May. Finishing the year with a bang, but having to leave town for a while p.2

They took the pizza to Vic's house, where they organized the files to take to the police as they ate.

Dick texted Itziar to get her up to date as Victor worked on his laptop, taking screenshots of the profiles of the Foundation's so-called employees to print. There was a small workshop going on around him: Gar was next to the printer receiving the papers, Raven was in charge or highlighting relevant info and writing the post-it notes, and Kori arranged everything they had –the old and the new- on a folder.

At the police station, Dick took the lead. He tried to be nonchalant as he set the folder before the officer at the main desk. "Hi. We've uncovered evidence a nonprofit called NHT Foundation is a sham."

Their time at the station was even more anti-climactic than their adventure at the Foundation. The officers there took a long time understanding they weren't there to file a report, but to give them a case, and also took a long time understanding the minutes of that case. Then they took a long time getting someone to see them, making the five wait around on the precinct. They went through three different officers. The third guy they told the whole story to finally took the folder in his hands.

Now the man –he had introduced himself as Sergeant- heaved a long sigh. "Are any of your parents in a rival facility or something?"

Dick shook his head. "No, this is just something we found out, so we thought we'd bring it to you," he droned.

The officers' collective indifference had drained out their enthusiasm for the case, too. They felt the need to undersell what they'd done just to match their surroundings and not feel like stupid kids.

The Sergeant took off his glasses. "Right. Well. Thanks for bringing this to us. We'll look into it." He looked pointedly at them as he spoke, like he was humoring them; Dick's mood plummeted even more. "We'll check it out," he repeated, which seemed a sure sign they wouldn't, and nodded at them as if to tell them it was time to go away now.

The sun had gone down by the time they left, and it had rained at some point, because the streets were wet. All five were different measures of let down, ranging from Dick's supreme vexation to Kori's cautious optimism.

"Well that was a waste of time," said Raven. She was a close second to Dick.

"We did our part," said Vic, though his tone was dark. He was in the middle. He felt like he'd been hit with a fresh dose of reality. He didn't know how he'd ever trusted the police would take this. It seemed he'd been so swept up in Dick's idealism he'd thought he lived in a world where cops were there for the people.

Dick hung his head, himself having lost all his idealism. "I feel like a little girl at a fake tea party and they're pretending to eat our pretend food."

"That's oddly specific," said Gar. "Something you wanna talk about?"

Dick huffed in response.

"Look, man, I'm angry too," said Gar.

"Do you think they truly will not… check it out?" asked Kori. "Perhaps they were pretending the case was not important because they did not want us to keep doing the digging."

"You really think that?" asked Raven.

"It is possible," replied Kori.

"It's the other way around for me. They were so indifferent I think we proved it's up to us to keep investigating," posed Raven.

"Yeah, I think so too," said Vic, to Dick's absolute surprise.

Dick whipped around to them. "Yes! Thank you!"

Victor smirked at him. "Let's go, Project club. I'll drop you off at your houses and we can start planning tomorrow. Mainly how we're gonna show our faces in that charity again."

"Maybe we can pretend we're still doing the teen research thing, maybe it's a several meetings thing," posed Dick, assuming a thinking pose. "We can see if they advertised it anywhere and work out-"

"I said tomorrow," replied Vic, basically shoving Dick into his car. "Go to sleep, Dick."

Vic made a turn on the avenue, and the car behind them started flashing blue lights for them to pull over.

"Ugh," went Vic.

"As if we hadn't seen enough cops today," grumbled Dick.

"I wasn't even going fast," Vic said as he parked.

"You know they're just stopping us because we're a car full of teenagers," said Gar.

"Yeah, that's why I'm being targeted," retorted Vic, glaring at him through the rearview mirror.

Raven was fully turned around looking at the car that stopped them. "That's not a police car."

Vic looked through the mirror as he parked. "Yeah. Am I getting pulled over by a Camaro? What is this?"

The man approaching them wasn't in uniform. He approached Vic's car slowly, and in that time the air turned tense.

"You shouldn't have stopped," said Raven.

"I couldn't not stop," argued Vic, hands gripping the wheel.

What is wrong, Raven?" asked Kori.

"I have a bad feeling," she answered.

Vic rolled down the window when the man arrived to them.

"Do you know how fast you were going?" the man asked.

"I…" Victor racked his brain for the least confrontational response. "How fast was I going, officer?"

Instead the man said, "You like meddling, don't you? Butting into things you don't understand."

"Huh?" reacted Vic.

"You're the kids who dropped in on the station this afternoon, right? The little assholes with the conspiracy theories."

