Who: Thomas, Max, and Audrey What: Audrey finds out that Thomas is the Bat, and things do not go well. Where: The hospital When: As Amanda is checked out. Warnings: None.
Audrey went to the hospital first thing the morning after the blackout. She’d slept for a few hours during the blackout, enough to get her functional with the help of a quick coffee run on her way there. She had some questions for Max, hopefully while Thomas was out, but hell, if he was around she was pretty sure he could answer them just as well as Max could. No one had been answering her on a damn thing lately. The closest she’d come was Luke, who had danced around the subject at the request of Max, and she was sick of feeling out of the loop, particularly if everybody’s lives were going to be in danger. The blackout hadn’t helped that feeling.
The nurses in the NICU recognized Audrey from the sheer amount of time she’d spent there a few days previous, and she had no issues making her way up to Max’s room, shoulders squared, determined to make sure everybody was alive and then grill them until she got some answers. When she arrived at the door to the room, she knocked lightly on the frame before walking in. “Hey.”
Max was in the hospital with the nurse, staring down at the baby, who had just had her oxygen tube removed for good. Thomas was filling out the hospital paperwork, which meant (she suspected) paying for things, and Max was listening to the nurse rattle off a million things that made her panic the longer she stood there. She’d been for her run already this morning, and she’d showered in the hospital room bathroom, her hair still damp from the water and the end of one strand in her mouth as she worried. She had a carrier, thankfully, and the nurse seemed inclined to put the baby in it for her, but that did little to allay the fear that once they got home there would be no nurse to do this shit for her, and the baby could break. It was a stupid fear, but it was there nonetheless, and she was glad to hear the knock.
Max turned, just as Audrey spoke, and the nurse removed the security device on the baby’s ankle and told Max goodbye, leaving her and Audrey alone with the (thankfully) sleeping Amanda. “Hey. Deal with the outage okay?” she asked. She knew Audrey had spoken to Thomas, so she knew the answer to that, but she asked anyway. She wasn’t doing very well with communication and people the last few days, and she was noticeably nervous.
Audrey nodded, eyes fixed on Amanda. "Yeah, it was fine. I went to Aubade because I thought you guys might be there and I got stuck, but getting stuck in Aubade is kind of like getting trapped in shangri-la. She looks a lot better." She stepped closer to Max, turning her head to get a good look at Amanda in the carrier, and smiling a little involuntarily.
Thomas, at the formica round table behind the bed, looked up from his stack of forms and blinking cell phone to catch Audrey’s soft little smile, and he met it with a proud one of his own. He turned his head to indicate a bluetooth earpiece and gestured to the phone to show he was on a call.
“Yeah,” Max said to the comment about the baby looking better, and she sat down beside the carrier on the bed and rocked it a little uncertainly, while they waited for the final bill and release papers. She was waiting for Audrey to notice Thomas’ vision, so she stayed quiet just then, expecting a reaction and figuring she might as well stay quiet for it.
It wasn't until Audrey saw Thomas move out of the corner of her eye that she turned to see what he was doing, and when his eyes focused on her she stopped dead. Then he was back on a call like nothing had happened, and as much as she wanted to ask, she didn't want to bother him. "...can he see?" she asked Max, surprise mingling with something like alarm, not because it was a negative thing, of course, but just because it made no sense.
Max merely nodded, an entertained smile touching her eyes and the corners of her mouth. “Not that he told me about it first,” she said, glancing over at Thomas and his bluetooth. “So, you ready for babysitting duty?” she asked Audrey, unaware that her sister wanted to discuss anything serious.
Audrey shook herself, trying to focus. Alright, there was a baby and Thomas could see, but she still needed to talk to them both. She edged the door to the room shut. "Yeah, of course. Look, Max, I need to talk to you about something. Do you remember what you said to me before they kicked me out of the delivery room?"
Max didn’t, and she was immediately worried she’d made some stupid, scared confession about something - her feelings for Thomas, something about the masks, something she shouldn’t have said. It was something in Audrey’s demeanor, in the way she closed the door, and she glanced over at Thomas once before looking back at Audrey. “I probably told you to kill Brandon for me,” she teased.
Audrey didn't take the bait. "You told me not to leave on my own." She let that sink in for a moment, glancing over to Thomas without thinking. "Then I came out into the waiting room and everybody was talking about somebody named Mockingbird, and not being out on the street, and getting threatened, and I walked up and it was like the teacher walked into the bathroom where everybody was smoking. Luke wouldn't tell me what was going on. He said you wouldn't want me to know." Her hands went into her pockets, lips pressed together. "If something is going on where people are getting threatened and I'm not safe, I want to know what it is. Luke wouldn't even let me walk down to the fucking lobby by myself."
