Hi.
I'm sorry if you've been patiently waiting for more of this story. I've got a lot going on right now. Given that I'm writing three stories at once, I'm not sure when I'll be able to put more of this out. It's going to be divided into volumes. I'll finish putting up volume 1, but honestly, it might be months before I can go past that. I'm going to finish posting this volume before next week (finals week) starts as my parting gift to you, but it might be static for a while after that.
So anyway, if you're interested in reading more when it finally comes out, give the story a follow, or keep checking back. And as always, reviews are appreciated!
Thanks for coming this far.
Nicky twirled his mask around on one finger, heedless of the fifty foot drop to the warehouse floor below him. Maybe sitting in the rafters wasn't the most comfortable—but he still couldn't wait to see if the Batman would fall into yet another trap. Nicky eyed the explosives lining the doors and windows—every possible entrance to the warehouse was blocked, and none were visible from the outside. All of the circumstances promised a grand fire show.
But he was bored out of his skull.
"Becky," he complained. "What if he doesn't turn up until tomorrow?"
She smirked as she turned her mask inside out, then inside out again, each time pushing the material through the smiling mouth, making it appear as though it were eating itself. "Then we wait until tomorrow. Nicky, Nicky, lighten up!" She snatched his mask and turned it upside down. "Turn that frown into a smile!"
He scowled as he grabbed it back. "What if he doesn't come here first? What if he still thinks we were working for other people? As funny as it was to try and fool him, I don't want to be waiting here while he chases shadows."
Becky put on her mask. "This is why I'm wearing the happy face, Nicky bird. And he's got no lead, genius. He'll still have to catch us first!" She giggled. "He's funny. Doesn't even know why he's fighting people, just does. Hasn't even listened to our side of the story!"
A ghost of a smile crossed Nicky's face. "True…he might understand us if he knew that the Graysons wouldn't respond to the fan letter we sent in…"
"Of course he would—" Becky smirked. "We were so very upset, after all."
Nicky's smile widened. "And why shouldn't we tell them how we felt?"
They both cracked up.
It was then that they both felt something sharp pinch the bases of their necks, and before they could even look down, they had both fallen from their perches, into blackness.
I watch them both fall from the rafters and toss the dart gun to one side. It won't be of any use if it comes to close combat. The sedative appears to have worked, but I don't want to take any chances. I ready a Batarang as I carefully make my way forward, toward the pile of empty cardboard boxes at the center of the floor, now crushed.
And yet I'm still not prepared for both of them to come flying out of the wreckage, apparently unaffected by the sleeping agent.
I toss the boy over my head as he charges, and try the same with the girl only to have her hold onto my arm and swing around to kick me in the back. I stumble forward, before wheeling around to face the both of them. They're advancing, both looking for their entrance. This time, they're not running.
I have to duck the knife that the boy throws at me before entering combat with the girl. I don't understand how they're so strong, so well trained. By herself, she keeps me busy, dodging, ducking, and weaving around my attacks with her agility and sneaking in blows to slowly wear me down. The boy joins in, and it becomes a sick game of whack-a-mole as I try to keep track of both of them. I can't even pull anything off my belt—I'm a tad busy.
It's his pride that's his downfall.
I can see the boy—Nicky—getting overconfident. He can see my difficulty holding myself against them, but mistakenly views it as exhaustion. I'm nowhere near exhaustion.
As he tries to enter with a roundhouse swing—powerful, but slow—I send my foot into his chest. I can tell by the resounding crack, the whoosh of air exiting his lungs, and his gasp of pain followed by his eyes rolling up into his head, that he's finally down.
But when I spin back around to face Becky, she's not there.
I'm starting to realize that between the two, she's the one that I have to keep an eye on.
I sense movement off to the side and I throw a flash bomb in that general direction, earning a small shriek from the girl as she topples from the top of the pile of crates, partially stunned. But before I can move towards her, she hurls her knife—not at me, but at one of the doors—before throwing herself behind what cover she can find. With nowhere to go, I simply drop to the floor and cover myself with my cape as the explosions start to go off.
I'm lucky I do. The chunk of metal shrapnel that crashes into my side would have been enough to pierce my suit, and probably a few vital organs with it. The tough material reduces the impact, albeit only slightly. It still hits me with the force of a raging bull, shoving me over onto my back before pinning me in place. What is it, even? The door? I'm trying to lift it with my free arm when an unwelcome sight enters my vision.
The girl has also survived the blast, but she, unlike me, was not hit with anything. Her mask sports nicks, and wood splinters adorn her hair, but she's smiling down at me, smudged visage illuminated by the roaring flames.
