Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-09-05 08:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, door: dc comics, huntress, supergirl |
Who: Kara, Bruce, and a mostly unconscious Helena
What: DaddyBats swoops in to see his little girl.
Where: Sanctuary.
When: After Kara gets in touch.
Warnings/Rating: None.
As promised, Kara was at the entrance to Sanctuary in five minutes.
In the hallway of Passages, the door changed to a sleek, unbroken white, and the sound of water filled the corridor. It was dark, the lights in the hall muted and the space beyond the smooth surface of the door surrounded by dark and cold sunstones in slumber. There was no space for a key, no lock, and the air was cold enough to chill the bones and make even the most well-dressed person uncomfortable. All around, the echo of water threatened, and the walls and ceilings and floor seemed to buckle with the pressure of it.
The door, when it snicked open, barely showed a seam, and the space inside was austere and unbroken white. There was nothing there, save the white floor, the white ceiling and the white walls in an empty octagon. There was only one path that was visible beyond the octagon, and that was more unbroken white, though it seemed likely that the other seven walls led places that simply couldn't be accessed.
In all that quiet, stood Kara, her jeans and bright pink hoodie spattered with copious amounts of blood, and the ends of her hair clumped and sticky with it. There wasn't any blood anywhere else, save at her feet, where she was leaving sneaker-prints on the white floor. She wrung her hands, looking every bit the fifteen-year-old she'd been only months earlier, her bright blue eyes clouded with fear and things past her years. Whatever her powers beneath the yellow sun, the truth was that she was just a scared girl, and she didn't have any powers at all in this place.
"Human male," Sanctuary said in English, sounding every bit the parental butler with his Kryptonian accent that bordered on sounding British. "Adjusting temperature."
"I told you to speak Kryptonian," Kara corrected half-heartedly.
"I am sorry, Kara," Sanctuary replied. It did not sound sorry.
Kara turned her attention to the man at the door, and her voice was a shaky thing, cry-hoarse and small. "She is in the medical lab. The machines are gone now, and the barrier is down. I did not think you would want to see that. She is not bleeding, and she is stable. She will be woken up for you, when you are ready," she said, wanting to prepare him for what he would see. She knew her own technology was nothing like what they had in Gotham. And, while everything had been cleared away, she suspected he might find it strange to see a sleeping girl on a white slab, with nothing around her at all. "You can take her home once she is awake." She looked down at the hands she was wringing. "I did not think she should see me after she failed. I did not think it would make her calm."
It might have been Luke who stood in the hallway waiting for entry to Sanctuary, but only in body. He didn’t fight Bruce, not on this, and he stepped back to give him control without protest. The silence was deafening, a roar within the hollow confines of his mind. Cut her throat echoed over and over, repetition, and each time it felt like a knife was being twisted deeper and deeper into his chest. When she’d been in the hospital and the doctors had asked about depression and suicidal thoughts, Bruce had known it was bad. He’d sat by her bed, listened to her ramble nonsensically, and he knew it was bad. But this… this was worse. She could have died and he would have had another Wayne to bury beside his parents, the curse of a family whose lives ended sooner than they should.
She could still die, and that terrified him in a way nothing had since the plague, since he had watched his family sicken around him, since he’d nearly lost Selina in the process.
As soon as the door opened to reveal all that white, he stepped through. And then he was entirely Bruce, taller and broader than Luke, ashen-white pallor accentuated by the black he wore. Black silk shirt, black pants. He stood out in the midst of a definite lack of color, and his stride was slow, weary, like he carried a great weight upon his shoulders as he walked. The blood caught his eye first; Helena’s blood. Bruce had seen death, he’d seen murder and watched as life drained out before his very eyes, but he closed his eyes briefly at the sight of Kara’s bloodstained clothes, only a second or to needed to compose himself.
He said nothing in greeting. Even the sound of a disembodied voice, strings of familiarity that reminded him of Alfred, was barely reacted to. Bruce listened as Kara spoke, and on the surface he heard what she said in a cool, logical way. “I’ll take her home once she’s able to be moved,” he said, and while his voice was oddly flat it didn’t take much to surmise that he was intentionally keeping it that way. “Thank you,” he added, because without her it was almost certain that Helena would have bled to death. “You saved her life.”
