Barbara Ann Walker ✖ Commissioner Gordon (commissh) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2010-09-26 22:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | barbara walker, brad butler |
Who: Brad Butler and Barbara Walker
What: Awkward conversations?
Where: Their station, NYC
When: Sunday evening, September 26 2010
Warnings: None! Except a lot of cursing on Barbara’s part...
Brad was having a strange weekend. Really, he was having a strange couple of weeks. His move to Manhattan hadn’t been what you’d call smooth, but he survived, relatively intact. (Sadly, the same could not be said for most of his furniture.) He’d long been used to Alfred’s presence at the back of his mind – hard not to be, after almost 20 years – but New York seemed to make him louder. Gotham certainly did. And so did his new partner, Barbara Walker. She was... interesting. She talked big, but even after two weeks, he knew she lived up to it. She was a good cop. Loud, but good. And she was also Commissioner Gordon.
That threw him for a loop. Which was saying a lot. Brad was hardly ever taken by surprise, but seeing her on the reincarnate boards – seeing who she was, and learning about what she did in her free time? He’d never been so speechless in his life. At the time, he was just glad he hadn’t logged on at work, while the two of them were sitting across from each other. Talk about awkward. But, that didn’t mean that seeing her the next day was any less awkward. It was hard, acting like nothing had changed over the past twenty-four hours, but somehow, Brad managed it. At least while the other detectives were around. It was only when they took off just before dark, when he and Detective Walker were the only ones left in the station house, that he decided to broach the subject.
“So. Commissioner, huh? They pay you for that?”
Despite the fact that Barbara hadn’t been a reincarnate for nearly as long as Brad had, it was shocking just how easily she was able to let this shit just roll off her back and move forward. She honestly blamed the JL, in the best possible way of course. Those kids had this insane ability to roll with the punches, to just take their licks and shrug them off. Barbara was endlessly impressed by them, for a bunch of (mostly) kids, they really were role models. And if you were going to survive in a group like that, you had to learn how to roll with the punches too, so it actually wasn’t all that awkward for her to see Brad the next day at the station. After all, she’d gone through the same thing with Fox not too long ago too, so while she definitely hadn’t been expecting her new partner to turn up with another voice in his head, she’d been shocked by much worse.
Of course, the fact that he was carrying around Alfred Pennyworth in his skull was a bit of a shock, to be honest. She was honestly starting to think Gotham was doubling as some weird sort of mother ship, calling all the Batman reincarnates home. Wouldn’t be the first time, that place was like a magnet for trouble. Good thing Alfred definitely didn’t qualify as trouble, the JL could really use the rest. Things definitely had changed over the last twenty-four hours, though for Barbara, things had been steadily changing since the night she’d sought out Batman on the roof top of GCPD. She couldn’t help smirking at the memory, bent over her paperwork on her desk, so the sudden interruption in her thoughts at the sound of Brad’s voice actually took her by surprise.
“... Hell yeah they pay me,” she said as soon as she recovered, flashing her new partner a grin as she leaned over on her desk, propping her chin up with her hand. Almost everyone else had already gone home for the night, two weeks working with Brad and he was already proving to have the same sort of work habits as her. Namely, staying up until indecent hours at the station and mostly functioning like complete workaholics. There were worse things. “I’m the only commissioner in town, they gotta pay someone.”
Brad chuckled and nodded his head in agreement. It made sense, in a weird way. Of course Gordon would be getting a paycheck. Probably a hefty one. Brad was almost jealous. “Hey, as far as second jobs go, you could do worse. I mean, you could be a butler. Alfred’s great and all, but I don’t envy him his job.” He was fully prepared for a joke to come his way now. He had Alfred in his brain, and his last name was Butler. Coincidence? Probably not. But it did make for some unavoidable inner grumbles on Brad’s part. Alfred refused to comment, in that amused, all-knowing old man way of his. It would’ve driven Brad nuts if he weren’t so used to it by now.
He shook his head to himself and leaned back in his chair, crossing his hands in his lap. “Anyway, what’s that they say in the movie? If you’re good at something, never do it for free?” The corner of his mouth twitched slightly – he wasn’t smiling outright, but he meant what he said, despite who he was quoting. Barbara was good at her job. She deserve the compliment.
