To my readers, be ye loyal or new.
I would like to take this opportunity to hold a moment of silence for the tragic bombing deaths in London on the day of this Chapter's initial posting, Thursday July 7, 2005. My condolences go out to the families of those who died in this despicable act of terrorism, for which, at this moment, the media has yet to find a snappy name for. As a resident of the D.C.—metro area (N. Virginia specifically), I was very close to one of the 9/11 attacks (my father works in the Pentagon, though thankfully not the destroyed section) and suffered through the reign of terror perpetrated by the D.C. Sniper (most of the random murders from which happened within an hour's drive of my house or less), and so I have nothing but empathy for those affected by this heinous act of violence. I pray for the survivors, that they may have a speedy recovery. God Save the Queen.
DISCLAIMER:
This story is not for those of an age (determined not arbitrarily by law and censors, but rather, by each individual's life experiences) such that their accumulation of years does not amount to the necessary maturity to understand and enjoy thoughts of sex, drugs, and other fun things like that. I've know people in their 30's too young, as well as 10 year-olds already old enough. The second case is kind of sad, but none the less, that should be the criterion of entry here.
That said, the author of this story understands that in this world there is something called high-risk behavior. This amounts to engaging in such activities as promiscuous sex, drug use, and drinking alcohol in any of its forms. It is this author's personal opinion that any of these things, when done intelligently, can be enjoyable, if never exactly safe (especially when dealing with highly addictive drugs, which are never really safe). However, it is also known to this author that none of these things are legal for minors, and few of them for anyone else, and so he is obligated to grant the following message.
The only truly safe sex is none at all—called abstinence. The only way to prevent the negative side effects of getting high—also abstinence. The only sure-fire way to avoid getting drunk—you guessed it—abstinence here too. In our current reality, there are no handheld bio-scanners that detect STD's, just as there are no super-medicines that cure being drunk, so if you screw, you run the risk of catching something nasty, and if you drink, you're gonna get drunk, and it's gonna last till your liver (which you aren't doing a favor with that liquor) is done cleaning it out. It is not my intention to promote promiscuity or drug abuse with this story, merely to use the shock value of these things to entertain.
—And now… fun with naughty things—
With this chapter, I wanted to back away from romance for a little while and examine the relationship between these two awesome guys a little closer. For the purposes of this story, the history between them in the comic books is only slightly less defunct than the rather non-existent one in the show, so don't refer to either when you read this—it's all original. The intent, and hopefully you'll see it too, was to show an old, powerful bond of true fraternity, and how Speedy uses it to clear away Robin's rampant confusion and doubt over the course of a rather typical guy's night out—with the exception that the guys are super heroes and celebrities.
I do not feel the need to get drunk. Thus my descriptions of such things are based on my observances of an alcoholic older brother and an army of rowdy college buddies. I may not have first hand experience, but my second-hand is plentiful (not that I won't accept any criticism one might offer.)
Enough! Story time.
Third Chapter: Liquor… Promiscuity… Nice!
"Hey, did you hear that?" Speedy asked Robin, his voice a harsh whisper to just barely break the oppressive silence of the nighttime streets. The part of Jump closest to the docks wasn't the ritziest, and the broken street lights and utterly abandoned sidewalks strewn with garbage left the bright moon as the only illumination, and the large rats the only witnesses. It was not the kind of place to be off one's guard, even if one was a superhero, and this is why Speedy held up his friend at the first unexpected sound.
"Hear what?" Robin asked, still more dejected than anything else, walking rather forlornly two steps behind his friend on their way to the pier. "I didn't hear anything."
"Eeeeepp—" a slightly louder sound, a muffled cry to be sure, split the quiet that ruled the darkened streets. This time Robin perked up, and no more words had to be exchanged between the two as the Boy Wonder's eyes narrowed, his combat reflexes remaining true despite his extensive emotional trials of the past days. If anything, the promise of action seemed to lift a great burden from his shoulders, and as the adrenaline began to rush and he allowed a birdarang to fall into his palm, he wondered why in the world he hadn't thought to pick a fight from the first moment of his depression.
In any case, Speedy had his bow out in a motion Robin's eye never caught, and after a series of hand signals, they had a plan fully developed and in action. Robin, moving like a silent shadow through moonlight and darkness, danced up the walls of the building the sound had come from, silent as a breath of wind. Speedy kept to the streets, clinging to corners and melding with the dark, the slightest electric hum announcing that the night-vision lenses in his mask had activated. The two converged on a lonesome alleyway between two old warehouses, and that was where they discovered the source of the muffled wailing, the sound growing ever louder and more distinct as they crept closer, a number of figures barely visible as outlines in the dark.
"Quit struggling girly!" a harsh, clipped command, barely audible in the reaching pitch-black of the alleyway, was directed from a tall, skinny, standing figure to a second shape kneeling in the back of the alley, boxed in by all the others.
"Yeah… this'll only get bloody if you don't cooperate!" a second voice, deeper and stupider than the first, rumbled out a harsh warning, even as the sound of an intense scuffle filled the vacant darkness, the man's huge frame concealing a smaller, violently struggling form wrapped up in his titanic arms.
"Hey stupid," a third voice, chill and lean, addressed the second, coming from a nondescript outline leaning against one of the alley's dirty brick walls, "don't make any promises you can't keep. If I get my way, this'll get bloody reeeaaallll fast."
"Oh yeah—" the first voice, twisted with disgusting lust, chimed in again, "and if the shrimpy one is as fresh as she looks—" he paused for a reason that could not be determined in the dark, probably to everyone's benefit, "this might get bloody by 'mechanical necessity!'"
"NO!" a female voice now, shrill and breathless as though after great exertion, came from the kneeling shape, "you promised! You said—you said that if I came with you quietly you—you wouldn't!" She was obviously distraught, the trembling brink of tears quavering in her tone, a sound sliced short by a ringing smack of fist impacting with flesh. She grunted in shock, laid out fully on the ground by the punch, then coughed past the pain into a slow series of wracking sobs where she lay.
"Shut up bitch!" it was the weasel-like first voice, apparently the source of the blow that silenced her. "We'll do whatever we damn well please, and if you don't like it, the knives come out—get me?"
"Don't worry," the scary, cold voice said again, in a tone that would cause any sane person to contradict his command, "Bruno here is the only one who really gets off on the puny, skin-and-bones type, and I'm sure he'll leave her alone… if you ask nice-like."
"Heh-heh-heh," the stupid sounding man laughed slowly, the diminutive shape in his overpowering grip still jerking around uselessly, though it's muffled squealing had come to stop the moment the woman had been beaten to the ground. "It'll have to be the nicest 'request' of all time—better get down on your knees… if ya know whut I mean…" and one could hear the way his disgusting leer, hidden by the darkness, distorted his voice.
"Oh-okay—" and the girl on the ground seemed to cave as the three men closed in, surrounding her a few steps back on three sides with the back of the alley behind her, choking off any possible route of escape, "I'll do… whatever you want… just—please!" and she broke down into freely flowing tears right here, "let my little sister go!"
"Nahh nahh!" the skinny, vicious man exclaimed, as he crouched next to her and reached out a hand, a tiny switchblade flipping open despite any promise he might have made to the contrary, "the squirt doesn't leave till we're sure you give us everything you've got to give, sweet cheeks!"
