirt seemed. She eyed some debris from a destroyed building to the left, past an alley, and she headed that way. But she'd already drawn attention to herself, and there was more than one pair of eyes watching her as she went.
Unaware of the movement in her wake, she made it to the crumbling building, which looked like it had been destroyed by fire. "Well, here we go." She grabbed a handful of dirt without caring about filth getting under her nails, and without cataloguing all the possible strains of bacteria in the filth. She dumped the dirt on her hair first, because the blonde, she logicked, was the most attention grabbing thing about her. She'd do her clothing next.
She was concentrating on the correct disbursement of dirt when the giggle of a little boy made her spin, and she laughed when he tossed dirt at her like it was some sort of game. He was small, much younger than her brothers, and his missing-teeth smile was adorable. He was a dirty urchin, and her cheek was stained with dirt now. She tossed her handful of dirt back at him. The little boy laughed, and she ended up with a cheek full of mud before he ran off in a peal of giggles.
The only reason Jason found Gwen was the sound of laughter. It wasn't exactly the most common thing on these streets, not in this part of town, no genuine and sweet like that. It sounded like a very young boy and a woman. A mother and child? What the hell were they doing around here?
When he emerged from the alleyway, though, it was in just enough time to have one of his boys go sprinting by. The boy spun in a circle when he saw him, hesitating a moment, but then picked up the pace again. He shook his head, suppressing a smile at the kid, and looking to the girl.
She was an absolute mess. Nice clothes, covered in dirt. He felt a tiny flash of guilt on the kid's behalf. "Did he do that?" he asked. "Sorry. He doesn't know any better." It was hard to get too riled up about a pretty girl with money getting dirt on her in the slums, but her laughter had carried to him all the way around the corner, and he halfway suspected that they'd been...playing. Which was weird.
"Do you need directions?" A girl like this one didn't belong, not with all the mud in the world in her hair. Jason didn't look precisely the way most of the other people on the block did, but he did belong. There was a comfort to the way he stood next to a half-collapsed building without sparing it a second glance that spoke to long knowledge and familiarity. He was cleaner, sure, and while his leather jacket was well worn, it wasn't filthy. He looked tired, but not like someone without a home. He probably could have used a shower, his voice all gravel, his look a sharply assessing stare.
And he was tired. Christ, was he. The wakeup call from a better Gotham, a world of how things might have been, it had been long and rough and he was ashamed to say that he'd gone half the way kicking. He wouldn't admit that to anybody, but for a while, while reality tugged, he'd said no. A Gotham where the streets weren't choked in crime, where the family talked, where Kara was happy and he'd never been dead. That was a better Gotham. A better life, one that had never really existed, but felt like it could have, maybe.
He had a lot of problems, still, to work his way through. Kara had to be put right the second that Wondy and Supes got something out of Queen, but for the time being there wasn't much to do but worry and wait, and nurse his alternate reality hangover. He hadn't slept much, which was why he was out walking in the middle of the day rather than saving his energy for patrolling at night.
On the sidewalk, a pair of gutterpunks slowed and crossed to the other side of the street at the sight of the pair of them, or perhaps at the sight of the building next to the one that had collapsed, the one the boy had run toward.
Gwen stared at the newcomer with a curiosity that was better suited for a lab and a white coat. Her cornflower stare was direct, inquisitive, and she crossed to the boy in the faded leather without any concern for weapons that might be secreted upon his person. Her dad had taught her basic self-defense, but the desire to know things always outweighed her need to be careful. It had been that way since she was a little girl, one who would put absolutely everything into her mouth in order to figure out how it tasted. In those days, she had a coloring book with notations about everything in nearly illegible crayon. These days, she had a scanner, and she wanted to very badly pull that scanner out of her bag. But she refrained, because she wasn't that socially inept. Well, she almost was. But she still crossed all the way to him, her chunky shoes leaving muddy prints on the already filthy sidewalk, and she stopped a foot away, oblivious to the gutterpunks changing course.
