The night before New Year's Eve, patrol was a little slow. Kala and Jay set out from the bunker and made a leisurely loop around the Bowery, noticing that it was a quiet night for crime. Maybe even the bad guys were resting up, planning to watch the fireworks tomorrow night.
They did see a car rolling slowly through an underpass, and Jay frowned at it. "Look, K … I need you to hang back for a bit. There's a couple kids I wanna check on, and I don't want them freaking out over a meta, okay?"
She tipped her head sideways, a slight furrow forming between her brows. "Sure, Jay, but why? I thought I was pretty good with kids."
"Not these kids," he said with a dry chuckle. "Trust me, I know how wary they are."
It took her a beat to realize what he meant, and Kala nodded slowly. "Right. It's the end of the year, people got bonuses, the johns are cruising. Go do your thing, I'll hang out up high in case you run into trouble."
He looked at her steadily, and they both remembered that first 'baby patrol' he'd taken her on. The first time she'd ever seen a fourteen-year-old boy hooking. Long before she knew that Jay had been one of those kids. No wonder he knew exactly how they'd respond, and no wonder he was so intent about getting them help they could actually use.
She made her way up to a nearby rooftop as Jay strolled toward the underpass. He didn't walk right up into the sheltered nook at the top, just waited, and eventually someone sidled out: a thin teenage girl with track-marks on her arms that Kala could see even at this distance. It made her wince, wanting to sweep the girl up and take her someplace safer than this; she couldn't be more than seventeen.
Jay spoke to the girl for a moment, and from her vantage point Kala noticed how his whole body language changed. Dealing with most people, whether ordinary folks or criminals, he kept his shoulders squared and his muscles tense, projecting an aura of readiness and strength. He could dial that up into 'dangerous' very quickly, able to threaten with little more than a look. With kids, he softened everything, rounding his shoulders, relaxing his posture, making a point of showing his hands open and empty of weapons.
Kala knew him well enough by now to realize that didn't mean he wasn't ready for a fight anyway; Jay could snap from looking relaxed to throwing a punch in an instant. But deliberately making himself look less threatening was enough to reassure the kids that they talked instead of just running.
It was a brief conversation, and Jay ended it by handing over some money wrapped around business cards like he had before. The girl waited while he walked away, and Kala realized with a pang that she'd learned not to turn her back on anyone, not even someone who was helping her.
She followed Jay on these rounds, too; he knew all the likely spots. Kala wasn't trying to eavesdrop, but she heard him murmur reassurance to a couple of the kids. To a boy who shifted nervously when Jay offering the money, he said, "It won't always be like this. I know what it's like, and I turned out okay, right? Life gets better." And to a girl who looked at him with cold, angry eyes, he said, "You don't need a pimp. Especially not one who hits you. If I catch him, he won't be able to bother you for a long time."
Listening to that, Kala felt her heart seized by a kind of awe. Jay had been through so much, and he turned it into compassion for others. She never would've believed any of this last year, when all she knew about him was what he'd done to Tim. His kindness to these kids didn't change how utterly terrifying he could be to the bad guys, but it made a more complete picture of who the man really was.
Jay joined her on the rooftop a few moments later, and cocked his head curiously. "Why are you smiling at me like that?" he asked.
"Because you're not just a trigger-happy asshole, after all," she told him.
He scoffed, smiling at the callback. "Whatever, I want other people to think that. Just not you."
Kala stood up to roll her shoulders, listening to the night around them. Except for the occasional early firecrackers, it was quiet, at least with regard to their sort of trouble. "Do you trust me?" she asked softly.
For a moment, Jay just stared. "Thought that was clear by now. What're you thinking, K?"
She took a deep breath. "I want you to do something for me."
"Whatever you need," Jay said, and it took her breath away how readily he agreed.
Kala paused, trying to word the request just right, knowing that he might still rebuff her. "I want you to tell me the story of the little boy who wanted to be an astronaut. The boy, Jay."
He studied her expression a moment. "I'm not quite sure what you're asking, K. You already know the story."
Shaking her head, Kala explained, "I don't want to know everyone else's version of the story. I want to know yours. Not the articles and stuff everyone gathered about you. Just you, the way you saw it. Do you think you can trust me with that now?"
Jay looked off in the distance for a beat. "Well, we're in the right place for it. About ten blocks from here is the last apartment I lived in with my mom. And if you really wanna laugh at fate, I can show you where I was living on my own. But K … I don't know if I wanna go into all of that tonight. It's not you, I just don't wanna stir up shit I have to shove back down when we head to the Manor. They're expecting a nice day of family togetherness followed by a night of fireworks-watching tomorrow, not group therapy hour."
She bit her lip, deciding how to respond, and Jay stepped toward her with a small smile. "Tell you what, let's just do the tour. Lemme show you where I lived, places I know."
"I wanna know," Kala told him, and thought she'd never said anything more real and heartfelt in her entire life. "I want to understand."
"Then come on. Let's do the all-inclusive tour of the Bowery, Jay Todd edition," he said with a little laugh.