"Besides," and it was the scary man again, his voice still that eternally frightening, perfectly even tone, "Bruno likes to hold on to the little ones… didn't I tell you that? I'm not sure if we'll be able to get him to let go, even once we're done with you, much less in the meantime. I'd say your best bet…" and his voice tensed with sadistic amusement, "is to make sure you 'tire him out'… or I don't know if you'll be seeing your pretty little sister ever again."
With this statement, the girl in the man's arms went into a whole new series of muffled screams and useless struggling at the same time that the woman on the ground gasped, her whole body stiffening as she realized, perhaps for the first time, that there was no way for her to get herself or her helpless sibling out of this mess. As the three men towered over her, the biggest one still gripping her sister with both arms, her frozen shock transformed into unbroken panic.
"Help!—Somebody!" she screamed, far too little, far too late, and the skinny man darted forward to tackle her and press his knife down against her throat.
"Bad move girly!" he spoke directly into her face as he pressed the point of his knife against her cheek with one hand and choked off her air with the other. "This is the Box-Town… nothing 'round here but empty warehouses… squatters that wouldn't save their own mammas… and the rest of our gang. Scream all ya want, it wont—"
There was a loud clattering sound from down the alley, like something metal had just been kicked and allowed to bounce around, and all three men turned on their heels with a simultaneous jerk, gazing out into the choking black like startled wolves, a variety of knives and guns coming out in a flash of practiced ease. There was naught but the sound of the metal object coming to a slow, loud, gradual rest as it spun on its side, and that was more than enough to spook the crooks.
"Nick, put your cock away and strap up," commanded the scary one, who brandished a dirty .45 as he backed up against a wall. "Go check that out."
"Aww, damnit, why do I gotta go?" the skinny man whined without getting off the woman. The other two turned to look at him with nasty expressions shrouded by the dark, but the power of their combined disgust could be felt as a physical force though the air. It was enough to make an observer reevaluate who the stupid one was.
"Damnit Nick!" screamed the scary one, "you stupid fuck! You've got the only god damn flashlight! I mean Jesus Christ, you gotta cut back on the crack man!"
"Hey, it don't affect me!" he shouted back defensively, then turned back to the woman he was still strangling easily with his off hand. "Alright toots, you lucked out with this rat or whatever, but don't you even think about making a break for it."
"Yeah… I still got yer purdy little sister all ready and waiting," reminded the big one, rather redundantly, hefting the younger woman easily, her body having gone limp in defeat after so long struggling fruitlessly.
"And if you should happen to get up, I'd be forced to ventilate you," said the scary one again, adding his threat for kicks, the woman obviously too terrified to even make a sound, "and we'd just have to have our fun with what was left over. Now Nick, get off your lazy ass and check that out. The triads have been sniffing around our turf, and we can't be taking chances like in the old days."
"This is stupid!" Nick made his opinion known without reservation as he reluctantly got off the woman and pulled his modified machine pistol off his back and the flashlight off his hip, "even if there was someone there, he'd be a stupid fuck to still be there now!"
"If you don't get your ass over there… I'll shoot you," the scary one, clearly in charge, made a threat, and as the flashlight came on with a click that split the quiet alley the same way the intense beam of light split the darkness, it was clear that Nick didn't take it lightly.
"Okay Don, Okay, I'm goin!" he whined again, and got his ass immediately into gear. There was no reasoning with Don, and the last thing he needed was his boss putting a cap in his skull for insubordination. Better to humor his paranoid delusions and get on with the night's fun.
That in mind, Nick was down toward the alley's mouth in moments, checking around some ancient dumpsters that hadn't been emptied since he was in high school beating up nerds for lunch money his whore of a mother couldn't provide. Ignoring the stench as an ever-present part of his everyday life, he gave the area a half-hearted once-over, trying to make it look good for Don. Actually, when he did find something, no one was more surprised than he himself.
"Oh shit!" he shouted in surprise, as he bent over to check the object that was shining under his light, "hey Don, take a look at this! I don't fricken believe it!" The object was metallic, done in a red, vaguely avian motif that the gangster recognized instantly—it was on enough contraband merchandise to be immediately identifiable to anyone with eyes. The razor-sharp Birdarang sat embedded in the side of the dumpster, where it had stopped after ricocheting off of the brick alley walls any number of times.
"Don?" he asked again, half annoyed and half confused when there was no answer, and he turned to shine his light back down the alley. "Bruno, what happened to Don?" The other man, who'd been standing closer to Nick than to Don and their cowering victim, apparently lost in lewd contemplation of the helpless kid in his arms, looked up at the sound of his name without comprehending.
"What? I dunno, he was behind me a second ago," and with those famous last words, both turned as Nick's flashlight blasted a harsh beam of illumination back toward the end of the alley. The circle lingered for a moment on the cowering woman, then traced right to where Don had last been standing.
Emptiness.
"Ohhhh no…" Nick moaned, his voice trembling, his hand beginning to shake violently, causing the beam to dance erratically along the back of the alley. "ohhhh no…."
"What? What's the matter man?" Bruno asked cluelessly, "Where's Don?"
"I—I—I—" stammered Nick, his mind going blank with undirected terror, the image of that disgustingly sharp birdarang filling his mind's eye to the exclusion of all else. He was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, and as he began to backpedal slowly, gradual working up the nerve to bolt for his life, Bruno remained clueless.
"Hey, Nick, hold the light higher, I think I see something up the wall…" the big guy asked, ignorant of what made his friend quake with terror. The light remained where it was for a moment, and then there was a strange sound from behind him, and the light fell clattering to the ground, its beam leaving the wall and flickering randomly until it rolled to a stop.
"Nick, you dipshit, why'd you drop it?" Bruno asked angrily as he turned around again, looking back up the alley.
Emptiness.
By the bare illumination of the light where it cast its harsh glow onto a bare patch of bricks, Bruno could see that he was suddenly alone in the alley besides the woman on the ground and the girl in his arms. His pulse chose that moment to quite reasonably begin to thunder out of control, his breaths coming fast and short as he looked around reflexively for his two buddies. He desperately wanted to believe that Nick had just made a break for it, that Don had found some sneaky way of ditching the two of them. But even if such a pleasant lie could be true, even if there had been some way for Nick to get out of the alley before he'd turned around, even if there were some place for Don to duck out in the utterly blank brick walls, it would still mean that Bruno was somewhere he should be far away from, and that left him cold, unable to obtain peace of mind, even from denial.
"Nick…? Don…? Come on guys…" and the big guy was speaking in a quavering tone, desperately hoping that this was all a joke, his grip reflexively tightening on the woman he held like a rag doll. Though he was huge, possibly upward of 300 lbs, just shy of seven feet tall, built like a hunk of granite with arms, he still shivered like a frightened child, the unbroken quiet of alleyway reaching in from all sides to choke at him.
"Your friends can't hear you, Benjamin Hoopers," a mysterious, terrifyingly cold voice spoke, seeming to come from all directions at once, addressing him with the name his mother had given him, ratcheting his panic to a whole new level. The instant he heard it, he whimpered, backing up until he cowered against the very back wall of the alley, holding the girl more like a safety blanket than a victim-to-be. His eyes, widened unbelievably by the icy fear crushing his chest, desperately searched the shadows, the glare of the discarded flashlight doing more to hinder his sight than to aid it as it stabbed his eyes.
"Who's there?" he asked, terror numbing his already deficient IQ, letting no more than the tiniest whisper escape his lips with the way it mercilessly compressed his lungs, "who—who are you?"