"Is he your little brother?" she asked of the boy with the gappy smile, her gaze shifting to where he'd run off to. "He was helping me camouflage, so that I could fit in better with my surroundings," she explained. Helena had warned her that everything in Gotham was terrible, but that there were a few kind people who had no recourse, and she wondered what category he fit into. She wanted to take notes, but that might go over poorly. But maybe he would be able to figure it out anyway, because the blue gaze that swept over him was very obviously assessing. He was dirty, but he didn't look homeless. If she had to guess, she would say he was in the vicinity of her age, but it was hard to tell with the lack of direct sunlight. His voice was gravely in a way that she didn't associate with anyone from her own social ranking. But he looked human, and she couldn't find one mutation, which further cemented her belief that Helena had been metaphorical when she said she had cat and bat mutations in her blood.
Original assessment made, she considered his question about directions. "Are you trustworthy? I know there's no reason to believe that you're going to answer my question truthfully, and maybe I shouldn't be asking, but I don't have enough to go on in order to form my own opinion," she told him, and she rocked on her chunky shoes and brushed mud off her cheek. In the end, she could only think of one way to ascertain his trustworthiness. "Do you know Helena or--" She paused, trying to remember the name Helena had given for her father. "Bruce? Do you know Helena or Bruce?" He would need to prove it, of course, but it was a start, and her hand closed more protectively on her bag, which was shifting with the force of Carnage's sloshing.
Jason seriously considered, at this point, that the girl in front of him was an alien. But then he chuckled, surprised and sudden, incredulous. "He wasn't wrong," Jason said. "And he isn't my brother. I just know him. Lots of kids like him around here." He gestured to her muddy outfit, the dirt that now clung to her pretty skirt and her mucky shoes. "You fit right in," he added, with a touch of sarcasm and a hint of bitterness. It said a lot that a well put together girl came to this part of town and thought she needed to roll in the dirt to fit in with the locals. It stung and brought up old feelings of resignation at the same time. She was right, but the fact that she'd gone so over the top with it reeked of privilege. The poor people were dirty, so she'd get dirty too.
Then again, if she wanted to make it back out of the neighborhood, laughing with a strange kid and covering herself in dirt at least made her look crazy, and the sheen of filth went a long way to making her seem less shiny and ripe for the picking. Are you trustworthy? "Depends who you ask," he said, with a small smirk. That it fucking did.
Things took a sharp turn when she asked after Helena and Bruce, though. The joking and bemusement dropped away, and his jaw hardened. "How the hell do you know Helena and Bruce?" he asked the nut with the sloshing bag. What did she have in there, a forty? He glanced up the street. The punks who'd avoided them were now clustered with a few more in front of the shuttered diamond grate at the doorway of an old bodega. They were looking their way.
Jason backed a step into the alleyway, gesturing to the girl. "Come on. Let's walk and talk. You can decide whether you trust me when we get you someplace friendly to pretty girls, alright?"
It was the indication that there were lots of kids like him around here that made Gwen realize the boy was probably an orphan. There was a probability of error that was higher than what she was normally comfortable with, but she was willing to go with the most likely scenario, despite probability percentages. "We actually have a lot of kids like him too," she said, and her tone indicated surprise. For some reason, she'd assumed everything about Gotham would be different, but few cities could trump the orphaned and homeless kid situation that New York had going on. She would have genu comparing statistics in her head, but the sarcasm and bitterness in his voice made her attention turn entirely back on him, as if he was a petri dish with something new and interesting growing in it. "You're angry because I felt the need to get dirty to not draw attention to myself," she said observantly, and if politeness dictated that she not be so blunt about it, well, she knew as much about politeness as she did about socially acceptable behavior. "I'm sorry. I stood out," she said with an earnest naivete that said she missed the nuance that had really tripped him up. She should have dressed more appropriately, having seen the way Helena dressed, but she hadn't been thinking.
