InsaneJournal

Who: Jason and Kara
What: Kara gets off to a good start by probably killing a guy, and Jason stashes her in a safehouse, and there is much fish-out-of-water comedy and murder.
Where: Gotham, then Jason's safehouse [DC Door]
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Some violence and aside references to sexual assault.



The world beneath ocean was lonely, dark and cold. Even with Krypto, who she'd rescued from the Fortress along with Kandor once she realized she couldn't hear Kal, it was lonely and dark and cold. Kara loved Sanctuary, loved the sunstones that still carried her father's voice, loved the small city filled with people she knew, people she loved, all waiting to be awakened. But it was quiet. Her feet echoed along the empty halls, and the time away from the sun made her normal again. She could sleep, she could eat, and she could grow tired.

At first, growing tired felt like a blessing. Sleep felt like normalcy, and in dreams she could forget that she was in this strange place, alone, and with no lingering hope of saving Argo or Krypton. But even the dreams had stopped being enough eventually.

She had gone looking.

What she found was a world that was the same. She saw no changes. Saw no alterations, save people being gone who should not be gone. Kal was nowhere, his lover was missing, and the hated Kon had disappeared. Even Siobhan was nowhere, and Kara was left to wonder if they had all been tied to H'EL somehow. Not his creations, not illusions, but somehow tied to his presence.

But then she heard the Worldkillers. It made no sense for them to exist, but not the others. But the sky was empty, no Watchtower in sight, and

Confused, she left her Sanctuary, and she made her way to Metropolis. It was quiet in her cousin's city. Bright and good and quiet. It hadn't been like this before, and she didn't like to be there now. She didn't like anything here, but that was nothing new. She didn't understand it either, and she wasn't certain she wanted to take the time to make sense of it. Everything was archaic, antiquated, a shadow of something like an older home she had only known in books.

Gotham was her next stop.

Once, she had liked the dark city better than Metropolis. Metropolis, with it's bright surfaces and shine, reminded her too much of Argo. Gotham was polluted, unhealthy and dark. It held no hidden memories, no desires for things she could no longer possess, no missing cousin that she only remembered as a baby.

She didn't know the rules of the city that was shrouded in fog, and she walked with her hands shoved deep in the front pockets of the bright red hoodie she wore. She was small and blonde, eyes a shining-bright blue, even in the darkness. Her jeans were Siobhan's, as was the hoodie, and Kara walked along Crime Alley's sidewalk like the place was safe and serene. It wasn't, of course, but she didn't recognize the catcalls for what they were. She spoke the language, thanks to H'El, but it was still an afterthought that her ear didn't listen for; she wouldn't have known the words anyway.

Two men approached, leather and black and lascivious grins drawing their mouths wide. She cocked her head, confusion and a tumble of blonde hair over one shoulder, not understanding the words they used. They were not in the gift H'El had given her: Bitch and fuck and blowjob.

Saving attractive blondes who'd wandered down to the wrong side of town wasn't something that happened much to Jason anymore. In Gotham, most people knew the rules of how to move around the city these days. Savvier girls (and boys) had learned to walk in groups, stay out of Crime Alley, and to fear.

To Jason's eyes, the world had, of late, been even more of a mess than usual. Coming back to Gotham and having the weight of his own sundry issues on his shoulders again had been something of an adjustment, but he'd gotten back into the swing of things quickly enough. If the burn of his second trip into the Lazarus Pit still hadn't left his bones, so what? It was just more fuel for the sick flame, and there was no need to run from that. Not everybody had a purpose in life. He ought to be grateful. Everyone expected him to be back up and running by now, to have smoothly shaken off the lingering feeling of wrong all over that had come with being in the pit, the first time and the second. But it stayed. It didn't ever really go away. At least it had done him the favor of getting his priorities back in order, hardening him up in all the places he'd gone soft. What had he given up lethal force for, anyway? For a precious few months of playing it like he had in the old days, what good had he done? There were millions dead who wouldn't be if someone had just killed Ra's when they had the chance, and the Joker was still walking around after murdering children. Maybe it was all a hopeless, uphill climb, but he didn’t care. Sure, he’d be Sisyphus. And he’d push the rock harder than the Bat.

There was one wrench in it all, of course - the warehouse full of kids now under his charge. They were Gotham brand street kids who knew how to take care of themselves, but that didn't mean they weren't relieved to have somewhere safe to come back to, somewhere slowly accumulating enough beds for everyone and sporting a fully stocked pantry. Their numbers had swelled by a few in the days since Jason had taken charge of their care from the Cat. And her move back into Ivy’s greenhouse was definitely an issue that he was going to have to address, because against his better judgement, he still liked her. It would be a shame to see her fall back in with someone like Ivy just because Damian was a complete brat.

Patrolling was a constant, though more difficult now that there was a herd of kids to look after. It kept him sane to get out and do a little street cleaning after watching those kids straggle in the door all day, worn and beaten. He knew how some of them were making their money, and those boys in particular he felt beholden to, just like Selina had to have known he would.