"Who am I?" the voice asked, still with no discernable source as it rained down and echoed unbearably over the sheer bricks. There was a violent hissing sound as something buzzed through the air toward him, and Bruno felt his knees turn to jelly just before his whole body jerked in a terrible jolt, the clang of metal against stone piercing his ear. He slowly turned his head to look there, and what he saw made his eyes water as a blood rush to his head nearly stole consciousness from him. A birdarang, its dull sheen telling the tale of its intensely sharp edge, jutted from the wall the merest inch from his ear.
"Oh SHIT!" Bruno screamed, his terror finally breaking out into full, unrestrained panic as he dumped the girl to the ground and took to his heels, motivating his enormous girth down toward the alley's entrance as fast as he could. A sudden glowing in the shadows put his panic on pause, and he nearly fell on his ass trying to stop before he hit it. His face ticking freakishly with the enormity of his fear, he backed away from the glow slowly, desperately resisting the urge to screech like a little girl. The glow brightened suddenly, and he could just make out a masked face behind a drawn bow and the glowing-tipped arrow knocked and drawn upon it.
The face was grinning wildly.
"EEEEHHHEEEEE!" Bruno screamed, the squeal more akin to what one heard from a teenage girl at a horror flick than from a titan of a man hardened by years on the street. The next instant, the arrow released, and Bruno had just enough time for a pop sound to register as the missile transformed before an enormous boxing mitt crashed into his face and flipped him over backward, the bright yellow fist hard as a hunk of steel despite the layer of leather over it. After sailing through a full flip, he planted face-first into the pavement, his body following a moment later with a resounding thud. He knew no more.
The bowman, whose second shot had already been knocked and drawn, let off his bow when he saw that the gigantic man had a glass jaw. He stepped forward a few paces, looked down at his target, then spat in disgust. After a moment, he was joined by a second silent shadow, dropping down from the rooftops. The two figures glanced at one another for a moment, and there was a poignant moment of tension between them, almost tangible in its overarching presence.
They then simultaneously burst out laughing.
"OHHH-HO-HO my GOD-hahahahah!" Speedy shouted in utter, fantastic delight, slapping his knee as he keeled over, unable to stand his own mirth.
"That was exactly what I needed!" Robin shouted back at him, as he gasped for breath between resounding strings of laughter, the two filling the alley with a sound that hadn't graced this part of town in ages.
"Did you see that skinny chump with the tats wet himself after you snatched the first guy?" Speedy asked as he finally curbed his laughs and began to suck down great gasps of air, straightening slowly and slinging his bow away.
"Oh yeah, and the big one—ohhh damn!" Robin exclaimed with glee, his troubles forgotten in the moment of perfect triumph, shared as it was with someone who understood the game just as he did, "—when I ran his mugshot and called him by his full name—you'd think the big bastard was gonna start crying!"
"The pedophile piece of shit deserved more than what he got," Speedy's expression soured, though he didn't quite loose his smile, "too bad he's such a pansy or maybe he would have lasted a full volley."
"Oh don't sweat it," Robin admonished the marksman, holding out a clenched hand, for which his friend offered the traditional double tap with his own gloved fist. "I haven't had that much fun since I left Gotham. With all the super-powered nuts and psychopathic assassins running around this hole, you could almost forget what a blast it is to terrorize the 'superstitious, cowardly lot.'"
"Amen!" Speedy agreed readily, as the two of them walked the rest of the way into the alley, stepping over the big guy's huge, utterly limp body as they began the cleanup. "What ever happened to good old-fashioned muggings?" the red-head found himself asking the next moment, "I mean, for example," he started a good-natured rant as he pulled a brace of arrows out of his quiver and passed Robin a few, "when was the last time someone without super-powers tired to rob a bank around here? Huh?"
"I can't remember a single instance," Robin admitted, casting back through his memory as he and Speedy planted the arrows into the bricks of the opposing walls, allowing the lamps mounted in the arrow shafts to light the area with full-daylight brightness. "Gotham had a few real fruitcakes with issues that landed them in Arkham, but this city—it draws freak-jobs with crazy powers like some kind of cosmic weirdness-magnet! I sure as hell didn't know this was what I was getting into when I ditched the old man to make it on my own!"
"Seriously!" Speedy agreed, as he looked up into the area above them that had used to be solid shadows.
Up there, now clearly visible, there were two men hanging on lines, completely unconscious, their mouths gagged as the bundling cord kept them safely aloft. The first one had been the scary man, and his moderately nice suit and the nasty scar on his pale face spoke of success in his chosen profession. The other guy was also pale, but his spiky red mohawk and the plethora of tacky tattoos covering his flesh as exposed by the rather queer leather outfit he wore more than made up for his lack of skin tone.
"Now, if you don't mind," Speedy continued, a hint of something odd in his voice, "I believe its time we checked on the ladies!"
"You go ahead," Robin suddenly lost some of his humor at the mention of females in general, "I'll tie up chuck-o the child-molester here," and he was referring to the enormous black man Speedy had taken down with a single shot.
"Oh man, you never could handle the attention!" Speedy teased, even as he walked over to the two women lying quite motionless at the end of the alley.
"I was never doing it for the attention," Robin said, voice ice-cool by now as the thrill of the fight left him. These guys had been chumps, and as fun as it was to mess with chumps, as great as it felt to protect the innocent, Robin still longed for an actual challenge. He needed something serious, something he could throw all his energy into—that was the only way he'd kept things strictly business in the past, and that was the only path he could see for getting his mind off the hotties after his hide and general affections right now.
"Yeah, yeah," Speedy felt Robin's dour sentiments getting him down too, despite his desires to the otherwise, "You were one of those 'personal vendetta' cases. I remember that talk." As depressing as Robin could be at times like this, Speedy stuck around, and as obnoxious as Speedy could be at any given moment, Robin stuck around. They had had a talk, quite some time ago now, and they did have a connection since then, quite undeniably.
In any case, Speedy was over the two women the next moment, and he had to admit, he generally appreciated what he saw. The younger sister was knocked out from the rough handling, but otherwise seemed okay. She really was young, not conceivably older than fifteen, and probably closer to thirteen by the fresh face and not-quite-there-yet curves just getting started in earnest all up and down her body. Indeed she was young, but there was something about the picture there Speedy didn't quite like, namely that she had sandy blond hair down to just past her ears dyed with pink highlights, more paint on her face than the average side of a house, and she was wearing a purple and pink striped tube top and purple hot pants that showed off more skin than was legal by any stretch of the imagination. The whole picture, in fact, screamed 'jail bait,' the bane of week-willed older single guys across the country. Anyway, she was obviously dressed to go somewhere, but Speedy didn't think the kid's mother knew.
Once he was sure she was breathing and had a pulse, Speedy moved on to the older sister, a young woman a great deal more interesting to him than the kid had been. This lady was probably somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, but by the way she was dressed, she could have passed for twenty-one in a heartbeat. She had the same sandy blond hair as her sister, its length falling in expert braids just past her shoulders, framing a face that looked to have been done up by a professional makeup artist, despite the trailing smudges her tears had left. She was currently wearing an extremely hot halter-top done in blue and black swirling patterns that perfectly complimented a black skirt with full hose and garter accoutrement, all the way down to her impressively tall high-heels. She was laying quite still, though Speedy didn't think her unconscious, and as he approached and got a good look at her, he had to shake his head in amazement.
"Helloooo Nurse!" Speedy muttered under his breath, then louder, "Are you alright lady? That was a pretty close call there."