Thomas looked up from his paperwork, straight at Max, and then he put his hand to his ear and told whoever it was on the other end of the line that he would call back. He pulled the earpiece out and put it down on the table, leaning forward over the papers to press his fingers together. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at Max with a faintly arch expression that said, ‘Well? What now?’
Max gave Thomas a look that was all that’s it?, and she really hoped this wasn’t his fucking parenting style. She stalled, tucking the blanket around the baby’s kicking feet, and then she finally sighed and looked at Audrey. “No one’s threatened you. I was just worrying. If anyone does, I promise I’ll let you know, Aud. I was drugged the fuck up; you know that. As for Mockingbird, she’s blackmailing people.” That wasn’t a lie, not exactly.
Thomas got up to join them at the bedside and he nudged Max’s elbow. “Don’t swear.”
Audrey listened as Max spoke, her expression just growing harder as she went on. "Then why did Luke say that I might be in danger?" She found it difficult to believe that someone like Luke, who seemed like he had a level head on his shoulders, would lie or worry her unnecessarily. Her arms crossed without her thinking about it. When Thomas spoke, she turned, hoping he'd be more forthcoming - but all he had to say was a rebuke for Max, and the expression of surprise and disappointment that crossed her face was fleeting, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "He said I wasn't...'involved' the way you guys are." She very nearly pulled that out without making it sound like part of this was anger at being the only one out of the loop, but she didn't quite manage it. She was so tired of being outside the inner circle, and the things everyone around her did just reinforced that she wasn’t in on the big secret.
Max just glanced over at Thomas and glared when he chastised her, and then she was looking back at Audrey and listening to that anger, seeing that familiar disappointment in her sister’s eyes when she looked at Thomas. Audrey might not trust her to tell the truth, but she trusted Thomas to. Max stood, wrapping her arms around herself tightly and busying herself with packing away the few items in the bedside drawer. “Luke might not have been sure who was threatened, Audrey,” she said, trying to keep from lying as much as she could. “He might have taken what I said to mean you’d been threatened. No one threatened anyone because of me. If you’re not involved, well, I’m not involved either, not when it comes to this. Thomas is being blackmailed, but they threatened the baby, not me or you.” It was, Max hoped, enough honesty to take that kicked-puppy look off Audrey’s face.
Thomas looked upon Max’s relationship with her sister as something entirely within her own purview, and he wasn’t comfortable informing Audrey of things without Max’s input. He was still surprised, however, that Max wasn’t more open with her sister, but Thomas had never had siblings, so maybe he misjudged the situation. He was immune to Max’s glare, and he kept his thoughts to himself behind the alert gaze, though he watched Audrey’s face.
“And this doesn’t have anything to do with Thomas disappearing for days and going blind, or what I heard you guys saying about ‘being out on the streets’?” Audrey wasn’t an idiot, and she could tell that Max wasn’t giving her the whole story. She could also tell that there was probably some honesty in what she was saying - that they were being blackmailed. What she really wanted to know was whatever black ops thing they were getting blackmailed about, whatever thing they were all involved in that meant Thomas got kidnapped and people had to be pulled off the streets. If she didn’t trust them not to get involved in something dirty, she’d think it was the mob. Considering her sister’s background, she was pretty sure it was military, and military operations that everyone, including an 18 year old kid, was included in but her set her teeth on edge.
Despite Thomas’ opinion that it was Max’s place to tell Audrey whatever she chose to tell Audrey, Max didn’t entirely see it that way. At the end of the day, when all was said and done, Max wasn’t a mask. She wasn’t lying when she said she wasn’t involved the way Thomas and Luke were. She wasn’t even like Oracle or Ratchet - she didn’t actually do any vigilante work, and it wasn’t her fucking place to say anything about anyone’s secret identity. When all was said and done, she just wrote a paper - not even a very good one - for Creations. And, sure, there was the fact that she knew about her sister’s need to fucking prove herself. Anyone who grew up in the Main household had a fair dose of that sitting on their shoulders; getting involved with the masks would only make Audrey feel that even more strongly, and Max was reminded of Audrey swinging a baseball bat at armed carjackers. Max wanted someone in this damn family to be safe.
The baby started crying, and Max didn’t know what was worse - having to get Amanda out of that carrier, without ever having done it before, or finding something believable to tell Audrey just then. “It has everything to do with that,” Max finally said, because fuck if she could think of anything else with Amanda crying.
