dami can't (leavethenest) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-16 23:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | damian wayne, death |
Who: Damian and Death
When: A day after laz pit crazy
Where: The Lazarus Pit
What: Death scolds Damian.
Warnings: Not really. Just death talk.
The meeting with Selina hadn’t gone quite as she’d planned, but she blamed at least half of that on being off her game thanks to the acute awareness of the green pit in Batman’s cave. She was still trying to track who had been lost when things started happening with the pit. It had started as an itch, creeping along the back of her neck, then as a ringing in her ears that had sounded more like the wailing of injured birds than bells. The sound had turned her stomach, the first time she could remember such a physical response in her entire existence. By the time the young man’s rebirth scream ripped through her, feeling like it took a part of her with it, she was glad she had left Selina, as it made her double up in actual pain. It made her fight for breath even though she didn’t need to breathe, and it followed her even when she slipped into her own domain. The entire realm quivered with icy aftershocks when it was usually silent and warm. She gasped out curses in every language of every race she had ever known, a strange cacophony of sounds that would have likely deafened any living creature unfortunate enough to overhear, possibly even torn at their sanity. Luckily, her realm was empty, save for herself, and it spared anyone from such a fate.
Time passed, slow and then quick, immeasurable as she hid her face in her hands, shaking. In every world she touched, births and deaths alike paused. No one arrived and no one left as she tried to pull herself back together. She had known that the pool was going to be trouble, but she’d never thought that putting someone into it would hurt her quite so much. It took another few turns of time for her to settle herself, and when she emerged again, the day had not yet passed over to the next. And she was shaken and angry. She knew where to direct her anger, too, knew who had created the pool and who had put someone into it. So that was where she went.
Damian wasn’t working on gadgets or updating the cave security. He wasn’t patrolling or spending time with his cat, Bandit. He wasn’t even letting Steph bug him into having an actual meal with her somewhere outside of the apartment. No, he was at the Pit. Sitting in the corner of the rounded, arena looking cave, he pulled his knees up to his chest and watched the green liquid bubble and burst from its hole. Damian didn’t doubt his intentions or his actions, but he wished that it didn’t have to come to actually using the Plan B.
It wasn’t just the implications of the Pit. Of how bringing someone back to life through mystical means was questionable. It was that doing so marked a return to his own blood line. At ten he wouldn’t have even considered bringing Jason Todd of all people back with something that was so very al Ghul, but things changed. He couldn’t lose part of his family. His weird, bird brained, messed up family. When Death arrived he looked up with surprise on his face, but not alarm. “How’d you get in here.”
The usual soft sound of feathered wings was less a murmur and more the crash of a wave, Death still tense and unsettled, especially being closer to the Pit again. She actually gagged at the sickly green hue it gave off, even as she felt its siren song pull on her core, putting a hand up as if to ward it off. What would happen if she actually stepped forward and touched it? Would it unravel her? Unmake her? Trap her? Do something even worse? She didn’t want to know. Actually stumbling as she found her feet on the stone floor of the cave, she turned dark sparks of angry eyes on Damian.
“I walked,” she stated flatly, a less-teasing echo of the conversation she’d had with his father. And there was really no doubt that they were father and son. Face to face with Damian, she saw Bruce there around his eyes, the stubborn set of jaw. No matter that they began in different worlds, how Bruce could ever doubt that this was his son... She shook her head from that train of thought. It wasn’t what she was there to address. “You and I need to have a talk.”
“I think you should tell me who you are first.” Damian said with the same kind of authority his father and mother had passed down to him. There was arrogance, but it seemed bred into him. A clasp around his personality that he couldn’t break free of. He was unimpressed by her and it showed. Damian didn’t even feel threatened, even if someone so grim should make him at least a little wary. No, he treated her like a trespasser.
Death didn’t care about anyone’s lineage or what sort of traits it led to, and her expression said as much. She may have looked the same as the next gothpunk girl, but when one looked closer, there was far, far more behind her usually-cheerful expression. She had taken emperors and beggars alike, sometimes within the same breath, and she had no use for arrogance. His had no more effect than a kitten’s breath against the towering granite cliff of her indifference. “And I think you should tone down the attitude, but maybe neither of us get what we want.” Her reply was terse, the sharp bite of unfamiliar sickness still lingering in the back of her throat. She crossed the space between them in less than a step, suddenly inside his sphere of space and looming over him even though she would be much shorter than him if he were standing.