He smirked, and her expression turned almost entertained. "Smartass," she said, but it was upper-class polite, the word, and it was obvious she didn't have a lot of experience with it. Gwen didn't curse, not as a rule, and even her new life of bruised knees and salty lips hadn't changed her speech patterns very much.
When his jaw hardened, she wondered if maybe he wasn't part of the same superhero alliance that Helena and Bruce were in. She didn't know if this world had X-Men or Avengers, but she assumed there were sides and drawn battle lines, because those existed in every war that had ever historically occurred; Helena had certainly made Gotham sound like a battlefield where war was being waged regularly. "I know Helena," she replied, and then - in order to cover her tracks - she quickly added, "but please don't tell her I'm here. It's safer if no one knows I came here." She followed his gaze down the alley, her hands closing more tightly on the red of her messenger bag. A second later, she fell into step beside him. It wasn't that different, she logicked, than going into an alley for sex with a stranger. "I'm twenty," she said once they were moving, unaware of the lingering threat at their backs, "I think that means I no longer qualify as a girl, and I've never been considered pretty, even when I'm not covered in 500 different strains of bacteria." She looked over at him, and she smiled, dimples pressing dots into her cheeks.
Well, she wasn't totally out of it, he could at least give her that. Her politesse, though, made him wonder if she actually understood what she was saying. It didn't sound like she did. It sounded like she was cataloguing his distaste for the act like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Where was she from, anyway? Metropolis? Where was she from that the idea of orphans was somehow surprised to her? It was like seeing them reminded her they had them back home, as if she'd forgotten because they were so out of sight. The apology was polite enough, in a totally-missing-the-point kind of way. "Don't worry about it. Safer? Are you in some kind of trouble?" He glanced behind them, but so far, nobody was following. Good. He nudged her to the left, deeper into the alleyway, slowing to a stop at a barred and bolted door. "You're a girl," he insisted, with confidence and that same little smirk. "And if you're fishing for compliments, you could pick better timing." He knocked, once, and short, quick footsteps skittered up to the door on the other side. There was a moment's pause, and then the bolt shot back, and the door swung open.
Behind the door, just inside, was another kid, not much bigger than the one who'd gotten into a dirt fight with Gwen on the street. He had a tuft of dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, and he couldn't have been much older than nine. There was a scar at the boy's temple that trailed under his hairline and out of site, a long line of pink and white.
Inside, a few kids of widely varied ages, teens and little ones, were sitting on surprisingly clean furniture under track lighting, donated couches and chairs. Everything looked a little worn out, some more than a little, from the clothes on the kids; backs to the holed upholstery. They all stopped what they were doing - reading, talking, shoving each other like brothers - when Gwen appeared in the doorway. One of the only girls, very young indeed, clutching a gray teddy bear, tucked herself a little closer to her playmate in the corner. Strangers, clearly, were a cause for concern. A few of the children, anachronistically, were wearing shoes that looked better suited to a ballet in the 19th century than a slapdash orphanage in the 21st.
"Come on," Jason said, turning back around in the doorway to face her, "you'll be safer inside." He stepped up, just inside, and made room for her to follow. He wouldn't blame her if she didn't trust him, or if she didn't want to. They'd just met, what, thirty seconds ago? But the slums weren't the sort of place where a girl like her should be hanging out on the street. "I'm Helena's brother," he said. She could believe him or not, but maybe it would tip the scales a little. "By adoption, anyway. Jason. Jason Todd." He didn't know if Helena would have mentioned him - maybe yes, maybe no. But the dirty blonde (ha ha) would have a lot better luck getting home again if she came inside until the fun bunch that had been watching them scampered off. Sooner or later, one of them would decide to find out what was bulging in her bag, and things could only get ugly from there.
