dami can't (leavethenest) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-10-12 22:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !dc comics, *log, damian wayne, holly robinson |
dami/holly
Who: Damian and Holly
Where: Cottage
When: recently!
What: chatting
Warnings: none!
People talked all the time about how awful Gotham was. The mobs and the gangs, the street crime no one cared about, the kids who fell through the gaps - newsflash, most of the kids falling through the gaps? Weren’t complaining about the system because they knew just how bad the system was. But Gotham was home in a way nowhere else was: thick soupy smog, screams and sirens in the middle of the night and condemned buildings and all.
And Gotham never got over its gossip. The newsprint was scrumpled, a week out of date and smudged where the ink had run, but the newspaper snagged from a bench outside the shitty apartment in old Gotham when she got back through? Had a very distinctive photograph on the front, and she could practically feel the insinuation dripping off the page. But a paper? Didn’t buy groceries and the empty fridge was bare of even moldy food. She ditched the paper, traded it for a jacket and boots and the door slammed behind her.
She wasn’t a thief. She wasn’t even a baby one but picking pockets? Wasn’t exactly the same. Early-morning was easy pickings: rich men hurrying to be very important without watching to see who might think they were a target. Holly’s army-surplus jacket was weighted pleasantly at the pockets with other people’s valuables by the time the sun was really up and the cottage? The cottage had food.
The window wasn’t really a break-and-enter job. Maybe because the Manor had enough security to cover the grounds and maybe because you didn’t exactly break in to say hi to a resident Bat, but by the time the resident Bat was awake, she was perched on the counter, with a bowl of cereal drowned in milk and feeding corn-flakes one by one to the cat.
Damian came home in his Talon outfit of black and gold. It wasn’t anything like the Robin suit she was used to seeing with the bright colors and the boyishness. This was all brooding Gotham Knight used for sneaking into mob meetings and listening in on big plans that he could foil later. Gotham was an endless pit of crime. Take one mob boss down, add another. Break one crime ring, two more popped up. Damian was sick of it, he had always been pretty sick of it, but lately it was easier just to accept it was a way of life.
The door opened and he took his mask off before immediately pulling out a throwing knife as he realized there was someone else there. He stood, about to cut through something that would likely need surgery before he realized who it was. “Holly.” He said her name with extra broody and then added something that might have sounded like a joke in the right light, “I can’t believe the zebras let you in.” He slowly lowered his hand and then walked over to the couch, taking off his utility belt and gloves.
“Pour me a bowl.” He commanded and then reached down to pick up his super fat cat.
The last cornflake fell, uneaten to the floor as the cat (traitor) abandoned ‘food’ for the now more immediate pleasure of being petted. Holly swung her heels back against the cabinet below in a one-two drum of what was probably greeting. The throwing knife? That earned itself a look, from above the cereal. Really? If she’d been someone looking to hurt the babiest of Waynes, she probably wasn’t going to sit still while he threw something at her. The look came with a smile, bedraggled with dirty clothes and tangled hair.
“The zebras have decided they like me,” she said confidently, having emptied much of what looked like ‘zebra-food’ from the fridge. “Or they’ve decided they’re not going to eat me. Same difference. Your cat liked me until you showed up.” Now? It was ignoring her, rusty-clockwork purrs and tail bottlebrush straight as it slunk around the ankles of that dark suit.
She ate a spoonful of cereal before extracting another bowl with an unnerving familiarity with where things were kept inside the kitchen, and shoving dry cereal in a bowl over the counter to skitter toward him. “What’s with the suit?” No how are you and nothing about media attention. She didn’t go in for that.
“I nursed this cat back to life. Stephanie turned it into a land whale. Big surprise.” Damian said it all with his brand of rough affection. He carried the fat cat like a baby in his arms as it purred loudly and chirped at him with sharp, hungry meows. “Yes, yes.” He said resigned as if the cat now owned him, which it likely did. The carefulness that he used to scratch behind her ears and then set her down didn’t seem anything like the rough and angry bird he tried to make himself look like. Damain took off the top protective layer of his suit so he was just down to a black undershirt and his pants and then went to fill the cat food and water bowl.
