It had started in the rain. It was a crappy day, the kind where you just want to sit inside the whole day drinking some warm, wrapped in a blanket, and watch a good movie. But sadly, Robin had not been able to do any of that, she had been at work since five this morning. Soaked down to her skin, shivering in the cold April rain, Robin cursed herself for not getting a taxi when it had been offered to her. It had been a really long day at work and taking a taxi all the way across town seemed foolish, now it seemed foolish not to take it. With every step she took in the rain, she could feel the drops getting deeper and deeper into her skin, the tremble in her lip getting more intense every time that the wind picked up. She wished she would have brought her umbrella to work with her that day, but the weatherman had not called for rain at all today but wit the way that the whole year was going she should have guess it would have rained- or worse, snowed.
Night had fallen over the city hours ago, before she had gotten out of work, but she could tell that she was late for dinner, hours late because of something that Pepper, her boss, had made her do before she was able to leave. The sounds of a few males falling out of a local bar could be heard in the steps that were coming from behind her and that cat calls started soon after this. On any other day Robin would not have minded this, she was an attractive girl and she knew it, but on this day she did not want anything to do with five drunken fools, she just wanted to get home in one piece. They scared her, something from within her told her to run, to run as fast as she could and to pray that she could make it back to her house before they were able to catch up to her. Their voices got low, to a whisper, as they kept looking to her and that when she flung her brand new heels off of her feet and took off. She could hear the five man running after her.
" Common Love, we just want you to show us a good time!" One drunk cried out.
" I'll have the dress off within a minute." Another one called out.
" I bet that you will love it when I tear that ass in two." A third, much bigger guy cried out as she ran as fast as she could down the alleyway that connected to her apartment building when one of them finally caught her and slammed her against the wall.
" Help!" Robin cried out as loud as she could, trying to fight him off of her. " Someone please! Help!"
She knew that she would have been able to fight off one of them, they were drunk, but one girl against five men, even drunk, was a fight that anyone would lose. Robin kicked and hit hunt he pinned her to the wall, reeking of Gin and a few breath mints. She could hear the others running down the alleyway too and started to break into tears. This could not be happening to her, was all that kept going through her mind as she screamed for help. That's when one of them pulled out a knife and brought it to the girls cheek, running the non-sharp side of the blade from the side of her eye to her chin. Robin could feel her heart in her throat, the tears blending in with the rain, dripping down her dress which was tightly pressed to her body.
" Help!" She screamed out, testing the drunks, and felt a sharp pain on the side of her face that made her scream out again.
" Common, you act like you don't want this." The male that was in front of her whispered into her ear as she quietly wept as he ripped her skirt clean up the side.
" Leave her alone." Was all she heard from behind the man before he was pulled off of her.
" Why don't you just get out of here, Friend, we have no issues with you." One of the guys, the big one, said with his hands up.
" Get the hell out of here and we wont have any issues." The man said as he placed himself between the drunks and Robin.
" Can't do that, Friend." Another one said, though she could not see her hero's face, she could see by the clenching of his fist that he was happy about this.
" I was hoping that you would say something like that." Her hero smiled as he slammed her fist right across the side of his face, sending the drunk right into the wall.
" Knife!" Robin called out as the man that had been in front of her ran right for her hero, hitting him in the side with it.
What happened next was something that Robin could not believe. First of all, the guy had a metal arm! Without even flinching about being stabbed, her hero just takes the man by the throat and slams him up against her apartment building, cracking a few bricks as he did so, before allowing him to drop to the ground. The three that were help unharmed help the others up and started to run away, leaving Robin to just stand there with her mouth hanging wide open, starring at the man who had saved her. All she could do was look from him to the way that the five drunks had run, before she noticed that the rain was not the only thing getting the mans shirt wet.
" Oh my god, you have been stabbed! We need to call 911 and get you to a hospital!" She said as she ran over to her hero.
" No!" He yelled as he finally look to her.
His eyes were a beautiful shade of brown with little specks of blue in them that just took her breath away with how much sorrow they had within them. Everything about him really just made her more intrigued with him though, Robin could have sworn she had seen him before. As he tried to walk away from her, it was Robin's turn to pull on a man's arm, swinging him around and looking to her. She was frightened at first, he looked like he may slam her against the wall with that metal arm and bash her skull in.
" If you are not going to go to the hospital, you should atleast have someone make sure that you are not going to die from internal wounds. Common, I'll clean it up and if it needs stitches I have some pretty steady hands." She smiled sweetly to the man whose scowl slowly started to shift into a worried look.
" No. . . I could not make you do that for me." He hesitated and tried to pull away as she lightly kept pulling the man from the alleyway.
" You just saved me from being raped and possibly murdered. In any crappy romance novel I would be taking you up to my room to have heated passionate sex." Robin smiled as she heard the man nearly choke as she pulled him into her apartment building, past Mark the doorman, she leaned in close to the man to make sure that Mark would not see the fact that the man had a knife impaled into his side. " Don't worry, you don't have to be so worried about that."
" Is that so?" He said with a playful smile as she pressed the button to the elevator.