“Well... thanks!” She could feel that she was grinning like a fool but she couldn’t stop it, Barbara Walker had never been all that great at accepting compliments. They made her cheeks all splotchy, it was pretty humiliating actually. She was supposed to be a tough as nails cop, and she was, but she still had her moments where it was painfully clear that she was a woman. A sixteen year old girl even, if you spent enough time with Barbara you could tell that in some ways she had the emotional range of a teenager. Stunted emotional growth as it were, making the job your life had a few draw backs, and one of them was a serious lack of social skills. She bit her lip, looking down at the paper work on her desk to give herself something to do while the embarrassment passed before she looked back up at him.
“That Joker was a piece of work, but you can’t say he was wrong about everything. Just most things,” Barbara huffed, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest as she took the liberty of propping her feet up on the edge of her desk. “Anyway, it’s a little daunting. Suddenly going from detective to commissioner? Not sure I’m qualified, but Gordon is, so he helps. And they haven’t kicked me out yet, so I must be doing something right? Fuck I hope so.” Her grin eased into a knowing smile, cocking her head to the side and raising an eyebrow in amusement. “Kinda funny. You’re Alfred, you’ve got the last name Butler. Me? I’m named after Gordon’s fucking daughter. Crazy ass world we’re living in.”
“That is putting it mildly,” Brad returned, shaking his head with another chuckle. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this... what, amused? Light-hearted? That wasn’t to say he was one of those ‘emo kids,’ as today’s youth put it, but he’d never really been all that receptive to the squad jokesters. He usually left that to the other cops, the cocky ones who thought they were the shit. They weren’t, but Brad let them have their fun. He couldn’t be bothered to knock them down a peg – at least, not until they outdid themselves on the obnoxious meter. Then he was more than happy to deliver a verbal beat down. “All this irony’s gonna be the death of me.”
Once he was done laughing, he looked at Barbara carefully. He noticed the way she blushed and had to look away when he complimented her, but he didn’t tease her for that. He wasn’t that kind of guy. And besides, she was still pretty young – one of the youngest partners he’d ever had. A lot of cops dreaded having a younger, more inexperience partner, but not Brad. He didn’t mind rookies. As far as he was concerned, all cops were rookies, no matter how long they’d been at the job. There was always room for improvement, and unlike most jobs, this one did not get easier with time. And who knew that better than anyone? Commissioner Gordon. Barbara was lucky. She got saddled with one of the best fictional cops out there. Alfred had a military background, sure, but it wasn’t the same. Gordon knew how to deal with a tough city and even tougher criminals. Which reminded him...
He leaned forward again, propping his elbows up on his desk and looking at her intently. “How is Gotham, by the way? No supervillains tearing the place apart, I hope?”
Of course Brad had to start in with the tough questions, though he probably had no idea just how tough. For her part, Barbara visibly deflated, shoulders sagging and she raked a hand slowly through her hair to stall for a minute. How in the hell could she even begin to answer that question? Well, in true Barbara style, it began with a string of curse words.
“Gotham? Gotham is a fucking mess, Brad. It hasn’t changed. The only thing that has? Is that reincarnates of supervillains are tearing it the fuck apart now. It’s insane. I’m insane. You know I signed on for this willingly? Yeah. You heard me. A week after I got Gordon I was lighting up the fucking bat signal on the fucking roof of GCPD. A month ago some crazy ass supervillain reincarnates decided it’d be fun to let loose all the Arkham patients and Blackgate prisoners into the city and that was just the biggest shit pile of shit that I’ve ever been caught in in my life. It took two days to get the city back in order and round up everyone that got loose and I... uh, had help...”
Barbara cut herself off in her rant, arms half raised in the air where she’d been waving them around as she realized she was about to bring up the JL and immediately changed her tune. She should probably tell Brad about her involvement with them, not just because of his reincarnates connections to some of the people in that group but because he was her partner, but for some reason she was stalling on that too. Maybe because she actually wanted to leave Brad with a good impression, he had years on her as a cop and well, to be quite honest he intimidated the hell out of her. She was trying her best not to show it, but she wasn’t sure how well that was working out for her. “The reincarnate of the mother fucking Scarecrow got himself killed and his sister? His little sister fucking called GCPD and I had to tell her that her brother was dead. In short? Gotham blows, but I’m sure that’s no surprise to you or Alfred.”
For awhile there, Brad just sat there and stared. His eyebrows raised higher and higher into his forehead the more she talked and... what was that she was doing with her arms? Banishing spirits? Not exactly, but she was definitely... enthusiastic about all of this. Almost heated. And definitely out of her depth, that much was clear. But anybody would be, in her shoes. Gotham was not an easy town to deal with, especially from a legal point of view. Too many crazies and too many ‘respectable’ civil servants on the take. Hell, without Batman, it was practically impossible. Mr. Wayne. I wonder... Alfred’s thoughts interrupted his own, and while he tried to wrap his brain around everything she’d said, one very small and very glazed-over detail stood out to him more than the rest. She’d gone past it without elaborating, and that, considering her penchant for elaborating on everything, was a little strange.