Taking to the rooftops of Gotham wasn't as freeing as it had been in his first years as Robin Nothing felt now like it had then, when the past had been a mess but the future had seemed promising and brighter than the darkness behind him. It still gave him the thrill of being unencumbered, though, the clean feeling of being right where he was supposed to be. The girl down below, as he dropped down onto the top level of a half-collapsed fire escape, was precisely the reason he was still going out every night he could, whenever he had time through the door to do it. She was shiny as could be, blonde-haired and blue-eyed like an all-American dream, pretty to the lovesick of Crime Alley as a new penny, and one hardly needed psychic powers to figure out what the men approaching wanted to do to her. She seemed oblivious, which was a little odd. Most girls would have gotten the message by now. Even if she was from out of town, or didn't speak the language, couldn't she look them in the face and see what they wanted to do to her? Didn't darkness translate?

The Red Hood hopped over the edge of the fire escape, grabbed an exposed rod, and swung down with both feet into the back of one of the two half-human insects scuttling their way toward the girl in red. "You'd think living in this town, you would have heard enough by now to know that if you jump a girl in an alley, you're likely to cross paths with somebody like me." A vicious stomp on the man’s back put a quick stop to him struggling to get to his feet. The next thing to do was take out his friend, who had the presence of mind to lunge forward with a switchblade. And he had the decency, too, to look scared.

As well he should. In the low light, with that helmet on, Jason looked like a bloody death's head, unnervingly featureless except for the slits at the eyes, a force of nature in the sense that he was also a blunt force object, striking forward, and striking hard. "Stealing your mom's butterknife is not a good way to go about your day-to-day attempted rapes," came the chastising voice from behind the mask. The man in front of him darted forward with his knife, so Jason countered with one of his own, the blade dropping into his hand seemingly from nowhere, dodging left and planting it up through the man's palm. Reflexively, his opponent pulled his hand back.

Jason kept his grip firm, and yanked in the opposite direction in one smooth pull.

The would-be rapist hit the ground on his knees, clutching his bisected hand and screeching curses, the black leather at his sleeves beetle-wing shiny and spattered with blood. The Hood's own worn leather was speckled with scarlet spray as well, the knife in his hand slowly wicking blood onto the ground. "If you'd known well enough to worry about me bringing hell down on you, you would have known I'm not nice, like the Bat. And since your hygiene doesn't seem to be the best, you’re probably going to lose that hand." The Hood dropped the knife, tipping the man's head up forcefully with the edge. "If you're lucky, that's all you'll lose. I catch you at something like this again, or I even hear a whisper about a guy with no hand trying to grab girls with his broke-backed buddy, we all go back to the days of Solomon, and I start the new reign by cutting you both off at the root. Understand?"

The man who’d been landed on was trying to crawl away, but he was moving nice and slow, so the Hood took an extra moment to glance behind and see if the girl was still there. Usually even the bravest of the brave would have tried to put distance between themselves and everything that was happening by now - away from the blood, away from being made an accessory - and thanked their lucky stars to have been prevented from harm, no matter how fearful or despicable their rescuer seemed. If the girl was smart, she was already blocks away from the men who tried to attack her, and the dark clad rescuer with blood dripping from his knife.

By the time Kara was born, Krypton had eradicated violence. There was no sexual violence, no crime, nothing like the look in the eyes of the men that approached her. Pairings were made by parents, and gene matching was still the tradition for deciding who married. The caste systems controlled their lives, and there was plenty. The wars were long over by the time Kara was born, and her existence in the science caste meant she saw even less of the world's unfortunateness than most Kryptonians did. Only in her time on earth had she seen terrible violence, and she had been appalled. She didn't understand why Kal wanted to protect these terrible, violent people. She saw things she'd never experienced here, and those things made her want to scrub at her skin to get all the grime out of her pores.

And, so, it took Kara a moment to even realize what was happening. It wasn't the fight that she didn't understand; she'd learned all about fighting in her short time on earth. No, it was that she couldn't actually tell who was in the right, and who was in the wrong. The men had said things she didn't understand, but they hadn't actually touched her. The man in the red had a weapon, and he was inflicting harm. To her mind, he was the threat, since she didn't have any real grasp of what the men had been intending. She always had trouble understanding the earth language when she wasn't focusing, so the red man's words didn't make sense to her. She read body language, and she said something in Kryptonian, all vowels and hard consonants that didn't translate, but that managed to sound like "stop," all the same.

But the man in the red hood didn't stop, and she moved when he impaled his knife into the first man's palm. By the time he took that moment to turn and look at her, she was no longer there. She'd cast aside her backpack, the one with her suit, the one she always carried, and she'd placed herself behind him without any clear indication of how she'd done it. The man that was crawling away still crawled, and Kara just blew ice at the feet of the Red Hood, rooting him to the spot with ice that climbed to his ankles and took root in the concrete and blood at his feet. It wouldn't hold forever, but it would hold for a minute or two, and he could break free with enough struggle, but it would give the crawling man time to escape.

"I don't understand why Kal wants to help you, when all you want to do is hurt each other," she said in Kryptonian, forgetting to speak the correct language as she wound around the man in the red hood. She was close enough to grab, but she didn't fear his bloody hands. She couldn't see his face, and she wished she could. For a girl raised in a world without violence, all that blood told its own story. Her eyes were a curious, bright blue. She wanted to understand these people, but she couldn't.

The crawling man had, at this point, stopped crawling. Behind the man with the red hood, he'd picked up the discarded weapon, and he was moving forward, toward the Red Hood's back. Kara wasn't looking through the man in red, and she didn't immediately notice the movement. "Why?" she finally managed, remembering to speak the language the man in the red hood would understand.

