Title: A Librarian.
Summary: Somebody has to take up the responsibility of putting books back to where they belonged in the estate of Al Ghul, and that belongs to Tallant. Unfortunately, this is sometimes interrupted by important events as they occur. Batclan, AU fic for Rose Midnight Moonlight Black.
Disclaimer: Do not own the characters, the bases of this premise, or any credits set to be part of the comics or cartoons, do not sue me, please.
Warning: AU to the max but not without its charms as well as many characters as possible running around. RMMB's OC Helena Kyle appears, as well as Damian Wayne so, yeah.
Dedication: I found myself wondering, just on occasion, where the devil Rose Midnight Moonlight Black had gone off to. I now realize she was further developing her genius with the drafting and writing of her 'Unseelie Tea' which, for those of you that do not read her work, was point of fact one of the best fics ever written and should be given commendations and medals of the highest order. This little thing is my unfailing reward as such….Seriously, go and read her fic. DO IT NOW.
-:-
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and
older than the flow of human blood in
human veins.
-Langston Hughes.
There was a little white bowl, no bigger than the fist of a man's hand perched atop one of the exactly five-thousand and fourteen bookshelves placed in various odds and ends, ending, beginning and strangely assorted rooms in the manor on the edge of a dimension just outside the plains of human reality that belonged to the family of Al Ghul and looked rather reminiscent of the cathedral Notre Dame.
The white bowl that held the perfumed ends of sticks that had once been incense burnt down to a piece of wood only as long as a pinky finger, sat smoldering the dust of many different scents and thoughts, wafting up billows, a pillar of smoke that curled to the ceiling and around the figure of Tallant Al Ghul, standing on the third step of a slide-to-the-side ladder attached to a long winding bookcase.
Under his breath, breathing in through his nose a trace smell of the devil's favorite perfume—Clean Warm Cotton—and something like chocolate pecan, the teenager with octane colored hair tied loosely in a tail (a loose bang curving the front of his right eye) read a few lines from the hand-written copy of 'Hannibal en Hannibal'. The gothic work was a masterpiece to set along the tomes of other masterpieces his mother had looked over in the last couple weeks and had him collect and put back on the shelves. He had already put back 'The Monk'—an awful thing with violence, incest and sadism to name a few points—in the room that his uncle Dusan called Sliding Reality Room. Tallant had gotten lost along the scant and escape of wild growing rose thorn trees in a forest that should not have been there, but was, and he had not come back out into the winding hallway unscathed. Indeed, the bandage he'd applied to the skin along the bulge of his palm caught the light of the thousands of candles placed about the room he was in as he put the tome in his hand back among its others.
His eyes, bright and still learning, flickered upwards as, suddenly and seeming without cause, the smoking white bowl skittered about, legs that had been underneath it that had the look of spider's, clicked out and it moved three feet over towards the edge. Its legs clicked again and, even more unusual as it rarely behaved like a frightened bug as the rest of the scent bowls did, it bounded from the bookshelf Tallant stood by and over his head to the shelf across the way. A few bits of still smoking debris fell away and onto the floor, these ones wafting up smoke of Animalic Iris, Herbal Amber and Failed Cologne.
As the teenager stepped from the height he stood upon to pick up the wood pieces before they alighted and set the one hundred year old blue carpet to flame, fingers tight around the ends of wood, the reason for the scent bowl's panic became quite apparent. A shadow formed from the hundreds of shadows around the room he stood in—rather a simple room that was the size of a lake, all blue in color and opened out onto a balcony that looked over to other private rooms in the manor—and he looked into his own face, though much older than he was himself.
His older brother—one of many—looked upon him in his robes of sky blue and ebony black that gave Tallant the impression of looking at an acclaimed sorcerer, rather than one of his father's knights. Damian looked much more calm than he had last time, but still looked upon his brother with the mild distain and something or other that he always did since their mother introduced Tallant when she was in the middle of an attempt to usurp their father—her beloved's—throne for what felt like the hundredth time in ten years. Damian was not entirely unkind (and how could he be, what with that half-wit Grayson as a father figure for such a long time) but he was still older than his sort-of twin and had to act a bit like an ass ever time they were about the placement and time and surrounding of the other.
"Tallant, I didn't know you were into such dark literature," Damian grinned, teeth white as ever and eyes scanning the reading of their mother.
"What do you want, brother?" The younger of the pair of near indistinguishable men asked, going back to the third step of his ladder, hand that was not bandaged grabbing an original copy of 'Faust'.
"Helena and I came to announce that the coronation of Terry is tomorrow at first moon's light. It will be the first time father will allow him to see the world, what with him just opening his eyes three days ago, still with his ears closed and his little wings without fur. I would think you would like to be there."