Vic looked back at the others. "Yeah. I guess that's us."

"You're gonna drop that now, you hear? You pissed off a lot of people already. Don't make it worse." The man peered at all of them and made sure they all nodded. Then he got up, muttering, "Stupid fucking kids."

They watched him walk back to his car, footsteps echoing on the wet street.

When they go to Dick's house, at first it was just to regroup. Raven and Vic, at least, were still intending to go back to their own homes soon. In the end, though, they were both calling home saying they'd stay at Dick's tonight. Dick went down and asked his uncle if his friends could stay over, and Alfred put them up in four different guest rooms. They still stayed up late in Dick's room, talking.

"At this point, we should tell our families," said Vic, sensibly.

Raven closed her eyes to massage her temples. This would kill her mom. If it came to it, she'd only tell Azar.

Vic insisted. "I mean. We're being threatened."

Gar was camped next to Dick's window and never looked away from it for too long. He didn't really think anyone was going to send an assassin to climb into their rooms and take them out while they slept. But it was a primal thing: he was scared, and he wanted to watch his surroundings. The fact that you could barely see anything amidst the dark rain didn't help his nerves.

"I don't see the point," he said. "What can our adults do? If we tell them, one of them might actually try to report it to the cops. I know Steve would be stubborn enough to do it." Steve would say that it obviously hadn't been a real cop that stopped them, that they were too stupid to recognize a blue light, and what station would target them, they were just being silly.

Kori didn't say anything to that. She had no family here. This wasn't her call. "Do you think it was a real police?" she asked instead.

"If he wasn't, that means this organization's got the means and the guts to get a blue light and impersonate a cop," said Raven. "And if he was, that means they have the means and the guts to buy the police. And I don't know which is worse."

"Does it matter?" asked Vic. "The result's the same. We were threatened, and we can't talk to police about it, because there's a high chance they are the police."

Kori looked towards Dick. He'd been quiet for a while, and he wasn't facing them. "Dick? What do you think?"

Dick didn't answer immediately.

Victor turned to him too, almost angry. "Dick, you do know we have to let this be, right?"

Dick said, "Yes. Of course we do." He sounded certain, and also like it killed him to say it.

The next morning was bright; the sky was blue and proud and the sun left no memory of the rain from the previous day. It inevitably made them less afraid of their situation. They went to school, because they had to. After school, Dick and Kori went to the grocery store for beef and then went to Kori's apartment to have it for dinner. It was kind of a Tuesday night tradition by now, for them to make a meal together on a boring day.

On the bus, with shopping bags at their feet, Kori was talking animatedly, but Dick couldn't access a good enough mood to engage with her. He couldn't get over the way the mission had ended. He kept replaying when they'd had to tell Itziar they were dropping the mission. Her eyes had widened when they told her what happened, and she'd assured them she understood, and she would have tapped out as well. None of that made it better for Dick; it actually kind of made it worse.

Perhaps he would have liked to believe they were above normal people, so to speak; that they were braver, and would keep going beyond the point where others would tap out. The way they had been stopped cold by a higher evil –an established and organized institution of unstoppable corruption- proved to him they weren't.

He thought Kori couldn't tell he was down. He was taking comfort in the fact that she was still talking animatedly, until she covered his hand with hers, looked him in the eye and told him, "Dick. I know you are disappointed. But you must not despair. Remember the past cases we did? This one only did not work because there were powers involved too big for us. We will find other cases like the last ones. We can still make a good difference."

He felt himself blush, and he didn't know if it was from her touch or the embarrassment of being so seen. "Kori… Thanks," he said. He looked away. "I-I can't stop thinking about it," he confessed, as an apology.

She didn't stop smiling. "I know. That is you."

He wondered if she meant that in an endearing way or if she was just smiling because she always smiled. He decided not to ask.

When they got to her apartment and she unlocked the door, Dick immediately noticed something was off. He held Kori's wrist, and she stopped talking. He nodded to within the apartment. "Did you leave your window open?" he whispered.

Kori looked in. An uncommon light came from the hall that led to Kori's bedroom, like the window there was indeed open. Kori silently shook her head at him.

The fear and paranoia from the previous day came back to them all at once. Kori quietly set down her grocery bag on the floor, and Dick imitated her. She picked up a metal from bat behind the door that Dick had never noticed before; on her hands it looked like a sword. He looked around for a similar weapon. Before he could find one, Kori armed him with a pan from her cooker.

They heard movement from the hall. Kori swung the bat behind her head.