Jason had no idea how the girl had made it behind him, but he knew that he didn't really need an explanation once she froze his feet to the ground with her breath. He could hardly believe it - not entirely because she was powered, because yeah, there were those people running around, not that he tended to cross paths with them all that often, but because she was stopping him in his tracks and not one of the two men who'd been about to assault her. Whatever language she was speaking didn't sound like anything he'd ever heard. Somebody from space, maybe? Another dimension? Could be anything. At least it filled in the blanks as to why she'd just let the guys walk right up to her with no clear indication that she even knew what they wanted to do to her.

Flushed with bloodlust, Jason wasn't particularly interested in having a long conversation just at that moment, nor at being stopped cold (ha ha). He couldn't see the man behind him, and his sharp, successive yanks at the ice only seemed to be slowly cracking the shell around his numbing feet. "Because they wanted to hurt you," he said. "I don't know what you are or where you're from, so I don't know how much this translates, but they were going to assault you in a very personal way, and probably kill you, to boot. You ought to thank me, not give me frostbite." She looked for all the world like an honest to goodness angel, blonde hair, blue eyes, and total clueless curiosity about the evils of man. Great. Just great. It would be just his luck that he’d try to help a girl with superpowers who seemed half-ready to drag him down to the station. Maybe, if he was lucky, she didn’t know what police were.

He was right about that; she didn't understand what the police were. In her mind, the men she'd seen wearing uniforms and badges had been just as violent as the ones who hadn't been, and she didn't truly grasp the difference yet. Krypton had boasted no law enforcement caste, and the council was their only ruling body. It was significantly different. But she listened when he spoke, concentrating on his words, even the strange ones that didn't make any real sense in the context he used them - what did a boot have to do with anything? why did he say the frost was biting him? "They had not done anything yet," she said, her voice heavily accented and entirely foreign. The accent didn't match the all-American looks, and the curiosity on her features overran the confusion. "Can you predict what they will do?" she asked. H'El could read her mind, and maybe he could too. She didn't have that gift, but maybe he did.

That curiosity kept her from noticing the crawling man's approach until it was almost too late. She saw him rise up behind the man in the ice, and she only wasted a second turning her red-hot gaze on the frosty prison she'd crafted around the Red Hood's ankles. It melted, and she was behind him without any visible movement. In front of him one moment - behind him the next. The knife - which the criminal had intended to jab into the man with the red hood's back - met with Kara's stomach and went absolutely nowhere. She looked down at the marred fabric of her hoodie, and she unthinkingly sent the man flying against the alley wall in a spike of anger. Why was everyone here so terrible? There was a sickening crack of head and shoulders against stone, but she didn't hear it. Her anger, badly controlled just then, augmented everything. It made it impossible for her to keep out all the voices, all of them - What do you mean, you lost the money? and How much for a dimebag? and Hey, baby, 20 dollars for a ride. She put her hands to her ears, trying to shut it out, and she screwed her eyes shut tight.

"I'm not a psychic, if that's what you're asking," Jason said, with growing exasperation. "But you don't have to be one to know what they had planned for you. You just have to know what men like that are like, hear just one of the things they were saying to you, and it falls into place pretty quick, Dorothy. You're nowhere near Kansas, and you clearly don't know what men like that want out of a girl like you. So trust someone who does know."

Suddenly the girl's attention shifted, and she turned laser beams from her eyes on Jason’s frozen feet. What a good day today was turning out to be, with laser eye-beam girls running around freezing him rock solid and then almost burning his feet off to get him free. The only person he'd ever seen pull a trick like that was the Kryptonian down in Metropolis, and nobody had bothered to warn him there might be someone else made in that mold running around, lucky man that he was.

She moved faster than he could actually follow with his eyes. One minute she was lasering the ice off his feet, and the next she'd jumped into the line of the knife, straight at her gut. "No!" Jason started forward reflexively, but the knife met her skin and went no further, and he hardly even had the time to skid his momentum to a stop before she tossed the man into the alley wall like a cardboard cutout. Jason stilled. He'd heard that sharp crack of bone, and he knew what it meant. Did the girl?

It didn't look like she knew anything at all. After all that show of power, she just stood there, hands clasped over her head like somebody was screaming in her ear. Jason was now very conscious of the fact that startling someone who could snap a full-grown man into a brick wall wasn't the best of ideas, so he hesitated a moment. Clearly, star girl could take care of herself, but she was also freaking out. After a moment's debate about how much he didn't want to get manslaughtered by a mentally disturbed teenager with super strength, Jason stepped toward her. He wiped his bloody knife clean on the fabric of his jeans, tucking it back into the sheath where it belonged. "Hey, girl. You maybe want to get out of here before the cops show up?" When she didn't respond, he reached a hand out for her shoulder. “Sooner rather than later, Pippi Longstocking.”

"My name is Kara," she said, when he called her Dorothy. She didn't know where Kansas was, but she suspected it was a location somewhere on earth, though the reference didn't make much sense to her. She didn't have a chance to ask what the men wanted with her, though the curiosity in her gaze said she wanted to ask very badly. But there wasn't time for it, not with the threat and the knife and the crack of bone. She didn't actually realize the man was dead; she would have been concerned had she noticed. She'd never had these powers before, never had this strength, and she'd only fought non-humans to this point - Kal, and Diana, and H'El, and Kon, and Banshee. No simple mortals that broke when she shoved them away unthinkingly. She turned to tell him that he should move, should flee before the man moved again. But his hand met with her shoulder before she said it, and she looked down at it, confused. She didn't expect anything resembling a comforting touch here. Her blue eyes went wide, then she looked up at his faceless red hood.