Quietly amazed that he'd agreed to it, Kala followed his lead. The first place he took her to was obviously a school, and seeing the sign gave her a flashback to reading his file. The place was entirely empty, over winter break, and looked bleak and forlorn. Snow lay on the roofs, playground equipment, and fences, seeming to glow under the streetlights, and Kala peered intently down at the school, trying to imagine little Jay running around. Perhaps he'd liked the swings as much as she did, when she was small. Beside her, Jay looked down, his eyes looking inward.
"East Gotham Heights Elementary," Jay said at last. "Where Bowery kids start to figure out life. Former workplace of Mrs. Porter, the best damn school librarian in the history of the world, who let me check out anything I wanted and helped me get books from the public library too."
"What did you like to read, back then?" Kala asked softly.
"Everything," Jay laughed. "Boys' adventure stuff, sci-fi, all the nonfiction that even slightly interested me. I went through a dinosaurs phase, too, but mostly I liked books where kids like me went off on adventures far away from here. Whether it was going to other countries, or outer space, or back in time, I just wanted to get away."
They were standing on a roof with a railing, and Jay rested his hands lightly on the cold steel. Kala slipped one hand over his, and looked at him with an understanding eye.
…
When Kala took his hand, Jay came back to himself a little more. He didn't spend a lot of time reminiscing about his childhood, honestly. Only K brought that out in him. Jay chuckled, trying to keep things light, and said, "Man, my ten-year-old self would be so stoked to know I managed to grow up to date a hot alien babe."
Kala laughed, her voice ringing out over the empty school, and she smiled brightly at him. "Fits with your astronaut schtick."
"Yeah, I think that went hand in hand. I wanted to be an astronaut to get away, and also because all the sci-fi books had Earth men meeting hot aliens." He could do this, he could show her what she needed to see, and still keep everything just on surface levels. There was no need to talk about how he did so well in school because he was a bright kid, of course, but also because his mother kept telling him education was the key to being successful in life. The key to getting out of this hellhole, and what a laugh, he knew so much more now and he chose to come back here.
Kala leaned against his shoulder. "What was your favorite subject?"
"English," Jay replied. "I could read really young, and reading gave me something to do when I got ahead of other kids in the class. I used to hate it when we had to read out loud, though. I was okay, there was always that one kid who had to show off, and five or six kids who mumbled through their section. That part was torture."
"I hated it too," Kala told him. "I used to read so far ahead, when it was my turn I'd end up tripping over myself trying to get back to where everyone else was."
He put his arm around her, knowing she wasn't cold even though the temperature was somewhere in the low forties. Jay himself wasn't chilled; his uniform had some insulation, and running rooftops kept him warm. "C'mon, let's hit the next stop on Memory Lane," he murmured.
It wasn't far, just eight blocks, but he remembered how long the walk had seemed when he was a kid. Boiling hot in summer as he trudged home with a heavy backpack full of books, and freezing in winter when he never seemed to have enough layers to keep warm. Now it was nothing to his longer adult stride, and Jay scanned the street below as they moved. Most of the landmarks he remembered were gone or changed beyond recognition; the corner store where he'd bought candy on the way home from school, and later groceries for his mom, had changed hands, with new generic signage instead of the hand-lettered sales sheets in the window. The coin laundry had been updated and painted, too.
He stopped opposite what had been their building, and a sense memory hit him right between the eyes. The lobby always had a hot, furry smell in the summer, like baked dust, and every time he crossed it he'd detoured around the stain Mrs. Gordon's dog had left by the door. Jay remembered getting the mail, Catherine always worried about the bills, and then climbing the stairs to their apartment. He'd surreptitiously checked out the graffiti every time, adding to his vocabulary on occasion.
"Jay?" Kala murmured beside him.
"Fourth floor, in the back," Jay said. "I used to sit on the fire escape and watch for my dad to come home. Smoked my first cigarette on the roof there – I remember thinking it tasted like ass and death. But I thought I looked cool doing it."
She snuggled in close to his side. "No wonder you smoke menthols."
"Shut up, you and your cloves are a Goth stereotype," Jay teased. "And Mom's menthols were basically just minty ass and death."
Kala elbowed him, laughing a little. "My mom smoked the cloves, Jay, that's where I got it from. She started on those to cut down on smoking; they taste good, but they're harsh as hell."
"So we both bummed smokes off our moms. Great, another thing we have in common," Jay said. "Your dad doesn't smoke, mine smoked Camels, and those are horrible."
"Mom used to smoke Marlboro Reds, back in the day," Kala told him. "She quit those when she was pregnant, actually quit-quit for a while, but after we were born, she started chipping cloves whenever she got too stressed. Never around us, of course. My aunts give her grief for smoking them, and my dad just checks her lungs obsessively."
Jay realized with a chill that Lois Lane-Kent had her very own x-ray machine living with her. That must've been annoying, but at least Superman's over-protectiveness would catch any serious health problems. Maybe if Catherine had fallen for a hero instead of a zero, she'd still be alive.
