sixthiterationlogs | This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive

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This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive

WHO: Stephanie Brown
WHERE: 6i and the surrounding forest
WHEN: 8/5-8/20
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: None Anticipated

[ Deep Forest ]
Steph has begun to spend the better part of her mornings foraging in the woods, picking up enough of the plants she'd seen around the inn to fill up half her backpack. With that done she took to the trees to practice her skills on the local wildlife. She was cautious of anything within ten feet of her prey, which was typically squirrels but occasionally birds and whatever else wandered close enough and could be killed by a thrown knife. Anything coming up behind her or from the side she was less conscious of. She was in the woods, after all. Any danger would be coming at her from the ground, and she knew how to make the most of a height advantage.

At least she wasn't likely to accidentally knife anybody.

[ Inn ]
Late afternoon Steph brought her prizes to the inn. She tried to wait until there were either several people around or nobody to drop off her kills, partly because she wasn't sure if it was cool to leave them without skinning them or anything but mostly because she didn't want to lie about how she caught them. The less people knew about her combat abilities the better.

She was less cautious about dropping off plants. She didn't want anyone to get the idea that she was going to be a steady source of food or wild herbs, but she was willing to look for something particular as a one-time favor.

She didn't seek out company, but she was out and about much more often these days trying to take Kat's implicit advice. She didn't have to cut herself off from the world just because she felt guilty.

[ Forest's Edge ]
Later in the evenings Steph hung out on the very edge of the forest to work out. This perhaps looked a little different for her than it did for other people. She started out with stretches, yes, maybe a few pushups and a set of pullups using a branch. But after that she turned cartwheels back and forth in the open area, starting with one round and maxing out at three. She wasn't quite up to speed yet to try handsprings. Eventually she would go down to the beach, where falling wouldn't hurt quite so much.

When she tired of cartwheels she moved on to handstands, holding it for 60 seconds before hand-walking to a tree for foot support and doing upside-down pushups. Then she took to the tree branch for some hanging crunches.

As a gymnast she is, of course, obligated to take requests.

[ Other ]
If you want a special prompt, feel free to ask!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Awhile back, Peter woke up to a big box full of chemistry equipment, and he is definitely very, very grateful for that. Big thanks to whoever is up there sending them secret presents, because a small chemistry set is 100% better than no chemistry set at all. But, it is a small chemistry set, a beginner's chemistry set in actuality, and while Peter can run some experiments with it, he perpetually feels like he's running into roadblocks. The frustration is definitely real.

Today, he's got a beaker of violent blue liquid that he's carrying down to the kitchen sink. The good news is it doesn't smell that bad, a little like lavender and burnt hair, and he's run enough tests to feel confident it won't eat through the pipes.

"Hey," he greets Stephanie when he walks in, a little nod of teenager solidarity as he steps over to the sink and twists on the taps.

"Hey," she responds without really paying that much attention. She's only sorting plants, after all.

A second later her brain processes having seen a beaker full of strongly scented liquid in an amazingly unnatural shade of blue.

"What you got there?"

"What this?" Peter asks, his grin lopsided as he tosses it over his shoulder. He wheezes out a laugh, and then looks back to the blue liquid where it's swirling down the drain. "This is definitely not a failed attempt to synthesize the chemical compound that makes those little blue flowers smell different for everybody. Like, at all."

A wave of scent hits him, the lavender mixing now with freshly-chopped onions along with the burnt hair, and he coughs, pulling a face. "No, it is, it totally is."

She snorts a laugh, waving a hand to try to dissipate the smell some. It’s not that it’s bad per se, just really strong.

“I didn’t even know that they did. So what, are you a chemist or something?”

"I am not not a chemist," Peter answers, because nobody's ever paid him to do it, but he doesn't think it's egotistical to think he's definitely way better than the average high school student, either. He used to swing around on webbing that he concocted; that's nothing to sniff at.

Although sniffing right now would be a bad idea anyway.

"I mean, like. I'm only 16, so I never had a job as a chemist or anything, but I do experiments. Sometimes they even work." He pulls another face. "Sorry it smells so bad."