"Ahh!" she choked down a scream before bolting up and edging away along the ground until her back was pressed to the end of the alley. "Who—who are you!" She screamed, newly terrified of the masked miscreant before her, even though she could finally see that her previous attackers were quite gone.
"Ah nuts," Speedy was watching his tongue without realizing it now that he had a reason to, "I just don't have the same rep on this coast… ah well. I know you don't recognize me miss, but perhaps you know my bondage-happy friend back there?" and Speedy cleared away slightly to let the woman's panicked gaze travel down the alley to where Robin had just finished hauling the last guy's huge ass up into the air on a third line, hanging him next to his two buddies.
"Ohh…" the woman moaned, the tension running out of her body in a visible stream, her body seeming to crumple in on itself in pure relief, "Robin…? So… I'm… saved?" She seemed almost confused at first, apparently not having seen a rescue coming at all, especially not from such an esteemed community figure. It wasn't every day you saw one of the Teen Titans in Box-Town—hell, it wasn't every day you saw a Teen Titan period.
"Quite right you're saved!" Speedy was quick to close back in and offer his hand to young woman, her unfocused eyes sliding from Robin to him and apparently recognizing the similar theme in clothing. "My famous compatriot and I were on our way to…" he thought better of advertising their destination suddenly, the tabloids were not kind after all, "well, we were on our way there when we couldn't help but notice your predicament. Being concerned citizens and all—"
"OH thank you!" she screamed, cutting off his pointless rambling as she leapt up from her prone position to give him an enormous hug. Wrapped up by extremely grateful babe, the young woman crying freely into his shoulder, Speedy grew a contented smile.
"Ahh the small perks," he said very quietly, then pulled the lady off by degrees, helping her to stand straight considering the continuing tremble in her legs. "Don't worry," he said loud enough for her to hear, "you and your sister are going to be fine. Now, if you don't mind, it's better if we get out of here sooner rather than later."
"What?" the girl was completely ready to leave, to be sure, but she was still more than dazed enough by her sudden change in circumstances to question anything and everything.
"It's pretty simple really," and it was Robin this time, speaking from where he was hefting the younger sister onto his back, "we don't have any jurisdiction over common thugs like these, not like we do with the showy super-freaks the cops genuinely can't handle. Now, the police will tend to turn a blind eye, but we're not the Justice League over here, and beating on crooks is still vigilante justice, which is still a crime. No one takes it that seriously, but there are some cops who have it sore for us since we started throwing our weight around in the super-powered crime department, and they wouldn't exactly be enthusiastic about our doing their job for them in the mundane crime department too."
"O-oh-okay," The girl managed to get out eventually, still a little awed by the supreme star power of Robin and… his cute friend escorting her out of the alley. Then she saw the rather limp nature of her little sister, and she managed to panic all over again. "Oh no—Jess!" she shouted, her voice piercing the unreal quiet of Box-Town, "is—is she alright?"
"She's fine!" Speedy assured her, even as he hurried to hush her up and got her moving again by wrapping his arm around one of hers and pressing her forward, "But we won't be if we're still around when the rest of their gang shows up!"
"Trash like that never travels in such small numbers for long," Robin said coolly, using one hand to yank the light arrows out of the walls as Speedy finished gently but firmly muscling the older sister into motion. "My guess is that you just missed out on being the main course for something like twenty guys—that trio was probably getting first dibs before the rest of them showed up."
"T-t-t-t-twenty?" she said in horror, as her quickening pace caused her to stumble on her tall pumps, "oh my GOD!" and it was clear that she was freezing up again at the mere thought of what had almost been.
"Yeah, well, normally we'd stick around for the party—give the trash a warm welcome and all," Speedy assured her, trying to cover his exasperation as she lost all the movement he'd instilled into her, "but we can't do that and keep you two safe, so seriously—move now, freak later!"
"I—I can't run in these!" she exclaimed in a panic, tripping over her heels again as Speedy's pulling overbalanced her.
"You heard the woman!" Robin said, breaking into an even sprint that was impressively fast despite the awkward burden on his back.
"That I did!" Speedy responded quite enthusiastically as he caught the woman out of her spill and lifted her bodily into his arms, eliciting quite the squeal of surprise. In a heartbeat he was out and after Robin, his own measured dash running down and matching the other guy's in no time. They left behind three unconscious scumbags hanging from high-tensile wires, and not a single further trace of material evidence that they'd ever been there.
Behind them, some twenty seconds after they'd gotten clear of the alley, a small group of shady characters wandered nonchalantly into the same blind path that had been the scene of that one-sided conflict. They walked in, saw no one where they should have seen the night's entertainment getting started, then spotted the discarded flashlight, and it wasn't too long at all before they found their three friends hanging quite senseless above their heads. Expansive cussing was committed, people were cut down, and the word went out to muster for a rumble to take place before the night was out. They'd know who they were up against as soon as the three victims came to, not that it took much of a guess to realize the kind of opponent that beat you senseless then hung you up as an example.
"So… thanks again," the young woman said, quite completely in earnest, when the two men had finally put no less than five city blocks between them and the scene of that attack. The two guys in question were currently taking a much-needed breather, sweat pouring out of them profusely as they leaned against an abandoned warehouse and each other, the woman holding up her discarded sister while they rested.
"It's no problem, defending the innocent is what we do," Speedy managed to say with a jaunty smile, despite the distance he'd just covered in a flat-out run. She smiled back, the compassionate expression readily visible by the light of the working street lamps they'd finally reached, indicating their escape from the shadows of Box-Town. Robin watched them make eyes at one another for a while, then got fed up and decided to break the mood before it got him to thinking about things he'd rather not.
"SO!" the Boy Wonder broke in rudely, "Miss…?"
"Alicia," the girl answered, when she recognized the question, blushing deeply when she realized she'd never introduced herself to the super-star.
"Alicia," Robin repeated, seeming to consider it, then went on, "You seem to know me, but this is my good friend and fellow Teen Titan, Speedy. He usually operates out east, but he's in the neighborhood for the time being. Which brings me to the question… why were you in this neighborhood? Particularly why in the middle of the night?"
"Ohh… well…" she clamed-up suddenly, obvious not comfortable talking about what she'd been doing in a terrible, crime-rife area in the pitch black of night while dressed to kill and accompanied by a younger sister dressed to get some old pervert thrown in jail. Speedy immediately turned to toss Robin a distinctly dirty look for interrogating a woman that could well still be traumatized. Robin shrugged the other guy's disapproval off easily, tossing back a glare of disgust at the way he'd been flirting with a woman who could well still be traumatized. The two glared at each other as the silence deepened, then Alicia caved and started to talk.
"It was my boyfriend," she admitted, her voice gaining a serious tinge of shame as she started to relate her tale, "we were on our way… someplace…" she was obviously no more eager than Speedy to discuss her intended destination, "and we had an argument about… something…" her specifics were inspiring, and Robin rolled his eyes at the whole situation, "and he—he dumped me—out here!"
"So he just… ditched you… and your sister… after dark… in the worst part of the city?" Robin asked slowly, more than slightly disgusted. The air between him and Speedy was cleared by their shared disdain for this bum-ass boyfriend, and as they finished recovering their breath and began to stretch out, Speedy became spokesman for their shared thoughts.
"Sounds like you were dating some real scum," he said coolly, more sympathetically than accusatorily, and Alicia granted him a new, brilliant smile at the unexpected emotional support. "It's nothing to worry about really, happens to every pretty girl at least once in her life. The trick is to live, learn, and not put out for just any jack-hole that lays the pressure on."