"I'm not being chased by the cops," she said when he asked if she was in trouble. In New York, that was the generally accepted meaning to that question. "There's a possibility that a supervillain is chasing me, but I think it's likely that I had a good enough head-start that he wouldn't know where to locate me." Hopefully. She hadn't told Peter where she was going, and Helena didn't know, so there was a very good percentage of probability that she would get away with it. She nudged back when he nudged, just because she wasn't the type to let herself get nudged without some level of retribution. But she walked easily at his side. "Your smirk is kind of cute," she said, that lack of filter making itself known again. "If I'm a girl, you're a boy," she said, which wasn't her best comeback ever, but it would have to do. She blamed her inadequate wit on the unfamiliar scenery, which drew her attention away from his face every few seconds. "I don't fish for compliments," she said distractedly, her gaze committing a particular patch of graffiti to memory. "I have catalogued my own shortcomings in comparison with other girls in my age group."
And if her curiosity had been piqued outside, it was only heightened when the door opened. She looked at the little boy with the blond hair, and she tried to determine what had caused the injury to his temple. She edged inside without really paying any attention to the door that closed behind her, because she was too intent on settling her cornflower gaze on everything in the space. She took in the condition of the furniture, and she took in the sheer number of children. In the end, it was the little girl that her gaze stilled on. She smiled, because the child reminded her of Emily, and all little girls made her a little sad. She crouched, so that she was near the girl's height, despite the fact that the little girl was very much hiding near a paymate. "I like your bear," she said in the same voice she used every weekend to compliment tea sets and dollies. The ballet shoes were noticed, and that mystery was tucked away for later inspection.
She looked up, but she didn't stand from her crouch. "Hi, Jason. I'm Gwen," she offered. Helena hadn't mentioned him, not by name. "Helena said she has like eight adopted siblings," she explained, and she believed he was one of them. Perhaps there was a certain level of privilege there, a certain amount of naivete that didn't cause her to question his assertion. He said he was Helena's brother, and she believed him.
"Not what I meant," he retorted, moving toward the kitchen. "Throw your stuff down, if you like. I want to hear all about this supervillain who's chasing you, and how you met Helena." She looked peculiar there, crouched down and dirty on the floor, peering up at him as if all of this were perfectly normal. He was starting to get the sense that she was a little bit touched in the head, not naive in the way Kara was, but sheltered, unknowing.
The little girl, for her part, hugged the bear a little tighter and shuffled back a step. She seemed to have gotten the impression that saying she liked it meant that the blonde was going to try to take it. "Mine," the girl murmured. It might very well be her only possession, and she seemed inclined to keep it.
Jason disappeared into the kitchen for a moment. The couch Gwen was kneeling near cleared out, the boys getting up and drifting away into other parts of the building. It was hard to tell how big it was, since it looked utterly abandoned from the outside, but it seemed to stretch for most of the block. Most of the windows were carefully covered up to preserve the illusion to the outside, but those that still had glass were pocked with small holes to let in some natural light. It was dusty, but someone swept the floor and kept it clean. The kids looked like they were eating. It wasn't conventional, but it felt safe, like a house shuttered against a storm.
The girl eventually surveyed Gwen, and, when she didn't try to seize her bear, she lifted her head a little, staring at Gwen with dark eyes. "Snerkins," she intoned, with terrible severity. This was probably the name of the bear, though it was hard to say.
Jason returned from the kitchen with a glass of water and a wet washcloth, and he handed both to Gwen, sitting down on the floor beside her without the slightest compunction. "You shouldn't pay me too many compliments," he said. "I get attached to girls with bad judgement." He leaned up against the base of the couch. Behind them, a pair of boys began to argue vociferously over whose turn it was to use a small, battered tablet. It wasn't a quiet place - upstairs someone was playing music, audible even through the cement of the floors and ceiling, covered liberally with threadbare carpets. The scent of sizzling meat and the crackle of vegetables sauteed in oil emanated from the kitchen, and someone was watching a daytime crime drama in the next room. "Yeah, we're a pretty good sized brood," he said, of the collective Batfamily. A few years ago, those words might have held more meaning, might have held more of a sense of cohesion. Even when he had been ejected from the family, outcast, it had still seemed like a unit from the outside looking in. Not anymore.
