This is my second story here and I hope you'll like it. Please if you do follow and/or review (if you don't like it let me know too), also if you see mistakes in my English please tell me. And I'd say enjoy!
Justice or Revenge?
She was back.
Standing on the balcony of her current safe house she was deep in thought.
Not having been home in over two years and now here she was, well not really home but at least in the city where she had been born and had spent the first 13 years of her life.
She still felt a bit lost though: what should she do? Yes, she did have a plan that she had been preparing for a long time.
She'd been planning for the following night specifically for over a year and the last six months she had been busy to get every little detail right but now she wasn't sure if she should go through with her big plan.
She knew Talia supported it but Ducra, her teacher, had told her before she left that she should always follow her heart and control her anger instead of letting it control her and she wasn't sure if this was the right path according to her heart, maybe it was what all her anger wanted.
Maybe what she was doing wasn't seeking justice but revenge.
She thought about her family, no they weren't her family more like the people she had called family once upon a time, it was stupid and she knew it, but even now she didn't want to disappoint them, even if they had let her down and probably even forgotten all about her since she'd been replaced such a short time after her death.
At the thought of her death her normally blue-green eyes flashed a poisonous green and gone were her doubts.
The only thing remaining in her head was all her anger and she felt stupid for even having had doubts, it wasn't like there was even a reason for it.
Done with the view of the city she turned around and walked back into the apartment determined to make everyone who had wronged her pay for it.
And tomorrow she would start.
She glanced at the suit she'd been wearing the last six months while making a name for herself overseas.
She had designed it herself and perfected it during the previous months.
It consisted out of cargo-pants, reinforced with Kevlar, a reinforced turtle neck with padding to disguise her female form, combat boots with steel tips that were made to look bigger than her size 6 and had disguised heels of more than an inch to make her look taller, a Kevlar reinforced leather jacket with a lot of pockets filled with all kind of gadgets, black motor gloves with steel knuckles and a holo-computer on her left wrist and last was her helmet.
It was made of a very strong, light weight alloy and outfitted with gadgets like heat vision, UV, X-ray and night vision functions in the lenses.
A comm device, air filter and voice modifier were build in.
It was painted in a mat scarlet red so she could still use stealth when she wore it.
Underneath her helmet she always wore a red domino mask in case she had to abandon her helmet.
The helmet was one of several because she knew she could only repair it so many times.
They were a present from Talia, modeled after a design she'd come up with herself.
She'd also gotten a kriss knife, a replica of one of Ra's' and one of the few things that could cut through the robes her former mentor and his lackeys used.
She knew, she'd tested it.
She would see them soon and then she'd let them know what she thought about them. She was going to give them hell with a capital H.
They'd failed to avenge her, replaced her and plainly forgotten all about her and that was something that was going to change if she had anything to say about it.
Now, she'd show them what they could do with all their bullshit about family.
After all how much could it possibly mean if they couldn't even bother to notice she'd crawled out of her own grave.
But that was for tomorrow night, tomorrow she'd start.
They'd never see it coming and she was going to enjoy every second of it. But for now sleep.
She went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and glanced in the mirror somehow still expecting to see a boyish face look back at her but man had she changed at lot over the last few years.
Some things were still the same like her eyes - almond form with irises in a mix of sky blue and emerald green surrounded by dark lashes – although right now they gleamed too bright green (something she liked to ignore) and her hair – black with messy curls that had a dark red shine to it when lit by the sun – though now much longer than it used to be (it passed her shoulders by about an inch instead of the boyish cut she'd had at the age of 13) were the same.
But the rest of her appearance had changed a lot, not enough to make her unrecognizable by people who knew her but enough to make them have to look twice.
And of course the fact that almost everyone who had known her at that age had thought she was a boy helped although she was fairly certain Bruce had known she was a girl but had been waiting for her to tell him and of course Alfred had known but that man knew fucking everything.