He furrowed his brow and rubbed his chin silently for a moment before he spoke. “Help?” he asked finally. “You mean, like Batman?”
Definitely not banishing spirits, Barbara was just incredibly animated when she was getting worked up and she seemed to loose most if not all control over her various limbs. As soon as she realized she’d been waving them around like a crazy person she immediately put her hands in her lap, trapping them in between her legs and cleared her throat. So much for playing it cool. Once again her cheeks were red but there was nothing she could do about it, so she just pressed on and tried to answer Brad’s next question without going into an epileptic seizure again.
“... Yeah. I mean like Batman. Batman and an entire squad of Supers, they’ve been policing Gotham since before I even got Gordon.” She fixed her partner with a steadier gaze and leaned forward on her desk, releasing her hands from her legs to fold them in front of her as she rested heavily on her elbows. “I’ve got a modern day justice league behind me fighting bad guys like it’s the most normal fucking thing in the world and I spend my days worrying about people named the Joker instead of New York muggers. It’s like I walked into a fucking comic book and I can’t get back out. Fuck.”
Brad couldn’t help it, he laughed, and he laughed loudly. If chuckling was rare, this was even rarer. It took something special to make Brad Butler laugh so hard that his sides hurt (which was exactly the case right now), and if asked, he wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was. Even he didn’t know. But whatever it was, Barbara had it. She was... something else.
It took him a minute to realize, though, that right now it probably looked like he was laughing at her, which wasn’t the case at all. Sure, she had a particular way of talking that amused him to no end, but it was the situation that caused him to go over the edge more than anything else. She was in a fucking comic book – and so was he, just by association. Though he doubted it would stay that way for long. Alfred had a way of meddling.
“I’m sorry,” he said after he finally managed to calm himself down. “This... isn’t funny, I know. I just.” He shrugged and laughed again, somewhat breathlessly. “Never expected any of this to be real, you know? I mean, 20 years of nothing. Not a goddamn thing, and now?” He made a gesture almost like a waterfall, but not quite. “Fucking everything. I honestly don’t know how you handle it.” He shook his head and laughed once more. Anyone close to him would’ve know that this was about as close to hysterical as he ever got, previous fits of laughter notwithstanding. “Shit.”
Well, Barbara definitely wasn’t taking any offense to his laughing. Honestly, it was such a relief that he was laughing instead of calling a psych evaluator on her that she started laughing with him. Even if he was laughing at her, she didn’t care. It felt good to laugh like this, she hadn’t laughed like this in awhile. At least not the side splitting kind, which this definitely qualified as. When his laughter died down so did hers, and she shook her head, muttering yet another string of curse words under her breath and leaning her forehead heavily into the palm of her hand, exhaling out and willing herself to calm down. She hadn’t talked about this with... anyone outside of the JL. It felt good. And she really liked Brad. Alfred aside, he already seemed like a guy worth getting to know, and definitely a guy she wouldn’t mind being partners with. She could get over the whole mind-numbing intimidation factor. Maybe.
“It’s kind of funny. You know, if you’ve got a fucking sick sense of humor, which we both obviously do. Comes with the job!” She peeked at him through a crack in her fingers, her face now bright red and she chuckled dryly. It was actually pretty fucking funny to her that twenty years later he was coming to the same sorts of conclusions as her. Well, at least they were on the same page, barring the whole he’d been a cop and a reincarnate for way longer then her. “Honestly? I don’t know how I handle it either. Pretty sure I’m this close to having a nervous break down that lands me in Arkham but one, I’d never touch that place with a ten foot pole and two, Gordon would never let me do that. So that’s... comforting, I guess. But still. This is some fucked up shit. Think we should set up a reincarnates anonymous group in the station? I bet there’s more of us. Fox is one too, you know.”
“Yeah?” Brad tilted his head to the side a little and looked at her with more than just simple curiosity – he was intrigued. For a woman who probably couldn’t withstand the force of a strong gust of wind, Barbara Walker was much stronger than she looked, and that wasn’t just because of Gordon. He might’ve been helping out lately, but he could tell that she probably hadn’t changed much since she’d gotten him – she just had more weight on her shoulders, and she obviously wasn’t stupid enough to think she could carry it all by herself. That was a relief. Brad was so over martyrs. “Well, even if Gordon didn’t let you, I wouldn’t either. I mean, that’s what I’m here for. To help you... not go crazy. Sometimes that’s all you can hope for in a partner.”