"T-thanks…" she said uncertainly, blushing deeply again as Speedy referred to her as pretty, then blushing frantically as she realized what else he'd said, and that he'd known instantly what the argument in the car had been about. As she watched, too epically embarrassed to even move, Speedy pulled something from his belt and bent down next to Jess, Alicia's knocked-out little sister. He waved what must have been smelling salts just under her nose, and she jerked fitfully awake.
"Yeee gods…" Jess used a rather nerdy exclamation as she rose groggily from the ground. She took a quick look around, saw the two guys and her sister with her, then shook her head, rubbed her eyes for a while, and took a second, much closer look. "Sis… please tell me I'm not dreaming…" she requested slowly, as her confusion and disbelief transformed very slowly into a kind of wide-eyed, manic ecstasy that unnerved both men the instant they recognized it.
"These guys saved us!" Alicia confirmed excitedly, burying her embarrassment now that her little sis was able to capture the center of attention.
"EEEEEEE!" Jess squealed as she leapt to her feet and grabbed her sister around the waist, just barely coming up to her shoulder even as she nearly matched Speedy's height, "Oh my GOD! It's ROBIN and SPEEDY! IdontbelivethishowcouldohmygoditsreallythemherewaittillItelltheothers!" she belted out her excited raving so quickly that everything ran together in one continuous stream, and the two guys rolled their eyes in horror as they realized what they had on their hands here.
Teenage Fangirl.
"Calm down squirt!" Alicia said, simultaneously embarrassed and entertained by the way Jess was freaking out, most likely because it had been her first impulsive reaction as well. Robin at least was bigger than any boy-band singer or movie star alive as far as teenage-heartthrob status went, and Speedy was nothing bad to look at himself. "I think you have something to say to them… you know… for rescuing us?"
"Oh, right!" Jess shouted every word, managing to be articulate at least as her mind was blown by the epic personalities she'd stumbled across, "Can I get your autographs? It's just that—the other girls in my Teen Titan fan club won't believe I met you otherwise!"
The two guys were shocked into a sad, sad silence by the way the young lady was freaking out, having become far too familiar with this kind of thing. With Speedy, it was mostly disgust at the waste it was to get this kind of admiration from a little kid, still so far away from any level of actual sexual maturity. He may have been a philandering pig, but he placed his limit at fifte—sixteen. Definitely sixteen.
With Robin, it was more of a professional pride thing. He'd spent years developing an air of danger and mystery in Gotham, and it hadn't taken a few months out in full-daylight crime fighting to earn him a titanic fan-following and a brisk trade in posters etc. printed with his likeness (from which he saw no profit). If it kept up the way it had, he'd loose all his street cred, and then he'd actually have to expend the effort of fighting punks like those rapists.
"Uh… I don't know…" Robin was the first one to venture an answer, and the girl almost broke down into tears right there, her makeup hack-job already massacred by the ones she'd shed in fear of her life earlier.
"Please!" she almost screamed this time, desperation overcoming her excitement in a heartbeat, her eyes becoming almost crazed as she began to tremble with fear that she'd miss out on this unbelievable opportunity, "I don't have any paper on me—" and this was rather obvious considering she wasn't wearing enough clothing to hide a nickel, much less an autograph book, "but if you have a marker—you can—you can sign me anywhere you want!"
"Nononononono!" the two guys shouted simultaneously, holding up hands and looking away quickly before she could complete the rather insane motion that would have ended with her flashing them from behind her tube-top. It wasn't as though it was hiding much, but the idea of it all made a big difference, and Alicia was almost turning purple with embarrassment as her sister continued to freak out.
"Come on!" Jess went on, turning to appeal to her sibling for aid, "Alice, stick up for me here! I may never get another chance!"
"Uh guys?" Alicia asked, as the two calmed down again, ever wary of the fandom-crazed teen even now making goo-goo eyes at them and wringing her hands, a slight note of desperation making it into the older sister's tone when she spoke her timid query. At the sight of the that gorgeous, pleading expression, Speedy at least lost any resistance he might have still had and shook his head in amusement rather than horror as he took a closer look over at the younger woman, who was still barely containing her excitement at the situation. By the look of her, one would never have known how close she came to being brutally gang-raped and murdered by those gangsters. Kids these days—totally desensitized.
"Okay, okay," Speedy acceded at last, figuring anything that would distract her from disintegrating into a trauma-shattered mess about what had nearly happened was worth the obnoxious fawning, "but I don't think anyone here's got a marker, so I don't know if we'll be signing anything." The last he said as a nod to the fact that her hands still wandered dangerously near the edge of her tube-top near her breasts.
"But…" she began to crumble, the shadow of utter destruction breaking her enthusiastic expression.
"SOOO—" Speedy hurried to qualify the statement, "I think something else might be in order to commemorate our meeting! I think I could part—" and he reached behind himself with his lightning-quick draw to pull an energy arrow from his quiver, "with one of my signature projectiles." He completed the statement by doing something to the arrowhead that caused it to stop glowing, then handed it gently to Jess, who accepted it with shuddering hands and wide, unblinking eyes.
"Speedy!" Robin snapped, outraged, "what do you think you're doing! Those are dangerous!"
"Ah chill, I've disarmed it," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand and a huge smile, then turned to face his uptight partner even as Jess began the process of freaking out on a whole new level, the hand holding the arrow shaking violently with the force of her excitement. "Besides, I was figuring you could give her a birdarang."
"Give me a WHAT?" Jess screeched, ecstatic.
"Give her a WHAT?" Robin screamed, horrified. "No! No! And hey—NO!" His flat-out refusal had not been unexpected, and Speedy hurried to lay on his convincing arguments before the girl's utterly blown mind could recover far enough to clear her blank stare and allow his refusal to register.
"Oh come on—" Speedy started with the classic objection, only to be cut off.
"A birdarang is not a souvenir!" Robin shouted into the near mirror-image of Speedy's face arranged against his. "It's a highly dangerous piece of combat hardware, balanced for supreme gyroscopic stabilization and sharpened to a monomolecular edge! If you hold it wrong it'll cut your finger clean off!"
"Well…" and Speedy grew a rather sadistic smile all of a sudden, the kind of look that made Robin break out in an equally sudden cold sweat, "I suppose I could give her a different kind of memento then… like… say… some anecdotes about a certain weekend in Barcelona?"
"…. Barcelona?" Robin asked, confused rather than terrified now, Speedy's blackmail falling flat on its face. "Wasn't Barcelona where you downed half a bottle of 151, dressed up in nothing but the top half of that Mr. Snake costume and—"
"OH! Right, that was Barcelona!" Speedy flushed as he thought back, "I was really too wasted that day, but you have to admit, the Mr. Snakey dance was pretty fricken hilarious!" Absorbed in the alcohol-blurred memory, Speedy missed Robin's glare of utter disgust.
"Dude!" Robin shouted, their female audience forgotten for the time being, "You were arrested for public indecency—in Europe! That wasn't a nude beach you twit, and you know you were totally busted after you gave an encore performance for those Cardinals on leave from the Vatican!"
"Hey!" Speedy became defensive at last, also forgetting their audience in the enticing grip of banter, "I'd never seen a Cardinal before, okay? I thought they were seniors from the local shriner's club… they looked like they could use a good laugh anyway!"
