Title: Animal Splendor in a Time Out of the Cholera.
Summary: This running off to foreign lands thing has got to stop. Damian and Terry cannot stress this enough to Helena. But, a cat may look at a king, or two, and still just ignore them. One-shot, trade fic. OC present.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, don't sue me, I have no money.
Warnings: Helena belongs to RMMB, this is mostly based on a universe in which I'm not entirely privy to, Damian is featured as well, as this is much needed in reference material, and fluff.
Dedication: To Rose Midnight Moonlight Black for a rather…interesting challenge. I'm not used to working on things like this, but that's good. It gives me the chance to offer up better ideas to the altar of creativity. I'm not sure if this worked, but it's something. Hopefully I did Huntress justice, yes?
Red apples gleam brilliantly in the morning sun and look up from their sad little cardboard cartons, keeping them all together like they'll roll away on purpose—what a preposterous thought! They don't have legs and can't slither or fly—and for some reason Helena feels a little sad that she's going to eat one of them later and give the other to Damian. But, it can't be helped. She hadn't eaten since the night before last, being away from civilization for so long in this place of Nowhere, India, and she needs something in her stomach or she'll be sure to pass out.
"Sorry little apples," she sighed in English, the aged Indian merchant before her blinking at her words, but shaking his head as she handed him the money and picked two of the biggest apples—one all red and beautiful and one red with a large green spot on it—up before walking away, "You were just in the wrong market at the wrong time."
It pisses her off more and more that whenever she leaves Gotham or America for some peace and quiet and some alone time to train her senses and other form, her "dear" brother manages to find her so they can…She doesn't know how to put it, exactly. Spending quality time with family was never Damian's thing, but when he found her a few days ago in the jungle, wrestling with that she-tiger in a playful manor, and invited her to a training session, she couldn't say no. She may be a little more feral than Bruce or Selina could have cared for, but she was loyal to family and that meant going to see "his majesty" when he pestered the guys at the Watchtower to beam him down into India; even if he wasn't someone she particularly liked seeing. She much preferred Terry or Matt. Ah, but she couldn't very well blow him off now, that would be so unladylike…
Damian still isn't used to seeing her with one of those stupid dots made of red organic matter on her forehead, nor is he used to her actually wearing those white robes the women in this country find so important when they're not married, but what's worse? She actually seems to enjoy it! Along with the black polish on all of her nails—like she really needed that—and weird tattoos made out of a clay mixture reaching from one of the swells of her arm muscles and into the shade under her fingernails. They're not permanent, but still continuously annoy him.
Women, all of them, no matter where they choose to dwell, will never cease to confuse him.
"So," he called, hanging upside down from the giant-ass tree planted in front of the pathetic Micro nation looking hut (made rather originally out of rotting wood and mud that smelled a scintilla better than dried horse shit) his sister had been staying in for the last month, three hundred pound weights hanging from his ankles, "I forget; does the red dot mean you're a virgin, that you're married, or that you're free to be screwed?"
"I have no idea," she answered, rather simply and with a shrug; she chose to sit directly beneath him then, not at all afraid of being flattened by him falling, "They just keep giving me the option to press the crap into my skin every time I get shots at the one bar in the city. It smells nice and I don't want to be rude, if that makes any sense."
"It doesn't."
"Oh, of course," she smirked, removing the apples from the inside of her dress wear, shining them across the linen lining her breasts, "When have you ever been polite as a courtesy not to piss someone off?"
"I'm polite to father," he replied, half-hearted and pathetically drawn as he was trying to retain normal breathing capacity to stay strong in holding the weights.
She made a sound similar to a cat when it was in the shade after coming inside a house from a day in the scorching sun, when it stretches out and can't meow, but doesn't quite sigh either. Like a 'murr' or a 'hurm', but not the point. The point was that…she accompanied the sound with extending one of her nails—more like a claw—and skewering the apple with the green spot. She then held her hand and apple up towards him and he snatched the food away. When he bit into it, three drops of the juice escaped and hit the dirt three inches from her foot.
This thing they have going between them since as long as Damian can remember; her going away for some time, him noticing and looking for her, finding her, has been the one thing, the ex-assassin trained Wayne thinks, that makes them mellow and complacent in talking to each other, civilly. And it's always a great amusement to her, seeing how he reacts to just where she's staying at the time.
Last year he was on a tirade for the sixteen hours they sparred in that village to the far north that had, ingrained forever and however long it had been around into the sand a large, monolithic man, standing threateningly with a club and a very erect and threatening penis. Helena could not stop laughing until she fell asleep where they had called a halt to the game for the night and fallen onto the floor in the empty house she was staying in like a pair of children.
"So," Damian continued, teeth grinding the apple in his mouth into practical mush before swallowing, eyes not on her, but on a dot on the horizon he had been looking at since choosing to hang for exercise, "Why India this time? Get tired of summer at home? Sweating there not enough for the princess?"
She snorted, teeth—canines especially—piercing the blood red apple of her own, "No, sweating there is fine enough, I just wanted a change of scenery."
"Where you could get Cholera of Malaise or, as an added bonus, Black Plague?"
"They don't have…Black Plagueanymore. And I've been vaccinated from the rest, if you're so worried."
"I'm not, I just don't want it incubating inside of you like a parasite and then branching off to me, or Terry, Matt or Father when you come back."
"How thoughtful of you."
He nipped the stub at the top of the apple and spit it at her for the tone. She caught the thing without needing to look behind and threw it back in his face. It his hit eye and he snarled.
