addy and steph are the (blondebat) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-12 03:20:00 |
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Three days. In essence, three days was a mere blink of an eye for someone like Eddie Nigma, but for Stephanie Brown, nineteen years didn’t afford that sort of perspective. Time fluctuated. Three days could feel like a whirlwind, or like the longest expanse of time she had ever suffered through. Luckily, Saturday wasn’t awful, or at least as awful as it could have been. Once Eddie left the apartment, she had only spent another hour or so longer. Showering, moseying around the various rooms she didn’t get to explore when he wasn’t around, picking idly at the Eggo’s she’d toasted. Though she was sorely tempted to disorganize Eddie’s record collection for the hell of it, Stephanie dressed in her jeans and his math equation t-shirt to head off to that US History class. Later, she met up with some school friends, had a little froyo (because she was trying to be a little healthy lately), and went home to help Damian comfort Helena after the news about Tim. (Which, she too was upset about, but Steph was consumed by other thoughts.) Just another Saturday afternoon for the blonde bat, but even that early on she kept thinking and thinking about what Eddie might be up to. Patrolling that night, at least, provided enough distraction to forget about if her boyfriend was okay or not. Thanks, nameless thugs, you save the day again. Time moved at a maddeningly sluggish pace, and Sunday dragged, dragged, dragged. She had no school to distract her, no patrols to vent her frustrations through, no friends to pretend to be okay around. Damian and Helena busied themselves with other things, and Stephanie didn’t have the energy to fake being okay. Not when she was consumed with worry and fighting the urge to say fuck it and hunt Eddie down a day early anyway. She only thought of asking the two of them for advice for a split second before sobering herself. No, no one in the Batfamily needed to know. They would use this as some sort of convoluted excuse that she needed to stay away from him. (See what happened to ex-super villains? Vague, shady life threats and little concern about what might happen to you.) Not that she would listen, of course, but they certainly didn’t need more ammunition. And, Stephanie didn’t want to hear them cut Eddie down, not when she didn’t even know if he was going to show up dead in the next day or two. So, when she couldn’t concentrate on her discussion questions on A Tale of Two Cities, she burrowed away in the Gotham U library on Sunday, teaching herself the lost art of Morse Code. Open textbooks spread across the tabletop, pen scribbling notes across the lined page, with her comm in one ear and an earphone blasting some Justin Timberlake in the other. Eddie had been right, thinking it would be useful in the long haul as a crime fighter. Now, though, she used it to decipher the little beeps he’d send her over the comm every now and then over the past few days. Screwing her face up, she tried her best to remember the patterns of the beeps and pause to figure out the words or phrases he’d send her. As she combed over the basics for hours, another few messages came through, and this time, she could translate them then and there. Simple words that related to them. IKEA, waffle, green. She struggled at first, but created a bit of a flow for herself, enough that she took only a little time to work through each tiny message Eddie sent her. Love you. Steph smiled as she scribbled down that translation in her marble notebook before continuing to wrack her brain. She vaguely recalled the tapping near her ear the morning before, and she just knew it was important. Eddie always did things with purpose, even the most seemingly banal gestures or words always meant something. It consumed the rest of the evening, trying to remember the pattern of the taps against her skin, trying to make sense of what Eddie was saying to her. When the librarian snuck around the corner and tutted at her about the hour until she packed her things to leave, she’d figured out the first three letters. A. R. T. Well, that was useless. What the hell did art have anything to do with it? (She always was the worst at Eddie’s puzzles.) Patrolling that night distracted her enough again, and when dawn rose, Stephanie felt exhausted, so exhausted that she didn’t even think to check in on Eddie before she crashed for a blessed few hours of sleep before class. That Eddie hadn’t contacted her either barely blipped on her radar. She was tired, and she didn’t think, and later on she would beat herself up for that. But, the little blonde bat went along with her usual Monday. Class, meetings, friends, etc. She afforded Eddie passing thoughts, but it was just the beginning of that third day. She would ping him that night, if not in the late afternoon. She could taste the fatigue in her mouth throughout the day, though, and she sort of hoped Eddie’s detective work hit a wall so they could just crawl into bed and wrap themselves up in each other. And that was what she thought of most of the day. Not the concern that filled her brain over the weekend, but a desire for things to calm down enough that they could be normal for five minutes. Half-way home that night, however, she realized her comm hadn’t beeped in almost 12 hours. Neither of them barely slept, and Eddie catching a few winks wouldn’t be an excuse. Panicked, finally, Stephanie burst into her shared apartment with Damian and careened into her bedroom. After trying him on the comm a couple times to no avail, she began to gather her equipment to go patrolling to find her now probably missing boyfriend. She couldn’t believe that she had been so goddamn stupid. Why wasn’t she alert? What kind of bat was she? What kind of girlfriend was she? Just as she began to undress, her phone notified her about a new email. She was a shaking wreck before she even opened up her laptop, nauseous at the implications of him not responding, and when she opened up that email and the file within, her stomach wretched more. Thin fingers reached out and brushed at the points where his hair was, the bruises littered across his face were, the blood dripping down from his temple was. There was Eddie, beaten and bloody, rattling off a riddle, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Yet. |