She rarely used who she was to intimidate or to frighten, choosing instead to take people quietly and gently, with care, even if their cause of death was violent. She wasn’t the judge of people’s lives, simply the escort at the end. But she wasn’t taking Damian, and so she pushed. It was easy enough for her to press against his thoughts, making herself known in the most immediate way. Worlds and eons of those she had taken, the knowledge of them and the catalog of every face and life, lingered behind her gaze as she stared down at him. She was Death. And now he knew. “Now maybe you tell me, Damian al Ghul, why you think you have the right to be the one to determine who lives and who dies in your sickly, unnatural little pit.” There was steel and stone in her voice, in his head as much as his ear. She refused to use his father’s name, placing him (for the moment) firmly among his mother’s family.
He blinked, closed his eyes and then opened them heavily. Damian felt a chill go down his back and out through his fingertips, but he refused to show it. Ookaaay well that wasn’t what he was expecting, but with her pointed comments about the Pit, he shouldn’t have been surprised. What was she going to do? Try to take the Pit away? That had to have been impossible, even for someone like Death. Maybe she just wanted to lecture him. In which case, Damian would have rather she just take his soul now and get it over with. He rolled his eyes at her with a scoff.
“Fine. Call me an al Ghul. You won’t be the last.” Damian brooded, scooping a pebble up with his hand and flicking it out towards the green liquid. “And, so what if it’s unnatural? You don’t haunt doctors when they they use a defibrillator, do you? How is some magic pit any different from what science can achieve?”
The flick of pebble toward the pit made her breathe in suddenly and shuffle her feet in a quick step, leaving her across the cave again, far from where there was danger of any of the green splashing on her. When she returned her gaze to Damian, it was darker than it had been, things hidden behind her eyes that were rarely seen by others. “Is it your age that makes you foolish, or something else entirely? Do you not realize that there is a balance? That is it not up to you who lives or dies? Do you know who was meant to die today? Who was meant to be born? ...Do you know who was stolen from their chance at life because you felt it was your call to make? Who had to be traded because of your arrogance? The remedy may be worse than the disease.” The last words came out in Arabic, a proverb pulled from hot sands on the other side of the world.
The air had gone heavy and thick in the cave as she spoke, the echoes of bats going silent. They had fled in the face of her anger, flown out because animals know when a storm hits. “Everyone has a time. Some sooner than others. And that is not your call. And...” She was close again, leaning over him in a curve that had her hair falling forward to nearly brush against his face. “The difference, Damian, between science and your pit is that science revives life that is still clinging, still possible. Your pit,” the word was spat with disgust, “brings a man back from another place. Forces him back into a body he has moved beyond.”
Damian found himself feeling strangely nostalgic when she spoke to him in Arabic. His memory drifted back to the smell of strange spices and the dust of a dry land. He had always felt a stronger connection with Gotham, but he couldn’t deny the sand pits his other bloodline was born from. “You know better than anyone that death is rarely permanent here. Who was the last to die that didn’t come back? I can’t think of a single name besides my grandparents. If you were so concerned with keeping an order of nature, you’d do a better job at it.” He was arrogant, but more than that, unconvinced that the Pit was any different from the myriad of abilities, sciences and discoveries that could do nearly what the Pit could. Just with a little less accuracy.
The smallest of the birds shrugged at her, standing up to walk closer to the pit. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then finally: “When Jason came to he was begging me not to bring him back. I don’t think he’ll ever forgive me.” His pressed his lips together, trying to forget the screaming, the crying. “But, I thought he was family. I thought my father was family. Now, I’m not sure if I’ll ever have one.”
“Death was rarely permanent in your world. And you should know better than most how different things are here than from where you came.” She gestured to his height when he stood, easily taller than she was, when his ten year-old self would not have even matched her. “Who, other than Jason, has come back since you’ve been here?” She knew the answer to that as easily as she knew the answer to his question. “I do my job when I am here, tiny bat. But I can no more steal all the time from my Las Vegas counterpart than you can.”