But she wouldn't have been his mom. Jay would've ended up with whoever Willis married, because Sheila had no interest in raising him. And it was all useless speculation, anyway. "We lived there a long time," Jay said to Kala. "Even when Mom got sick, we stayed. I don't know how she managed it, I guess there must've been some money from somewhere, but I wasn't paying the rent. Just the groceries and her meds. She sold her jewelry, what little she had, and the TV, and eventually the furniture. I remember one time she put the couch up for sale, and a lady came to buy it, and I guess she saw how poor we were or figured out I was sleeping on that couch, because she gave my mom the money and told her to keep the couch. Mom cried, a lot, and I remember being mad at the lady a little for pitying us and making Mom cry, but we ate that night, so I forgave her pretty quickly."
Kala looked very somber, but she wasn't as upset as he would've expected. She'd led a sheltered life, by his standards, and the fact that people she knew had been in such desperate straits was hard for her to hear. Instead of something profound, though, she asked him, "What was your favorite thing to eat, as a kid?"
Jay chuckled, because he remembered now that she asked. "Same thing we ate that night. There used to be a little place a couple blocks over called Mary Ann's Golden-Fried Chicken. I don't know what the hell they put in the batter, or what kind of oil they fried it in, but I've never had fried chicken that good. Mom sent me out to get a four piece bucket with mashed potatoes and gravy and corn on the cob, and they did biscuits, too. Crappy biscuits, but I would've eaten cardboard soaked in chicken grease and gravy."
Kala nodded. "That sounds like Uncle Gene's Fried Seafood in Metropolis. I swear they put something in the batter to make it addictive. It's fried hard and they put cracklings from the batter in the bottom of your box. Hot fries with malt vinegar, too. Once we were sure I could eat gluten without exploding, I wanted Uncle Gene's at least once a week."
"Sounds pretty tasty," Jay told her, thinking that he'd have to stop by the place if he ever found himself in Metropolis again.
"Everybody had a hidey spot as a kid," Kala said thoughtfully. "At the Riverside house, I liked to go out on the dock, even though I wasn't supposed to be out there alone. In the apartment, I'd curl up in a corner of the lobby. What was yours, Jay?"
He scoffed a little as another memory popped up. "At the top of the stairwell, right under the roof. No one looked there, and the roof door was usually locked. I figured out how to climb up there from the fire escape eventually, but I wasn't supposed to be there, so I'd hide in this thing – it was like a surround for an air conditioning condenser, but it was empty. The lock on it was busted so I'd just climb in."
"Sounds cozy," Kala said. "It'd be a great hiding spot."
"Yeah, but it got real hot in the summer. C'mon, K, I saved the best tour destination for last." Jay turned, sighting on the cathedral, and set out for a longer walk.
"Oh really? What's that?" she asked, following dutifully. She could just fly them anywhere with a whole lot less effort, but K was asking questions and following his lead. And maybe, if he took her on a walking tour of his old neighborhood, Jay might be able to leave a small portion of his baggage and bullshit behind with the year that was passing.
Instead of answering, he picked up the pace to something challenging enough to warm him up. Kala stayed right at his side without busting out powers, leaping fearlessly between buildings. They ended up on a broad roof, and Jay led her over to the edge first, looking down into the alley. "You know where you are, K?" he asked.
She looked up and down the length of the narrow alley, and shook her head. "Not without going up to reorient. I know we're still in the Bowery."
Jay nodded to the street below. "That, K, is the infamous Crime Alley."
Her head jerked up, and she looked at him wide-eyed. "Seriously? The one where…"
"The one where every crook in town knows to behave, one night a year, because Batman always shows up that day," Jay said. "Even better, we're standing on top of the Monarch Theater. Right down there is where it happened."
"Holy shit," Kala whispered, staring over the edge as if there might still be blood on the pavement.
"You ready for the real kicker?" Jay asked. She turned back toward him and nodded, those anime-girl eyes open wide. "I was the only one young enough not to know about the annual visit. I boosted his tires right down there, just two blocks away. And brought them back to the room I was living in. Guess where that was?"
Kala glanced at the building across the street, and Jay tapped his foot on the roof. "Right here, K."
"You were living in the Monarch Theater?" she asked, her voice rising. When he nodded, her jaw literally dropped. "Holy fuck, Jay!"
"Yep. Right here. Wanna see?" His pulse beat faster at that casual-sounding question. It was one thing to tell Kala how desperate he'd been. It was another entirely to show her. Kala's worst childhood hardship – well okay, her worst childhood hardship had been getting fucking kidnapped by that asshole Lex Luthor. Her second worst was something like the air conditioning going out. She had never known real hunger, or real cold, and had never been seriously beaten up. She'd never had to make the choice to buy pants with no holes in them from a thrift shop, and then steal food or go dumpster-diving because that was her last five bucks. She'd never even been left completely alone. Shit, she'd had four parents and he couldn't fucking keep one.
It wasn't that he was ashamed of his past. And he knew damn well that Kala wouldn't belittle him for it. She was much more likely to kick the ass of anyone who dared to do that. No, it was just … Jay knew it would hurt her, to see this place and know he'd lived like this, and she hadn't been able to do anything to fix it. He didn't want to hurt her.
At the same time, he wanted her to know everything. Every dark thorny secret in his soul, every pitiful truth, every embarrassing detail. He'd given her most of it in that file, but Kala wanted more. She wanted to know him, to understand him, like no one else in his life ever had. Not just the dry facts, but how he felt about them, what it all meant to him. The weight of her regard wasn't intrusive or painful, though it was intense.