The mention of the large black wings that each of the born of blood sons of Wayne had, granted Tallant the perverse urge of wanting to spin Damian around and open his cloaks wide, so that he might see the ebony of his brother's own wings, span at least thirty feet, which dwarfed Tallant's impressive twenty feet span. Both were nothing compared to their father's majestic leather width and spire and length, but impressive all the same. Tallant's own wings often stayed hidden under his clothing as it both displeased and excited their mother. She had once, in a fit of rage at her beloved's actions to display power over the Al Ghul dominion, taken Tallant aside and ripped at his left wing. It now sported a tear near the base of the muscle that curved in his flight and caused him chill and discomfort even on summer nights.
The thought of meeting his and Damian's little brother, wings pink and perfect before the world tried to sully them caught his attention; even more-so than the sounds of snowfall-like steps scurrying the way of the two brothers that most definitely was their sister and Tallant's pets.
Tallant ignored his hearing of the encroaching hoard for the moment and picked up another book, this one bound in leather and with a title only their grandfather could read, and maybe Dusan as it was the text of a long-forgotten people Ra's once held sway over in an attempt to create a class of people completely reliant on the immortal—well, almost immortal—being. He slipped it between a pair of books that could have been sisters clothed in yellow paper with littler red birds drawn upon the covers.
"If I can get mother's permission, I will come," Tallant said, voice hesitant, that feeling of the collection of cats he heard finally drawing to a close around the bookcase the brothers stood between. His eyes glanced down and he found curling about his ankles his two biggest males, both with dark eyes that set blood a boiling when blood shown on the moon looking up at him expectantly, and ignoring Damian in his entirety. One was a course, rugged ginger from a southern state of the Americas Tallant had picked up striking fear into the hearts of mice and large dogs, making noises fit for Black Annis of Ireland or Scotland; Tallant and Damian's aunt Nyssa named the tom Jonathan, but both boys liked to call him Scarecrow on account of how many of the dark birds he caught outside of windows to eat them whole. The other feline was a ginger with tiger stripes and leopard spots and cooling eyes that seemed to hold the answers to the world. It would be appropriate, as Tallant had to drag the fellow from a library in Washington and he yammered on and on and on more than a dog; his name was Edward, but Tallant sometimes called him Eddie—it seemed to make the creature's hair turn up and ruffle him, which pleased the dark prince somewhat.
Damian looked over the two felines grabbing for his brother's attention and looked above their heads as the white bowl clicked to life and scurried to the other end of the shelf it stood upon, hitting its underside once and a while as two pairs of brilliant, dazzling eyes emerged from the dark; their figures emerged as well, one sleek red that would shame roses that seemed to glow green along her front paws and stomach and tail that curved off and split into three tails that set along green eyes just as beautifully—Damian can't quite recall whether his brother called that queen Ivy—and the other a blinding white-yellow that seemed to be ruined in effect by dark brown and black diamond shaped spots along her spine, flank, back legs to finally group into the pitch of a night sky at the end of her raggedy tail, blue eyes spectacular. Damian didn't remember what Tallant called her and didn't think more on it as another shape emerged from the shadows (so like her mother) to grab at the little ladies and hold them to her chest. The smile along her lips with her fangs that could be called teeth just visible to the naked eye as their sister, Helena, laughed; the furballs clutched in her arms made a protest to go after the bowl again and that, more than their sister coming into the focus of the blue room, caused Tallant to look up from his miscreant males that were ruining his own dark robes with their fur.
"Talia would never give you permission, though," Helena smirked crookedly down at her brother, her own claws smoothing the fur of the two queens before she let them go; Ivy bounding to the floor to go look for rats and Harley—now Damian remembered, somehow—just sat and growled pitifully at the still scuttling white bowl, clicking its legs in most assured antagonism. Her big blue eyes flashed once and then she was gone in a mist of smooth silver and tan vapor that copied the smoke from the skittering white bowl perfectly, the scent of ashes and rock salt left behind.
"She's right, little brother," Damian continued, voice coaxing in a way so very similar to Tallant's own rhythm whenever and often he tried to get Dusan to give him the keys to let the somewhat loyal son of Talia outside the palace. That voice and tone often got Tallant exactly what he wanted without fail and without any reason that could be explained by someone with even a few more scruples than the entire Al Ghul clan line presented themselves and itself as to have. Tallant would need his wits about him for the time being.
A sort of current passed above the look-alike brothers' heads and when each of them blinked, Helena was between them, something brilliantly white with red here and there folded in her arms that was about the size of the flag that stood erect each day outside of the territory of their father—a military sized one that could clothe a fully grown man in robes and a cloak; a giant black bat figure standing out against a blue background unlike the linen in Helena's arms—that she held out to Tallant. Her dark fingernails stood gaunt apparent to the cloth.