" Well I mean we are in New York City, and you do seem like a cute guy and all, but I really doubt that my roommates would appreciate me having a one night stand with someone on a school night." Robin said as she pulled him into the elevator and hit the button to the 22nd floor.
" So how does a girl like you find yourself alone at eleven-thirty at night, running home in the rain, in the city that never sleeps?" He asked lightly.
" Work was a bitch today and I couldn't get out until I finished what my boss needed me to get done. So low and behold at eleven at night I get out, refuse to take a taxi, and well you get the rest. I lost a pair of heels from that." She sighed as she curled her toes around the dirty, but dry rug of the elevator. " So, my knight in shinning armor, am I going to get your name anytime tonight?"
" It's. . . it's. . ."
" Listen dude, if you don't feel like telling me, tell me a lie then. I just wanna know the name of my rescuer." Robin smiled, the guy really did not know how to lie well anyway.
" James, it's James." Robin smiled to this as she tugged him out of the elevator and down the dimly light hallway that just went in a straight line. James, she liked it, though it did not fit him very well.
" Nice to meet you James, my knight, I'm Robin." She said lightly as she pulled her keys out of her coat pocket, body still shaking from fear and cold as she tried to put it into the key hole but found that she was shaking too hard when the cool of a metal hand was placed on top of hers and took the keys from her and did the locks to her apartment.
" Steady hands, huh?" James smiled down to her lightly.
" Only when they've gotta be. Now hush, they're gonna be asleep." She said as she flipped on the light to her kitchen to find that both her siblings were asleep on the couch with the news on.
" And those are your roommates?" James said with a wider smile as he stated more than questioned them.
" Don't start to think that they're mine. Their my siblings." Robin said as she pulled out a chair for her knight to sit on. " Now don't you dare try to slip out the door, I still gotta go back and find my shoes sometime between now and tomorrow and I would hate to have to hunt those and you down." She demanded from him as he placed his hands up with a soft smile as she lightly went to the living room part of her apartment and lightly woke up her two kid-siblings.
They had fallen to her hands when her parents had died, terrible accident at work that no one really brought up anymore. Robin knew that there was no one else that would be able to take care of her siblings, there was no one else left in her tiny family to take care of them, so Robin dropped everything that became the mom and the sister of her always shirking family. Cecilia was five, blonde like their mother and the joy to the family. Simon was twelve and kind of took on the role of playing big brother to Cecilia when he had to, he was trying so hard to be the man of the family that it really wore him down and no matter how hard Robin tried she could tell that it was eating away at the boys childhood. As she picked up her little sister, she could tell that her brother had already picked up on the fact that there was someone else here.
" Did Stark finally say yes to a date?" Simon asked lightly, as Robin rolled her eyes and gently nudged him.
" No and I told you, I do not work for Stark." Robin hissed as she lead them back towards the twos room.
" He looked familiar though, is he one of your old modeling friends?" Her brother asked as he kept looking back down the hall towards the kitchen. " What the hell happened to your face?"
" No, but he really does seem familiar. He just saved me from. . . from getting mugged, well after the guy took a good slice out of my face, and I'm just fixing-"
" I really don't want. . . or have any energy to pry tonight." Simon said with a yawn before opening the door to a room that was on one side filled with superhero crap and the other side was skateboarder junk.
" Still odd that she could not have liked princesses." Robin sighed as she placed her sister into the bed that had the avengers comforter on it.
" I don't know. . . I mean I would take that Black Widow-"
" Shut the hell up before I come over there and smack the shit out of you." Robin said as she lightly kissed Cecilia on the forehead and then walked over to her brother and fist bumped him. " Night, Jerk."
" Later, Brat." She could see the smile on her brothers face as she left the room, in the bathroom to pull the rubbing alcohol out of the cabinet under the leaking sink, and walked back towards the kitchen to find that the man looked like he was about to bolt out of her apartment.
" Don't even think about it yet. . . you still have a knife in your side." Robin playfully glared to James as she moved to the far end of her small kitchen, pulling out some needle and threat, then opened top shelf and pulled out a bottle of Vodka and slid it in front of the man.
" What's this for?" James said as he looked from her to the bottle.
" Its the best form of pain medication that I have in this house, seeing as you won't go to the hospital, you may need it." Robin said as she got down to her knees and started to look at the knife wound. "
Looks like it didn't go in far enough to really penetrate anything too important."
" Are you even old enough to drink?" James asked.
" Don't ask dumb questions." She was nineteen, she had gotten in from a friend of a friend a few months back.
" Are you a nurse?" James asked as Robin just started to laugh.
" No. . . but my mother wanted me to be. Here, hold this," Robin said as she pulled the towel off of her stove, " When I pull this out it is going to start bleeding a lot and we are going to need to stop it from bleeding too much. I'm going to try and clean it out, and then we'll get to stitching it up." Robin nodded as she looked up to James, she could tell that he knew that she was fighting not to faint and was scared as hell.
" You know I could probably just do this on my own. . ." He said, hoping that would make her feel better.
" No! You saved me, I'm going to save you now get ready to put pressure on it." She said as she grabbed a hold of the knife and started to pull it out.