And still Jay couldn't just unburden his whole soul all at once. He was too closed off for that, and Kala knew it. She kept finding chinks in his armor and carefully peeking through; guarding those gaps against other people, too. As long as he could present this as something humorous, Jay could show her a little more without crawling into a bottle tonight.
Kala followed him as he worked his way down to a window on the top floor. Jay reached in through a missing pane and shone his flashlight around, listening. All he heard was the squeaking of rats. Just in case, he called out, "Hello? Anyone living here? We're not here to bother anybody, we're just urb-exers filming a series on old theaters." Kala managed not to snort at that obvious falsehood, and Jay didn't hear any reply.
He also didn't hear any telltale sounds of people scrambling to get out, which he halfway expected. Well, Black Mask had cut a swath through the homeless population this past summer, maybe no one was here. The theater got damn cold in the winter, and with fewer people on the streets, maybe more of them were in warmer spots. Jay worked the catch on the window and opened it, stepping through carefully. "You probably wanna hover, K," he murmured.
The window opened onto a corner where the floor had rotted away and fallen through. Streetlights shining in the huge windows gave a decent amount of light, more than enough for people used to roaming the city after dark. Jay walked lightly across the huge iron girder that supported the roof, remembering. As a kid he'd crossed it with sweaty palms and pounding heart, the first couple times, but as he grew accustomed to the narrow pass and reliant on it to protect him from anyone who might follow him home, he'd eventually strolled across it casually, as if it were a sidewalk. Rather than float, Kala followed in his footsteps, but he could tell by the sound of her boots that she was holding most of her weight with flight and only touching the ground enough to convince any potential onlookers that she was walking normally.
He stopped halfway out, and looked down into the huge theater. The view was much the same as it had been years ago. Most of the original plaster ceiling had fallen down in chunks, and the rigging for lights and catwalks had rusted through and fallen with it. The seats that should've occupied that space had been ripped out or thrown aside. Now the floor below, which would've been the orchestra pit, was a jumble of chunks of plaster, acoustic tiles, twisted metal, busted chairs, and rotten wood, along with some trash left behind by people who'd snuck in. The kinds of people who explored old buildings with cameras were usually more conscientious than that, but the homeless didn't have regular trash pickup, and the kids who tagged the place with amateur graffiti didn't care about cleaning up after themselves. All of the debris made walking across the ground floor treacherous as hell.
He sighed, and looked to his partner, staring with avid eyes at every detail. "Well, K, there it is. The Monarch. Opened in 1915 as a vaudeville house, converted to cinema in 1926, it hung on longer than most of the old movie palaces. What finally did it in was the heavily publicized murder of a well-known local doctor and his wife, which took place on the street behind it, now known as Crime Alley."
"Bruce's parents," Kala murmured softly.
"Yep. It went to hell in a handbasket after it closed. Once a few windows got broken and the weather got in, all the plaster started coming down, and of course people like me broke into it." He felt strange, standing here looking at the place he'd once lived. Even then Jay hadn't really called it home. It was just where he stayed. He was proud of it, of having his own space, but that was more about his independence than any kind of attachment.
Kala turned in a slow circle, looking at the main theater, and murmured, "This place must have been gorgeous when it was new. You can still see the stenciling on the walls. And some of the plaster work."
"I bet there's photos online of what it looked like before. I might look them up sometime," Jay said, trying to picture it the way she was. Trust Kala to see the ghost of the theater's magnificence in all this decay.
She turned back to him, her eyes full of wonder. "Maybe we'll look them up together. Where did you stay?"
"In one of the offices upstairs. There's a whole second theater on top of this one. C'mon, you'll love it. More of the stuff is intact." Jay flashed her a grin, and Kala followed him the rest of the way across the beam, then down to a part of the floor that was still solid. From there it was much easier to get around. He led her over to the stairs, testing each step to make sure the wood hadn't rotted out. Each riser held a thick layer of gray powdery dust, gradually turning the stairs into a ramp. As Jay picked his way up, he told Kala, "Try not to breathe this shit. Most of it's plaster, but there's probably some asbestos too."
"Seriously? Do you know what asbestos does to your lungs?" Kala said, sounding outraged. "And people live in this?"
"Hey, as a kid I had no clue. No one's coming to clean this up, because no one's supposed to be here. It's probably not any worse than anything else the street kids are doing," Jay pointed out.
Up a couple flights, and Jay stepped out onto the hallway he remembered. "Urb-ex, we're just here to take pictures, nobody's in trouble!" he called out again, and heard a scuffle and a bang from the far end. "Well, somebody was here," he told Kala.
She sighed, looking sad. "I wish they didn't run."
Jay looked at her thoughtfully. In her day job, K was more used to people running toward her. And her expectations of the caped life were still mostly set by her dad and her brother, both of whom were frequently approached by civilians. Even as the Blur, she wasn't around long enough for anyone to get scared and leg it. So it must've been a bit of a shock to have people flee from her.
Jay was used to it. Even in plainclothes, he was a big, intimidating guy. When he happened to see a woman walking alone, he always crossed the street to make it plain that he wasn't following them. People generally didn't approach him, except for kids like Lian who had a skewed sense of survival instinct.
