Barbara Gordon (babsgordon_) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-04-15 20:19:00 |
|
|||
Babs decided that today was as good as any to go for a wheel through the city. She took her tablet, a small notebook she'd picked up to use to jot down notes about Stark Resilient and the Titans, and made her way out into New York City. She still marveled how, sometimes, it felt so very different than New Gotham. It was brighter, even on cloudy days, and warmer -- maybe not by temperature but by feel and people. She wheeled her way into a corner coffee shop, not name-branded, and ordered a frilly latte with white chocolate in it, deviating from her normal herbal teas or, when necessary, black coffee. She found a table by the window and tried to relax. When a young woman she recognized from the network came in, Barbara readjusted the table for a second person. Usually, fellow refugees seemed to stick together. She was pretty sure her name was Kate Beckett, and she worked for the NYPD. Might be nice to have a chat, if the other woman had the time. She caught her eye, smiled, and motioned to the seat opposite her in case Kate wanted to sit for a few. She was nervous. The sort of nervous that left a knot of anxiety in your gut, made your hands feel shaky, and just left Kate with the feeling that her entire day needed to be over. It also didn’t help that it was completely absurd to feel that way because it wasn’t as if this was her first time turning in an application for Detective, it wasn’t like she hadn’t done this before and known what to expect but….she was still nervous. And coffee was her default setting. Nerves required coffee, a good day required coffee, a bad day required more coffee than was probably healthy for any human to consume. The line at the counter was fairly short, which meant that a few minutes after Kate walked in she was clutching her grande latte with two sugar-free pumps of vanilla. As she brought the cup to her lips for a tentative sip, her eyes caught the gesture from the woman in the wheelchair. For a moment in threw her, Kate suspecting that she was a fan of the show who wanted to ask a question. It didn’t happen very often when she was in her uniform, people seemed not to notice her that much, but she was in plain-clothes today - grey slacks, black heels, and a simple red shirt that she’d topped with a leather jacket Alexis had given her for Christmas. But as she stepped forward Kate realized the woman wasn’t a fan, she was a refugee whom she had occasionally seen post of the network though Kate had never commented to her. But she knew she was Barbara Gordon, and a version of the comic book character that she had read about as a kid. “Hi,” she said as she approached, “I’m Kate.” "Hi Kate, I'm Barbara," she greeted. "If you have to run, go ahead, but I saw you come in and saved you a seat if you wanted to relax for a few." With an uncle who was in the force for years, she knew what it was like to be rushing around and busy in the force. Frankly, she didn't know how Kate did it, coming from one New York and going to another. "Off duty?" “I...no…” she stuttered a bit, wrinkling up her nose at herself, “I’ve got a few minutes, I’m actually waiting on a call from some co-workers.” The call was about picking up a guy who they had some pretty damning evidence against for a murder in his building, and the lead detective on the case was throwing her a bone in letting her interrogate the suspect to bolster her application just that much more. They both knew the Captain would be watching with close eyes now that she’d turned everything in and made her intentions known, and whatever he saw would be reported directly one One Police Plaza and, in turn, have a huge effect on if she got the promotion or not. It was several moments after her reply that Kate realized she was still stupidly standing at the table, so she quickly took a seat, hoping that the other woman didn’t notice the slight blush on her cheeks. It was truly unlike her to be so completely out of sorts but..well, nerves. “Not quite,” she replied once she had taken the offered chair, brushing a stray curl behind her ear, “Got a few more hours to go, but I enjoy my job so it’s not a bad thing,” Kate added with a smile. Maybe it was weird that she liked spending her days sifting through evidence and solving murders, but she really didn’t care. There were certain things that people were meant to do in life - solving homicides happened to be hers. Barbara knew she was fairly good at reading people, so she waited a moment before responding. "My uncle was police commissioner for years," she said. "I would have gone onto the force myself if he hadn't blocked every possible way for me to get there. So I know a little something about police work. There aren't many people who would show up in a new world and keep doing it without the history and background of that world unless they enjoyed their job." She smiled and sipped her latte. "Working on anything interesting that you're allowed to talk about?" Not that 'being allowed' was really anything that Barbara lived by. As a vigilante hacker, she rarely paid attention to petty things like rules and laws. She had no idea what Kate knew about her or not, so she didn't offer up any of that information. At least, not yet. Well, that was different. Kate was more of a comic book fan than of the Batman tv shows and movies, but she couldn’t remember an instance where Barbara Gordon had been Jim Gordon’s niece versus his daughter. “Jim Gordon, yeah….” Kate replied quietly, giving a shrug of her shoulders, “I grew up reading comic books as a kid.” But it was obvious that this Barbara Gordon hadn’t come from those. “But that’s unfortunate. My dad didn’t really want me to join, but I signed up at a point in his life where he really wasn’t in a position to judge my choices and I was unwilling to take his opinion into consideration.” Jim Beckett had taken his daughter signing up for the Police Academy by drinking himself into a stupor and leaving her to find him three days later passed out on the couch surrounded by bottles. That had been the beginning of his third trip