"Oh, hey. I'm older than you." She probably could have guessed that, but when she arrived here he was sort of an authority on the place. It skewed one's impressions.

"Don't worry about it, we can air out the room."

"I'm probably still the youngest one here," Peter admits, although he's not sure about Ellie. It's hard to tell if she's actually younger than he is or just from a very different time. Asking her how old she was never even occurred to him; there are so few people his age here, it hadn't really seemed to matter.

He sets aside the empty beaker and moves to open the back door, take Steph's advice and try to air out some of the sickly-sweet scent. "I've gotten pretty used to it, to be honest," he admits, hunting for the stone on the stoop they all use to prop the door open.

“Being the youngest, or weird smells from brightly colored liquids?” It’s a valid question, even if it is teasing. She waves one of the nice-smelling herbs she had picked in the air in front of her, effectively accomplishing very little. Her hands will smell nice, though.

"Both," Peter blithely replies, and tosses her a grin over his shoulder as he drops the stone into place. Standing, he pops his back as he dusts off his hands. "I was going to say now at least, but actually it's always been both," he adds with a laugh and steps back inside.

She snickers as he returns to the kitchen.

"So hey, what kind of supplies are you working with, anyway? I didn't think there'd be enough raw materials for that sort of thing here."

"I got a couple of boxes awhile back— The big creepy ones that show up with your name on them," Peter replies. "It was pretty basic stuff, but it's a place to start." Poorly, apparently. "Mostly, it's just something to do."

It might help later or it might not, but Peter doesn't really know how to not be doing something with his time.

"Oh, I got one of those," she mentions just as a point of comparison. She'd thought that was a little weird, but it's good to know that other people have gotten them and suffered no ill effects.

"Get anything practical with it? Me and Bull were talking about baking soda, but I never got to take Chemistry."

"Alcohol," Peter admits, "for the burner that came with the set." And he sure has spent plenty of time considering whether he should use it for the intended purpose or donate it to the hospital stores. Eventually he reasoned his way into being selfish, but he still feels a little guilty about it.

"I'm trying not to use it if I can help it."

"Alcohol? I thought bunsen burners used, like, gasoline." For real, Steph is a total novice in this arena.

"Usually Bunsen burners use natural gas," Peter explains. "Liquefied petroleum sometimes, which is maybe what you're thinking of. But mostly they use like methane or propane, something like that. But what I got is an alcohol burner, not a Bunsen. Theoretically they're safer, but you also sacrifice a hotter flame, so."

Not that he has a choice regardless.

“Oh. Yeah, probably.” She followed maybe ten percent of that. Moving on.

“Have you made anything else with it?”

Peter's eyes briefly squint at her phrasing before he shakes his head. "No, not really," he replies as he reaches for the now-empty beaker and tips out the little bit of water that had gathered in the bottom. "Just research, mostly." Because he doesn't have close to what he needs to make web fluid in this place.

He hefts the empty beaker with a mild smile. "Back to it," he adds, and steps toward the door. "I'll see you around, okay?"

"See ya. Try not to blow yourself up." She waves as he goes.

Gotham. Joker. Black Mask. Jason has reasons for wanting to have this talk in person other than the excuse about typing being a pain - which is true, just not the main reason. Typed words don’t give you the same sense you get from reading a person’s body language, and the details about his life and death and resurrection aren’t exactly the sort of thing he wants fully broadcast for the entire village to see, if the topic of conversation starts moving in that direction, as it seems like it will.

The fountain’s neutral territory, a public space but open enough that anyone attempting to spy would be easily spotted. Steph already knows where he lives and he doesn’t read her as an outright threat, but Jason’s trust issues run deep. No sense inviting potential problems through his front door unless it’s absolutely necessary.

He arrives quickly and takes a seat on the fountain’s ledge, arms folded across his chest - tense, but not hostile, eyes scanning the area for Steph to arrive.

