Gwen West
Part Two: Run de run
He really hoped it didn't rain. He hated running in the rain. It was one of those things that grinded his gears: the rain, Slade Wilson and Bruce's lectures. It seemed that he couldn't get the former without the others, or something equally disastrous. Dick Grayson hated very few things, but the rain was absolutely one of them.
He wanted it to stay sunny because after being in that stuffy city in his stuffy apartment for a week, the weather had finally cleared up and he could get out of apartment 3A in the lower Gotham skyrise complex he had taken to inhabit. He could have a better place, he could have paid for one or just asked and received a better room, but the one he had was just fine: it was small, it didn't smell and it was as far away from Wayne Manor as he could get while still being in the city.
Dick leapt over a park bench with ease, drawing the attention of an old lady and her small dog. The lady was curious, the dog was not impressed. His legs stretched wide as he hurdled. Though it was looked down upon, the Greater Downtown Gotham City Park was really the best, and only, place for Parkour. There were obstacles to hurdle over, distractions that demanded his attention, results that tested his control and more importantly, it was closed enough to let his mind be open with reasonable restrictions.
All those things were good, as far as Dick was concerned, except for the distractions. He only decided that distractions were bad after he ruined the art of running by stumbling when his eyes fell on her.
There was no emotional significance to his reaction. It was all physical. His eyes told his brain too fast, in no uncertain terms, and his brain responded in the most miserable function it knew how: it disoriented him.
There were a lot of things he was expecting to find when he came back to Gotham: extra bright lights, a consistently orange-brown sky, Barbara Gordon, some punk named Tim, lectures care of one Bruce Wayne and some of the most ruthless, physical monsters that humanity would ever know. In every struggle, there was the good and the bad, the sweaty and the clean, the hell-bent and the relative saints: Dick didn't always know which of those extremes he fell on; sometimes he was only a hair's breadth from one or the other. Sometimes it bothered him, sometimes it didn't matter. Right now, a lot of things didn't matter, because it appeared that what he thought he knew about his world, the universe and his backyard simply wasn't the case.
When her eyes turned to him, her mouth was occupied with gummy candy. The two of them were looking at strangers: he had never met her, she had never heard of him. She didn't seem to find him as anything particularly fascinating, as far as Dick could tell. She continued to hold her candy with her entire fist, chewing it enthusiastically as she looked at him because he was in her immediate range of vision and because he was different. He wasn't a face she knew intimately, so she looked for a long time.
Dick Grayson caught his breath and did the most daring thing he had done in a good number of years: he said hello.
There had been two of them: one he knew, one he didn't. The one he didn't know already had her attention focused on him, the one he did turned her mature features to look forward and simply gazed: she didn't stare, she maintained her blinking cycle, she didn't look surprised, displeased or impressed in any way, shape or form. It was like four years hadn't happened.
Except everything was different… at least everything wasn't how he expected.
"Dick, it's rude to stare."
That's the first thing she says to me? Not 'Hi Dick'? 'Long time no see, Dick'? Meet the candy chewing baby on my lap, Dick'?
"It's a baby," She said calmly, "Not a freak show."
Dick remembered how to blink. A few moments later, he'd remember how to breathe and feel shame.
"Is that…"
"It's a baby. Haven't we been over this?"
That was when Dick got his breath back.
Raven continued to rub the baby's back and the baby continued to chew her candy as she gave him a look that Dick decided was one saved for the terminally stupid. That look made him decide not to ask Raven if it was hers. Those eyes said it all. They were the same shape as Raven's, but the color was different: it was human, natural, totally un-unique, totally un-Raven.
Of course, Raven looked un-Raven, at least she didn't look the way he had projected her in his mind: though in truth, he had done no such thing. If he were going to be honest with himself, a practice he generally disliked, he hadn't thought about Raven in years. But when he looked at her, body mature, skin pale but natural, eyes as wide and intelligent as he remembered, he couldn't understand how he had managed to forget her.
"You're not wearing a wedding band." Dick said rather randomly. He was very good at observation, but his tact was lacking. It was the one thing that Raven knew about Dick without question: Dick Grayson was blissfully unaware of subtlety.
"I'm not married." She replied.
That was when Dick felt his cheeks grow just a bit red. She didn't seem to be leaning towards any particular emotion about that statement. Who is this woman? Dick asked himself. The old Raven would have…
Dick heard a distinct gurgling sound and remembered what had started this dialog. The baby on Raven's lap was a girl with blue eyes and brown hair that had taken to curl over the butterfly barrette headband. She was wearing a powder blue sun dress, her tiny feet clad in white sandals. On her left, upper arm was a band aid. She might have had six teeth in her mouth.
