Disclaimer: I don't own Batman Beyond. Nor will I ever.
Children of Justice
By: PennyGirl
Part Three: The Girl in the Long Skirt
The breakup had been a big production. Yelling and fighting, begging and pleading, crying and groveling. But in the end, the result was the same and as Dana had intended it to be. Terry's complete humiliation in front of the whole school and end to the relationship that he had once had with Dana Tan. The message was clear and final.
Terry and Dana...were over.
Forever.
Terry was heartbroken, but Wayne couldn't be happier.
"You two weren't good together anyway," commented the old man as he typed away on his computer. "You were always apart, and neither one of you could remember the last time you'd made each other laugh."
"How do you know?" Terry asked defensively.
"You told me. And you also told Max, over your intercom, while she was telling you about school."
"Whatever," Terry said, grabbing his suit.
"Don't," Wayne said, holding out his cane to block Terry's way. Terry gave him a quizzical look and the old man gestured for him to drop the suit. He did as told and asked, "What's going on?"
"Take the night off," Wayne said. "You're overemotional, you've got a lot of things on your mind right now, and it wouldn't hurt for you to do your homework at a decent hour for once."
"What about the fight ring?" Terry asked.
"It can hold off for one night." Wayne jerked his head at the door. "Go, before I change my mind."
"Uh...Thanks."
Terry picked up his bag and dashed for the exit with Ace fast on his heels and barking joyfully. Wayne smiled and leaned back in his chair, hoping that the kid wouldn't get in trouble…much.
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"Terry, honey!"
Terry leaned back in his chair so he could see his mom better. "Yeah?"
"Will you go to the store and get some milk, please. We seem to be out of it right now." To emphasize her point, Terry's mom shook out the milk carton to reveal that nothing was inside.
"No problem."
Terry threw his pen down on the table and jumped out of his seat by the desk. Grabbing his jacket on the way out, he also grabbed the milk money from his mom. "I'll be back in a little while," Terry said, kissing his mom on the cheek and closing the door behind him. He walked down the hall to the elevator, shivering as he pushed the down button and the doors slid open. He turned around as they closed just in time to see what looked like a wisp of smoke filter out of a vent. He thought that maybe it was a problem, but then decided that he was just seeing things.
When he got to the small market on the corner of the street, Terry walked in to discover that it was packed with people, and that the store was out of milk. Swearing under his breath, Terry left the store and went to the one two blocks down instead, bumping into a blonde girl just as she and three of her friends were leaving.
"Oh, sorry," Terry said, stopping to look down at the girl as she turned to apologize.
"No, my fault, I bump into lots of things," she replied, tucking a piece of curled blonde hair behind her ear as she smiled at him. Terry liked her smile instantly.
The two continued to stare at each other until…"God, Annie, flirt later, we've got things to do," spoke up one of the girl's friends with a British accent as she tugged on the girl's arm and pulled her down the street.
"Well, bye then, nice meeting you!" called out the girl as she waved a hand gloved in black leather with golden fur trimming. She laughed as her friends pulled her down the street and around the corner, all of them laughing about something funny that the girl had said.
"Bye," Terry said, waving a little wave as he watched the pretty girl disappear. He stood that way for several moments before the guy behind the counter yelled at him, "Hey kid! You gonna buy something or what?"
"Huh? Oh yeah!" Terry tripped through the doorway and into the store so he could buy his mom the milk that she wanted. Thoughts of the pretty blonde girl were still in his head while he was paying and light skinned hand tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Terry, what's up?" Terry's friend Mitch asked as he faced him, the bag with the milk in his hand. Mitch smiled at him and he smiled back.
"Nothing," Terry replied stepping aside and letting Mitch walk up to the counter to purchase his juice and bread. Terry remembered that Mitch had said once that he had a lot of brothers and sisters, and that he was the one to buy the groceries all the time.
"How's Dana?" Mitch asked as he and Terry walked out of the store just as Terry felt a drop of rain.
"Fine," Terry said, then, "She dumped me."
"Ouch," Mitch said. "Was it a production?"
"Weren't you there?" Terry asked.
"Nah," Mitch said, "I was in shop class with my sister. She's making some weird pole thing, and needed my help."
Terry threw Mitch a weird look and the sixteen-year-old boy held up his hands defensively. "Hey, don't look at me man, I was just lifting' things."
Terry smiled. "Yeah, that's usually the case with me and my boss, too."
"You work for Bruce Wayne, right?"
"Yup."
"Is it true that he's crazy?"
Terry thought back to the past two years of his employ in Wayne's hands. The cases, the work, the batsuit, the errands, the jibes, the ass kicking's, the people, the dog. Then he realized, he really liked it. "Nope, he's not crazy," Terry replied, "He's just a little insane."
"Is there a difference?" Mitch asked, as he, too, felt a drop of rain fall on his head.
"Don't know," Terry replied, zipping up his jacket and turning up the collar on it.
"Huh," Mitch said, just as a blood-curdling scream ripped through the air.
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Anne screamed bloody murder as a joker with an evil grin and an empty pipe came towards her, spouting crude words and scaring the daylights out of her. One grabbed her from behind and she tried to scream again but her mouth was covered and she couldn't do anything really but try and escape. She was about to reach her weapon when a thickly muscled fist slammed right past her ear and hit the joker holding her in the nose. The joker let her go, and she stumbled forward to hit the guy with the pipe in the jaw.
"Jackass," she mumbled, as one of the jokers flew over her head and hit the wall.