The man who stood on the doorway actually blocked the whole light that came from the hall behind him. When Dick saw the gigantic creature, he felt lightheaded. What kind of Viking nightmare had they hired to take them out?

Kori had the complete opposite reaction. She dropped the bat, which hit the floor loudly, opened her arms wide and went towards the man, cheerfully speaking in what Dick was pretty sure was her first language.

Only when he heard the same language from the big guy Dick began to understand. The man hugged her back, lifting her off the ground, and they talked for a while before Dick sheepishly set the pan back on the cooker.

Finally, Kori was set down, she turned to Dick and tuned back to English. "Oh, Dick! May I present Galaktion Fyodorovich, my k'norfka. He took great care of me since I was little. I call him Galfore, and you may as well."

As Dick went to shake hands with Galfore, he found himself wondering if everyone in Kori's country was golden-skinned, green-eyed and redheaded, before he dismissed the thought as ridiculous.

"It's great to meet you," he said, smiling to feel safe, pretending he didn't notice the man glowering at him. Then he also had to pretend the subsequent handshake didn't crush his hand.

Galfore grunted at him in response.

Kori noticed nothing, having moved on to unloading groceries into her fridge with giddy energy. "I am so happy you are here finally! Oh! And on the day I was going to make Sis'lyk!"

Kori noticed Dick retreated into himself during dinner. She was talking to Galfore –she couldn't stop smiling every time she looked at him and he was there; she'd missed him so much- and whenever she turned to Dick, he was far away, lost in thought. He must have taken Kori being diverted by her k'norfka as permission to slip away. He did that often; if he was in a group and people were talking around him, it was like something in him took it as sanction to go into his own mind. Kori thought he might not even have noticed if they had continued the conversation in Tamaranean. He would occasionally tune back—but she always caught him drifting away.

When they said goodnight by her building door, Kori thought he looked apologetic. But she didn't mind; how could she mind something he couldn't help? She went back upstairs, and her step picked up as she crossed the hallway, thinking that for the first time in forever, she was coming back home to family under her roof.

"So that's Dick," Galfore said in their language. They were back at her table, eating sweets he'd brought from Tamaran. "The way you talked about him… he's not what I expected."

"What did you expect?" she asked, humoring him.

"Someone taller," he chose to reply.

Kori laughed. "He was preoccupied tonight. Please don't judge him too harshly. He's just being his hardworking, noble self."

"You're not even dating, and already making excuses for him."

Kori reddened. "Galfore!" She punched his arm in protest, and her k'norfka laughed.

"I want to meet your other friends," he said, granting her a change of subject.

"I want you to meet them too. I'll bring them around as soon as possible. But how is my family in Tamaran? How did you leave Ryan? How are my parents and Komila?"

"Ryan is sulking, but he went to school willingly enough. Komila… between you and me, she's about to drop out of school. Your parents don't suspect it yet. Expect a storm."

But Kori found it hard to believe there would be a storm. She knew her parents wouldn't condemn Komila even if she did drop out. She could almost guess her parents' train of thought. Koma was smart, she would figure something out; it was dear Korina they had to worry about.

"You seem preoccupied as well, Kotenka."

She smiled. "You know me well, Galfore." She knitted her hands. "There was… something we had to do. And we couldn't complete it, because circumstances overtook us."

"That doesn't sound like you," Galfore stated resolutely.

Kori thought her k'norfka gave her too much credit; he still remembered her as a headstrong little girl. "I was always naïve about a lot of things, and I was always… sheltered."

"You weren't sheltered, you were trapped," he responded, swelling with rage.

Kori held his hands, willing him to calm down. She knew he blamed himself, as unfounded as that was.

He stared at her, waiting for the full story. She drew her hands back and took a deep breath. "You remember the Club I told you about?"

Bruce had been persuaded to go upstairs by the loud shuffling and banging coming from Dick's room. What he found was Dick surrounded by more chaos than usual. His wardrobe doors were wide open, boxes were empty with their contents scattered around them, books were on piles on the floor, and Dick was standing in the midst of all of it, glaring at the clock in his hands. He looked up with a frown when Bruce poked his head in.

"What are you doing?" Bruce demanded.

"Tidying up," answered Dick, like it was obvious.

Bruce looked at the room and back at Dick. "What's wrong?"

Dick let the clock down on the floor as he mulled on his answer. "School is going terrible. It's horrible and terrible and crap," he replied, making an effort to mind his language. "And I don't wanna talk anymore about it."

"Okay," agreed Bruce. "How're you gonna solve it?"

"I can't. It's…" he trailed off. "Something unfair is going on, and I can't do anything about it. The… An evil teacher… won."