to rehab. It’d taken two more for it to stick. “Ummm…” she hedged a bit, sifting through both the caseload they were working and the facts in her mind to find something she could share with someone she had just met. Barbara seemed nice enough but she wasn’t Castle, and Kate didn’t know if she could trust her just yet. “We are working a case with a guy found dead in his apartment, doors locked, no other access. Found by the housekeeper,” she shrugged. It wasn’t the most exciting or the most difficult case to work, but it was something. Barbara nodded. She wasn't from a comic book, and she had researched enough to know and understand that her history was vastly different from what many people knew about "Barbara Gordon." She liked that though. It gave her an edge, a certain quality that meant not everyone knew everything about her already. "Was it an upper floor of the building then? New building without a fire escape? What kind of front door access was there? Key cards, security cameras? Did he have his cell on him?" Kate had to fight not to smile, busying herself with sipping her coffee. It seemed she was, like Castle, quite intent on finding a mystery to solve. And, she was sure, once she got home and told him about her day these would also be the sort of questions that flew out of her husbands mouth. “Top floor, and no fire escape. There are stairwells on each end of the building in case of an evacuation, and all the doors are covered by security camera. The cameras show no one going in or out of the doors, and no evidence that the system has been tampered with either. Front door access is through a doorman, who makes guests sign a ledger. The vic had a visitor approximately four hours before he died, and the guy has an alibi, but we are going to try and break it. And yeah, he had his cell phone in the apartment. It wasn’t physically on him when he died, on the kitchen counter.” Barbara allowed the information to move through her, and she nodded a few times. "Did you run the cell or sweep for bugs? How did he die? Did you completely rule out suicide?" She had seen stranger things in her line of work than this, and Barbara liked little better than solving a puzzle. She smiled encouragingly. “CSU swept for bugs, nothing came up. His cell phone is still being processed by Tech, and suicide was not the cause of death unless he somehow managed to shoot himself in the chest three times,” she replied, her eyes narrowing slightly at Barbara, surely she didn’t think they’d be so careless to investigate a homicide when it was a suicide. “The most likely story is that the visitor is the one who shot him, and somehow they managed to find another way out of the building that…..” Kate paused, her eyes glazing over slightly while a piece of the puzzle slotted firmly into place, “....the shooter didn’t exit the building,” she muttered almost to herself, aware that the locked front door still presented a problem but all in all, it was rather minor. There were ways to lock a door from the outside. It was always fun to watch the pieces plug together, and a wide smile grew onto her face behind her latte mug. She nodded a few times and then gave a little shrug. "A disgruntled neighbor? An ex? That makes sense. Maybe you need to run some checks on those. See who was in at time of death. And tech needs to run for deleted texts," she added off-handedly. Barbara figured that most every decent tech department would do that but… she still needed to say it. “They will, they’ll run the whole phone for deleted texts, photos, cleared cache’s for calls - the whole works,” she replied, still busy running down the idea that had sprung up in her mind and latched on. And then Kate pulled out her phone and started texting, her fingers flying over the keys as she explained the hunch to the lead detective and stopped herself just short of asking him to look into it. Eleven years on the job in homicide, seven of them with her own team. It was hard not to resort to orders because it was so ingrained into her mind that she sometimes forgot she was still just an officer, no matter how long the leash she had been given by a few in her in precinct. “Disgruntled neighbor, several floors down. They have a dispute over how the condo fees should be used,” she explained, dropping her phone onto the table to take a long drink from her travel cup. “But there is a full background check being done on any other associates, and we will talk to all of them before the case is closed.” Barbara sat back a bit. "I tend to find that talking something out usually helps it along. I'm sure you'll find the person responsible. You always seem to. Is your husband helping out with cases here as well?" She had a TV and free time. She'd watched quite a bit of new TV, especially ones with people who were fellow refugees. Well, that made her pause. Kate’s cup had been halfway to her mouth when she had spoken, and the words both served to lift one of her eyebrows in question and widen her eyes. “I...uh…” she stuttered, putting her cup back onto the table in order to rub her hands against the fabric of her pants. For whatever reason, she hadn’t pegged Barbara as someone who would watch the show or know her beyond shared refugee status via the network. Clearly, that had been a wrong assumption on her part. “...No,” Kate replied after a moment, again tucking that stubborn curl behind her ear, “I’m still an officer which means that Castle isn’t able to go out into the field with me. I’m eligible for promotion today so I’m hoping that will change soon. Once I’m back on the force as a detective, he can join cases as a civilian investigator - provided the Captain doesn’t mind,” she explained, well aware that the Captain did the opposite of mind and, even if he did, One Police Plaza was sort of banking on the positive publicity from having the “America’s Favorite Crime Duo” (or whatever the hell they called them, Kate hadn’t asked and didn’t particularly want to know) working together in this version of Manhattan. “But we don’t always get the guy,” Kate added quickly, thinking of the multitude of cases she had worked that hadn’t made it to the tv