"You okay?" asked a tall guy with black hair and pale skin who ran up to Anne and held her steady as she tried to regain her footing.
"Fine," she said, pulling a piece of wet hair behind her ear as her friend Tasha went running past, Gretchen fast on her heels.
"Hell," the guy said, taking Anne's arm and throwing her behind him as jokers rushed forward to get at the girls. He braced himself steady and shot out after them, just as another boy who was tall and pale raced forward to join in.
"Should we help them?" Nadia asked, limping over as the two boys and the jokers took each other on to give and receive an equal amount of punches from one another.
"No," Anne said, as she and the girls watched one f the helpless jokers go flying over their heads. He landed in the garbage and emitted a loud groan as he rolled over out of the pile and landed three feet below to the ground. Another soon followed suit, and then another as the fight continued on. "I think they're fine."
"But you're not," growled a raspy voice.
Anne and the girls turned and saw a thick necked man of large proportions come stumbling towards them, his face an eerie collage of scars and stitches punctuated with his holey teeth as he grinned and slinked towards the three girls.
"You're not a Joker," Tasha said, backing away from the creepy man as he stalked towards them with a crowbar in his hand.
"No, sweetie," the guy said, slobbering all over himself as he stalked forward and grinned disgustingly at the girls, "I'm not."
"You're with Davin," Nadia said, slipping off her gloves so that her thick silver bracelets showed in the light of the silver moon as it rose in the sky following the abrupt halt of the heavy rainstorm that had so quickly approached and then left.
"No doubt," the man said, coming towards the girls. He gestured to Anne and said, "But he only wants you."
"Fat chance," Anne said, pulling a small, thin, folded up piece of metal out of her coat sleeve. "No way in hell I'm ever going back there again."
"I will make you go," the guy said, raising the crowbar and stepping forward.
"Bite me," Anne said, snapping the folded metal into a long thin rod that crackled with electricity at the end.
"Gladly," he said, charging the girl.
Anne braced herself and jammed the rod into the guy's side as he rushed forward. He yelled in rage as he flew back and hit the wall behind the girls, having been thrown over their heads as Anne braced her shoulder and threw him over it. He hit the garbage cans below with a resounding crash that halted the fight between the teenage boys and the jokers. Both the boys and the wacko's turned to see what had happened. All they saw was three teenage girls huddling together in fear for their lives on the stoop of the building, and a fourth sitting on the ground as if she couldn't move at all a confused look on her face as she watched the jokers go running past. The jokers took this opportunity to turn tail and run, seeing as how the two boys who were there to help the girls were beating them pretty badly.
"Are you okay?" the (slightly) taller one said, walking forward and helping the blonde one, the one on the ground, to her feet.
"Huh? Oh, I'm fine," the girl said, trying to stand steady on her two feet as her other friends tried to stand on their own or with the help of the other who'd come to their aid.
"Are you sure?" the boy asked Anne, his face concerned and worried about this girl he hardly knew.
"Sure, sure. I'm perfectly sure," the girl said, and then tripped as one her heels on her boots snapped off.
"Oh!" she said, falling to the ground, or just barely falling the ground, actually, as the boy swept her up into both his arms as she nearly fell to the floor.
"Are you sure you're okay?" he asked again, this time not letting the girl go as she wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulders.
"Sure I'm sure," she said, smiling at him as the other three girls looked at them and smiled, already knowing what was going to happen and how soon, too.
"Are you going to let me go?" the girl asked, her blonde hair curling up as it dried off from the freak rainstorm that had hit when the girls had been attacked.
"No," the boy said.
"Excuse me?" Anne asked surprised as her friends giggled and hid their smiles.
"Uh…" the boy blushed and let Anne go, setting her gently on the ground as her friends continued to giggle and smile, "That's not what I meant. I meant that, um…uh… well, you see, the thing is that uh…."
"Don't worry, I know what you mean," Anne said, smiling up the boy as he blushed and stammered.
"You do?" he asked in shock as Anne smiled at him wider.
"You meant that you weren't going to let me go until I got to another pair of shoes," Anne said, cooing out the word shoes as she smiled up at the boy flirtatiously. "Because I am unable to walk with only one heel on my shoes."
"Huh?" he asked.
Anne pointed down to her shoes and the boy noticed that she was missing one of the heels, and that the other was a dangerously spiked one. The boy laughed. "Sorry," he said, " I didn't notice."
"It's one of the reasons I fell," Anne said laughingly as the boy helped her to climb onto his back.
"Where do you live?" he asked, "I'll get you there as soon as I possibly can."
"About thirty blocks away," Anne said.
The boy balked and she laughed and said, "just get me to a phone and I'll call my dad, he'll get me home."
"Okay," the boy said, as Anne's friends, and the other boy who helped them, followed them out of the alley. "By the way, I'm terry."
"I'm Anne," Anne said, " and thank you for saving my life."
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A/N: Hello all! Welcome back and thank you for reading my story. I realize that, if you'd read children of justice before, I might have little explaining to do. All right, here it is:
I didn't like what I was writing. The story was turning out badly, and I just didn't like where it was going. So here's the third part, rewritten. The first and second parts are fine, I left them alone. They were mostly the way that I had wanted them to be, and I saw no reason to change them. If I have upset you, my readers, in any way, I'm sorry. But if I followed the story line I had written and begun with the other three parts, it would have been way too complicated. And don't worry; everything will explain itself in the end.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
---PennyGirl