"Killing you wasn't even part of the plan," she says underneath her mask's ever present grin, staggering as a stray bomb goes off. "But you shouldn't have meddled with our private squabbles." She kneels down next to me, but too far for me to reach. "Do give the Grayson's my regards, won't you?"
In a last-ditch effort, I raise my right fist and shoot the blades out of the gauntlet. One hits her shoulder, two her ribs, and one her face, and she recoils with a cry. But as she rips them out, I realize just how insane she is. She's hardly fazed. I can see blood beginning to spill out of the crack in her mask, but she only gives it a casual wipe, smearing blood across her mask and into her white-blonde hair. Though her façade smiles, I hear her snarl as she draws a second knife.
"Goodbye, Batman."
I'm trying to rip through the tangled mess that is my cape so that I can reach my belt, but the cloth is nearly impossible to break with bare hands. Just as she raises her knife and I finally force the cloak aside, something hurtles in from the side of my vision and knocks Becky to the ground.
She shrieks as the pair tumble over the ground before coming to a stop just feet away from a flaming pile of debris. The newcomer wrests her knife away and flips backwards out of her reach with incredible skill. It's only as Becky also climbs to her feet, spitting out blood, and the two survey each other with a watchful eye, that I recognize the colors that the stranger is wearing. The red, yellow, and green of the circus. It's Dick.
If I hadn't expected him to try and come after me, and if I didn't know the circus colors, I might not recognize him. Part of his face is hidden underneath a black mask that fits over the bridge of his nose.
Becky's snarl turns back into a smirk. "Well, well, if it isn't Grayson Jr. Come to join mummy and daddy, little boy? Miss them?"
The boy laughs. "Dick Grayson isn't the only boy in the circus. You should know better than to mess with my people at Haly's. I'm not Dick Grayson, but he's a friend. And since you don't know who I am—" with blinding speed he whirls and kicks her into the flaming pile of wreckage. "—call me Robin."
His voice seems different, but a voice is easy to change. The thing that surprises me is his fighting proficiency. I didn't know that Dick could fight…
Looking again, I realize how well Dick thought this out. A slight change in voice, even if barely perceptible. Showing fighting skills previously hidden. For anyone who'd only seen him once, Robin would seem too tall, too old, too assured of himself, nothing like the mess of a boy who'd been grieving over his parents at the circus. To a stranger, Robin could be anyone.
While Becky gets back up and attacks him—she can't seem to understand the meaning of "down"—I'm working to rip off one of the sedative darts attached to my belt. My guess is that in order to resist the first one, both twins had been on something—taken in some sort of adrenaline to combat the dart. However, her bloodstream should be neutralized now. All I need is a clear shot.
"Robin" is matching Becky stride for stride. He has youth, speed and agility to match hers. But she has expertise. She's wearing him down. Her chance comes when she finally manages sees a break in his technique and vaults over his head, exiting his range of attack. She kicks him in the back, causing him to stumble forward, but before she can make another move I flick the sleeper dart with precision at her neck.
In her eyes I can finally see her defeat. She looks down at the needling sensation and rips the dart out, throwing it to the ground with vindictive fury. "You—" she tries to spit something at me, some unflattering phrase, but it ends in an unintelligible gurgle as she sinks to her knees and falls forward onto the sooty ground.
The boy's chest is heaving, as he looks from me to Becky's still body, to Nicky's prone form a good distance away. And then, as he picks Becky's knife off the ground and begins to move towards her, I understand what he's done. The act as Robin was to keep the twins, or any accidental onlooker, from recognizing him. He'd need to protect his identity for what he's about to do. I still don't know how he got out of the house, but the one thing I'm sure of is that he's not here to assist me. He's here for one purpose, and that purpose is not justice. It's revenge.
"Dick, no."
Now, lacking his previous adrenaline, I can see that he isn't as calm and assured as he'd made himself seem before. His breathing is ragged. His hands are trembling, but his grip on the knife doesn't falter.
"This is personal, Mr. Wayne. Let me make my own decisions."
As I heave, I finally feel the metal impeding me start to move.
"I'll let you make your own decision, but you have to know what you're doing. Killing seems so easy to the young, to the naïve, but you're doing something much more than bringing down a knife and removing an enemy. You are ending a life—ending a heart, ending a soul. Do you know who these children are? Do you care who they were before they became killers? Do you know how they were driven to insanity?"
He kneels down next to her, knife raised, but his hand starts to shake even more violently, and he freezes there. "I—I don't care. I shouldn't. They—both of them, they killed them, they killed my—my—they deserve it—"
"—and if you kill her now, then what will you do when you discover she has a mother, or a grandmother, or a lover, or someone who still believes that, beyond her mental condition, the sane girl that they once knew can come back?"