"I'm Kara," she repeated, not knowing who Pippi Longstockings was. But he was right about leaving, even if she didn't understand his concern with the police. She looked around, as if she was trying to decide where to go. She wasn't ready to return to Sanctuary, but she didn't think he wanted her to follow him either.

She took a step back, and she nodded toward the crumpled man. "He will awaken soon. You should go also," she told him. And she had no idea, just then, who to pity here, who not to. Who was the villain, and who was the victim? She wondered if everyone in this world was both, and she wondered, again, why her uncle would have sent Kal to such a violent place. She was not supposed to be here, she knew. But Kal had been sent intentionally. Why send him here, to such small and tiny beings with so much anger and violence? She didn't need a psychic bond with the man in front of her, not to know he carried anger. It was in his carriage and in his voice.

But a crowd was gathering, and someone was approaching the crumpled man and calling out in words she didn't understand, angry words. They should go.

Jason didn't need to be told to go twice. It was definitely time to clear the scene. GCPD would be there any second, most likely. That accent of hers wasn't from any country he could place, and he wondered, as he saw the crowd approach, if she even had a home to go to. One thing was abundantly clear - she didn't seem sure which way to turn. "Come on, sister," he said, positive that he was going to regret this...now, as soon as he'd done it. He could at least get her somewhere out of sight to lie low. He had the benefit of a mask. She didn't. Everyone in that crowd could now identify her as someone at the scene of a murder, or a paralyzing, if the too-still sap on the ground wasn't completely dead, and while they were more likely to pin it on him than on her, it was probably best if she didn't stick around to accidentally cripple the angry mob as they tried to take her down. Girl didn't seem like she needed any more trauma today.

Jason leapt up to the rusty old fire escape he'd jumped from a few minutes before, swung himself up. He wasn’t smooth and graceful like Grayson had been before him, making his way up and over mostly on strength and years of practice. Then he began to climb, fast as he could. If they were going to try to outrun the police the rooftops were safest, and his bike was nowhere close. Plus, he had a sneaking suspicion the girl, Kara, probably had super speed in that grab bag of powers too. Or flying or something. Who even knew, at this point.

The second he hit the roof Jason ran, sparing a glance behind to see if she was following. He wasn't all that quick at first, since his half-frozen, half-burned feet were tripping him up with pins and needles, but he gained speed quickly.

"We are not related," she clarified, though she didn't know why he would need that clarification. If she was in Sanctuary, she would have run checks, just to be sure. But she wasn't in Sanctuary, and she just scanned his physiology to be sure they shared no cellular similarity. No, he wasn't Kryptonian, even beneath that red hood. She would ask for further clarification later, since it seemed he was inviting her to follow him. She didn't really need to, not in the strictest sense of the word. She could get back to her fortress beneath the sea in minutes. She should go and check on Kandor and the dog. But she didn't do either of those things.

Instead, she watched him leap and jump, a little impressed by the effort it took with his center of gravity and the gravitational pull of the planet on his bones. It was a lot of work, and she wasn't sure she would do it, if she was in his shoes. Sheepishly, she had to admit to herself that wasn't true. Back home, she'd always ignored the preparation for the physical trials. She'd always put the science lessons first, and sparring and fighting had always fallen by the wayside. Those things had never interested her. She wouldn't have bothered climbing any metal fixtures, had their roles been reversed.

But she didn't have to worry about that. She sped to collect her discarded bag, and she was beside him a second later, hovering alongside him as he ran, not even breaking a sweat. "Where are we going?" she asked. If he gave her a location, something she could triangulate, she could help.

"Yeah, people say that to me a lot," Jason said, leaping forward and grabbing the ledge at the edge of the rooftop, using the momentum to throw himself across the gap to the next roof. He took the fall in a short roll, skidding across gravel and pushing back to his feet to keep moving. He looked over to the effortlessly floating girl beside him, and shook his head. "Some people just get born under a lucky star, don't they?"

She asked, and the answer was on the tip of Jason's tongue, but then he stopped. He had intended to let her lie low at the warehouse with the boys for a little while, but while she didn't seem the type to hurt a kid, she clearly didn't know her own strength in a big way. It might not be best to leave her alone with a bunch of well-meaning but unpredictable boys. One of them might startle her while she was asleep and get lasered to a crisp. "My place," he said, after a half-second pause. "It's private, and it's not easy to find. A safe enough place to wait until the heat dies down. Where are you from, space girl?"

She thought it seemed like much work to get from one place to the next. She almost reached for him, to assist, but she decided he wouldn't thank her for it, and she left him to it. She hovered in front of him the remainder of the way, as she waited for him to speak, and she tried to comprehend his humor. It was humor, wasn't it? It was hard to tell, without being able to see his face. But it was humor or madness, and while she couldn't promise he wasn't insane, she didn't think he was insane in that way.

When he hesitated, she stopped. "It is not warm," she managed, a reference to the heat dying down. It reminded her of something Siobhan might say, though, and that made the choice to accompany him. She didn't want to go beneath the ocean yet, not until her loneliness had dulled from a throb to something more like the memory of an ache.