The best thing he could do for Kala was distract her, so he led her across the floor to penthouse theater. Up here, all the seats were still in place, with their decorated sides and the fancy handrails on the steps. The walls still had most the original decoration, too, at least higher up where the taggers couldn't reach. The stage's proscenium arch was intricately stenciled too, and the stage floor looked open and ready for an act to arrive. Only the graffiti, the dust, and the torn-to-shreds curtains showed how long the place had sat empty.
"Wow," Kala whispered, staring all around her. "I mean, wow. Jay, this is amazing. I can't believe they just left it to rot like this."
Jay couldn't help being captivated by the look of wonder on her face. "It's in a bad part of town, K. No one's gonna pay the ticket prices it takes to keep something like this running. Hell, the only thing keeping the building standing is the fuckin' shoe store in what used to be the lobby."
"Are you shitting me?" Kala asked, her lovely mouth curving in a sneer of disdain.
"I wish. They blocked it off – the stairwells have steel doors bolted shut – and put in some off-brand place. That was never there when I was a kid, but you couldn't get in through the lobby, anyway. The giant mound of trash in the lower theater kinda stopped that, and the stairwells were all blocked up with old signs." Just talking about it brought back the memories.
"Wait, there's signs blocking the stairwell? What do you mean?" Kala asked.
"C'mon," Jay said, and headed that way. This floor was pretty solid; drain pipes had been installed at some point to deal with the water pooling on the roof. The basic architecture was sturdy, all steel beams and brick walls, so it hadn't fallen in on itself.
Jay wrenched open a main stairwell door and peered down into Stygian blackness. He shone the cold bluish beam of his flashlight downward, wondering if everything from years ago was still there. The beam picked out a sparkle of glass not quite covered in dust, and he remembered creeping down here as a kid by the light of a stolen flashlight to marvel at the giant sign.
'The Monarch Theater', in letters a foot high, bright neon ringed with brilliant flashing light bulbs. Jay had stolen one of those bulbs, and sat in his nest of blankets smoking a stolen cigarette to contemplate it. Back in the glory days of the theater, rich people had flocked to that sign, watching silent films at first. The Monarch had seen the rise of the talkies, and then color film. In its heyday the sign had been a proud symbol of the finest entertainment Gotham City had to offer.
Now the huge sign lay in the stairwell of its dilapidated building, most of the bulbs broken, a generation of dust heavy on its bold letters. Jay peered down at it, and felt the same strange nostalgia as he had years ago, a yearning for a place and time he'd never really known. Kala came to stand beside him, and gasped softly at the sight of the sign. "What's it doing in here?" she murmured, voice as soft as if they were in a church or a graveyard.
"No idea," Jay told her in the same hushed tone. "The other main stairwell has the marquee in it. I'm not sure how they got them in, much less why they stashed them in the stairwells."
Kala stared, and Jay wondered if she felt the way he did, imagining the scent of popcorn and the sound of an in-house orchestra, picturing the old-time playbills and the bright limelight. It was long before both of their times, and the world tended to view that era through a sepia-tinted lens of nostalgia that forgot how different those times were, and how dangerous. Jay knew better; the times they lived in weren't as bright as everyone wanted them to be, but at least some of the darker parts of the past were gone. The mob had ruled Gotham damn near openly in the thirties, and the police corruption then had been as bad or worse than what Commissioner Gordon inherited decades later.
When he felt they'd stared at the old sign in its improbable resting place long enough, Jay stepped back. "I saved the best for last," he told Kala, and led her back across the upstairs lobby. She stayed close to his side, frowning at the lurid graffiti on the walls.
Even after all these years, he remembered which office it had been. Jay stopped in front of the door, struck by the thought that he would open it to find his thirteen-year-old self inside, probably smoking a cigarette, with a stack of tires he'd winched up here by means of a rope thrown over the big central beam. And what would he say to that angry, lonely, fiercely independent boy? Things get better, kid. They're great for a while, then they suck, then you basically die, and it sucks again to come back, but if you hang in there, everything gets better. You get to have a family who actually cares about you, and the most amazing woman you ever met comes to visit on the holidays.
Knowing himself, that kid would probably just tell him to piss off and quit blowing smoke up his ass.
Chuckling at the mental image, Jay pushed the door open. The room was empty, the walls still bare of graffiti, peeling plaster the only decoration. With the way the offices had been divided after the theater's heyday, this room had only part of a window, which was why Jay had chosen it. It got enough light to see by, but unlike the other offices didn't have a lot of glass to let in the cold. There was some trash in the corners, fast-food wrappers and such, and Jay noted that he had never left food trash in his own space. That was a great way to wake up with a rat scampering across your face. So either this room wasn't being used right now, or whoever slept here hadn't learned that particular lesson.
"You lived here," Kala said, stepping into the room. It was a mind-fuck to see her, freaking Supergirl, in this room. With that same stain on the ceiling that looked a little bit like a bear, and the same weak light coming in from the partial window. The same smell of disuse and decay and dust. And, as he looked closer, a couple of lighter patches on the walls where he'd hung posters he scavenged. The futon he'd laid on the bare floor to use as a mattress was long gone, just like the stereo he'd had. Jay had only taken his photo of Catherine with him when he left this place, the last time. He hadn't really expected to find anything left behind, either. He hadn't had much, then.