"A good laugh!" Robin screamed, totally exasperated at Speedy's utter lack of remorse, "Speedy, one of them was just elected Pope! The Pope has seen you do the Mr. Snakey dance!"
"Ah… but he didn't see my face!" Speedy shot right back, his smile almost manic with glee at the way he was infuriating Robin.
"Which should be proof to you that there is a God!" Robin spat the yell into Speedy's crazy smirk, then turned away in disgust, shaking his head and muttering curses under his breath.
This was about the time they became aware of the expressive giggles coming from behind them, their audience announcing itself with lilting waves of delighted humor tickling through the empty nighttime streets. Recognizing what he'd just been shouting out loud, Robin began to blush furiously, his anger forgotten in a cleansing wash of extreme embarrassment. Somehow, he managed to feel awful despite the fact that he'd merely borne witness to the terribly indecent events. Speedy, who'd actually been the subject of them, took the laughter in stride—in fact, he seemed to thrive on it, tossing Alicia another suggestive series of looks that quickly turned her laughter into a blush of her own. Jess continued to laugh for some time however, and it continued to get to the Boy Wonder on a very deep level.
"Okay! Fine!" he shouted at last, cutting through the torture of laughter before it drove him over his limit. Without explaining further, he flicked his wrist dismissively, bringing a birdarang into his fingers as though he'd pulled it from thin air, then striding forward angrily and handing it very gently to Jess. "Never throw it, never swing it, never even touch the edge to anything you don't want cut. I won't be held responsible for lacerations, amputations, or decapitations." And with that, he turned on his heel and walked away, overwhelmed with relief at the end to her mirth.
Behind him, Jess stared at the weapon like she was holding the Holy Grail itself, her face flushing deeply and winding up into an expression that promised an indescribable explosion of excitement and emotion. Instead, just as it reached peek, she emitted a small, quavering peep, her legs trembled then gave out, and she crumbled to her knees, a deep crimson blush running along all that exposed mid-pubescent skin, her harsh breaths coming in shaking gasps as she began to tear up slightly, her gaze never moving from the iconic tool of destruction she held.
"Hey Robin," Speedy whispered conspiratorially to his buddy as the dour fellow came to a stop without turning, "she had quite a reaction. Actually… I think you just made Jail-bait Super-fan back there cream herself!"
The punch came fast and hard, slamming into Speedy's ribs and knocking the air from his lungs straight through the armor. As he choked on the pain and the forced exhalation, he still managed to wheeze out a trail of laughter, his smile only growing as he keeled over onto his knees.
"Oh god—" he gasped out, as though in pain, then controlled his tone and changed it to humor with, "I love messing with you man."
Robin didn't dignify that with a response.
"Are you ladies going to be able to get where you're going okay now?" Robin asked, utterly fed up with the whole situation, all of his good humor from that relaxing brawl squandered on tolerating Speedy's antics. "Do you want us to call you a cab or something?"
"That won't be necessary!" Alicia said, almost too quickly, giving away even further the fact that she didn't want them to know where they were headed too. "We should be fine now—thank you so much!"
"W—wait!" her little sister shouted, crawling up her side until she was standing again on shaky legs, her blush brightening intensely until she almost seemed to have a red glow. "Will you—will you come with us to the party?"
"JESS!" Alicia slipped a hand over her sister's mouth and began the process of making hasty denials, "We weren't going to a party—or rather—we were headed to a friend's party—that's all. It's really nothing you two would want to see." She smiled nervously as she resisted all attempts by her younger sibling to break out and shout whatever it was she wanted them to know, and the two guys exchanged skeptical looks. Finally, Speedy expressed their indifferent disbelief with a single poignant comment.
"Considering the way you two are dressed… it must be some friend." With that, he walked around behind Robin, who had started to walk over to the nearest warehouse, and gestured conspiratorially at Alicia, making hand motions along the lines of 'call me' before he spoke up again with, "let's get out of here Robin, nightime's a burnin'."
That last comment spoken, he turned and dashed toward his buddy full-tilt, just in time for the Boy Wonder to spin around and put out both hands in a simple stirrup. With a grunt of effort and a powerful, full-body loft, Robin launched Speedy up all the way to the building's two-story high roof, and the svelte shooter caught the edge easily before yanking himself the rest of the way onto the building. Robin then paused for a moment to look at the two girls one last time, his current, general disgust with the very concept of females making it almost an effort.
"Don't do anything stupid," Robin said, perhaps hinting at how much more he knew than he was letting on as he pulled a grapple off his belt and pointed it up. "and for God's sake, be careful with that birdarang." That last comment made, he fired the grapple upward, and was gone the next moment. Alicia waited quite a while before she let her hand off Jess's mouth and began pulling her little sister along the quietly abandoned road.
"Alice!" the younger girl squealed in petulant anger, "why the hell did you do that! I was sooo about to get them to be our dates!"
"Would you wake up! This isn't a tea party we're going to Jess! If they'd known where we were headed, they totally would have busted us!" the older girl shouted right back, still amazed that she'd managed to dodge two bullets in a row like that. It was one thing to escape an exceptionally unpleasant death, but to then sneak out from under the noses of two professional crime fighters while on the way to a very illegal rave… well, she'd definitely used up all her luck for this century.
"Oh poo!" Jess expressed volumes of immaturity, still clutching her souvenirs almost reverently as she was jerked along the road.
"Don't you 'oh poo' me," Alicia was not happy as she continued to drag her sister along, "you're not even supposed to be out here tonight. I swear, why Tod didn't turn around the minute we found you hiding in the back seat—"
"It's probably because Tod is a dickhead!" Jess said flatly, and Alicia came to a sudden stop as she turned on her little sister. There was an air of tension stretched out over a long minute as older sibling and younger sibling stared one another down, until finally the older sister yielded the point.
"At least we can agree on something," Alicia said sadly as she started walking again, no longer dragging her sister, who put into step just behind her anyway. Tod had been so eager to get them out here tonight, he hadn't even hesitated to bring Jess along when they'd found her. The bastard had nothing on his mind but getting some action, even right there in the car, with Jess watching. There was the small satisfaction of the names she'd called him, including pencil-dick (not that she'd ever seen it), and a number of other, more esoteric things she only even knew to say because she'd heard her mom shout them at their bum-ass dad before he left. "Anyway…just… come on. Jackie will be at the party too, and you can sleep in her car until it's time to go home."
"No chance!" Jess objected, utterly defiant, "I didn't sneak out here tonight to wait in the car—I came to party!"
Alicia didn't even respond, she just spun around and gave her little sister a stinging, open-hand smack right across the face. The sound of the resounding impact echoed off of the featureless brick buildings, and for some time the only noise was the rebounding crack of flesh-on-flesh. Tears of surprise and stinging pain flooded Jess's eyes, and as she began to sob slowly, Alicia wrapped her up in an enormous hug, pulling her close and sitting the both of them down on the street curb.
"I don't know if you understand this—" Alicia began, her own, silent sobs dripping terrified tears down onto Jess's shoulders as the younger girl's own tears of confusion and faceless fear ran down onto her far too tight shorts, "But we almost died a few minutes ago—"
"I—I—" Jess couldn't respond, her own shock finally catching up with her after the displacing excitement of meeting the pair of idols, "Oh Alice!" The two ended all words then and there as they shared the terror of their close brush with an end of incalculable, unimaginable horror—to be used and disposed of by men so twisted that to them, a woman was little more relevant than a urinal, and of similar natural function. Their sobs wore on for some time, until finally they worked all of the immediate nightmarish stress away in a torrent of purifying tears.