But there was a story to tell, supervillains and Helena Wayne. This ought to be good. The little girl and her playmate became distracted with one another again, the little boy poking the girl and giggling, until they both got up and started chasing each other. "So, supervillain," he said. "How'd you get your head start?"
Gwen didn't "throw her stuff down." She only had the bag that contained Carnage, and there was no way she was going to put that down where a kid could get to it. She kept it clutched to her middle, and she watched him walk toward the kitchen. After a few seconds, and some logical determination that really had more to do on the perceived emotionality of a boy who took care of orphans, she sat down on the floor and crossed her legs. Her pleated skirt reached to mid thigh, and she settled the red bag in the space the skirt filled on the floor, between her knees.
She heard his question about villains and Helena, but she was more interested in the little girl's concern that her bear was in danger. Gwen crossed her arms, tucking her hands beneath her armpits in a very obvious demonstration of not being able to take the bear. It was a little too obvious, but that was just another example of her socially awkward tendencies. Either way, she smiled at the girl, and she nodded her assent at that murmured mine.
Gwen tipped her chin, and she watched the boys scatter into the corners of the warehouse, and her attention returned to the solemn little girl. "Snerkins," she repeated, because she had experience with all of Emily's oddly named dolls and bears. "My bear's named Einstein," she offered, and it wasn't a lie. She still had the first bear her dad had ever given her. The bear had, once, had a silly name - Mr. Bubbles or Mr. Brown Bear - but he'd become Einstein somewhere along the line, and Einstein he had remained.
Gwen took the water and washcloth one at a time, utilizing one hand and keeping the other firmly on the red bag. Her hair was coated in mud, but she began wiping at her face, trying to get as much dirt off as she could without the help of a mirror. "Don't worry. I can pay you as many compliments as I want, and you will physically find yourself unable to be interested in me. At best, you'll develop some quasi-siblings for me," she said with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. She looked up when the music made the ceiling shake, and then she looked back at him. She had already identified the scent of food being cooked, and it actually made her mouth water. Homemade food wasn't a part of her life anymore, and she lived on protein shakes and takeaway. She missed her mom's cooking, and it took a little bit of work to drag her attention back to the boy sharing the floor with her.
The little girl ran off, and Gwen watched her go with something on her face that looked like pain. She sighed when she turned her attention back to Jason again, and she began scrubbing at her face in earnest. "Helena was my cupid," she explained of how she'd met his sister. "But she kind of doesn't know I'm here. I needed somewhere to stash something so a supervillain won't get to it, and she made it sound like this might be an acceptable place for that endeavor." Admittedly, now she wasn't so sure. There were kids everywhere, and Carnage was dangerous. The bag between her knees wasn't moving anymore, but she wasn't surprised. Carnage always calmed down when she talked. That had never weirded her out before today, but given recent events she was beginning to realize it was unnerving.
The fact that Gwen did well with the small girl didn't go unnoticed with Jason, though he didn't say anything about it, nor did he miss her obviously pained expression when the girl left. "You don't sound like you've got anything to be bitter about," he said, but delivered it loosely and lightly enough. She had stiff upper lip written all over her, even in that pretty smile.