For a moment Jay felt like he was standing outside of himself, watching the man he'd become and the woman at his side from the eyes of the child he'd been. This was the future he'd never quite dared to believe he could have; the uniform he wore, and all it meant, was even more of a fairy-tale. To be Robin had seemed such an impossible dream, even when Bruce offered it to him. To be his own man, with Batman's blessing, was something he'd never even thought of back then.
Jay's mind flashed to Julio, Carl, Lenny, and the rest of the kids. He was as much a legend to them as Batman had been to him. Although, he'd been the kind of person to smack Batman in the chest with a tire iron, instead of falling into hero-worship. Jay remembered that first meeting with a chuckle, now.
Kala's boots gritted lightly on the dirty floor, and she turned to look at him, leaning back against the wall as if the grime was a non-issue. "What's funny?"
"Ancient history," he said. "The first time I ever met Bruce, he caught me stealing his tires, right? So he called me out on it, and I said I wasn't stealing, and he asked me what the tire iron was for, then. I said, 'This!' and whacked him one with it."
Her silvery laugh sounded just right even in this empty, run-down room. "You really were a little firecracker, weren't you?"
"Yeah, I was. He followed me up here and found the rest of his tires. Tried to take me to a new school that opened up in the area for troubled youths, thinking it was the best place for me – and it'd keep me out of the system, which I made damn clear I didn't wanna be a foster kid." Jay hadn't thought of Ma Gunn and her young thugs in years. He looked back now with a skeptical eye.
"How did that turn out, since I know you ended up with Bruce?" Kala asked, curious as ever.
"Oh, the broad running the place was actually training a gang of thieves. I busted the operation, and Bruce took me in," Jay said, simplifying the tale a bit. "I remember when he introduced me to Commissioner Gordon, the Commish asked him what was up with training another kid, and he said some crap like, 'This boy is more of a man than either of us.' I guess he figured being on the streets, I'd grown up faster than he did."
"That's bullshit," Kala said hotly. "You weren't a man at thirteen, and no one should've expected you to be one. You were a kid, Jay. Just because you'd seen too much and done too much and had to take care of yourself, didn't make you any less of a kid. Bruce should've let you just be a fucking kid for a while, instead of shoving you in the Robin suit and taking you out to fight bad guys."
Jay could only blink at her vehemence. He'd never once thought of it that way. "I didn't want to be a kid, K."
She shrugged. "So what? That doesn't mean you were ready to start carrying adult responsibilities. Mom kept us out of capes until we were sixteen for a reason. Look at all the ex-sidekicks we know, Jay. Don't they all have issues from growing up too fast? You shouldn't have been Robin, you should've been allowed to be just Jay Todd for a while."
"If he wasn't training me to be Robin, I would've really wondered why the hell a grown man would take in an obnoxious kid like me," Jay said, feeling oddly numb. The last time she'd gone off on this, right before he gave her the file, he hadn't quite known why Kala was so insistent. Now he did – now he fully understood how protective she was. This had never been something judgmental, she just fucking cared this much.
"And you needed a chance to find out that maybe you deserved a good life, without worrying about how useful you could be to someone," Kala shot back. "I'm not saying you weren't capable, Jay. I'm saying you didn't have to prove yourself worthy of anyone's time, or effort, or care. You already were."
Jay didn't know what to say to that. Kala made it sound so simple, and from his point of view it had been much more complicated. "It wasn't just that," he finally said. "Letting me be Robin … it was all I wanted back then. A chance to do something good, to be someone who mattered. I didn't want a family, K, I wanted to be my own man. The only reason I threw in with Bruce was because he gave me that chance."
She just gave him a mulish look. "You were always someone who mattered. How many times and ways do I have to tell you that?"
His heart clenched, and the boy he'd been spoke up in the back of his mind. You have to protect her, no matter what it takes. She's the best thing you'll ever have. There were times in Jay's life when he'd really, really needed someone to believe he mattered – and for one reason or another, he didn't get that from the people he was with. He knew better now, he knew Bruce cared about him for more than Robin, but as a kid, he hadn't understood. He'd only seen Dick's legacy, and tried to fill those golden boots as best he could. As much as he'd told himself he didn't need Bruce, part of him had wanted a home, a place to belong.
"Someone should've helped you," Kala continued. "Not just channeled your anger, because fuck that. You're more than your rage, and more than a weapon. Someone should've helped you get a handle on everything that happened to you – and don't try to tell me everything was fine after your mom died, I know damn well it left its mark by the way you talk about it – and helped you figure out what you wanted to be and do. Not just channeled you into someone else's fucking flawed-ass coping strategy. I love my uncle, I do, but he is not the best example of how to deal with trauma. You had too many ups and downs, too fast, and you never got a chance to breathe."