"Heh, this is one of my favorite parts," Speedy began when they were both on the rooftop, turning back to look down as the two women stood silently in the street. "Playing guardian angle for a few hours ought to—hey!" he noticed that Robin was already making his way away, and he ran after the other guy compulsively, "Where do you think you're going?"
"Last time I checked the plan was to go get smashed," Robin said matter-of-factly, never stopping as he reached all-out sprint and leapt full-extension over to the next rooftop. Speedy kept up, but just barely, and in a moment, his confusion was matched only by his impulse to indignation.
"But dude, Robin, you know where they're headed, right?" Speedy asked, wondering if the obvious destination those two had in mind, coincidentally identical to their own, could have conceivably eluded Robin, even considering the stress he'd been under.
"Of course," and now Robin was indignant, his professional pride clearly insulted by that question, "They're going to the same rave we're about to raid for booze, duh."
"And what—you're just going to let them?" Speedy was genuinely amazed, never having expected to see such rampant irresponsibility from Robin no matter how the other guy was feeling. "I mean, the hot one, sure, she's old enough to make her own mistakes like that, but the little one—come on man!"
"I'm not their dad or their brother," Robin said coldly, as he wound up and leapt again, clearing another enormous gap with Speedy just barely managing to match his enormous long-jumps. "Umph—" Robin grunted as he landed, then stood up, took off again, and picked up where he left off, "Whatever they might do now is none of my business. I warned them not to do anything stupid, and as far as I'm concerned, that absolves me of any responsibility."
Speedy literally couldn't believe what he was hearing. He was so stunned, in fact, that he missed the next jump by about four inches, his body dropping like any other object left in midair, only a single, wildly flailing hand managing to grip the edge before he plummeted the rather painful and possibly fatal distance to the blank pavement below. Robin had turned around and was offering him a hand the next instant, but Speedy slapped it away as he slowly managed his way up the ledge himself.
"Damn, Robin, what are you saying!" Speedy asked when he'd gotten his thunderous pulse under control, never having been as comfortable with roof-leaping as a guy who'd been dancing on skyscrapers after a childhood filled with trapeze and tightropes. "Don't you know what could happen to those two?"
"Gee, let me think about that…" Robin paused, glaring at Speedy rather than even pretending to think about it, "they could get picked up by another rapist. They could get to the party and drink themselves so senseless that they're easy prey—or hell, just die. An enterprising pimp could slip them some crack, get them hooked, and they could end up working the street by next week. Some prick could doctor their drinks and lord knows where they'll wake up. And then of course, they might just do something stupid—against my specific instructions, I might add—like hell, I dunno, wash down some E with that drain-cleaner they try to pass off as vodka at these things, and then subsequently get rolled out into the street and left to die when they hit the floor an hour later. The possibilities for tragedy are almost as numerous as they are disgusting. But you know… I refuse to worry about them."
"Why?" Speedy asked, his voice heating with anger at the way Robin was talking. "Is it because you're too wrapped up in your own petty problems to worry about two strangers? I never thought I'd see that day…" and Speedy's sad, sad disgust was obvious to hear.
"No," Robin said calmly, shaking his head and growing a… a smile, of all things, turning to fix a smug expression on his excitable friend. "It's because I heard this:" and he held up a small transmitter/recorder he'd been hiding in his palm.
"We've taken enough chances tonight!" Alicia's voice came through loud and clear, blurting right into Speedy's uncomprehending expression, "We're going to go in, get Jackie, explain what happened, and get home!" Speedy stared on in stunned silence as Robin let the message finish playing.
"I'm so sorry Alice!" Jess sobbed out miserably, "I just wanted to hang out with you! I didn't mean to worry you, I never wanted this!" 'This' was where Robin cut the feed, then turned and began to set up his next jump.
"Why you lousy prick!" Speedy shouted, his surprise becoming an embarrassed smirk as he realized what an ass he'd made of himself, "you planted a transmitter on them! You were planning to keep tabs on them from square one!" Speedy hurried to follow Robin's lead again as he made the next leap, so at first there was no response, just a casual backward glance from the black-haired nut revealing a brilliant grin.
"What can I say?" Robin answered him when they were both standing on the next roof, signaling a halt as they finally reached the bay and the enormous system of commercial piers there. "Just because I'm having some lady troubles doesn't change who I am. Besides, I've always had kind of a soft-spot a damsel in distress—even if it was never as big as my hard-spot for women that can whoop ass in their own right."
"Whatever!" Speedy dismissed it all out of hand, grinning wildly at the idea of Robin making a joke, trying to remember the last time he'd seen the guy in such good spirits. He'd been putting on a good show of being morose, but now that Speedy had gotten him engaged, given him something to put that sharp-ass mind of his to work on, and gotten him out of the circular-thinking, fantastically confused mess of denial and heartache he'd been wallowing in, he was recovering quickly. The guy was just about ready to mellow out over a nice drink or twenty, pass out, and wake up later today with a hangover and the opportunity to attack his problems from a fresh angle, unclouded by his inability to deal with all those awful new emotions. Or that was the plan anyway. We all know how plans can be.
The two of them spent a long moment examining the scene at pier 24 before either of them said anything. The mob of cars mashed together in the cargo loading/unloading area would eventually draw the cops, but bribes had gone to the necessary people to ensure that this would not be soon. The barbed-wire fences that stood between the ships and parking lot were meant to be a representation that customs regulations were being enforced, but this side of the docks hadn't been used for anything but overflow of local freight in so long that they didn't even post security guards anymore. The fence's one opening was at a guard station long-abandoned, taken over by burly, mean-looking bounces and a cashier that gave a whole new meaning to the word 'greasy.' Beyond the fences stood the scene of the crimes, all several hundred of them taking place on the apparently derelict tanker ship that was currently hosting the hottest underground venue on the west coast. This was what Speedy had been talking about, and now, looking at it, Robin had second, third, and fourth thoughts.
"How are we going to run this?" the Boy Wonder asked, as his sensibilities and sense of justice smashed firmly into his desire to get stinking drunk someplace camera's wouldn't intrude.
"That never ceases to amaze me," Speedy said calmly, his voice barely carrying over the blasting techno-dance beat that reverberated along the surprisingly close, chokingly humid space containing the party.
The two heroes had opted for a less than direct route to getting what they wanted, a necessary effort that Speedy had intended from square one, much to Robin's approval—or at least such that he could overcome his disapproval of the whole matter now that he wasn't so blinded by the desperation that had roped him into the deal in the first place. Thus, after sneaking on board quite to the ignorance of anyone running the party, they'd made their way spy-like into the rather odd space that had been created within the bowls of the ship to house the rave. Speedy's amazement, so eloquently expressed moments ago, was directed at the Boy Wonder's current antics, as he was tightrope walking quite effortlessly across an aluminum lighting fixture at least thirty feet off the ground, making his way into position to begin their operation in earnest.
"I've explained this to you before man, several times now, in fact," Robin said pleasantly as he reveled in the thrill of walking the inch-wide pole so high above the hard steel of the floor below, "balance is in my blood, plain and simple. If you believe my old man's stories, I was born on parallel bars… and conceived on a trapeze."
"Ooooh—kinky!" Speedy shouted, having heard that story a million times by now, but none the less happy to have Robin talking about something other than his predicament. "Just don't let it go to your head! One false move and they'll be scraping you off the floor like some brain-fired OD."