As his recent mistakes were listed out in such bald terms, Thomas shifted uncomfortably, and his expression settled into that stony Ramses-like sobriety that he used when he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. Amid Amanda’s red-fisted screaming, he sat down on the bed next to the carrier and gave Max a final look to see if she was going to connect the dots for Audrey. It didn’t look like she was going to. Ordinarily he would have said secrecy was the principal factor here, but Audrey’s safety was also at risk, and she didn’t even know what she needed to be guarded from. Thomas privately thought it was only a matter of time before she figured it out anyway. He held out a strip of newspaper that he’d taken out of his briefcase on the table.
Audrey was surprised when Max almost answered her question honestly, but Amanda's screaming took precedence. She edged toward the baby, unsure of whether she should try to help or let Max take care of it. Then Thomas was handing her a strip of newspaper, which she took with surprise (where had he even gotten it from?) and skimmed over.
It was an editorial piece about the Bat, and it took reading it twice before something clicked in Audrey's brain. If the date on the article was right, then the length and timing of the disappearance of the Bat matched up nearly perfectly with...
Audrey stared at Thomas. And then she stared some more. "No."
Thomas didn’t meet Audrey’s stare exactly. He was too busy distracting the baby with long fingers and then, with a curious, concerned glance at a faintly panicked Max, he was undoing the little belts and blankets and lifting Amanda. The screams turned into hiccuped, gasping wails interspersed with bits of total silence. He looked up at Audrey then, and he certainly didn’t look like the kind of nut that would dress up and beat people in the middle of the night. Then again, he had handled Audrey’s carjackers very well. He didn’t say anything.
Audrey looked between him and Max. She didn’t know what to say. The Bat - well, Batman in Musings, she’d written a comic about him (and somewhere, vaguely, she felt a drop of dread, because she’d recently polished that one off and sent it to a publisher for review). She’d thought he was amazing, a real live superhero, but Thomas? It would explain a lot, yeah. And did she think Thomas was a good enough man for it? Absolutely. But making the the thought that a man who fought crime dressed as a bat could be someone she knew sensible was not an easy feat, and she stared blankly for another moment. “So...what you’re trying to tell me is. You’re the Bat.”
Audrey stared at Max, and then said, maybe a little shrilly, “Then who are you!?”
Max watched Thomas with the baby, finding the time to wonder how the hell managed to do that without freaking out like she did whenever she even thought of it, and then Audrey’s voice was going shrill and loud, and Max was looking back at her sister. “I’m not a mask,” she told her truthfully, and she hoped to God it kept Audrey from getting it in her head to go be one. “I wasn’t fucking lying about not being involved like Thomas is,” she said, arms crossed tighter. She had wanted to avoid this at any cost, and now that she was in the thick of it, it still seemed like a supremely stupid thing to have done. Not because she didn’t trust Audrey, no, but because she knew how her sister wanted to impress the man in the room.
Oblivious to these strange sibling dynamics, Thomas shifted back and forth in a barely perceptible rocking movement that didn’t appear to have any immediate effect. He kept doing it, however, watching Amanda’s contorted little face with controlled amusement rather than real worry. He looked up at Max, and shifting the baby, lifted an arm to take her elbow and pull her down on the bed beside him. He knew that defensive look and he didn’t think it was going to do anyone any good if she started snapping at people like a wounded lion. “You should hold her so if she starts crying again it’s your fault,” he said quietly, deliberately taking his voice an octave down from Audrey’s. He looked at the younger sister then and gave her a slight shrug that was more apologetic than anything.
Audrey felt like she was having a meltdown. Thomas was a vigilante. Max was his sidekick, or his backup, or something, and now Thomas was treating this revelation like he'd informed Audrey what would be served for dinner and stroking the baby. "Right," Audrey said, looking a little like she might be going into shock, eyes gone wide, posture rigid. She stared at them for another second, mouth open like she had something else to say, and she stopped. She took a breath, and tried not to act like a complete girl. She pursed her lips. "And Mockingbird is blackmailing you...because you're Batman," she said, just to clarify.
Max, who had given in when Thomas pulled her down on the bed, hadn’t taken the baby because she had no idea how to take her. How to hand her off, sure, she’d done that plenty, but not the other way around, not without a nurse handing her over. She had, however, uncrossed her arms and risked a touch to one kicking little foot, while Audrey began talking. As soon as Audrey said Batman, however, Max’s gaze flew to the door and back at her sister, and she had to fight to keep from lecturing her about keeping quiet. “She’s blackmailing a lot of fucking people,” was all she said.