After Damian finally fell out of the tree—almost landing on her, but instead receiving the impact of her shoeless foot to his ribcage—Helena invited her brother into the hut; though if she hadn't been grinning and laughing (if giving purring noises and something like 'kolkolkol') at how he was rubbing the now forming bruise of her perfectly pedicure foot, she would have taken note that he was paying close attention to the sounds around them once they breached the rag curtain of a door.
She had carried both of his weights into the hut (just to prove that she could, poking fun at how he couldn't stay in that tree a little longer) and when she saw what was sitting on the bed of spikes she had brought along from her apartment in the city—much to Damian's deviant delight behind her—she dropped the weights so close to her feet that when they made an awful thud, she flinched at how close the vibrations were. Two more inches and she could have said goodbye to that toe…
Terry was dressed in the fashion of the people of the small town—well, mostly. His clothes consisted of black shorts and a twenty-five foot red and white shawl thing that wrapped around one shoulder, his waist and then the other shoulder—and was sitting like a Buddhist, reading her copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream she could have sworn she hid under the jugs of wine she had bought during the last week—every bottle and open batch of wine making the small dwelling smell less like a horse stall.
He didn't even look up on account of the thud, he just turned the page of the Shakespearian play, "I thought you guys would take forever to get in here. Was Damian not insulting enough, Huntress?"
His tone and his position remind the splicer and daughter of Catwoman vaguely and in this really intrepid and backwards-ass way of Don Hall, or Dove, as he was often called. All calm and quiet. But it is not Terry and the illusion and thought fades as soon as it comes, swiftly followed by the much older siblings continuing inward, Damian grumbling about a worse training regiment when they get back home after this crap.
The youngest blue eyed sibling ignores this in favor of giving the Huntress a smile, closing the book and choosing to stay upon the spikes—he has no idea how to get off of them, anyway.
"So, how was the market in the scorching heat?"
"Oh, well enough," Helena shrugged, removing the weights off the floor in favor of stacking them precariously atop one of the tiny little chairs she has in the place that is really more of a cushion with legs to sit on next to the tea table she has that requires one to sit on the floor, like a frickin' hippie or something, "I didn't get my pocket picked."
"Nobody picks your pocket," Damian scoffed from what can be considered the door to the basement that is a pull-up door in the ground that leads to a staircase that leads to a sort of cellar with huge cubes of ice keeping her meat and other perishables from expiring. She doesn't question that he's going down there for the sports drink that she knows they both like.
"Not since the incident with the transformation and that little prick two weeks ago, no," she grinned, grabbing one of the open wine jugs and a shot glass; she took her seat on the other tiny ass chair she had and poured some of the wine, the jug making a thunk on the table.
Terry smiles, one of the bruises outlining his cheek making it looked force, but it can't be helped; he's Batman and he's gotten used to the slight pain, "Matt sends his love."
Her eyes adjust to the dark that is her hut to look at him in such a contemplative place such as India. It almost hurts that he looks so serious at such a young age—she would stop the change if she could, but she can't, it's not the way things are—but then, whenever conversation strikes the occasion and person such as his—their, she reminds herself—baby brother, the age retrofits and he is the way he should be. She tries as often as she can to speak of the small Bat, as he is a joy in their lives, and especially to Terry.
She latches onto this thread of talk and downs her drink, adding more wine to the glass immediately, "Ah, he is he lately? I forgot to call."
Terry smirked, and she could see that he was trying—failing—to remove himself from the spikes, just slowly. Like a caterpillar from a cactus, "He aced the math test last Tuesday, and a few days ago, he crossed the threshold of every ten year old girl in America."
The drink she was about to down takes the direct route back to the table as she is positive that what leads away from this conversation would cause any drink in her mouth to come out through her nostrils and she didn't want to stain this robe, "…What?"
Damian slams the door to the cellar closed—that wonderful cold from the ice leaving him positively refreshed—and Terry pauses, cringing a little at the feeling of himself having jumped a little and caused one of the spikes to jab his…scrotum…and he bites his tongue so he doesn't cry out. The Devil smirks from his spot coming into the room, knocking the weights out of the other chair and sitting back down—the grey Indian shirt and pants making him look holier than he should drinking dragon fruit in a glass bottle like some starving artist from Greenwich Village. Helena rolled her eyes as he moved his chair to the other side of her table and continued on for Terry.
"The little rabbit got his ear pierced to impress some Teeny Bopper."
Terry groaned, having enough of the spikes and finally just launching himself into a roll; he landed on a mat on the other side of the other two that was traditionally used by the lady of the abode when Helena wasn't renting the place, "Don't call him a rabbit."
"I will," Damian chuckled, tossing another dragon fruit drink at his brother, the thing haven provided the skin under his shirt much coolness, "When he stops trying to get into the lining of everyone's pants."
"He's a growing boy," Helena grinned, swigging the whole shot glass before adding, "I recall someone who did the same thing."
Damian leaned over and actually flicked Helena's rather sensitive ear.
Through a force of habit, Terry secured both Damian's and Helena's red drinks before the Huntress launched herself at their older brother.
He sipped from his own drink and smiled. It was hard to imagine entire months without his elder siblings fighting; in fact, that was why he and Damian hated the silence so much.
He'd remember to tell Helena to call Matt when she was done strangling Damian with her thighs; the kid needed female comfort after getting such a bad infection from that ear piercing.
Helena cackled as Damian spun them, they rolled, and it ended in the Devil Sprout getting a clawed noogie.