Steph takes her time getting to the fountain, paying special attention to her surroundings in case this is an ambush. The logical side of her brain says that's ridiculous, what reason does Jason have to ambush her? The much louder, irrational, constantly low-key afraid side of her brain says that danger is waiting around every corner. That's why she has throwing knives in her pockets and her collapsible staff tied at her back, hidden by overalls.

She's relieved when she sees he made it here before her. If it's an ambush he's going about it all wrong. She raises a hand in greeting, the other hanging by her thumb in her pocket.

"Heya."

“Hey.”

He nods in acknowledgment to her greeting but otherwise doesn’t budge from where he’s seated. She doesn’t look like she came to fight, but that possibility is always a hum in the background of Jason’s thoughts, an idea hardwired into his awareness long before he ever crossed paths with Batman. He gives the surrounding area a quick glance around, decides it’s deserted enough to proceed, and waves her to come closer, if she’s willing.

“What do you know about the Black Mask?”

She takes a seat on the fountain rim next to him, only close enough to be polite. She can move fast if she has to, and as long as she keeps her hands near her pockets she'll be able to reach blades even faster.

She doesn't meet his eyes.

"More than I'd like to. He's... well, he's a lot of things. Not nearly as well known as the Joker, so I guess it was just wishful thinking, but what I was trying to get at was... He's a sadist. He gets his kicks torturing people."

Her shoulders raise defensively as she explains, like the memories and emotion are physical things that she can ward off if she tries hard enough. She doesn't go on. Hopefully he'll get the hint as to her own manner of death.

He can read between the lines - the tension in her shoulders, the words she doesn’t say. Jason’s witnessed and lived through enough awful things to recognize the signs of experienced trauma, and what she’d said before about thinking she was dead, remembering bleeding out - well, it doesn’t take a genius detective to connect those dots. She doesn’t say it, so he does:

“And he got his hands on you.”

Tortured. Murdered. Jason thinks, suddenly, about what befell the other Jason he met in Wonderland, how instead of being beaten and blown up, he too was tortured, at the Joker’s hands, only he survived it, if you can call being forced to live with that kind of abuse surviving.

They’re all the same, aren’t they - Joker, Black Mask, the dozens of other freaks in costumes and code names that run wild through the streets of Gotham, ruining untold numbers of innocent lives because Batman won’t stop them, once and for all. Jason frowns deeply, white-hot anger flickering up his spine as his fingers curl tightly around the stone ledge. No one should have to suffer through what Steph did. Jason shakes his head and curses under his breath.

“Sounds like I should’ve done more than just blow up his office.”

Edited 2018-08-17 18:54 (UTC)

She just nods in response. This would have been easier over text, she thinks. She could fake being flippant, and she wouldn’t have to worry that she’s going to turn her head and he’ll be looking at her with pity, or horror.

The cursing, however, is an entirely new reaction. She frowns and turns to face him.

“You what?”

“I blew up his office.”

Jason runs a palm over his face, and when he turns to look at Steph, it’s not in pity or horror but understanding and smoldering fury. He’s too familiar with all of this to be properly horrified, but the anger held deep in his heart never quite burns out.

“Joker killed me, like you guessed. I was out of the country ... made a stupid mistake, and he caught me. Took me to a warehouse, beat me bloody, then locked me in with a bunch of explosives.” Jason closes his eyes for a moment, pushing a violent flash of memory back into the darkest corners of his mind, the Joker’s voice: Please tell the big man I said hello!

“I was sixteen. I guess I was supposed to be a message for someone, but I don’t remember what happened next, on account of being dead. I remember coming back, though - underwater, something called a Lazarus Pit. Does basically what it sounds like from the name. I spent the next five years getting back to Gotham and putting a plan together to get to the Joker. Black Mask was part of that plan - he had the pull and the resources to get the Joker out of Arkham. So I screwed around with his operations until he got so fed up, he cut a deal with the craziest guy in town.”

And that hadn’t worked out quite the way Jason wanted, though in retrospect, that little drama ended in a way he halfway expected. If Bruce hadn’t cared that Jason was dead, why would he care about him when he was miraculously brought back? Jason inhales a deep breath and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry, Stephanie. I should’ve taken Black Mask out. I should’ve taken ‘em all out years ago.”