“I’m Talon and Robin.” Damian turned to look at her and barely waited for a nod of recognition. Talon was a whispered name by dangerous men. Robin was more celebrated like a hero to younger people, especially kids. “Tonight I had to listen in on a meeting and then break a scumbag’s arm for information. There’s something going on. Some kind of shipment.” He seemed distantly interested. “There’s always something.” He took the bowl of cereal and got some milk for it.
That cat? Didn’t know being half-dead if it bit it on the tail. It looked like a pet, like it was used to getting fed when it wanted and sleeping curled up in the crook of a boy’s knees. It was demanding, the way all cats were and Holly laughed, because she hadn’t thought Damian would be wrapped around anyone’s finger but a cat? Totally had him curled around its paw. She ate cereal like she’d been missing food for half a week instead of a day, and she watched him shed the costume like he could become the baby Wayne instead of a superhero just by climbing out of a shirt.
“Talon?” The name rang bells, of course she’d heard it. But he’d been a boy scout, in red and green and yellow and Talon? So not the same league as the boy scout. There was a grudging note that sounded kind of like being impressed, and she pulled one foot up from the dangle over the counter, to sit cross-legged more comfortably. “When did you turn into Talon and why are you in red and green if you’re Talon too?” Sidetrack. She’d found one, but the cottage, the reactions she could practically predict, even the zebras? Comforting.
“When I first came to Gotham, I felt that I outgrew the Robin name. People used to make fun of me for it and I was trying to impress everyone.” That everyone was Selina, but he left that unsaid. “I stopped an underground group of assassins and killed their leader so I could take his name. Since then, I’ve been Talon to scare people.” Because scaring people was the best part of being a vigilante. That look on a mook’s face when he knew he was done for always made Damian’s night.
“I’m Robin for the bat family. For people to feel safe when I go out to patrol. Everyone thought I was dead. I heard a child even saw me die. Being back gives them hope.” He stabbed at his cereal and then took a bite. “Or at least, that’s what I think.” Damian wasn’t stupid. He knew that he was a rich boy trying to protect a city that didn’t grow up like he did. What he thought would be good for them wouldn’t always be the case.
Her boots were dirty but she sat on the counter anyway and she thought about growing up quickly enough that everyone still made fun. She hadn’t been in a Gotham where there was a Robin, not long enough to think of it as anything but fun but the red and green and yellow? Childish, in a way Damian wasn’t and if she could see that? Maybe the rest of them could too. “You killed their leader?” Eyebrow up, and she’d finished the cereal, and the spoon clattered to a still and she didn’t like the idea of that, of killing. It was final, and she wasn’t stupid, Gotham was full of people who killed and died and screamed and got hurt, and maybe it was better that someone out there was willing to make it go away.
“But you’re Talon for you,” she finished his thought with a guess. Robin was for his family and to be something else and she didn’t say aloud she thought maybe he’d grown out of it completely if he struggled being what his family wanted. “I think Robin makes people feel safe but Talon does the making it that way part.”
“The leader was undead. He wasn’t- he was barely a real person, Holly.” Damian clarified like doing so was a huge pain in his ass. He liked that Holly was new and she was getting to know him the old fashioned way, but it was weird not having her know everything he did. Most of the people in Gotham were lifers and remembered everything beat by beat.
His expression softened when she told him what Talon was for and he was glad she got it so easily. That part always seemed hard to explain. “Robin is a responsibility, something to be upheld. Talon is who I am.” He ate a couple spoonfuls of cereal and then shrugged. “You get it.” That was about as close as she was going to get to a compliment today. Or so Damian thought. He coughed and changed the subject. “Visiting because you missed me?”
Undead? Wasn’t all the way dead and she was learning one thing at a time, painfully slowly that maybe ‘not all the way dead’ was better than the alternative. She wrapped her fingers around the laces of her boot and pulled, thoughtless distraction of fingers and a jangle of bracelets and watched the cat circle Damian’s ankles in a mindless furry rub of adoration.