Thomas nodded an affirmative at Audrey and then he gave Max a look when she said ‘fucking’ again. She could at least make an effort. When he noticed that Audrey was still standing with her knees locked, he said, “You should sit down before you pass out.” The worst thing was that he was completely serious about the observation and not facetious in the least. The baby kept punctuating intervening comments with little demanding yells of inarticulate frustration, and Thomas finally shifted her halfway upright so she could see Max properly before the wailing halted. “Mm,” he said, with some satisfaction, like he’d figured out a puzzle.
Audrey followed Max's look, but the door was still closed, so she didn't know what Max was worried about. "Other rich people, or other vigilantes?" she asked, because really, either one made sense.
Audrey's gaze snapped up to Thomas and a blush colored her pale cheeks. "I'm fine," she insisted, but she did sit down in the chair against the wall, mostly so Thomas wouldn't worry that she was going to swoon or something.
Max didn’t answer Audrey’s question, because this was Thomas’ show, and the less Audrey knew, in Max’s opinion, the better. She glanced over at Thomas, quirking a brow and expecting him to answer, and she touching a waving, tiny fist as she did it, the movement not awkward, simply because she wasn’t thinking about it. She did glance back to make sure Audrey was sitting and not in danger of keeling over.
“Other vigilantes. All of them, in fact. There has been a spate of coincidental accidents after the round of threats recently,” Thomas said.
Audrey was not going to keel over. She was sitting ramrod straight in her chair, actually. "So you know all the other vigilantes," she said, processing that too. "God. Okay. I haven't had a coincidental accident - does that mean I'm in the clear?"
“No, we don’t know who everyone is,” Max said, because now Audrey was going to start wondering if everyone they talked to was a vigilante, and that just put everyone else’s secrets out there. Plus, it wasn’t a lie. She had no fucking clue who Arrow, or Rorschach, or Starfire were out of their masks. “And that’s the point,” she clarified. “Not to know who everyone is, to avoid shit like this happening. And you haven’t had a coincidental accident because I’m not a fucking mask, and no one threatened you.” And okay, maybe she sounded like a wounded lion, a fact Amanda didn’t seem to care for, since the crying started again and got louder the higher Max’s voice went.
Thomas actually hushed Max with the back of his tongue, nudging her elbow again. “Sh.” Dismayed, since he’d just managed to get the girl quiet again, Thomas looked back up at Audrey. “The focus seems to be on those of us on the streets. So no, not you, unless you know someone you aren’t telling us about.” A serious eye quirked.
Both Audrey's brows shot up. "If I had known someone who was involved in this, I wouldn't be so fucking surprised, I think." Audrey was unaware of the no swearing around the baby rule, and therefore unaffected by it. She was making connections quickly, now. She'd seen reports of the Bat running around with a younger superhero, Robin, and that answered her question of how Luke was involved pretty neatly. "Do you guys have anything on Mockingbird?" And three steps ahead, the question was 'So now what can I do to help?', and it hovered there behind her eyes.
Max was on her feet halfway through Audrey’s question about Mockingbird. “NO,” was all she said, and it was pretty fucking obvious that it was in response to whatever Audrey was about to ask, not what she had asked.
“We can have this conversation later,” Thomas said, as Amanda started to scream in earnest and his expression got rather dark. “Or you two can have it in the hallway.” He waited to see what the response to that ultimatum would be.
Audrey stiffened, stood, and held her head up. "Nevermind, I'm going," she said, hard as nails, and walked out. She didn't stop in the hallway. She didn't want to talk to Max. So now she knew about the secret club, but she got to sit in the bike room while everyone else had fun inside. It was like people telling you about the party you hadn't been invited to, or, more appropriately, watching people you cared about go off to war and not being allowed to fight with them. Because you were too much a girl. Because you weren't good enough. She would find a way whether Max liked it or not and she knew exactly who to start with.
Max gave Thomas a hard look. “That,” she said, pointing at the door, is why I didn’t want her to know. What do you think she’s going to do now?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you what she’s going to do, she’s going to keep going until she finds someone who lets her be involved in this, and she doesn’t have the sense God gave a deer when it comes to defending herself. She thinks she can take on the world with baseball bats, because it would make the General proud another world away. Dammit.”
Thomas, with his little girl on his lap, was unmoved by the hard look. "You say that as if you would not do exactly the same thing in her place." The wailing was finally abating again. "We could have talked her into a safe outlet if you had not shouted." Thomas seemed to think this was obvious.