She stares at him wide-eyed as he tells his whole story. There’s no judgment, maybe a wince when things get gory, but mostly she’s trying to process it all. There’s an idea forming in the back of her mind, but for now she lets it simmer.

When he finishes, when he apologizes to her, she starts to laugh. It’s almost a startled sound. After a moment she starts to cry, and quiets to a chuckle as she furiously dries her eyes.

"Crap. I’m sorry, it’s just... You blew up his office? That’s the best news I’ve gotten in a long time." The fear and despair she feels every time she thinks of Black Mask is very much overshadowed by the vindictive pleasure she derives from picturing him running away from an explosion, terrified.

"And now... you're apologizing to me? Like it's your fault? Like I didn't-" She stops herself before she can finish the sentence: Like I didn't bring it on myself. After the gift that this new mental image was she almost wants to tell him the truth, but she can't. He's from Gotham. He'll be angry, or disappointed, or disgusted. He can't know what she did.

The tears keep coming, and she keeps trying to rub them all away.

"Sorry," she says again.

Edited (mid-work epiphany) 2018-08-18 13:05 (UTC)

“What are you sorry for?”

It’s asked gently, not in reproach but genuine puzzlement. Jason knows it’s not uncommon for those who’ve been targets of violence to blame themselves for what happened - hell, Jason’s done it himself, blaming his death not only on the Joker but his own rash actions and lack of foresight that he’d be playing right into the Joker’s hands. And like Stephanie now, he’s found himself in tears plenty of times over the past five years, but unlike her, he was alone. He’s not sure if she’ll appreciate the gesture, but it’s what he would’ve wanted, if anyone had ever been around to listen or offer comfort. He decides to take a gamble and moves to gently place a hand at the back of her shoulder, if she allows it.

“Look, I don’t know what happened, how you got mixed up with a guy like Black Mask, but I don’t need to know. You didn’t do anything to deserve what he did to you.”

Tortured and murdered at the hands of a psychopath like Black Mask is a fate that should only ever befall someone of the same caliber, in Jason’s opinion, and he’s made up his mind to believe that Stephanie doesn’t belong anywhere near that category. He may not know her well, but that’s the impression he’s formed of her.

“I should’ve done more to protect people like you from scum like him. I’ve been in a position where I could, and I didn’t. I held back.”

“I keep crying,” she explains, starting to sniffle now as well. It’s a vulnerable and embarrassing state to be in with somebody she doesn’t really know, even if she’s decided he doesn’t intend to hurt her (for now).

She looks up at him when he puts a hand on her shoulder, only to look away again in shame. Maybe she deserved it and maybe she didn’t, but the fact remains that she did a stupid, horrible thing when the gang war started. She deserved to pay for that one way or another.

“You’re not the only one,” she offers when he’s finished. His voice has gone so gentle, he obviously really does blame himself for what happened to her.

“Got a hold of his gun, but I just... couldn’t do it.”

Edited 2018-08-18 19:17 (UTC)

“Crying’s normal. Nothing to be sorry about.” He’s clearly not judging her for it - Jason knows all too well what it’s like when your emotions build up to a breaking point, and crying is the only way to come back down to a baseline functionality. He’s cried more times than he could possibly count over what happened to him, and hearing Steph’s story, seeing the impact it’s had on her - it all resonates deeply in his bruised heart. It reminds him of himself, the brutally battered boy who died in that warehouse in Bosnia and came back screaming under the surface of the Lazarus Pit’s waters. It reminds him of the other Jason, the boy who was left behind in pieces at Arkham and put himself back together under the name of the Arkham Knight. If he thinks too hard about it, he’ll likely end up crying, too. He inhales a sharp breath and focuses on the rest of what she says instead.

“You ever killed anyone before?” It’s more of a rhetorical question than one that requires an answer - he assumes the answer is no, and continues: “It’s not really as easy as it looks in movies and comics. There’s a difference between pushing a guy off a balcony and shooting someone with a gun. Guns take practice, training. You gotta really know what you’re doing.”