The Talon part? That made sense, and if Robin was someone else’s, a duty handed down along with the family name? It seemed completely reasonable to want to be something else. She’d scream and kick if anyone made her be someone she wasn’t, even someone she liked. She beamed at the compliment as if it were a real one, but felt the heat burn its way up her cheeks in the next second. It was all Selina and Steph’s fault. It wasn’t anything.
“No,” she said, defiance in bright eyes above pink cheeks, “You have food, I didn’t.” Very deliberate, and she didn’t want to be chased and she didn’t want weird, she liked it here, even the zebra.
Damian didn’t expect her to blush since she had been good at keeping this friends only. That said, most of his family were bored. Especially his sister and the cat. He knew what Stephanie and Selina liked to stir up and most of the time he hated it like a little brother should. He could tell this was all them and it made him a little angry, a little sad. Holly was one of the best things to happen to him recently, so of course Selina wanted to force until it didn’t work anymore. And, Stephanie? Stephanie had problems with her marriage that made her focus on something she thought she could control in typical big sister fashion.
He shook his head with a small smile at her no. “Okay. You came for the cereal.” Damian let her have this since she let him have his walled off snarky ways. “What’s happening in Gotham that Talon or Robin don’t know about?” A change of subject to get away from the awkward.
He let that ‘no’ slide away into nothing and the heat in her cheeks faded away, relief flooding in like cool water. Damian? Didn’t want weird either, and she swung one foot free and kicked her heel against the cabinet in a one-two tattoo of fuck-it, just because she could. “You have good cereal,” she said thoughtfully, filling in the space with words, quick and sharp as she could, “It’s worth the trek over Gotham, baby Wayne.”
And then her face drew itself into more somber lines at the remembrance of what was actually the problem before Selina had wound her along a path of really, really awkward. “Well,” and she looked at him more seriously, clear blue eyes and not a trace of anything other than plain trust, “Before I went? Before Ra’s? There were friends of mine who I kept losing touch with. Maybe they cleaned up, maybe they went somewhere else, but they weren’t here anymore. And more have been going. And when I came back from the wizards? Someone else was gone.”
Damian visibly perked up at the mention of something wrong in Gotham that didn’t involve regular old gangs trading arms or dealing drugs. This felt more real somehow and he wanted to help. “Missing girls. In this town it could be anything from a slave ring to a psycho needing lab rats.” He said so with great distaste and disgust. The moral code of the little bird was practically golden. That said, she could see that vigilante shine in his eyes. Stopping things like this was why he put on a costume in the first place.
“Give me their names. I can look into it.” He took a couple bites of cereal. “Thank you for coming to me with this.”
In her Gotham? There were no vigilantes, at least, not as many. No-one on street corners but she’d looked all the places she knew to find her friends. What had happened to them? She didn’t really want to know: there was some stuff you talked about and some stuff you really didn’t. This fell straight into the latter but Ra’s had torn this new Gotham apart and she’d liked it whole.
“They’re not exactly the name and address kind of people,” she said, as he looked pleased and she felt uncomfortable about relying - even a little bit - on anyone else at all. “But Hannah, Ruby, Tina, Pips,” the list went on, ten girls gone, ten girls who’d never come back to say ‘see you’. Holly tucked the flat of one ankle bone beneath her opposite thigh curled up on the cabinet top, and she said nothing about thank you anything. Sharing? Wasn’t a big Gotham thing.
He knew the names were either fakes or temporary and it would take some digging, but Damian didn’t mind. Selina said he was hiding from the world, but he was only trying to take care of himself and uphold the bat name the best he could. Batman was practically a myth these days. The only hero they saw regularly was Robin. He wanted that name to mean something and saving these girls while he wore the red, yellow and green would help the city more than chasing down some gangs.
“Do you want to watch some tv?” Damian asked after a moment. He wasn’t good for conversation, even if he still wanted her company. He tried not to look too hopeful, ready to tt and go take care of the zebras if she said no.
That? Was pretty much a ‘we’re done here’, even Holly knew and she slid off the counter, bracelet-jangle and boots and careful to miss the cat padding around on the floor. And oh, choices -- she could go back to the quiet apartment, or she could play normal some more. “So long as I get the remote.”