"She doesn't look like you." Dick blurted out. He felt a bit dizzy. Verbal diarrhea had caught him in a particularly unforgiving hold. He had suffered a good range of dehabilitating illnesses; this one was absolutely the worst.
"She's her father's daughter." Raven replied.
"What's her name?" He asked. "Your daughter," He clarified, just in case Raven continued to play around with her words.
"Gwendolyn." Raven replied.
"Gwendolyn Roth?"
"Gwendolyn West." Raven replied.
"But you're not married." He said again.
"Never been… haven't we been over this? I feel like we're talking in circles, Dick."
There was that since of shame again, that Dick Grayson couldn't keep from his cheeks. Dick was perfectly capable of carrying conversations, even with old acquaintances and especially with strangers. Raven Roth was sitting before him as a little bit of both and Dick could barely make full sentences. Conversation was out of the question, he'd have to use super hero speak: short, declarative diction with pauses too short to be filled with outside party intervention, but long enough for him to think and, hopefully, react.
Gwendolyn was drooling, still working that same bit of candy into her mouth. Raven felt the warm saliva touch her hand, looked down at the baby then pulled a cloth bib from her bag to wipe off her fingers.
"Isn't she a little young for candy?" Dick asked, finally able to work his words again in a way that wouldn't get him glared at or insulted.
"She's nine months old, besides the fact that she'll lose these teeth soon enough, she doesn't eat candy very often. Today's a special occasion." Raven pointed to a band aid on the little girl's left arm. "She had shots today. She cried her little head off until I gave her a piece."
"I didn't think you to be the kind to be bullied by a baby."
"You think you know a person…"
It was the way she said it that woke the wind. The gentle breeze cut off his words. The air moved through the short blades of grass, it rippled over the pond not twenty feet to the west. He watched the short strands of his midnight black hair flicker into his face as the incredible length of hers fluttered over and around her shoulders. Her slender feet were clad in expensive looking high heels that were a shiny black, not really appropriate for a park. Neither was the secretary's skirt that hugged her thighs and hips. Her white blouse would have been a stain magnet for any other woman. Dick didn't venture to guess if those dangling earrings had ever been a target of Gwendolyn's attentions or a pull or two from those little hands. Raven's skin didn't look the way he remembered it, she didn't look unique anymore. Her tone was close to his own, but paler. Her look was clean, classy, classic really. She looked the part of a woman who wanted to be seen, recognized, admired… it was so un-Raven Roth.
"You look different."
"I am different. You aren't though. Your posture, your lack of social graces, and your disposition haven't changed a bit in four years."
He didn't like the look in those unique eyes. She was an empath, she knew how his emotions were flickering beneath his heartbeat and she was playing on them. She had never done such a thing before. He hated that she was doing it now. He didn't have super powers, he had simple strength of will and a since of pride that could blind even the truly righteous. He didn't like be tossed around, if he let her, she might continue to.
"Raven, I don't know if you noticed, but you don't know anything about me." Dick ignored that little trickle of sweat that ran from the base of his hair line down the side of his face. Raven didn't. She watched it; she trailed its every second until it disappeared in a larger pool in the nape of his neck. He was handsome, but he knew that that wasn't the reason why she was looking at him so. Four years had been too long a time to hope that somehow that bond could work both ways.
"It's a common thread between us…" Raven said. Gwen gurgled, drawing Raven's attention to the small girl for a few seconds. She didn't look up from Gwen's soft face before speaking to him again. "Do you want to change it?"
"I'm not sure." It was the first time he had been honest with her in a very long time.
He heard her snort, saw her adjust an amulet around her wrist, watched her turn those eyes back to him. Her tone had always been cold, except for that one time, just that one time, when she trusted him with her future. She had a future now, she didn't need to give him any affection. "Coward. We're in a new city, with new lives and you're afraid that I'm in love with you still after all these years and a beautiful baby on my lap. You know Boy Blunder, a little ego deflation never hurt anyone."
"Boy Blunder?"
"Prove to me you're someone different." Raven said simply.
He knew a challenge when he heard one. He could have fallen into a trap of her word games, could have been insulted a bit more, punished a bit more because of his surprise and lack of preparation, but that wasn't what he wanted. It had been a long time since he had last gotten what he truly wanted, he didn't see any particular reason why today he couldn't change that.