It’s an oblique admission as to his own history - that he has killed before, and he’s experienced with firearms. It’s not the kind of thing he typically advertises when he’s not in body armor and a helmet, but in this situation, it seems right to say. Like it might be something of a reassurance for Steph to hear that she wasn’t somehow wrong in her inability to kill her killer first. Still, most people frown on murder, even in Gotham. Jason drops his hand from her shoulder, shifts to bring a knee to his chest, both arms wrapped around his leg - a substitute for the hug he’d like to give her but doesn’t know if she’d accept, especially in light of his vague confession.

“Seriously, don’t blame yourself for what happened. If you wanna blame someone, put the blame where it belongs. Gotham PD’s useless at best, if they’re not in someone’s pocket. And the city’s self-appointed moral authority won’t do a damn thing to actually stop the sickness from spreading - best he’ll do is slap a band-aid on and call it good while Arkham’s revolving door keeps kicking all those lunatics right back out to pick up where they left off. And then it’s people like you who have to suffer for it.”

The implication that he's good with guns gives her an instinctive spike in anxiety. But there aren't any guns here, not that she's seen. The information is stored away for now, into the same cooking pot as the unfinished thought.

She doesn't feel bad about not killing Roman Sionis. There were reasons, and they still resonate with her enough that the not-so-subtle reference makes her flinch. She doesn't trust herself to say anything for a long moment. He'll figure out she's a vigilante, and if he's so angry at Batman who's to say he won't take it out on her? It wouldn't be hard to guess, knowing that she managed to run into a guy with a skull face--

The thought bubbles up. She turns to watch him again, so she won't miss his reaction. That will probably tell her more than his answer.

"Can I ask you maybe a weird question?" This is only a formality. She doesn't wait more than a second for a reply.

"Have you ever worked with Batman?"

The question startles him, and he doesn’t make any effort to hide his expression as he turns back to face her. Plenty of people from Gotham don’t like Batman or his methods even if they haven’t met him personally, so Jason’s ire couldn’t have been enough of a clue on its own. She hadn’t recognized the name Jason Todd, and his death - the cover story about him dying in a random bombing - hadn’t caught much publicity in the Gotham papers anyway. No one gave much thought to the fate of an unexceptional street rat taken in by Bruce Wayne after an initial news cycle or two had noted it. And it’s not as if Batman held a press conference to announce Robin had been murdered at the Joker’s hands - Robin just disappeared without an explanation.

But there’s no reason for him to deny it. In Wonderland, his life story could be checked out at the damn library and read by anyone. Damian, Tim, Cissie, Jon - they all knew him, either by reputation or previous personal interaction. They’re not in Gotham now, and who Jason used to be really doesn’t matter here. There’s no crime war to fight, no one to protect by keeping his identity secret.

“Yeah,” he finally says, with a nod of his head. “I used to work with him, before I died. I - I was Robin.”

It’s been a long time since Jason’s acknowledged who he was before he died. It was easier to focus on who he needed to become in order to exact his revenge, easier to look ahead to his future plans than to remember and honor the boy who fell in battle. He looks away, shaking his head.

“Y’know, I used to argue with him all the time - enough with the moral high ground. We weren’t stopping crime, not in any way that made a real difference. But it was like talking to a brick wall. I died, and he - he didn’t care.”

He took me away from you. It’s been months since Jason forced that confrontation, months in which he has spent his waking hours burying his feelings as far down as they’d go, all the anger and the hurt and the betrayal, months that Jason has spent ignoring the fractures in his heart and pretending he’s unbreakable, and in this moment of revealing his terrible secret to a another murdered child of Gotham, all of it comes rushing back up, threatening to drown him.

“He didn’t care,” he repeats, and his voice wavers. “Nothing changed. Joker’s still alive.” Jason shuts his eyes against the sting of tears he can already feel building, dropping his face into an open hand. There’s nothing wrong with crying - Jason just doesn’t want to admit to anyone, even just the two of them, that the pain of that betrayal runs marrow-deep in his blood and bones.