Gwen seemed like the type who liked to categorize everything. She had already decided there were categories of men she interacted with, based on what sort of interest or lack thereof they took in her. Her continuous distraction by stimulus around her, from the girl to the food in the kitchen, made it seem like she was trying not to miss anything, to get it all down for later. He listened to her talk about Helena as she wiped herself clean. As suspected, there was a soft, unmarked, pale complexion underneath the mud. She made quite the picture, mud on the hem of her skirt, dirty all over but with her face wiped clean. It didn't last long, but it did make an impression. Listening to her chatter carelessly about supervillains didn't remind him of the way his siblings and friends talked about them. It was matter of fact, as if such things were a fact of life to be nimbly dodged, kept one step ahead of. "Did she mention this place specifically, or just Gotham?" he asked. It could have been either one, really. He settled his shoulders against the front edge of the couch, getting comfortable in his spot on the floor. "She was probably right," he said. "Gotham's a tough place to find anything, least of all something you're looking for." He glanced down at the bag. It had gone quiet now, but, for a moment there, he'd thought it was still sloshing around, even without moving. That was not a little unnerving. He looked back up, dark eyes gone thoughtful. "What's this thing you have to stash?" he asked. The wheels were already turning. Sure, he barely knew this girl, but if she had something to keep out of the hands of a bad guy from elsewhere, it was hard to see the harm in it. The likelihood anyone would find out it was with him was pretty slim since they'd never met before today.
Gwen. Where had he read that name before? He paused, then said, "You're on the journals. I've seen you around there a few times. Not from this neck of the woods, though, am I right?"
"I'm not bitter," Gwen replied, and there was a lack of understanding in her tone, like his belief that she was bitter didn't make much sense to her. "I'm speaking from years of experience," she added, because she had years of experience not being that girl. "I know it may sound harsh, but I was created as a catalyst, and I'm not actually intended to do anything other than die to further the story of a superhero. I'm supposed to help him come of age through grief." She sounded like a book, self-help, maybe. She also sounded very sure of her belief and her statement.
"She mentioned Gotham," she said of Helena. "She was talking about the mechanics of her world, and I believe she was referencing the mutations of her parents, though I didn't see any mutants walking the streets. Was she being metaphorical, or do you have a mutant situation like we do?" She wasn't sure situation was the best word, but it was always almost a situation, and the feeling always existed that it might become a significant problem one day. "She's depressed," she finally added, though she wasn't sure if that was a betrayal. "I offered to let her stay with me, if it made her less depressed." There. She logicked that felt more like information provided to a family member, and less like betrayal.
She held onto her bag tighter when his blue gaze slid down to it, and she was looking at his face by the time he looked back up. She quickly considered the pros and cons of trusting him and, in the end, the presence of the children weighed trust in his favor. She opened the flap of the bag, and she pulled out the containment unit. Carnage, agitated, sloshed back and forth in the unit, red goo that appeared fairly harmless, save for how completely erratic it was acting. She ran her hand over the unit, and she spoke to it quietly. "It's okay. Calm down." And she looked back up at Jason. "This is Carnage. He's a parasitic alien. He claims hosts, and he kills people. That's all he does, is kill people in violent and terrible ways. He's insatiable, and there's no known way to kill him." Her voice calmed the sloshing, and she looked back down at the container. "I took him from someone who was trying to clone him." She looked up. "Do you understand?" And then she nodded. "And yes, I'm on the journals. I'm in Marvel. I was around when your plague killed one of our most respected - if extravagant - heroes."
Jason's brow climbed up a Gwen started naming herself as a catalyst in someone else's story. "You sound like a book," he observed, leaning back a little. "You can't take that shit too much to heart, the Vegas stuff." He sure as hell hadn't. What good would it do him, seeing predestination in a comic? Especially when they all branched off in so many different directions, so many futures with so many different paths? He didn't see the point, not even a little.