She had met one human boy on this planet, and he smiled often and was shy when she entered a room. This boy- man-

She put her feet down on the edge of the roof in front of him, immediately there, with nowhere to go but down. He would need to skid or change course not to slam into her, and she didn't think he had the coordination to do it. But the impact wouldn't be anything to her; they wouldn't fall.

"Take your hood off," she said. "And give me your name."

If she was going to start giving him truths, then she needed some truth from him in return.

Jason did skid, and he did bump into her, unable to stop quite short enough. She didn't budge an inch, so he didn't know why he'd even been worried about it in the first place. He backed up a step, looking up at her with true chagrin in the cant of his head.

"You're giving the orders now?" Jason asked. "Look, I'm trying to help you out here. Something you should learn sooner rather than later is that I don't take orders all that well, and we don't have time to stand around and chat. As soon as those people back there tell the police they saw me, they'll come looking, and they'll come fast. They'll check the roofs, too. We don't have time to stall." When Jason was a kid, his teachers had complained he had a chip on his shoulder. When he was older, school psychiatrists indicated he had problems with authority. That much had never changed, and orders from anyone continued to sit badly with him unless that person commanded the utmost in respect.

He had a sneaking feeling, however, that mystery girl Kara was stubborn enough to float any which way he turned unless he satisfied her, and he hardly needed her turning on him at a moment like this. She might not need to worry about protecting herself from the police, but he needed to worry about protecting them from her. And he did need to worry about getting himself surrounded, since there was no reason for her to stick around, or fly off with him if a police chopper swept over and caught them in its sights. Jason reached up to the side of the helmet and flicked a small, hidden latch just inside. The two halves of the helmet came loose, and he pulled it off sharply, a move of smooth practice.

Brown hair, a cut over the bridge of his nose, and dark, tired eyes that tended to stare a little too long, and flickered with the intensity of swinging hard at everything for so long that nearly everything was a target to it. He obviously wasn't much older than her, a few years at most, but he carried himself with all the self-assured confidence and wear of someone much older. He gestured with the helmet, the two halves clattering loosely on their hinge. "They call me the Red Hood," he said, one ear cocked for the sound of sirens, still a ways off, or the low hum of a chopper on the approach. “Satisfied?”

She didn't contradict his statement that she was giving orders, because she was a little. "You tried to give orders first," she said simply. "Me giving them is not any different than you giving them. Whoever says the smarter thing should be listened to," she added, after a few aborted attempts at the words in her own tongue. She might have continued in that vein, but there were sounds overhead that she had already learned to associate with violence. She didn't understand that they were law enforcement; she only knew that weapons followed those sounds. Bullets didn't hurt her, and knives didn't either, but she knew the people of this planet did not care who else was around to be hurt, not when they had a target in sight. Mistakenly, she believed it was all about him. She had only pushed a man aside, hadn't she?

She wasn't surprised when he pulled the helmet off; she expected him to give in, though she didn't understand why she believed he would. But his face surprised her. He was young. Older than her, but only a little. Just a boy. She was a teenager, and she didn't think of herself as an adult yet. Being an adult meant finishing the trials, and she hadn't even begun them. She was just sixteen at her last memory of home. She didn't realize she was a little older here; the difference too subtle. "But that is not your name," she said, though she knew the sounds were nearing. They were coming close enough for him to hear now, those machines in the sky. "What is your House?"

Jason had no clue where Kara had gotten her logic about following the smarter person, but there was no time for arguments. As soon as he heard choppers, the helmet went back on, clicked into place. There was no reason for GCPD not to use lethal force in his case, after all, though who knew if they would. Without Gordon around, they'd become difficult to predict. He couldn't help but laugh, though, at the idea that he would have a 'House'. "Don't have a House, if you mean what I think you do. Not anymore, anyway." The sweep of the chopper came closer, the blades whirring louder than ever. The dark shape was in sight in the sky - it would be on them in just a few moments more. "That's a helicopter,” he said, brusquely, behind the mask again, pointing sharply to it. “They're not friendly. Let's talk about this when we're somewhere out of sight, huh?"

Jason slid past her, trusting she wouldn't stop him this time, and flipped over the edge of the ledge just as a spotlight swept across the roof. The beam of light missed him by about a half-second. He let go, and dropped down a story, grabbing the windowsill of an apartment a floor down with a grunt of pain. Not his most graceful move, but it got him out of easy sight of the choppers. The chopper was so close to the roof above that the roar of the blades was practically deafening, and the spotlight trembled and turned down into the alley. The edge of the roof above just barely kept Jason in shadow as the spotlight swept for figures, and then, after an excruciating moment of hanging on, it turned away, and the black shape above began to buzz on to the next rooftop.

Jason dropped the rest of the way, and cursed as he hit the ground, half-staggering. He started to run again. "Kara?" he tried, calling out without daring to raise his voice too loud. Judging by the wrenching pain through his shoulder he'd done something nasty to it by grabbing that sill as he fell, but there was no time to worry about it. His place was close, just another couple of blocks if they could make it.

She didn't question his logic when he spoke of the machine in the sky. Where she came from, vehicles didn't roll on black tar on the ground. They flew, but here only people with power could control things in the sky, and she didn't trust the people in power here.