He takes a moment to breathe, collect himself, rub at his eyes before he can look up to Steph again.

“How did you know?”

Edited 2018-08-19 02:56 (UTC)

Robin. She wasn't expecting something so close. In the business, sure, but maybe a vigilante like Helena or a criminal. Batman doesn't use guns, so of course Robin doesn't.

It feels like getting dumped into ice water. Another Robin, another obituary. She'd seen the suits in the cave but there weren't any names... or maybe he removed them before training her. He never said what happened to the people who wore them. She wasn't allowed to ask. Now, in light of all this, she can see why he's so angry. She can't relate, not really, because she's still too ashamed to feel anything like anger, but she can understand.

The cold feeling doesn't leave. For a moment she's terrified. He was Robin, a real Robin, and if he figures out what happened, what she did, it won't be like Kat. Kat didn't understand how a gang war could possibly be one girl's fault, but Jason would. He would understand, and he would know just how many people are dead because of her.

It's like a fog fills her brain, her flight or fight instinct malfunctioning and leaving her sitting there, wide eyed, shaking.

"What?" The question breaks through the fog just a few seconds late, and she gropes around for an answer.

"You... you knew enough to track down the Joker and Black Mask, and were confident enough to- to get close to them. And... it sounded like you spent a lot of time thinking about Batman."

“Fuck Batman,” he mutters, rubbing a hand over his face. He inhales a deep breath and sighs it out. “Yeah, I guess you could say I spent a lot of time thinking about him. You go out fighting the criminal element every night with a guy, you think you know him.”

He is that criminal element now, more or less, and Jason spent a good portion of the five years he let Bruce believe he was still dead thinking about him - about ways to hurt him the way he hurt Jason. But as it turns out, you can’t really hurt a brick wall; Jason realized this rather late into his elaborate stratagem, as Bruce turned to walk away from him, pistol held to the Joker’s head, yelling Him or me, decide, now! Even then, Bruce hadn’t chosen Jason over the Joker.

And yet ... when Jason activated the timer on the explosives, Bruce had pulled him out of the way of the blast. Why?

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, shaking his head to clear that nagging memory away. “He’s not my partner anymore and I’m not playing by his rules.” Which explains the guns, of which there are none in this place, but you don’t need guns to fight. Jason rakes a hand through his hair, mulling over an idea.

“Do you know any self-defense stuff? ‘Cause if not, I can teach you. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of threat in this place right now but you can never be too careful.”

The fog clears by degrees, her logical brain waking up again as he keeps talking. He doesn't know, and he doesn't have to know. It feels selfish, keeping this secret from someone she already feels a kinship with, but what she did was pretty selfish too. Why change now?

She turns to face the ground again, letting the shakes run their course.

"I know a bit." At least she only needs to lie by omission and understatement.

"From what I've seen most of the danger here comes from wildlife, and things like earthquakes and thunderstorms."

“Yeah ... not a whole you can do for that except stay aware of your surroundings.”

He senses, now that he’s pulled his focus out of his own well of pain, that something is off with Steph. Something caused a shift in her mood - something about what he’d said about being Robin, about knowing and working with Batman. He doesn’t have any inkling that she too wore that cape and mask, another soldier in Batman’s war on crime. For all he knows, she’s just a girl from Gotham who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and died at Black Mask’s hands. What is it he said that shook her? He assumes it must have something to do with him, the violence he’d intimated at, the offer to teach her self-defense. Maybe she’s frightened of him now and trying not to let on.

“Hey,” he says, softening his tone again, “look, I know you don’t really know me, and you’ve got no real reason to trust me, but I’m not gonna hurt you, OK? I promise.”

That was more or less the impression she'd gotten from him the moment he heard her story and started to share his. Still, she looks up to search his face for any hint of a lie.

"I believe you," she decides, then looks down again. Can she afford to get close to him? What if she slips? She only just started making real friends here, getting out and about, trying to drag herself out of the funk she's been in. Jason might compromise that.