Kara just nodded. She didn't say anything else, because she didn't want to waste time arguing about saving Helena's life. She hadn't, really. Helena had still cut her own throat, even with her standing there. She hadn't stopped anything. Even her attempts at stalling, at giving Helena something to work at and live for had failed, and she could still see Eddie's and Stephanie's angry words jumping off the holopage at her. If she had done something differently, maybe it wouldn't have come to this. Stephanie had told her to stop meddling; she should have listened.
"She is down the hall. You can stay as long as you need to," Kara explained. "I am going to clean up," she added, motioning down to her clothing.
"Please wake the patient in the medical lab once our guest enters," she instructed Sanctuary in Kryptonian. "Refrain from additional conversation," she added, in case Sanctuary decided to act parental, as it often did. "No offensive action whatsoever," she added belatedly.
Sanctuary agreed, and Kara motioned down the hall, where lights along the wall lit up in a muted, holographic blue, leading the way to the medical unit where Helena was waiting to be awakened.
"I am sorry," Kara added, before turning and disappearing into a corridor that snicked open for her, and then closed immediately after.
Bruce was sorry too, though he didn’t say as much. He simply nodded when she excused herself to clean the blood, and he watched her disappear into the whiteness that surrounded him. Too much white; he didn’t like it. Shadows and black were familiar, but this bright clarity was too revealing. Perhaps that was why he favored the darkness. In darkness, one could hide. Here, there was nowhere to hide, and he followed the blue-lit hallway down to the medical lab. He knew better than to expect the machines and IVs and tubes a normal hospital would have utilized, even without a full understanding of Kryptonian technology. Whatever was housed here would be far beyond even the most cutting edge WayneTech innovations.
To see her laid out on a table with nothing, however, was disconcerting. For a brief, agonizing second she looked to him as though she might be dead, and it felt like someone had reached into his chest and squeezed his heart tighter, tighter, making it difficult to breathe as he approached. Upon closer inspection the pressure eased and he let out a sharp, uneven breath, because she was breathing. Bruce could see that much. She was breathing, and she was alive, even if she was unconscious. At that moment it didn’t matter that he wasn’t her true father or that the blood which connected them wasn’t quite right; she was his daughter, and what he felt as he looked down upon her could only be love.
“Oh, Helena.” His voice was hushed, and he reached out ever so carefully to brush his fingers through her hair, the touch feather-light and barely there.
As ordered, the medical pod attempted to wake Helena up. A long, thin silvery tendril wound out of the top of the bed, a soft white light making the end glow as it touched her temple. It had not be ordered to keep her awake, and doing so would have been counter to medical protocol. Instead it delivered a mild pulse to provoke a hypnagogic myoclonic twitch, that jerk that roused people that were on the very brink of sleep into startling awake.
It worked and for a brief moment, Helena's eyes flashed open. She saw but did not see, the image of Bruce freed from connotation, from any connection in her chilled brain. She did not look confused, nor upset, nor like she recognized him at all and there was no urge to find out more, to look deeper, to investigate as her eyes rolled shut again and the probe receded back into the bed.
But the fingers in her hair, those she felt like the trickle of water down steps. It didn't feel like the snap of bat wings in her face but like the first quizzical twitch of cat whiskers, only in her scalp. Pleasant. It felt pleasant. She might have smiled, if she hadn't already been falling into the rosy hued, steel gray clouds occupying her mental landscape. And really, there was no better thing to do but fall and fall and fall into rainbowed puffs of half frozen water that meant nothing and couldn't hurt her.
It was more than he should hope for, he knew, for Helena to awaken and be cognitive enough to speak to him. Yet Bruce watched with his breath caught somewhere in his chest as her eyes opened, leaning further forward to make sure he was within her line of sight. “Helena?” Her name escaped his lips too soon, as he realized a second later that the lack of recognition and awareness in her gaze meant she likely hadn’t registered his presence at all. That was confirmed a moment later when her eyes closed again, and he finally exhaled in a long, heavy sigh. Maybe it was for the best that she continued to linger in unconsciousness, at least for now. She needed the rest and she needed to heal.
And he would wait, for however long he needed to, until he could bring her home and attempt to fix what was broken inside her. He had no idea where to begin, no idea what to do, but he couldn’t allow this to happen again. Next time, she might actually succeed and that was a possibility he could not even begin to fathom. Despite having no idea whether or not she could feel anything at all Bruce continued to stroke her hair, the touch as much for him as it was for her, quietly reassuring.