“Oh.” Barbara stared at him for a long moment, taking her hand away from her face as her mouth opened in a small ‘O’ of surprise, though she wasn’t sure what exactly she was surprised by. Maybe just the sincerity of the statement, she’d had decent partners before but... hmmm. There was something about Brad that made her all fidgety, or more fidgety then normal anyway, maybe it was the Alfred thing? Alfred was always pulling the ‘touching moment’ card and making Batman squirm. And now apparently she was lucky enough to get the same treatment, which was hardly fair. Gordon wasn’t a misbehavin’ vigilante. She found that she didn’t actually mind though, it was nice. Feeling supported.
“Well shit! It’s a good fucking thing I’ll have you around then,” she finally managed to say as soon as she got control of her facial expressions again, her mouth screwing up in that smile of hers that was always half a smirk, like she couldn’t decide how she was feeling about a situation so she just went for both. “Same to you, partner. Might as well keep each other in line while we’re at it. If we’re gonna be dealin’ with all that is Gotham at least. You should come with me to the station tomorrow- the uh, other station... I can show you around!”
Brad watched her expressions change, trying (and failing) to make it look like he wasn’t watching her at all. He should’ve known it was a lost cause – her face was just too fascinating. It was... unpredictable. He liked that about her. She was so genuine that she was almost impossible to anticipate. “That’s probably a good idea,” he nodded, smiling back at her, “since I’m guessing I’m gonna be spending most of my free time there, am I right?” His smile turned into a sort of knowing smirk, but there was nothing arrogant about it. There wasn’t even anything teasing. He was just stating a fact. One that happened to make him... happy. Yes, that was it. He was more than happy to help lift some of the burden off of her shoulders. It made him feel useful, and she obviously needed him.
... It, he corrected himself. She obviously needed it, as in the help. He blinked and looked down, surprised at himself. Why had he thought that? Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. He was her partner. This was his job. End of story. “Um.” He looked back up at her, something strange behind his eyes that couldn’t quite be named. “Before or after work tomorrow?”
“You bet your sweet ass you are,” Barbara quipped at him without even thinking, immediately biting her lip to keep her grin from widening like an idiot. It was so weird talking to him like this, she couldn’t remember ever being this immediately comfortable with someone she’d only been partnered up with for two weeks. One minute he was making her nervous out of her mind and the next minute she was talking about his sweet ass. What the hell was going on? She didn’t think about it though, at least not too much. It would probably show on her face if she was, so she immediately put that out of her mind and moved the conversation forward.
“Uh,” she cleared her throat, rolling her eyes at herself and leaning back in her chair again. Before deciding that she obviously wasn’t fidgeting enough during this conversation so she stood up from her chair all together and started moving things around on her desk before picking up her empty mug, probably with the intent of refilling it in the break room. “Either? I go in before and after work, just to make sure on a normal day that not too much shit piles up by the time I clock out of here. So if you don’t want to wake up at the ass crack of dawn, we can head out to New Jersey after our shift tomorrow. Whatever suits you best, partner.” Partner, she found she had to remind herself, staring at him for a moment before mentally shaking herself. This was ridiculous. “Want some more coffee?”
He laughed softly and nodded. “After’s fine. Unlike Alfred, I’m not much of a morning person.” Standing up as well, he reached for his own mug, though he stared at it awkwardly for a few moments before he decided what to do with it. His indecision was definitely noticeable as he finally held it out to her, looked back up at her, and smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Sure. Long as you’re offering.”
“Yeah, me neither. Sooooo you probably wouldn’t want to see me that early in the morning anyway, unless you have a death wish.” She grinned slyly at him, for a moment a little surprised to find that when he stood up he was around the same height as her, maybe a little taller. Yeah, definitely taller. Of course, she already knew that. But being so tall herself, it was hard to forget that not everyone was shorter then her sometimes. She really was a tall, skinny rail of a thing. Prone to getting blown over by a gust of wind was a most definite accurate description of her physical frame. Bony in all the wrong places, but it had never bothered Barbara before and it certainly didn’t bother her now. What she lacked in size she made up for in her sheer, metaphorical balls.
She hadn’t even noticed his moment of indecision because she suddenly realized she’d reverted back to blank staring again and gave herself another mental shake. “Coming right up!” Taking the mug from him, she hurried away to the break room to refill their mugs and catch her breath. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why she even needed to catch it.