She followed him, and then she moved ahead of him. "Your shoulder is dislocated," she said from just in front of him, as he said her name, her blue gaze seeing below the skin and into the muscle and bone that made him what he was. She reached out a hand to steady him, and then she reached out another hand and corrected the damage to his shoulder, one and two, and without thinking to ask for permission before she took the liberty of setting things to right. It would hurt, but she didn't have a true sense of pain any longer, at least not here. Despite Gotham's fog, the effect of the yellow sun lingered, and she hovered in front of him a moment later. "They will not harm you," she promised him of the things that pursued him. Perhaps, like with H'El, she was too trusting. And perhaps it was just a result of loneliness. But she would see him safely to where he was going.

She didn't understand, yet, that he feared her, or that he feared what she could do. That moment might come, but it had not come yet. She let her feet touch the ground, and she tipped her head, blonde hair and blue eyes and a completely harmless expression as she encouraged him to lead on. "Your name." It was a request, even if there was no inflection to indicate as much. If she had ever been told not to talk to strangers, the lesson obviously hadn't stuck with her. Neither had the one about not going to houses with strange boys that had blood on their hands.

The girl was unbelievably fast. Jason was starting to feel as if there was little point in calling out for her - invariably, she'd be right there beside him when he did. She seemed so completely calm about everything, even after her freakout in the alley - was it the confidence of having all the power in the world, or just a trait of gorgeous blondes from...where ever it was she was from?

Despite the fact that she kept pulling abilities of her ass out like a clown car, he wasn't expecting her to be able to diagnose and administer medical treatment, too. When she reached for him, there wasn't even time to pull back before his shoulder was dragged into place. He set his jaw, but didn't make a sound except for a soft hiss of breath. It was very painful, actually, so good of her to notice, but also hardly the first time he'd had a dislocated shoulder.

Something about having her step so far into his space and affect his body without asking, despite the fact that it was to help him, touched off something deep, and he pulled back a step once she was done, a blink-and-you'd-miss-it move. He collected himself after that moment of startled drawback, shook his arm out, and rolled the shoulder, staunchly refusing the acknowledge how much it hurt. It'd ache for a few days, but at least he wouldn't have to put it back himself. "Thanks," he said, cautiously. The chopper was moving away, but he could definitely hear one coming from the direction the first one had to give the are a second sweep. Time to move.

At least she was oddly complacent, for a hovering, fish-out-of-water super girl. Jason didn't know why she was so easy breezy about following his lead, but it was probably the same total calm from lack of fear that he'd suspected before. She didn't have much to be scared of from him, with powers like those.

He wondered if she even realized what she'd done to the man she'd thrown. Would it alter her calm if she didn’t know and found out, or was it too complete for that? Well, he'd keep it to himself for now, just in case. Jason started moving again, a little slower than before, listening for anyone on the approach. The intersecting network of alleys was cramped, trash-coated, and dead of activity. Many of these houses had been emptied out by the plague, and they were close enough to Crime Alley to begin with that many of them had been home to no one but squatters, junkies, and impromptu brothels. Any legitimate residents were definitely gone now that sickness had taken so many lives, and only some of the aforementioned laundry list of desperates remained. They knew better than to go outside when there was a police search on. Jason didn't even so much as see the top of a head peering through a basement window as they moved out of sight of the squad cars firing down the street at top speed, sirens blaring and red and blue lights at full blast. In a part of the city with no streetlights to puncture the gloom, the red and blue glow from the cars and the white spotlight above were some of the only visible lights in sight. All the copper had been ripped out of the streetlights to be sold for scrap, the residents of this most depressed part of town stealing light from themselves to put food in their mouths, under the weight of the deepening dark.

"Jason Todd," he said, with no expectation the name would mean anything to her. "And you never did tell me where you were from." He slowed to a stop around the back of a ramshackle, narrow old shop. The back door seemed barred shut with a metal splint, but Jason produced a square of metal from his pocket, ran it over the wall to the right of the door, and it clicked open, swinging toward them. The metal bar that looked as if it was cemented into the brick came away with no resistance, and Jason pushed the door wide enough to accommodate them both. "Shut it behind you," he said, and stepped into the cobwebbed shop front inside.

The windows of the shopfront were blurry with time and grime, and a few sad mannequins stood in front of it, cracked and half-dressed. Some peeling letters that might once have indicated who owned the place were so worn as to be unidentifiable. The half-empty racks scattered across the floor housed only the skeleton shapes of clothes-hangers, and a few moldering garments. The front door looked innocuous enough, which probably indicated that anyone who came in that way had a nasty surprise in store for them.

To the left of the door they'd entered through was an open doorway, and beyond it, a set of stairs that followed the building's side up into darkness. "Before you ask, I don't keep the mannequins for company," he said, beginning up the steps.

It would be overstating to say she could diagnose medical problems. She could see his physiology, see what worked beneath the skin, and she could see how it worked. She could tell his shoulder was wrong, and she could tell where it needed to be in order to be right. She could have, in truth, done as much damage as she fixed; she was not medically trained. She was a member of the Science Caste, her aptitude skills and her family heritage placing her there without question, but she hadn't begun her training yet. She was bright, some might even say gifted, but she was still a young girl. It was luck that his shoulder worked right after, but she didn't think to say as much, because she had no understanding of the damage she could have done.