She watched the shift of expression over his face, the memories of Jason’s return. The pit still pressing against her thoughts, she shivered as well at the memory of the scream that had cut through her even from across the city. “I wouldn’t blame him if he never did. You can’t do that and not expect repercussions. You can’t go backwards. It’s like... spilling flour across the counter and then trying to put it all back in the bag. You’re never going to get it all. There will always be some of it missing.” She stared at him, not offering any comfort. Even her next words were sharp, like she couldn’t believe she actually had to say them. “Of course he’s family. They both are, along with the rest of your brood. And you’re even more of an idiot if you think they aren’t. But that doesn’t give you dominion over their life and death. Over anyone’s.”
“They aren’t.” Damian said after a moment, his tone not dismissive of her like it had been before. Just sad and, for the first time, unsure. Jason wasn’t family. Neither was his father. Neither was Stephanie or Tim or Helena. It was clear that there was something about him that saw the world differently. And, even if Jason was different now than he was before being brought back to life, Damian thought it would be good enough if he was just there. “You don’t have to worry about me using this again.” And then Damian uttered a phrase he hadn’t said since he was ten. “Dead is dead. I’m putting all this sentimental nonsense behind me.”
Death’s sigh was easily audible in the small space, and obviously annoyed. She took two steps, not enough to close the distance between them, but it didn’t stop her from being right there again. She had to look up at him, and actually reached up to take his chin and tilt it down. There was very little ability to fight against her. When she wanted to get close, to touch, she would. “Listen.” She caught his gaze again, her own intense. “Listen to me.” She paused, but her gaze never wavered. “I have existed for more lifetimes than you can imagine. I have family of my own. I know family, and these people are yours. It is written all over your life, and whatever else is going through your mind, it does not change that.” Her fingers were still strong on his chin, holding him there. She wasn’t done. “Sentiment is not foolish. Never, when it comes to family. ...I know how many moments you have left, whether it’s days or decades. Do you really want those to pass estranged from those that care about you?”
He normally shied away from physical contact that didn’t involve kicking someone’s head in, but with Death he didn’t really have a choice and he was too tired to fight her away. “They don’t care about me. No matter what I do.” Damian kept his eyes locked with hers, serious and with a sort of sadness that had obviously lingered around him for too long. “It’s easy for someone with immortality to act like they can understand everything.” A subtle dig, as his own grandfather had proven that knowledge and age didn’t always match up. Still, it was hard to fight someone like Death on matters like this. He really had no experience with a real family, so why did he think some makeshift one in Gotham would work?
But, Jade wasn’t talking anymore. She wasn’t agreeing with Death or doing her usual soft cooing of the importance of friends and family. Because Jade herself was hiding out, wasn’t she? They both were and that mixed feeling of shame and loneliness emitted through them. “I think you should go.” Damian said to Death, eyes casting down as he looked from her wrist to their feet.
Death shook her head slowly, almost sympathetic. When she spoke, her voice was softer. The pit was still a raw throb in her world, but her attention had shifted for the moment. “You poor Waynes,” she whispered, using his father’s name again, and her fingers finally softened enough to stroke along Damian’s jaw as she pulled her hand away. “My family has you all twisted around, don’t we?” She felt a different sort of ache at that, the knowledge that she was the only one of her siblings there. She didn’t dwell on that though, couldn’t. “I don’t know which people you’re looking at to convince yourself that they don’t care. Because that’s very, very wrong.”
She smiled, but it was sad, and she sighed. “Now, I never claimed to know everything. There are plenty of things that I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand. Also, you can’t be immortal if you’re not actually alive.” She lowered her hand, rested it over his heart for a moment, and then stepped back. Just a normal, single step. And then she looked. Really looked. At him and through him. The moment hung, never ending, until she finally sighed. “Walling up this part of the cave might be a thought. I don’t know yet what the trade off is going to be for Jason’s life, so let’s not toss anyone else in, okay? Plus, it hurts like hell when you toss someone in there. Think my Vegas girl might have even felt that.” She took another step backward, still facing him, and raised an eyebrow. “And you know, I don’t think I can even count the number of teenagers I’ve met that incorrectly think their families didn’t care about them. Just... think about that, okay? I know you’re a special snowflake because of who you are, but you’re pretty damn normal too.”
And then she was gone. Feathers and wings sounding far more delicate than when she’d arrived.