Bruce leaned on the doorframe. "You won't want me to go talk to the school."

"No," confirmed Dick.

"So you're giving up." That earned Bruce a glare. He shrugged. "I'm just checking."

"I can't do anything. I can only keep my head down and graduate and…" Dick trailed off again, because his frustration was no longer communicable in the parable he was trying to make up for Bruce. He would graduate, and then what? Try to change the world as an adult? Become a jaded adult and not try to change things at all? Try only to be stopped by higher powers, like now? What was the difference between Dick as a teenager and Dick in the future? If he tapped out now he'd tap out then, too. Maybe he was never meant to be any sort of… hero. Dick wrinkled his nose. Even thinking the word made him feel pathetic.

"Take care of your belongings," Bruce told him as he turned to leave. "No matter what you end up doing, you're going to need your things."

Galfore had stayed quiet for a while after Kori told him everything.

"Are you certain this organization would come after you?" he finally asked.

Kori shrugged. "I can't know that. But the man who may or may not have been a police officer sounded serious. I would readily believe he had people backing him up." Galfore nodded slowly. Kori looked at him pleadingly. "What do you think I should do?"

"I can't tell you that," Galfore said immediately. "But I can tell you want to follow through."

"My friends already decided to drop it."

"Is this what Dick was angry about?"

Kori nodded. "He hates this as much as I do. That they won. That they make us feel scared and powerless."

"You're not powerless." Galfore shifted on his seat and leaned forward to take Kori's hands. "I won't lie to you and say there is no danger. But there is always danger. Kotenka, the schu'ka is in the sea to make the karas stay alert. You cannot pretend there is no danger. But you can acknowledge it, and decide if it is worth it."

Tears were prickling at her eyes. God, she had missed him. She'd always felt like he was the one who could straighten her path with a few words. "You make it sound heroic."

"I'm just reminding you of what you are. You're a warrior, Kotenka. You weren't made to live small."

She dabbed her eyes and smiled at him. "Galfore, why do you always think so highly of me? You have more faith in me than I have in myself. Do you praise me so much to make up for everyone else in my family?"

"No, Kotenka. I truly think what I say of you. Not only do I think it—I am right that you're special. That your mother and father don't see that is their own problem."

After she cleared the table –Galfore protested that she should let him do it, but they compromised in that he'd do the dishes if he let her do this- and went in her room for the night, Kori called Dick. He picked up with a, "Hey. I was just about to call you."

"About what?" she asked, English sounding hard on her tongue after talking in her language for so long.

"The mission."

Kori smiled to herself as she heard him take a deep breath.

"I don't think I can live with myself if I don't follow through," Dick said. "I wanted to tell you, because… I don't want to do my own thing secretly again. But my mind is made up… What do you think?"

"Dick, I agree," she said, savoring the words. "We have to do it."

"Wait, really?"

"I decided to… pick the danger that is worth it," she said, faltering. She shook her head at herself. It sounded better in Tamaranean.

Dick seemed to get it anyway. "Kori, that's great."

"I think we will still need the help of an authority, if not police"

"And we have to find a way to keep the others out of it, if they don't wanna be involved."

"We will avoid all mention of them, if they still do not want to join."

She could just see Dick nodding and pacing through his room. "Yes, yes. We'll talk more tomorrow. Okay?"

"See you tomorrow."

After the call ended, she fell back on her bed. Dangerous proceedings aside, she allowed herself a moment to smile. She couldn't help but notice they had changed their minds in the same way at the same moment. Were they connected, she wondered? She put her pillow over her head to stifle a giggle—she wasn't alone in the house anymore.

Gar, Raven and Victor listened to Dick and Kori in silence as they told them how they were going to go through with the mission, and made clear the three of them had no obligation too. The three looked at each other, but said nothing. Then they walked away to speak among themselves. Now Dick and Kori watched them from afar.

Kori couldn't hold back. "Do you think they will…?"

"Give them a second," said Dick. "Maybe they'll come around."

They saw Vic and Gar arguing animatedly, while Raven stood by them, lost in thought, saying nothing. Eventually Vic stalked away. Gar leaned against the wall, then began talking to Raven. The two talked for a while.

Dick and Kori held their breaths as the two approached them.

"We're in," said Raven.

When the four walked out of school at the end of the day, Vic was waiting for them in the parking lot. They stopped when they saw him.

"You're barreling through, aren't you?" Victor asked them.

"Yeah," admitted Dick.

Victor pointed to his car. "Let's go."

"I thought you said-" Gar began.