James's side was patched up pretty well. Though Robin felt like she was going to either vomit or faint ( or possibly both ) she was happy to know that it was patched and had stopped bleeding. James not even once flinched or really looked like he was in pain at all, he just sat there and allowed her to pour rubbing alcohol into the wound and then she started to stitch away. Once she felt like the room was back the way that it was supposed to be, she was the one to take the first hit off of the bottle. It was chocolate whipped cream flavored, though that did not help it taste any better, she took a long drink off of the bottle. He had cleaned up her face after. It may have needed a stitch or two but she was not like him, she thought that going to the hospital would have been better and just allowed him to clean it up as she kept drinking off of the bottle before she handed it to him to take a few swigs off of.
They spent the whole night up with one another. Nothing romantic, just talking and drinking. Robin doing most of the talking, but James seemed like he was hanging off of every word that she said. James was something that she had never seen before, he was like no man that she had ever come into contact with before. He was charming in his own way, but everything about him told a story of deep sorrow and regret, and there was the fact that Robin could have sworn that she had seen him somewhere before. But when James smiled, it was like the whole room light up, they were so rare, true smiles like the ones that he did, that it was a beauty all on its own. Robin really just wanted to call out of work the next day and just sit there the whole night and stare into his eyes, tell him to tell her his story, and in that way she would be hanging off of his every word, because she knew that he had a story that would be worth listening to. Never did James come onto her, not when she was sober and not when she was tipsy either.
She could not tell when they finally fell asleep, but when her phone alarm went off at six-thirty, it seemed like she had only been asleep for a couple minutes before she stumbled into the kitchen and started to make herself a pot of coffee. Robin debated calling out of work and just going into her bedroom and sleeping off the day, she even thought that Pepper wound understand her calling off work, but she needed the money pretty badly. Besides, someone had to make sure that the kids actually got out of bed and got on the school bus. She also had to make sure that they had lunches packed and that they had something to eat before they went to school as well. All Robin could so was sigh as she pulled some peanut better out of the cupboard and shuffled to the fridge, grumbling the whole way, as she pulled out eggs, milk, and jelly and started working on both the kids breakfast and lunch, hoping that she was not putting ingredients where they did not belong.
" He's still here?" Simon yawned as he, half awake, pulled the orange juice out of the fridge and poured it into two cups.
" Yep. I. . .I don't know if he really has anywhere to go." Robin sighed as she tried to shake the fuzziness out of her brain.
" So is he going to be our bum then? We're just going to start a homeless shelter here?" Simon whispered.
" Only if they save my life." Robin said as she placed the scrambled eggs onto a large plate, that was the only way that she could get her sister to eat eggs, scrambled.
" Good-morning!" Cecilia said as she skipped around to the dinning table in the kitchen.
" Shh Celie, we have company that slept over last night." Robin said as she placed her index finger to her mouth as her little sister whipped her head to the couch to find the big man on the couch.
" Oh. . . sorry." She said with a smile as she skipped to her place at the table and ate her breakfast, everything with that little girl had to be happy, it was not in her system not to be happy.
Robin had called and said that she would be a little late to work, personal issues. She had made sure that the kids had gotten onto the school bus before lightly placing a blanket onto the man who had taken over her couch. She did not want to wake him, he looked like it wast he first time that he had found peace in awhile, but she also knew that she had to talk to him. Robin was not a dumb girl, she knew that if she left this man in her house that there was a probability that she would come back to find that there was nothing left of her house, that James had taken everything and left. But she still felt like there was a debt between the two of them that she was going to have to pay off.
So she lightly nudged the man, but before she knew what happened she found the metal arm wrapped around her neck, cutting off all form of air. She was so stunned that she could not do anything besides choke on the lack of air. But James finally noticed that it was her and dropped her instantly, taking in deep breaths and refusing to look at her as he did this.
" You've been through some shit I see, Afghanistan?" Robin asked as she looked to James to find that he was finally looking back at her.
" No.. . . no. . . I should get-"
" No. Don't worry about that, I mean it was freaky and everything and I should probably call the cops but I' not. Stay here, sleep off the alcohol. I've gotta get to work, I'm already late and well money doesn't grow on trees." Robin shrugged as she pulled herself up from the ground.
" I really couldn't."
" Well thank god I am not asking then. Stay. Sleep." She said as she handed him a throw pillow to place under his head as she walked to the doorway and pulled on a pair of flats. " And if you think that you could steal anything just know, the doorman may be lazy but he ain't stupid, he'll call the police on your ass." This made James smile lightly.
" Thank you." He said.
" And if you want . . . just if you want though, it's spaghetti Friday and I could always pull up another chair for dinner. I mean my brother and sister are going to be off with their friends tonight and if you wanted I could make enough for two . . . if you want that is, no pressure." She found that she was really nervous to ask a man, with a metal arm, that she was not too sure if he was homeless or not, to have dinner with her.
" I'd like that." James said with a soft smile as she smiled widely.
" Well if you still think that when you are sober again, just tell the doorman that you are here to see me at around seven? I should be out of work by then and have dinner made, just come on up." Robin said, hoping that he was going to show up as she shut the door to her apartment.