His quick retreated was noted by bright blue eyes that saw everything. "I do not like being touched by strangers either," she said perceptibly. "When I first arrived here," she began, before deciding the story unnecessary. And so she followed his lead, her naivete more to blame than any faith in her own powers; she hadn't possessed them long enough to trust them.

The place he led her to was terrible.

Kara was born into one of the oldest, wealthiest, most prominent families on Krypton. Her parents had endless resources at their disposal. She had the best tutors, the best caretakers, and the best clothes. She'd slept on the softest bed, and she'd had only the best companions.

This place was foreign to her, and she landed her feet on the filthy sidewalk and stared as she followed him. She wasn't sure this was life; this was worse than Kal's Metropolis.

She did not think he meant what he said about the mannequins literally, but she didn't have much time to think about it. She was too busy looking over her shoulder, at the terrible things they'd left behind. "It is horrible." She looked back at him in confusion. "Why do you remain here, Jason Todd?" she asked, following him up the steps.

"Thanks," Jason said. "What a glowing compliment. I do what I can. What, in this building? It's out of the way, it looks empty, and it looks picked over already, so people with an eye for something to steal pass it over. It also doesn't look like a very good place to crash, so they don't try it. It's safe. It's not a place people would think to look for me."

Jason swept the small metal card from his pocket, and the door at the top of the stairs clicked open. He stepped inside and onto a floor with only one real wall to separate out different rooms, cutting off their side from the other half of the building. There was at least some equipment, bought with money stolen from kingpins and street thugs alike.There was a computer setup with equipment for tracking and tapping, a weapons case on the wall, tightly locked. There was a steel case next to it that looked just the right size to fit a uniform. There was a kitchen in one corner, with a real stove that looked like it had been in the building since it was built and a small sink and refrigerator. Once upon a time someone had lived above the shop, and the architecture of the small apartment remained.

The floor was bare wood, but it was clean, devoid of the dust downstairs. It was spare, yes, and not exactly cozy, but it was comfortable, a far cry from the dilapidation on the first floor, and miles from the trash and sewage in the alleys outside. The windows along the front and sides were covered in steel light blocking shutters for the night to seal out the light, curtains drawn in front of them to hide their presence. Overhead, exposed, rusty girders marked out the line of the ceiling, and a ladder led up to a hatch that led to the roof access.

Jason clicked the helmet loose again, and pulled it off. Light in the place was provided by a generator humming quietly away in the back. This place was very much off the grid. For water he'd tapped into the main line himself, which hadn't been all that difficult, considering that half the houses on this side of the city still got at least a little running water from the aged system. He pushed open a door with a glazed glass panel that had once led into an office, sometime before this floor had been turned into a makeshift apartment, and a long time before the owners had skipped town or been killed or whatever had happened to them. Now it was a bedroom, the bed low to the ground and set in a plywood box, a salvaged couch against the back wall that could be pulled out and slept on as well. It was spartan, no doubt, but it was home.

"If you're asking why I stay in the neighborhood? Well, I was born here, to start. It may be a shithole, but I know it better than any other part of the city. Makes sense to set your base on familiar ground." He tossed the helmet onto the bed and walked over to a half-open door in the corner. It lead into a tiny tiled bathroom, the tiles long since yellowed and chipping. He stripped off his bloody gloves, turned on the water, and tossed them in the sink, grabbing a handful of water to dash over his face and run over the back of his neck. "Shithole that it is, it's hard to find anyone, even when you're combing for them." The choppers could still be heard outside, distantly, but they were fading with each passing minute. "And this is where I'm needed." No more really had to be said about that.

He turned back toward her. Under the bright lights, it was easier to see the faint impressions of sleeplessness under his eyes, the bruise under the cut on his nose, the deep shadows under his brow. He gestured to the couch. "Go on and sit down and tell me the rest of the story you started a little while ago. About when you first got here. And why don't you tell me where you got here from, considering I’ve asked you twice now and let you into my secret lair?" He was ultimately pretty unconcerned about having her there. She seemed confused by violence or malevolence even as concepts. Unless she was a great fake and here for some nefarious purpose, she wasn't a threat unless she lost control of those powers of hers. And frankly, he had a hard time believing somebody would go to all the trouble of sending a superpowered spy to hunt him down.

"I meant everything is horrible," Kara clarified. She didn't realize he would take it poorly, because who could love a place such as this? This was the type of place that her planet had eradicated years before she was even born. Not this living space, but this kind of city, where violence outnumbered anything good. Why was it permitted to persist? She didn't understand. And why, if Kal felt he needed to help the people of this archaic planet, did he not come here, where things were at their worst?

She wandered around the space, ignoring the terms in his speech that she did not understand, and focusing on the tone instead. He was angry, that much was clear. His voice reminded her of H'El, of how H'El had sounded when he spoke of Argo, of Krypton, of his own fate and scars. As she moved, she touched things that did not respond. "Does the place have a name?" she asked him curiously. How could she ask the lights to brighten, or the temperature to cool without knowing what to call it? "Brighten lights," she tried, aloud and looking at the ceiling, but nothing happened. When that failed, she looked around for a console, something that she could touch and activate. Even the simplest and poorest castes had computers in their homes, built into their entertainment devices. But she saw no entertainment devices here.