"Her parents aren't mutants," Jason corrected, brow still raised. "What made you think that?" He had a solid guess - Batman and Catwoman, right? But he wanted to hear it from Gwen, not feed her the answers. He still hadn't made an ironclad decision about her, and he couldn't see any point in helping her make the leap. At the news that Helena was depressed, he grunted. "Not news," he told her, matter of fact to the point of grim. "She's been like that for two years, practically. Nice of you, though. Offering to let her stay, but it won't make much of a difference. She wants a Gotham where everyone is different, where everybody is exactly the way she remembers. Well as far as I can tell, nobody's exactly the way everyone remembers them. We all climbed past that. Helena never did." There had been tragedy along the way too, but that didn't bear repeating. When it came down to it, that was Helena's problem, a world that didn't meet her expectations. He'd told her what he thought she should do. Past that, all he could offer her was a hand when she was willing to take one. Hadn't happened yet.
When Gwen pulled out the container of sloshing, animated red goop, Jason's demeanor changed completely. The room had already basically cleared out, but the last of the kids ducked into the next room when he saw it. After the sort of things they'd been through, they all knew better than to get curious about things that smelled like trouble.
Jason had never seen anything quite like it. Something about it reminded him of the waters of the pit, that sensation of grasping, but that was subtle and slight, not like this. The thing was practically crawling the glass walls until Gwen started to shush it, and his brow went up again. "So you're a monster whisperer," he stated, flatly. "Great talent. Good for you." He listened, watching her face, glancing every once in a while to the red thing in the jar. It stilled while she spoke, which was...eerie.
If it was what she said it was, then nobody should be allowed to clone it. It didn't take much of a stretch to believe somebody would. Things like this, things that killed and were unique, somebody always wanted one for themselves as a pet, or to get it under their control. He could think of more supervillains than he could count on one hand that had gotten their start that way. The mention of the plague earned her a flicker of recognition. "You're from that other door," he said. The one that man Stark was in, the one who'd died (though he'd seen him around recently, so lucky him, back from the dead with no baggage to show for it). Selina had very nearly died that way, as had half the rest of them. At the very least, it proved that she'd been around a while. He did remember her name, definitely did, remembered seeing it mingling with the rest of the people on her side of the door. That wasn't necessarily enough to trust, but it was enough for him to buy that this thing in the jar needed looking after. If she had some ugly motives, then it was still best to get it away from her, right? But he didn't think so. He went with his gut, most of the time, and his gut said she was telling the truth. The weird, weird truth.
"If you need a secure place to put that thing, I do have a pretty good safe in this place," he said. "Came with the old building. It's down in the basement, iron and steel, two layers of concrete wall." He gestured up to the rotting molding. "This ugly thing was a bank at some point or another, until somebody tried to make a shitty apartment building out of it." He looked back to her. She was laser focused on getting the monster in the box taken care of. The problem was going to be keeping everyone in the house away from the thing, but he'd had the vault reinforced a long time ago. Mostly he kept the guns in there, since he wasn't keen on risking one of the young ones getting their hands on one. But it would serve pretty nicely as a hiding place for something that didn't need air or water or light. "Do I sprinkle fish food on it, or does it like crickets?"
"Your story," Gwen began, when he said she couldn't take the Vegas stuff too seriously, "does it vary? Are there variations? Do you live? I don't. I exist just so a villain can kill me. When he does, a hero grows up, and his love interest does too, and they find each other. It's the same, regardless of my manner of death." She pointed at the red goo. "He kills me once. But that's not my version. But I went back last year, and I died, and I threw away all my charts and diagrams after. Knowing didn't help me alter anything. I still died. I'm here now, and I can only assume that the same thing will happen at some point in the future. Either that, or I've become obsolete." Which was, in truth, how she felt most does. It was what led her to find her way into back rooms, scratchy carpets beneath her knees and the desire to feel like she mattered to someone, even if the very logical center of her brain insisted it was all fallacious.
The subject of Helena and her mutant parents was an easier one. "Helena said she had cat and bat DNA." No, Helena hadn't mentioned her parents specifically, but Gwen knew about Batman. Everyone knew that Mr. Stark and Batman argued whenever they spoke publicly. And she wasn't surprised to hear that Helena's depression had been a long one. "She told me why she was depressed. I don't think it matters that everyone else has experienced the same thing. You're applying logic to an emotional situation. Is there anything that you have a strong emotional reaction to, regardless of logic? It's like that. Just because everyone else handled it, doesn't mean she's able to. She needs a good doctor. I talked to her, but my area of expertise is biology and cross-species genetics. I'm not very good with depression." Not even her own.