screen. She understood why those cases weren’t for viewing, namely they didn’t make good tv, but those were the ones that bothered her, kept her up at night. “Despite what they show you on tv.” At that, Barbara couldn't help but laugh, just a little. It was true. She should have known better, knowing her own life and watching through the rest of what was aired on television that she hadn't lived yet. She couldn't imagine that those thirteen episodes were all that happened in her next year. That and the very fact that the show picked up at such an odd moment, telling so little of her life before it aired. "Of course they don't show everything," she said apologetically. "I imagine that's quite similar to my situation as well. Castle would have a field day in New Gotham," she admitted. "Like a kid in a candy store with the amount of weirdness and off-the-wall … 'cases' that I worked on. Nothing as exciting as dealing with people who can turn invisible or into water, hmn?" “Oh God,” Kate wrinkled her nose, clearly able to picture the little boy excitement , the sparkle in his eye and the insane theories that would flow out of Castle’s mouth before she could get a word in edgewise. He would absolutely push her to the brink of her sanity on a case like that, and even though it was usually adorable in this day an edge, sometimes Castle’s enthusiasm for a good story still managed to get the best of her, “You have no idea. He’s still disappointed that he missed out on meeting a ninja. It happened at home, and I think that has probably been a life-long dream of his, but, obviously, he doesn’t remember. Just what we saw on television.” Yeah, she watched her own show with her husband. Yeah, it was a little weird. But Kate liked to be prepared, to know what was happening back at home. “You’ll have to meet him sometime. I’m sure the two of you could talk for hours. He’d love to pick your brain,” she said. "I'd like that," Barbara said. "And he would be jealous because I've met a ninja as well, though it was years ago." Who would come back, well, her sister would, later on in Barbara's life, apparently. It was around that time, too, when she had started using her neurostimulator more and more. She frowned, momentarily, at the thought. Seeing herself back in the Batgirl suit, walking like that, had been difficult for her to handle. She didn't think she had the technology or the means to get something like that going for her here. “I’ve known Castle for six years, and he’s been talking about ninjas practically since the moment we met,” Kate said with a laugh, “Ninja assassins, super spies, government conspiracies. The more outlandish the better.” It was really just another day in their apartment when he latched onto an idea and starting running wild with it. Most of the time she didn’t even bother trying to reel him in, just let him go until he ran out of steam. “I fully expect there to be a ninja in his next book, if not an entire case built around one.” She took another drink from her cup, surprised to find that most of the liquid was already gone and took a quick peek at her watch to check the time. Kate had roughly ten more minutes before she needed to leave and prepare for interrogating her suspect, “So what have you been doing here?” Obviously, Barbara knew plenty about her but beyond the name Barbara Gordon and the obvious fact that she wasn’t from the Batman comics, that was about the extent of Kate’s knowledge. "A little of this and a little of that. I help out with communication for a few of the teams around here. I've applied to Stark Resilient. There are a bunch of options for me right now I guess, but I like to keep myself open to whatever shows up to me." Barbara tried to hint a bit that that meant she'd be willing to help out in any way she could as needed, though she also realized that working for something like the NYPD. Police departments made things more complicated. “Well, the department is always hiring,” she offered freely, completely missing the subtle hint hidden in her words but volunteering the information regardless. “Maybe not active duty, obviously,” Kate said with a slight frown, her eyes flicking towards the wheelchair, “But our investigative services teams are some of the best in the world, and the pay isn’t all that bad.” That section of the NYPD were actually paid better than active duty members, but there was a certain expectation that the brain trust had more qualifications and, therefore, should be paid more. "I'll look into it then, thank you. There are certainly a lot of decisions to make now that I'm here. Again." Even if the again wasn't something she remembered from the first time. Barbara smiled. “Of course,” Kate replied easily, tilting her cup to her mouth for one last sip of her coffee before she turned to toss it into a nearby trashcan. But then she paused, flattening out a napkin and tugging her ballpoint pen from where it was tucked into her black folder, scrawling her number across the delicate material. “If you need help getting started, or a reference or anything, that’s my cell number. I don’t know how much help I’d be for getting you onto investigative services, but I’ll do what I can.” It wasn’t until she had already stood and pushed her chair back into place at the table that Kate realized she had used the word again. Huh. It seemed Barbara had been here before then, like Alexis. “I’m in apartment 2203, in the Tower, as well.” "I'm sure I'll be seeing you around," she said friendly. "At least, I hope so." She gave Kate her apartment number, too, and tucked the cell number into her bag. "Best of luck with that case. I'd love to hear how it turns out when you're all through." “Oh, sure,” she said with a smile, “I’m not home a lot because I work long hours, but my husband is usually there if you wanted to meet him. But I’ll definitely let you know how it all turns out,” Kate added, taking a quick glance to her watch to see that her ten minutes were almost up, “But I’ve got to go or I’ll be late, it was nice to meet you!” "Nice to meet you as well," Barbara said. She held out her hand for a quick handshake. "Have a good rest of your day." |