The time she could fool anyone into thinking she was a boy had passed since her pretty cherubic child-face had grown into that of a woman even though she had only turned 16 a few months before.
When she'd been adopted after Dick had been Bruce's ward people had often asked Bruce where he got all the pretty orphans.
Now she knew she was attractive because people often stared at her and boys made too many comments to be a coincidence.
It was one of the reasons she'd designed her suit to make her look like a man but also so they wouldn't underestimate her.
Her hair she hid by binding it up so she could wear her helmet over it.
Interrupting her thoughts she quickly brushed her hair and changed into an old shirt for bed.
When she finally lay down in her bed she glanced at the clock on her nightstand and groaned when its display said 2:47 AM.
Closing her eyes she decided to try to catch at least some hours of sleep before morning came.
She knew she would wake up during the night, probably several times, due to night terrors but right now all she wanted to do was sleep, she was dog-tired and indeed within a few minutes she was fast asleep.
It was about 8 AM when she decided to get up because she wouldn't get any more sleep anyway.
She had spent the night drifting between different nightmares and had woken up screaming multiple times after which she'd spent several minutes trying to calm her breathing enough to be able to go back to sleep.
That had become a routine sometime after the pit, it wasn't like she didn't have nightmares before, she had seen enough terrible things for a lifetime when she'd been only 13, both on the streets and as Robin.
But nothing could have prepared her for being murdered by a grinning maniac and waking up buried in her own coffin followed by a dip in Ra's Al Guhl's Lazarus pit.
After she got up she made her way to the small kitchen – clean, thank you very much – and put on some coffee to at least feel a bit more alive, she was sure she looked like a zombie right then, well not like she wasn't a zombie in the first place 'Jasmine don't go there', but after at the very least two cups of coffee she would be able to think a lot clearer and not feel like her mind was filled with clouds.
She drank her coffee with a lot of sugar, just like she did it back when she lived at the Manor.
Alfred would give her disapproving looks for it but he still made sure there was always sugar on the breakfast table and that was just for her since Bruce and Dick drank their coffee without it, Bruce drank it black and Dick did it with a lot of milk, so much that it was actually more milk then coffee.
But she made it with sugar, just enough that not every grain would dissolve in the sour black liquid and that at the end of her cup she'd let the rest of the sugar melt on her tong, it was something she'd already done when she'd still lived with the bastard that had been her father and her mother – although she should probably call her her stepmother now but that didn't change the fact that Catherine Todd had been the only mom she'd ever had – ever when there was sugar to be found in their ratty apartment.
After she'd had her coffee she went to the fridge to look for something she could use to make breakfast.
She found some eggs and made a mental note to herself to shop for groceries one of the following days because there wasn't that much left in the fridge.
She made herself an omelet with cheese and tomato and ate it while sipping at her 3rd cup of coffee.
After breakfast she cleaned her cup, plate and all the cutlery she had used and took a quick shower before heading out for a run in the park that ended up being a run through almost the entire city because the weather was just so good which meant that it took hours before she was back at the apartment she refused to call home.
There she took another shower all the while avoiding looking in the mirror because she knew that if she did she'd see a pair of eyes that still looked too green staring back.
It was an almost constant reminder that she wasn't who she had been. She also knew that the green gleam wasn't always there but she didn't know what brought it up so she had no way of avoiding it.
Not that she really cared about how she looked, god no, but whenever she had eyes like that it seemed much more difficult to think straight.
But that were sorrows for later, now she had work to do.
And with that thought she left the bathroom to get her work-clothes from the hidden compartment in her closet.
She put on the armored clothes, checked the supplies of gadgets in her jacket's pockets, the ammo for her guns, strapped her knife around her left thigh and her main gun around her right and put on her boots.
She then bound her hair, put on a red domino mask and last came the red helmet she both feared and needed so much.
She tested the different features of the lenses and started the computer that gave her the latest stats on situations in the city.
Now she was ready, now the Red Hood was ready to go out to play.