Tallant raised a brow, putting a deep grey colored book in the middle lining of the shelf he stood before. He took up the cloth from his elder sister and it unfurled at half length, silk arms spreading outwards like tapered figures. The visage of a red bat was died upon the breast and sewn into the right side of the apparent robes were black, yellow, blue, all colors of the knights of their father's kingdom for sashes.
Helena and Damian both grinned, sneaky and strong as they were in all things, together or apart, and always like this just before they got their younger sibling in trouble with his mother and grandfather but got their uncle to revel in Tallant disassociating himself from the ways of the Al Ghul clan. It was hardly healthy, seeing as it got the winged teen's pulse and adrenaline flowing in ways that could not possibly lead to a good route in the health department, but it did work to their advantage in getting Tallant to come out of the shell he created around himself to protect him; shamrock against pixies.
Tallant walked down the hall, his siblings following him silently and skillfully with steps like sand falling upon itself after the ocean lapped against it. The cats not following as they usually did with just their master, but vanished much like their blonde queen had, the scent of burning leaves and rotting oranges left when the smoke and dust of changing places and time settled behind the two men and the one woman, all heading down stairs connected to the blue room that wound down or up, depending where they wanted to go.
When they left the realm of a color that made up what often was thought to be the essence of the blue marble that was the world they cultivated and presided over, Tallant lead them into the Summer Garden, so called because in was a place Ra's had created inside a small universe that focused in the manor they were in. The season never changed in the room and was really meant to grow special fruits and herbs that only Ra's and Talia knew the uses for, trees hanging overhead to cling to an impossibly high ceiling as tall as a lifetime that colored itself a deep, blood red. It was always hot, but the place offered a Merry-Go-Round at its center to circle a breeze out of the whispered musings of the painted tigers and elephants dressed for India that the ride offered, rather than the simplistic braying horses at carnivals and fairs for children.
Tallant walked straight up and upon the Merry-Go-Round, mounting an elephant painted rampart black of sin, admiring and scrutinizing over the offered robes his sister gave him. Damian stayed upon the ground, allowing his wings to stretch behind him and tease the nearby trees that tickled him with willow wisps—quite a strange difference, his black leather skin and fur to the mossy tan and beige of the leaves—and Helena pounced when the ride spun around once, to take a sitting position on a white tiger with blind eyes, its carved head bowed down in respect, which she liked; Helena's own eyes looking at her little brother.
"'Tis better to beg forgiveness," Damian started off, looking over his midnight black nails absently.
Helena finished for her brother, vanishing in a flash of deep purple mist that smelled like a thrift shop outside of Mexico, leaving her brothers back to themselves, mirror images save for the blockage of time and conception, "Than to ask permission. See you tomorrow night, little brother. Baby Terry will be happy to see you."
Tallant's own wings, out of sheer panic and out of always getting the living hell scared out of him when his sister vanished like that, popped out of the barely visible slits sewn into and out of the clothes he wore, banging into the silver and gold bars fixed into the ride to keep the passengers still to stand. His eyes fixed to his brother, grip tightening upon the offered clothing of a knight.
"But, but, but—"
"Oh, don't be so hesitant," Damian snorted, wings flapping once and sending him upon the ride, taking post upon the same tiger his sister sat upon, "You were going to ask Dusan to create a distraction for you tomorrow so you could observe from the crowd of peasants, anyway. Now that I'm here, you don't have to go through the trouble."
Tallant wanted so, SO, badly to negate this belief of his brother, but… He hissed out a breath of air from between his barb worthy teeth and his torn wing slipped sideways on a metal pole of the ride, coming to settle atop his brother's wing. Warmth connected an emotional chord in the two of them that they readily ignored for the sake of tough machismo.
It was as much of a signal of 'okay, I'll submit' that Damian would ever get out of his sort-of twin.
Grinning, the bigger and slightly less likely to be killed for insolence of the two brothers took from his dark robes, far deep inside and hidden in a pocket that often held a type of stimulant for their kind of beings that was similar to the human tobacco, or even better, cannabis. Once he found what he wanted, he made certain that Tallant was still clutching the existing robes granted to him and set his own large, clawed hand upon his brother's shoulder. The object in his other hand was a two foot long feather that belonged to the eldest brother of their family-soft as velvet and twice as nice in person-that glowed a faint, lulling blue just before the two brothers faded from the reality of the Al Ghul estate.
All that was left to prove that they were even there at all that day was the scent of an Egyptian Bazaar and the north bound wind. And even that only lingered for an hour before a group of rats that tried to escape through the holes and breaks in the Merry-Go-Round were attacked and taken down to death by the same cats from the library.