Jay reached up to run a hand through his hair, and realized he was still wearing the damn helmet. He settled for loosening the collar of his jacket instead. "K … I get it, but we can't change the past. There's no sense in being pissed at B now. He did the best he could." For a wonder, he believed that. As an adult, now, and as someone who'd trained up a new-ish vigilante, Jay understood better how Bruce had had to work within his own limitations. He really had done what he thought was best. He might've been wrong, but it wasn't malicious, and Jay couldn't stay angry at him for fucking up when he'd done his share of fuck-ups, too. Shit, over the summer he'd beaten Kala badly enough that he broke her ribs, badly enough that he'd vomited from sheer revulsion at what he'd done, all because he'd been wrong about her and desperate to convince her to leave before she got killed. How was that any different? He'd been wrong, Bruce had been wrong, they'd both fucked up.
Well, Jay had actually had the guts to apologize. Bruce had taken years to admit he'd messed up, and to ask forgiveness. Maybe that meant Bruce was more screwed up in the head than Jay was.
"It wasn't good enough," Kala said staunchly, her arms still crossed. "You deserved better."
Jay smiled, knowing she could see it. "Yeah, well, I have better, now."
Kala looked at him and sighed. "All right, I'll let it go. Just don't you forget, Jay."
"I won't," he promised, and decided to get them both out of this room before any other uncomfortable truths got unearthed. "C'mon, I haven't shown you the best part."
"I thought that gorgeous theater was the best part," Kala said, willing to let the past be for now.
Chuckling, Jay led her out of the room he'd once lived in, and past a couple doors that hung on their hinges. "This was originally the upstairs lobby, I think," he told Kala as the old, warped boards creaked underfoot. "It got divided into offices, and then un-divided at some point."
Jay stepped in the door of the room he'd wanted to live in, but it had just been too impractical, and heard Kala gasp in awe. The entire back wall was taken up by an enormous arched window, with views of the city. Almost all of the glass was still intact, too. Kala stepped forward, gingerly touching one of the panes, and looked out at the lights of Gotham's night. "Jay, this is gorgeous."
"You're gorgeous," he said automatically, and she smiled at him over her shoulder.
"It looks like a ballroom," Kala said, looking to the left and right. Three of the four walls had enormous multi-paned arched windows, lending a sense of grandeur to the room.
"Maybe it was, back in the vaudeville days," Jay said. "I used to love sitting in here, watching the city outside."
"I can see why," Kala murmured, and let herself float upward. It was still impressive to him whenever she did that; none of the other flyers he'd known had ever been so casual about their powers. Kala did it just to get a better angle on the view.
Then again, she did it like this because he knew what she was, the way very few other people in her life did. It was a trust thing, in a way. Other than Jay, only her family understood just how powerful she was. Hell, he could almost feel sorry for Sebast, not having a tenth of a clue of just how badass she was.
A little tremor of unease spoke up at the back of his mind, telling him Sebast had been nuts about the girl without knowing everything about her, but Jay stamped on that the way he would've if he'd seen a roach run across the floor. "There's only one view better than that," he told her.
"If you say it's your view of my ass right now, Jay, I'm going to throw you out that broken window we passed," Kala said, but she was laughing.
"Okay, there's only two views better than that," he responded, and she turned in midair to glower at him. Jay just smirked. "There's a fire escape on the other end. I used to sit out there all the time, when the weather was good. You can just barely see Metropolis, across the bay."
"Now this I have to see," Kala said, landing, and he led her across the upstairs hall, past the projection booth – no projectors, those were gone long before he moved in – and to the remaining fire escape. The bottom two flights of stairs had been ripped out, probably by the same people who'd shoved the signs down the stairwells, trying to limit access to the top floor. The top part of the fire escape was still secure, though.
The breeze hit him first, cooler at night, less tainted than the daytime air somehow. Jay took a deep breath of it, remembering how he'd sat up here and looked across the bay at the bright, shiny skyline of Metropolis. Not like he could make out much more than the general shapes of buildings at that distance, but he'd enjoyed wondering about what people over there were doing, what kind of lives they led.
Kala stood at his side, her gloved hands lightly resting on the rail, and the breeze played with the ends of her hair, pulling it free from the bun. Jay reached out and tucked one of the stray strands behind her ear. Her eyes were distant, and after a moment Kala murmured, "I can see my parents' apartment from here."
"Really?" Jay asked, leaning close to her.
"Well, I've got telescopic vision," Kala said, sounding a little embarrassed. "But I can just barely see it, looking between those two skyscrapers." She pointed, and Jay tried to follow her line of sight, but in the haze he could only see the skyscrapers themselves.
Another thought had taken hold of him though. "So like, if you'd been looking out the window at just the right time, you could've seen me?"
"Maybe. If I'd looked toward Gotham at the right time," Kala said with a little shrug. "Telescopic vision didn't kick in until well after flight, though, so I was sixteen or seventeen by then. You were already Robin."
Jay did the math in his head; she was two years younger, the last time he'd sat on this balcony he'd been thirteen, so she would've been eleven and hadn't had the power. "Damn. No luck, when you were sixteen I was eighteen, and in murder college. The last time I lived here, you were eleven. And doesn't that make me feel like a creep."
Kala knocked her shoulder against his. "Stop it, it's only two years. You should've been able to as much of a kid at thirteen as I was at eleven. I was a bossy little brat at that age."