"I'm sweaty." He said, laying out in indirect words, but no uncertain terms, that there would be some sort of end to their running around each other with words. Either he'd catch up or she'd stumble and they'd both be at the same place.
"And you stink a bit." Her words made it difficult to fathom where that same place was and if he'd ever get home again. Raven reached into her purse and pulled out an expensive, mobile communications device, flipped it open and demanded his phone number and address. "Why don't you run home and Gwen and I will be around in an hour to pick you up?"
"Pick me up?"
"I'm beyond positive your apartment isn't baby proof. We'll go back to my place, have a drink, and realize just how little we understand each other."
"What will you do for an hour?" Dick asked.
Raven presented a bag with a few slices of bread in it. "What we came here in the first place to do: feed the ducks."
"Raven, how old are you?"
"I'll be twenty-three in two months."
"You were seventeen then, when we fought Trigon."
Raven nodded, unaffected. "And I was eighteen when I left the Titans."
"I thought I was older than you."
"It's funny how you keep calling them wrong, isn't it?"
Dick Grayson forgot all about the art of running and simply took the pace that would get him home the fastest and with minimal pains. Minimal was relative, his knees became sore and his feet throbbed a bit, but the harsh hot water he used to cleanse himself beat the fast rush of his blood through his heart. He turned his neck to wash all his manly parts: his shoulders, his back and thighs, paying special attention to his neck and that place on his chest where sweat loved to pool.
His apartment still had a few boxes to unload. It wasn't that he made many personal possessions; it was simply that he was a terribly inefficient packer. Another person, more suited to being uprooted, could have packed his things into a third of the boxes he had. He narrowly avoided mashing his toe on the corner of his coffee table, it was really a piece of crap, but he hated to get rid of it. It still worked, it was just dangerous to maneuver around it, especially while combing through his wet, blue-black hair.
Raven was right; this is no place for a baby.
He felt the air knocked out of him and he had to sit down. He had looked at her, seen it with his own eyes, but his body still refused to accept it. Raven Roth, the pale skinned, unappreciated, under-recognized, under-whelmed… underling was a mother and beautiful and confident and a million other things that he just wasn't prepared for. The only things that remained about her for sure were those unique eyes that simply saw so many things. It was the window to the empath's soul, it was what made her such a strong mystic, it was what made Raven, Raven. He had looked into them, looked through them once, but never saw any of the things she could see.
Dick combed his hair. He rolled the cuffs up on his best pair of dark jeans, his shirt was thankfully free of wrinkles and he smelled good by the time his crappy cell phone rang and Raven let him know that the lovely Gwen West and Miss Rae Roth were waiting for him downstairs. He locked his door, checked his breath and all but dashed down two flights of stairs to the entrance of his building. He realized he didn't know what kind of car Raven was driving; assuming it was something small and reasonable, baby cute, soccer mom-ish.
He really knew nothing about her.
A car honk turned his attention to the left, where a tinted window was rolling down. Dick raised a slick eyebrow before approaching, sticking his head just far into the car to confirm that it was Raven with Gwendolyn West in a front facing carseat in the back.
Raven sat with her foot holding down the brake, the other resting just higher, the heel of her expensive black shoe pressing into the dark carpet. She was showing off her legs again, Dick was starting to think she was doing it on purpose. She had pulled her long hair into a pony tail in the hour since they had last seen each other. It was pinned between her back and the leather seat of her car. With her earrings and expensive blouse, and that look that he couldn't define in her face, she fit right in.
"I'm going to roll the window up in a few seconds so I suggest you pull your head out and put your body in or you're going to find yourself in an awkward position."
Dick coughed, Gwen honked her toy steering wheel horn, Raven waited.
"You drive a Jaguar?" He asked as he climbed in.
"I drive a Jaguar." Raven affirmed.
Dick buckled up. Raven adjusted her mirror then shifted gears, pulling into traffic quickly.
…
/ She waited for a few seconds and remembered how to breathe. He was looking at her, not the way that used to make her swoon, but in a way that could destroy her if she didn't blink and look away. His hands were touching her, but she felt cold for the first time under his fingers.
"You choose her?" She asked, her voice barely a whisper, it was barely audible over the single, silver tear she was fighting through.
His fingers rubbed over the skin of her cheek and her own fingers. He could be so gentle. He could be absolutely perfect. Even when he was breaking her heart. "I'm sorry Raven, I really like you… but I think there's something more to me and Jinx than to me and you."
"No, there's no need to explain."
"Raven…"
"Become happy."/
End of Part