“The difference, Thomas, is that Audrey thinks this is a game the cool kids are playing. I never thought it was a fucking game,” Max said, and she shook her head and looked down at him and Amanda. “I know we’ve had this conversation before, but I am an adult. Quit talking to me like I’m a kid you’re constantly chastising, while barely looking at me. Do you want to go after her, or do you want me to?” she asked, crossing her arms and unable to keep the hurt out of her voice.
“She doesn’t think it’s a game,” Thomas said, frowning. He had been worried initially that the younger people on the comms would think that, and he had been resentful of the situations that brought them there, but now he was not so quick to assume. He narrowed his eyes at her, waiting until she was done crossing her arms until he spoke, “Why don’t you ask her what she’s going to do?”
“She wants to do it because we do it, because you do it,” Max said, “and that isn’t any reason to get involved in this. If she wanted this, if she wanted it in a grown-up fucking way, she would have found her way to it before this,” she said. “That means it’s a game. No, it’s not even a game, it’s a way to make you proud. That’s what everything in Audrey’s life is - a way to make someone she cares about proud.” She dragged a hand through her now-dry hair and it didn’t escape her that he didn’t even address her statement she made about herself. She watched him a moment longer, something sad but resigned in her eyes, and then she turned and left the room, going in the direction Audrey had turned.
That explanation made Thomas angry. It was a cool, dark anger, somewhere at the pit of his stomach, and he knew it to be shallow. It sounded like she was making it his fault that Audrey would aspire to danger, like she was making Thomas the general, and he didn’t like it. He liked it even less because it was a familiar feeling. He let Max leave because he simply didn’t want to deal with the frustration of arguing with her. He turned his attention to Amanda instead, because there wasn’t anything about her that made him angry.
Audrey was already halfway to the elevator when Max came out after her. She'd checked behind herself twice, seen no one, and assumed she wasn't going to be followed. Her shoulders squared, she jammed the button for the elevator, stepping on as soon as it arrived, empty and going down. She stepped on, the doors hanging open behind her.
Max rushed into the elevator before the doors closed, and she stood on the opposite side of the elevator with her arms crossed as it began to move. “Want to tell me what the fuck you have planned?” she asked, because she knew her sister, knew that look Audrey had given then as she left the room. If she’d been less emotionally raw herself, she might have eased into the question, but the situation with Thomas was making her react instead of thinking.
Audrey resisted the urge to groan. She didn't want to have this conversation. She wanted to go home, get some work done, and then needle Luke until he gave her an in. "Nothing. Aren't your maternal instincts supposed to make sure you don't abandon your baby?"
It was a sore soft to prod. “I don’t fucking have maternal instincts, and we both know it,” Max said. “And if you want to try to hit me with Thomas next, don’t bother. In case you didn’t notice, he barely looks at me. So, want to tell me what you have planned?”
Audrey stared at the numbers over the elevator doors. "I wasn't going to say anything about Thomas," she muttered, watching the numbers go down like they would somehow fix this whole thing. "I don't have anything planned."
Max pressed her fingers to her forehead. “I have spent every night for the past half year sitting home and waiting for someone to die. You can be pissed at me all you want, but I didn’t want to add you to that fucking tally,” she said truthfully. “During that time, they’ve been shot, kidnapped, hospitalized. You fucking name it. And these are people who are trained in this shit, Aud.”
Audrey looked back over at her. Her lips were pressed into a thin, determined line. "How can I seriously hear you say something like that and not want to help?" she asked her. "Could you?"
Max just shook her head. “If this cause mattered to you, it would have mattered before Thomas told you who he was.”
Audrey folded her arms over her chest. "I've got to be honest with you, Max, I don't know anybody who wuld just spontaneously get involved with the masks for no reason. I don't know how they do it. But I've always followed them. I loved Batman back home, I wrote a stupid comic about him." The numbers paused on a floor, and the doors slid open, but no one was waiting outside. She waited for them to shut again before going on, still staring at the numbers and refusing to look at her sister. "I always admired the masks and what they did, and there's a ton more of them here. They're heroes. Thomas is a hero. So it actually did matter, I just never thought I could be of any help, but now I know people who are involved, so I'm going to find a way to be useful."
It was the last thing Max wanted to hear, and she pushed the elevator buttons and opened the doors, leaving the enclosed space before she said something stupid she would regret. She pushed the button to close the doors once she was on the other side, and she managed to hold it together until she got to the bathroom on the lower level. Once the door closed behind her, she just leaned her hands on the counter and looked at the reflection in the mirror under the harsh light. She didn’t go back up to the room until well after they’d released Amanda.