→ (signpost) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-05-20 14:59:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !dc comics, *log, clark kent, diana prince, zatanna zatara |
Watchower: Clark/Diana/Zatanna
Who: Zatanna, Clark, Diana
What: Information seeking
Where: Watchtower
When: In-progress
Warnings/Rating: Probably zilch
Zatanna knew Gotham's secrets. Shadowcrest, the Zatara ancestral home, was just beyond its borders - most of the time. A childhood populated with exotic travels still featured countless stops at the mansion, with its libraries that went forever and rooms that housed things she had not understood as a child. But her father did not take her to Gotham at first, not for many years.
It was the city beyond her window, lights in the distance and something to dream of.
She first visited the city covered in smog and cruelty when she was eight, but she had heard about it for years prior. Her father had told her stories of a place that was the opposite of a fairy tale. Darkness clung to stones there, he said, and age-old debts littered the sidewalks. It was a place where too much blood had seeped into the ground, and where hate had taken root in that spilled blood and grown, gnarled and obscuring the light. He told her of it, and he told her of the good people there who tried to turn the tides and fight the bloodied roots that the city was built upon. It had been meant as a tale of inspiration for a little girl with wide eyes, a morality lesson from a man immersed in demons that smelled of whiskey, but it had become a type of fairy tale, one populated with monsters in the shadows and dragons beneath the bed.
At eight, she expected fire and blood to run over the toes of her shoes the moment she crossed the invisible line that ushered in Gotham. She found only a sad city, an angry boy and people with distance in their eyes and diamonds on their wrists.
She returned countless times in the years that followed. A nomad, but she knew how the sidewalks felt beneath heels, and she knew how the air smelled when night chased away the day and brought on the horrors of the evening. She knew the way the divide between dark and light existed there, like a reverse tale of beauty and beast, and no clarity as to who was who. She worked there regularly, her magic show straddling a corner of old and new.
Yet, this was not her Gotham. She knew it as soon as she stepped outside. The air that circled her was different, devoid of magic and somehow wrong in a way that required adjusting to at the core of her. She closed her eyes, and she looked. No John. No Boston. No Xanadu. Bruce, she found Bruce, but quick words jotted down did not satisfy her. She was not an impatient woman, but the war had left its marks on her, as it had on everyone.
"Ekat em ot rewothctaW!"
She appeared on the main bridge, alarms heralding her arrival, the woman in the snug white shirt and leather pants. There were runes inked into the skin at her bared hips, and there were swirls and lines and gods and goddesses along her arms in black. Her hair was long and dark, and her eyes lived somewhere between blue and purple.
"Have I interrupted?"