Then again, she told Kat as much of the truth as she could stand to. Clearly that young woman had no intention of letting a few hundred deaths and several thousand injuries get between them. She would have at least one person left in her life whatever happened here.

"When I woke up here, I thought I was done. I'd never have to think about Gotham again, never go back. But... life goes on, apparently, even when it really shouldn't. I'm still trying to figure out what that looks like for me."

It's not a real explanation, and it doesn't particularly answer anything, but at least it's true.

Her answer doesn’t ring untrue, or even as a partial truth - it’s entirely in line with Jason’s own experience. Once he learned that his death hadn’t been avenged, he launched himself immediately into making plans, and that became his entire reason to keep pushing one foot in front of the other, all the way toward Gotham. Now, in the aftermath of the literal explosions those plans ended in, Jason is much less certain about what to do with this strange second chance at life he’s been given, and getting shuffled around to alternate dimensions doesn’t make that decision any easier.

There’s one thing he can do, though. He can be something for Stephanie, if she wants it - the support he never had when he was first in her position.

“I get that,” he says, with an understanding nod. “I’ve been there - hell, I’m still there, a lot of the time. And I don’t really have any good answers for you, but I know what it’s like.” He drops both legs over the ledge of the fountain, digging heels into the dirt. “Maybe sometimes you get stuck thinking about what you could’ve done different so this didn’t happen. Maybe that’s the thing that keeps you up at night when the nightmares aren’t taking a turn.” His own experience, but he imagines it’s probably not far off from hers, too. Jason gives her a sideways glance as he continues: “I don’t sleep a whole lot anyway, and I - I’m not great with the whole talking thing, but if you wanted to talk to someone about what happened, what you’re going through, someone who knows what it’s like - well, you know where I live.” He manages a tiny, crooked smile. “Just maybe let me know if you’re coming over first. Knock, or something.”

She gives a wry (if tired) smile in return.

"Aren't you supposed to expect the unexpected?"

She sniffles and wipes the last of her tears away. The time for crying is over, for now at least. She wasn't really expecting to start. That's just another thing she doesn't seem to have control over anymore, like fear and anger.

"But... it'd be nice to know I'm not the only one awake at 4am. I don't know how much serious talk I'm up for, but maybe we could just hang out?" She's been craving that kinship, she realizes now. Someone she can make casual comments to about how much Gotham sucks, who won't freak out when she talks about being dead, someone she doesn't have to hide her scars from to keep from upsetting. If that person happens to be an ex-Robin she needs to keep half a dozen secrets from, so be it.

“Yeah,” he says, huffing something like a laugh. “Expect the unexpected, prepare for everything.” Lessons he learned from Bruce, but somehow, Jason doubts even he would’ve been prepared for the situation in which Jason and Stephanie have found themselves. “Some things you just really can’t predict. Best you can do is roll with the punches and try to come up on top.”

He shrugs lightly. There’s not much sense in dwelling on the things they can’t control. They can’t change the forces that have brought them here - they can only control their own actions and reactions, their own choices of how to spend the time they have here. And Jason has decided on offering what he can of his understanding and compassion to Steph.

“Hanging out and not talking I can definitely do,” he says. “My best friend when I was a kid wasn’t much of a talker.” He smiles faintly at his own words. He’s always been lonelier than he’d ever admit, and the idea of knowing someone who understands something of his own experience is - a little terrifying, because it’s not easy for him to open up to people, and he’s already opened up to Steph more than he has with anyone else he’s met since being whisked away from Gotham. But that kind of companionship is something he deeply craves, more than the idea frightens him, so he reaches for it now.

She tries not to dwell either. How could anyone have been prepared for the shitstorm that she started? At least the Bats had comm links, people watching out for them, a strategist, proper weapons. She never stood a chance, and she knew it.

She manages another smile when he talks about his friend. It makes her think of Cass. Maybe they had their tiffs, but Cass’s only fault was caring in not quite the right way. And where should she have learned the right way?

“Yeah? My best friend back home was never much of a talker either. I don’t mind carrying a conversation about nothing.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive

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16th; fountain.

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