"What do you mean, was?" Jay teased, and she shoved him, laughing. "I'm kidding, K! Jeez, you should know I don't mind a little bossiness by now."
"Yeah no shit, have you met you?" she shot back. "Someone has to take charge."
"As long as you feed me, I'm fine with it," Jay replied.
Kala elbowed him again, then grabbed his arms and tugged them around her as if she needed him to keep out the cold. "I really think I would've liked that little boy."
He laughed softly. "Yeah, there were some things you wouldn't have liked about that boy. I was never a normal kid, K."
"I know, Jay. I read the file, remember? I saw that picture of you in the crowd. You told me what happened to that bastard." She meant the pimp, the one who'd beaten his friend to death – the one Jay himself had killed. Kala sighed, leaning back into him. "If I'd had to survive like you did, I probably would've done the same. If not more dramatic. Supers have this uncomfortable tendency to unlock new powers under stress. I am a Super, but when the chips are down, Jay, I'm a Lane. I'll do whatever it takes to survive."
"And the rest of the world is grateful you are," Jay pointed out. "A bunch of dead white guys on the currency is boring as fuck, but it's better than General Zod's face on every coin."
"Can't argue that," Kala said, then gave a bitter little laugh. "Would've been my face on some of it, you know. The House of Zod crest on one side, my noble Kryptonian profile on the other."
Jay reached up and ran a fingertip down her nose. "Nah, you've got your mom's profile. Gorgeous, but stubborn as fuck. Zod thought he could keep you under his thumb, and maybe he did for a while – you were young, K – but you wouldn't toe the line forever. You're too much a hellion for that."
She sighed again, snuggling into his embrace. "Know what I said to him, right before I shot him? In English, which we hadn't used to each other since about the second meeting."
"Tell me," Jay said. Might as well trade a little, memory for memory.
Kala's voice changed, falling into the Empress' measured cadence, but he knew she was quoting. "Dru-Zod and I were in the weapons locker, Jase and Dad were right outside, and if I I'd pulled the trigger, it might have killed all of us. Dru-Zod said to me, 'We four are the last of our kind, all that remains of Krypton's glory. You will not destroy us all, Kala. You are a daughter of the House of El, you dare not extinguish the last of our legacy…' And I grabbed my mother's bloodied locket that Luthor had hung around my neck – the locket Jase and I gave her on our sixteenth birthday, the one Luthor took off after he shot her – looked him right in the face, and yelled, 'Liar! Fuck you, fuck Krypton, and fuck your precious legacy! I am the daughter of the House of Lane!' And then I locked us both in to protect my brother and my dad, and I shot him with a kryptonite laser."
Jay squeezed her tight. He knew what Krypton meant to her, he'd been to the Fortress with her. For her to deny it all for the sake of humanity… "We're all damn lucky you're your mother's daughter," he told her huskily.
Kala nudged her head against the helmet. "We're all damn lucky you're Catherine Todd's son, too. Fuck genetics, it's about who we choose to be – and in the end you chose not to kill Bruce or Tim or anybody else, except the one sonofabitch who deserves it."
"Oh, I killed a bunch of other people," Jay said.
She rolled her eyes at that. "You haven't lately. And you weren't totally in your right mind then. You know what I mean, Jay. Even back then, it wasn't what you wanted to do that was wrong, it was your execution. No pun intended. You were trying to clean up Gotham. Isn't that what we all want to do?"
"Well, all of us who aren't bleeding the city dry," Jay said.
"You never targeted an innocent. And you scared the hell out of some really bad people who needed to be scared," Kala said staunchly. "My father wouldn't like to hear me say it, but you weren't wrong."
"I didn't go about it the right way," Jay replied, his voice quiet. His war on the city – on Bruce, on Joker, on the drug trade itself – had not had the impact he wanted. He hadn't gotten the closure he needed from it, either. Hell, he'd gotten more benefit from the realization that Bruce trusted him to train the Super than he had from all the blood and vengeance. What did that say about him? Was he going soft, or did he really just want someone's approval that badly?
Who cared, when he knew Bruce would never approve of him killing Joker? The girl in his arms, the girl who was half from another galaxy, she approved. And she was willing to help him, even if that thought gave Jay thoroughly mixed feelings. On the one hand, a woman who'd stand at his side while he made sure Joker never beat any other kid to death, he could respect the hell out of that. On the other … her dad wouldn't like it. And what the hell was he doing, taking Supergirl on a murder mission?
He sighed, squeezing her tight. Kala gave him an arch look, and said, "You'd better not be obsessing about corrupting me again. Jay, you haven't done anything."
"Oh, I'm gonna do something about corrupting you tonight," he said. It was so much easier to lean into the lust and attraction they both felt, than to worry about such implications. Jay gave her another squeeze, and lowered his voice. "How about we head back to my current residence, and you indulge a deprived, affection-craving little street rat, hmm? You keep saying I deserve better…"
"I think that could be arranged," Kala said fondly, and kissed the curve of his helmet.
Authors' Note: The visuals are based on the abandoned Proctor's Palace Theater in Newark. Dan Bell and the Proper People both explored it, and have videos on YouTube.