She narrowed cornflower blue eyes when he said she was a monster whisperer, but she didn't argue with him. She had a feeling she was walking a dangerously close line to villainy in most people's eyes these days. She worked for a supervillain, knowingly, even if Mr. Osborn had never done anything here that she was aware of. She was enamored of his equally villainous son. She defended an imprisoned god, and she talked to a symbiote. If Flash was still around, she would have added Venom to her list of villain acquaintances. But the fact that he was gone didn't change the fact that she'd been sympathetic to him too, and that she'd hidden him from SHIELD once upon a time.
She knew she'd been away from her door too long. If Doc Ock couldn't locate her, he would know she'd stored Carnage in another door, and she needed to decide her next course of action. In the end, the mention of the vault, combined with his relation to Helena made the decision for her. She stood. "Don't open the vault until I come back, and don't try to feed it." She knew it could go weeks without eating; she'd tested its eating patterns, and it was something like a snake that way. "Show me the way?"
Jason got up from the floor. "Come on," he said. "It's this way." As snap decisions went there was a pretty good chance he was going to regret this one eventually. He had never been one for too much analysis of where his feelings took him, even if they took him clear off the edge sometimes.
He led Gwen down a set of rickety stairs, into the bowels of the building. I still died. He was quiet for a moment after she said it, then said, "My story's usually got a death in it." A little cryptic, perhaps, but true. He glanced behind him, looking her over in a different way than he had before, looking for signs of death. People who had come through it and emerged on the other side couldn't be the same, he didn't think. Laz Pit or no Laz Pit, it did something to you. It made him wonder what she was like before. "I don't think there's any version that doesn't. I don't see it the way you do, though. You act like our lives are just a big story, with a hero and a villain and a girl who dies so the boy and the other girl can hook up. I don't buy that. That kind of purpose. If people are meant for something, it's what they do, not what they look like when you try to wrap it all up in a neat little bow."
Jason huffed a short laugh. "She did, did she?" It was hard to imagine Helena making a joke, but maybe it hadn't been intended as one. Maybe she'd been attempting to be mysterious. Still, the image was funny enough. He shook his head. "No. You're right. But we've tried to help her for a long time. I know her dad's tried to get her help on more than one occasion. Help's not really what that girl is looking for."
They reached the bottom of the stairs, turned the corner in the narrow stairwell, and came up against the vault door. It was wide, iron painted brown a long time ago, and the paint was peeling. There were some numbers painted in white on the surface, but they were too cracked to read. It opened with a heavy looking latch mechanism. A steel hook, obviously a modern addition, kept it closed, fixed as it was to the floor. A keypad was waiting on the wall.
Jason typed in the code, deft and quick, and the hook popped audibly, releasing. He pulled it up and off the latch, then heaved on the latch and the door itself. It swung open smoothly on its old chain pulley, clattering as it went. Inside was a short hallway and another door, this one made of steel and no bigger than an average doorframe, locked with a slightly more old-fashioned bit of security - a padlock. "I think it's safe to say we don't get many thieves around here," he said, holding the door open, "But I figure if they do ever show up, they're going to spend so much time trying to find out what's behind this door that I'll be back by the time they try to leave." He flashed a grin. No, thieves didn't come within a block of the place. They knew better, just like everybody else. His levity in the face of a freakish alien monster and a risen dead girl did say something about what he’d seen, what phased him, what a bad situation really meant. This was a weird day, sure, but Gwen was a lovely girl, and the weird monster in a jar was weird and interesting enough to capture his interest and get his adrenaline going. What fun was anything without some risk?