Half of Becky's mask was destroyed during the fight, making it possible to see her youthful face, the blood tracing her hairline, her expression devoid of any smirk or smile. Calm. Just like any other child. Tears begin to fall from Dick's hateful eyes, dripping down his contorted features.
"If we killed every murderer responsible for the death of someone we loved—there would be no one left on this earth. Dick, don't do something that you'll regret. Because if you do—it will haunt you forever."
The sound that rises from Dick's throat is pure grief and fury, the sound of a tortured soul who has lost sight of what is right and what is wrong. He slams the knife into the floorboards barely and inch away from the unconscious girl's face, screaming. "I HATE YOU!" He hits her across the face, causing the broken edge of her mask to dig into her forehead. "I WAS HAPPY, GODDAMMIT! I HAD A FAMILY! I HAD A LIFE! AND YOU TOOK THAT AWAY FROM ME FOR SOME STUPID—" He hits her again. "—POINTLESS—" Thud. "—REASON THAT ONLY YOU UNDERSTAND! Because you had to be crazy! You had to—to—" He tries to hit her again, but it's weak and floppy and goes nowhere. "I—I just—I hate both of you so much."
He doesn't notice that I've finally freed myself, and as I stand behind him, I'm not sure what to do. He's kneeling by Becky's unconscious body, sobbing uncontrollably; frustrated, angry tears. I finally walk over to Nicky, injecting him with a sleeper dart, before dragging him over to Becky and handcuffing them together. After that, there's nothing I can do but activate my police alert beacon and pull Dick to his feet. I'm surprised when he turns around and buries his face in my uniform.
I pat his back awkwardly until I begin to hear police sirens echoing outside of the burning walls. Then I put my cape around Dick's shoulders and guide his quaking form into the shadows.
"Mr. Wayne, don't you think—"
"Bruce. Just call me Bruce, Dick."
"Okay, Bruce."
We'd returned from the warehouse a couple of hours ago. Now, Dick is sitting in his bed, eating a bowl of soup, as I sit next to him. Despite the hot soup, he's still shivering.
"It's just that don't you think that others will view it as—I don't know—weak? The fact that you're not willing to kill anyone?"
"That depends on who it is. Some people will think it's weak. Others will think it's merciful, or honorable. I just think of it as being necessary. How do you keep order by sinking to the level of the enemy?"
He nods and sips his soup for a second, then turns back to me with a serious expression. "So what's our next move? We have to find out who they were working for, and it said in the poem—"
"Dick, they weren't working for anyone. It was a bluff."
"What?"
"How much did you hear of their conversation before I attacked?"
"Just about—my parents not responding to their letter." I can tell that he's trying hard not to start grinding his teeth.
"Just before that, they were talking about something else. And they mentioned that they weren't working for other people—that was just a false detail that they included to amuse themselves."
He plays with his spoon, and silence drags for a few minutes before he finally speaks again. "So they really did die for no reason at all."
"People don't die for a reason, Dick. Not in Gotham. My parents were killed because a robber took a liking to my mom's pearl necklace. We can't look at their deaths. So we look at their lives instead."
I'm getting up to leave when he stops me by speaking again. "You know, I think that you could get a lot more done if I helped you."
I close my eyes. I'd been afraid of this. Not of him asking, but what my answer would be.
He continues behind me. "Back in that warehouse, if I'd been there, we could have finished the fight a lot faster. I'm smaller than you, and lighter. I can go places you can't. And I was in the circus, you know. I'm strong and fast and agile, I can look after myself—and I can fight too, Bruce—"
"About your fighting style. You keep your guard too far down, go too offensive. Once you've trained up a bit, that's acceptable, but for now it's just a hazard."
He seems a bit put out. "Oh. Yeah, I guess I just—" Then he perks up. "Wait, so that means you'll have me?"
"I can't seem to stop you, can I? Though I'm willing to bet that it didn't take much for you to get out—Alfred unlocked the door for you, didn't he?"
"He thought it was a good idea."
I shake my head. "We'll also need to get you a different uniform. No offense, but red, green, and yellow is a little too bright and noticeable for what I do."
He's grinning like crazy. "As long as I'm there!"
"Oh, and by the way… why 'Robin'?"
He flushes a little. "My mom had a nickname for me—'her little spring robin'. It was because I was born on the first day of spring, and because I could 'fly' so well. It was the most embarrassing thing ever, but I don't know, there was just something I felt like I had to prove to those two children. I wanted to throw my parents back in their faces when I helped take them down. So, Robin. Nicky was defeated by a bat, Becky was taken down by a Robin."
"I like it. Nice ring to it. Flying creature. It seems to fit."
I take his empty bowl but pause again on my way out the door. "Dick—your parents would be proud of you."
He gives a weak smile and looks down at his bedcovers. "I hope so."