She stopped in the doorway to the bedroom, where she looked at the sad excuse for a bed. She was glad, for the first time since arriving on this planet, that she didn't require sleep. Well, not if she wasn't far beneath the ocean, where the sun couldn't touch her. The bed looked uncomfortable, and hardly like a place to sleep at all. But she didn't think he would feel reassured by the fact that she didn't require sleep. She had seen his wariness on the rooftop, and she knew that he did not trust her. Even without understanding she had killed a man, she knew that.

She sat down on the couch without argument, and she clutched her bag to her chest. "I came from the ocean on the other side of your continent." That wasn't a lie, and it was the most he would get from her then. She feigned a yawn. She suspected he had a soft side, or she wouldn't be there, and she suspected feigning exhaustion would staunch his questions.

Jason's brow raised, and he gave a half-shrug. Everything was horrible? "Oh," he acknowledged. "Well, I can't really help you there. If you mean this house...no, it doesn't have a name. It's just a safehouse, same as any other." He watched her touching for things that weren't there, looking for functionality in the objects in the room that clearly didn't meet her expectations.

When she asked the lights to brighten and seemed frustrated with their lack, Jason walked over to the wall and flicked a switch on the cord that trailed down from the industrial lights that hung from the ceiling. They brightened considerably. "Word to the wise - most stuff doesn't work by voice command," he said. In that moment, as he continued to speak, he had a flash of confusion as to why he was even doing this. Had he really just taken on responsibility for a transplant crazy lady who could crush his head between her thighs like an egg? No reason to question why his mind had gone to the thighs first. "Look for a button. Or a switch on the wall."

"The ocean." Jason didn't believe that. It was plain on his face that he didn't. But, at the same time, what could he say that would prove her wrong? She obviously wasn't from anywhere local. She yawned, though, and he sighed. "But I'll let you get away with it for now." He wasn't sure he believed that chicks with super strength got easily worn out, either, but who was he to judge? Research. That was what he was going to do next, once she was asleep. And call a few people.

Jason stood up from the bed. "You can sleep here," he said, gesturing to it. It wasn't made, but the sheets and blankets looked clean. "Or there." He gestured to the door to the front room. "There's food in the cabinets and in the refrigerator. ...I'm going to guess you don't know what that is because you thought I had the Clapper and you think this rat hole should have a name.” He paused, and began explaining with all the condescending patience of a fourth-grade teacher. “The refrigerator keeps food cold, and it's the white machine with the big door. Don't touch any of the other machines in there. Especially the one with the dials next to the fridge. You're not burning this place down. It may be a rat hole, but it's my fucking rat hole."

He settled his hands into his pockets. "You can stay here for the time being, until I figure out what else to do with you. I don't know if you can go back to your house in the ocean or not, but if you're going to hang around here, you should stay out of sight. Those people saw your face, ocean-girl, and they can identify you in a court of law." He ran over that sentence and wondered if she even knew what a court was. How different was this sea-place she was from, the place she was from really? He was getting a headache. There was still work to do tonight. He had a clown to track down, and boys to bring food to. "Do me a favor and just ask if I say something you've never heard of, okay?"

It reminded her of her very brief stay with Siobhan; her entertainment panel hadn't worked when Kara had touched it either. She wondered if everything here was so archaic, and she was starting to understand that it was. It made sense, didn't it, for a world so caught up in violence? If all their time was spent on weapons and injuring each other, then there wasn't time for scientific advancement. They were left with rudimentary lighting and places filled with bacteria and dirt. It was a wonder no one was sick here, and she didn't put much faith in the thing he called a refrigerator. She felt no hunger, but there were scientifically created rations at home, all replicated to be the perfect balance of nutrition and flavor. She was sure whatever she would find in his "white box" would be questionable at best.

She looked at the places he indicated for sleeping, and she was pleased she wouldn't need to actually sleep there. But the lack of a physical need for sleep hadn't removed her desire to curl up with a blanket somewhere safe and soft; this wasn't that place. She just nodded, understanding that he wanted her to remain unseen. She'd been in a big city once, though she didn't remember the name, and the men with the weapons and the flashing lights had chased her and chased her there. She knew what he meant, even if the concept was a new one. "They will seek me out with their weapons," she said knowingly. It didn't make her like this place any more than before, and she reached out with her thoughts and tried to reach Kal again. But there was nothing.

She nodded, when he asked her to ask if she didn't understand anything. She'd been doing that, but maybe he didn't realize it. She sat down on the edge of the unmade bed he'd motioned to, her bag clutched to her middle, as if she was afraid to lose whatever precious thing was inside; she was. She let herself fall back a moment later, and she screwed her eyes shut, not wanting to see the filth on the roof above her head. She could, she thought, clean once he left. He would leave, wouldn't he? Decision made, she curled onto her side and let her breathing even. She wouldn't sleep, but she could let her mind wander. She could almost feel like she was home, then, if she focused hard enough.

"Good sleep, Jason from the House of Todd," she said, forgetting his lesson from earlier and adding a verbal, "lights off," a moment later.

Jason walked over to the wall and hit the button again. With the shutters on, turning off the lights plunged the place into darkness. He walked to the door, across the floorboards that creaked, and almost told her he wasn't going to bed. But that seemed wrong somehow, and he stood in the doorway for a moment, hanging there, uncertain. "Good sleep to you too," he settled on, finally. Oh, Selina would love this. Now he had a warehouse full of boys and a superpowered future girl to be responsible for. Where was a self-respecting vigilante supposed to find the time to kill anybody these days?