"I know what I said." Vic begrudgingly smiled. "But if you're doing this, then I'm in too. Get in."

Minutes later, they were in Dick's room, planning. Dick had simply moved the remnants of his failed tidying up aside, just enough to clear a space on the center of the room.

"Okay, talk to me," said Dick, pacing in front of his friends sitting on the ground. He'd set them up on cushions borrowed from the living room; his bed and couch were covered in stuff. "How are we doing this?"

"We've established you have to be buzzed into the building, and there's no side doors or back doors," said Vic.

"Yes," said Dick.

"And the only way to get inside without breaking in is to go during business hours," continued Victor.

"And you want us to avoid breaking in," said Gar.

"Always," smirked Dick.

"We should go when Itziar's sister will be there," said Kori. "We shall find out when she goes."

"And we tell her to pretend to believe whatever excuse we give to get in," said Vic.

"We should make sure she's still on board with this," said Raven. "We've only ever talked to Itziar."

"Yes to all of that," said Dick.

"What's the plan for covering our asses?" asked Vic.

"We will give the new information to an authority we can trust," said Kori. "Someone we know will do the right thing. We get sure it is on the news."

"And we make sure the information we have is good enough that it runs the Foundation to the ground," added Dick. "The best chance we have to be safe is to make sure the organization no longer exists. And with the information we're gonna have after this, I think we can."

"And the family," said Raven. "We have to make sure the people behind this get repercussions, or we'll never be safe."

"And then, if there were real cops involved, they'll wash their hands off this nonprofit," said Vic. "And if that was someone impersonating a cop that stopped me, they'll go down with the Foundation."

Dick nodded along to all of that. "It's worth a shot. Does anyone see any problem with this plan?"

There was a moment of silence. Then Gar raised his hand. "Are we gonna walk back out the front door with the documents? What if someone's waiting for us inside this time?"

Dick thought. "We need an exit strategy." He thought for a while, then looked up at Gar in a manner that made him vaguely uncomfortable.

"Why do you even have a grappling hook?" Gar asked Dick, as Victor tied the rope attached to one such tool around Gar's torso.

"I don't remember," said Dick, unconvincingly, as he opened the window and looked down. "Just test if we can use it to climb down and up again."

They were in a guest room on the east side of the house. The window looked to the back of the house, where hopefully no one would bother or see them.

"Wait, I have to climb back up?" asked Gar. "Thought this was an exit strategy."

"You should just climb up 'cause if not you're gonna enter my house twice," Dick replied.

"Dude, I can't climb up this rope," said Gar. "And I could just come in through a side door."

"What'd you mean you can't climb it?" asked Vic.

"Have you seen me in gym class?" Gar muttered, his voice gaining some bitterness. "I can go down, but I can't climb back up."

Dick massaged the bridge of his nose. "Fine, come back through the kitchen door." He turned to the others. "Who here is confident they can climb a rope?"

Vic and Kori raised their hands.

"Okay, guess we just found who's making it into the building," decided Dick.

"Does that mean I don't have to go out the window?" asked Gar.

"I still want you to test it, you're the lightest," Dick said, and he regretted it instantly. He'd said it factually, but now Vic was snickering and Gar was giving him a death glare Dick didn't think him capable of.

Gar went to the window without another word. Vic fastened the hook on the window sill but stood next to it just in case.

Dick turned to Kori. "Did you get a hold of Itziar?"

"She is expecting us," answered Kori, reading off her phone. "Her sister will be home at five."

"Great."

"Grass stain made it to the ground," Vic let them know. He watched as Gar unfastened the rope from around his torso.

"So we know how you're getting out, but what's the plan?" asked Raven.

"We need a panorama of the building," said Dick. "That's why we're going to see Itziar's sister."

So there's a Russian saying that goes like 'the pike in the sea is there to make the crucian to stay alert'. I have Tamaran as an Eurasian country so I pose it has a lot of Russian influence (I picture it between Russia, Ukraine and Georgia), hence the mix of Tamaranean words (from the show) and Slavic naming. And this all came from me really loving Slavic naming conventions and nicknames x)

PenJunior: IITM? Omg, that's a good school! (Picture me as Paulette from Legally Blonde saying this. I'm impressed!) And thank you for your congratulations! ^^ Glad you're on board with everyone's characterization, and that you recognize Vic as the voice of reason I'm making him out as constantly having to be. Dick thinks this is his job because he's recognized/decided hero work is his calling—he has made it his job. And it's accurate you say the others will get him to relax, but he'll also spur everyone to action just as much. Glad you're enjoying the ride!