"You just worry about getting those lights," Robin answered as he reached his position and tied a line from his ankle to the flimsy pole even now bending beneath his weight, "I've got this down."
With that assurance, the two fell to silence, completely focused on working in sync on this. They were both high above the dance floor, currently standing on the massive arrayed lighting of multiple colors that had been custom built into the regular storage space of the ship to lend atmosphere. What had resulted was a wildly different design from normal cargo vessels, one that left a very exploitable causeway suspended high over the partiers with light-hanging poles coming off of it at regular intervals. One of those poles happened to be directly over the extremely busy bar, and it was this one currently occupied by the Boy Wonder. Speedy remained on the sturdy maintenance scaffold in the middle of the huge space, and both men were well hidden by the bright lights that would invariably be shining into the eyes of anyone that might chance to look up.
Suddenly, Robin turned and gave Speedy the signal, and the red-head wasted no time in snipping the necessary wires to plunge the ship into utter darkness. As the beat continued to thump incessantly, pressing through the darkened space like an enormous hand to squeeze the head and chest of the mostly-high, almost universally drunk party patrons, the DJ didn't hesitate for a moment, but wound up an old hand-cranked fire-truck siren for what he figured to be part of the show. The piercing wail drew every eye in the house, even as people screamed in excitement, the only light to see by cast by ever-present, multi-colored glow sticks and various knick-knacks, whirly-gigs, and toy light-sabers people had brought to create odd lights and sounds during these particular portions of the night's entertainment.
Under such perfect cover, it was child's play for Robin to lower himself down to the bar on an auto-wench, nab some booze, and wind himself back up again without anyone being the wiser. After all, in the nearly complete dark, even someone looking right at him would have been hard-pressed to pick him out against the walls with their scattered psychedelic paint-jobs. In this way, he was in and out in a flash, off the wench and fairly gliding back to the scaffolding along that murderously flimsy aluminum bar. Once he was safely next to Speedy, the marksman reconnected the lights, and people below were almost disappointed as the room brightened once more and the siren died out. The DJ didn't know why it ended so quickly either, but he distracted everyone from this fact by changing tracks theatrically, and the party was back in full swing before anyone could really complain.
"So what did you manage to haul in oh great ethanol bandit?" Speedy said sarcastically, wheedling on the fact that Robin still wasn't entirely comfortable about what they were doing here.
"Ahh, I couldn't see in that mess, and I didn't stick around to read the labels while I was down there, so lets check it out shall we?" he suggested, hardly letting on how much all this had to be getting to him. "Wow!" he exclaimed when he actually got a look, "It's looking like overkill by about five times for what we need! We have… Jose, Capn' M, Absolut, and your 'old friend,' Mr. Jack Daniels."
"Jesus, what a bunch of retail spooge!" Speedy exclaimed in disdain, "What—did they knock off an ABC to stock this party?"
"Of course it's stolen, and don't knock it too hard," Robin reminded him, "the only reason I agreed to swipe this stuff is because the insurance companies have already paid claims on the losses. Stealing from thieves doesn't count."
"Yeah, sure, but still—for Christ's sake, most of those can have their quality summarized by 'it'll get ya drunk," and he let that hang in the air for a moment, until he was certain Robin was disgusted and not entertained. At that point, he calmed down a little, realizing he didn't have a lot of room to gripe considering how eminently right the price on them had been, "Then again… I guess you can't expect to match the contents of a billionaire's 100-year old mahogany liquor cabinet with what you find at a teen-scene rave. Whatever—at least we covered the full spectrum."
"No kidding, I wasn't looking and I still managed to grab tequila, rum, vodka, and whisky all at once," Robin muttered playfully, eyeing the bottles with a mixture of longing and trepidation.
"Yeah, but what you didn't grab was shot glasses," Speedy reprimanded Robin shamelessly, grabbing the Absolut and the whisky for himself and leaving Robin to the taste of the southern hemisphere, "so be careful. We're here to get shit-faced for a while, not to take turns dying of alcohol poisoning. Now have a seat, pop a cork, and let's chat. Despite all that's been said, we still have things to talk about, you and I."
Robin didn't answer, he just planted his spirits onto the scaffolding, sat down, and flipped himself around until he was facing away. Rather than become incensed at this apparent rejection, Speedy did exactly the same thing, setting his back against Robin's so they each had something to lean back against, the intense lights and sound of the party below vibrating the very metal of the narrow walkway they sat upon. Then there was an electric popping sound in his ear, and immediately the two were connected again.
"Hey, mic check, mic check—how's it going perv?" Robin asked directly into his head, the whispered words dying under the unrelenting assault of the dance beat, but the radio signal coming in loud and clear into his earpiece.
"Signal's fine my virgin friend," Speedy sniped right back, then pried the cork out of the vodka bottle with one of his arrows and took a long whiff. He pulled his nose away quickly, wincing at the mass-produced aroma's crude bite, then shook his head sadly. "So, I guess here's to you Dick," Speedy spoke his favorite toast, playing a word game that had become an epic inside joke between the two.
"No, no!" Robin protested past a contained laugh, "here's to you, Cock—I mean Roy!" Robin answered with the response he could only use in complete privacy like this, raising his rum bottle up to tap it against Speedy's similarly raised vodka bottle before each took a miniscule hit to start the night. Both took a moment to appreciate the peculiar burning kick of their chosen beverage, particularly as the fluids hit stomachs empty of anything but a pittance of ice-cream. It was not going to take long to become incoherent tonight—no sir.
"So Robin," Speedy began cordially, stretching out to become more comfortable on the cold metal scaffold as he leaned back into his old friend, "how long have we been doing this now?"
"You mean going 'out'?" Robin asked, before allowing his face to contort slightly in concentration. "I suppose if you consider Memorial Day weekend in Gotham to be the first time… that being the time we met… that'd make it about five years."
"Damn… time she does fly, no?" Speedy asked, taking another tiny hit from the bottle and letting the vodka's burn warm his body, "Now that I think about it, it must have been at least that long, because these trips of ours go all the way back to our sidekick days. I mean—God!—do you remember when you and Old Bats came down to Star City chasing Two-Face and we all got together, you, me, Bats, and G.A., to bust open his counterfeiting operation?"
"Oh yeah!" Robin responded semi-fondly between tiny swigs of rum, harkening back with little effort to simpler days, "that was the night you talked me into sneaking off into that strip-club with you."
"And wasn't it great?" Speedy asked, reminiscing easily in the hopes of putting his pal at ease.
"Great?" and Robin's tone soured, "Speedy, we were twelve! Twelve! I practically pissed myself, you actually got a nosebleed, and then—we got caught. It's just damn lucky they thought we were posers in costumes, or lord knows what the tabloids would have said."
"Yeah, yeah," Speedy dismissed the less fortunate end of that night out of hand, "But that was when we decided to get together for these little jaunts on a regular basis. A few months later it was Maui, which was just a while before Key West."
"Followed by, at various points in our shared adolescence," Robin supplemented his comment, "Madrid, Paris, London, Amsterdam—My god Amsterdam—Rio, Vegas, Barcelona, the Rivera, New Orleans, Tokyo—MY GOD Tokyo—and any number of other places two rich kids with an excess of energy and ingenuity could find to make trouble for themselves." He paused for a long moment, as if in deep thought, and Speedy figured he'd gone into brooding about problems he was supposed to be forgetting. Fortunately, he wasn't, as indicated when he continued, "And if I'm not mistaken, you barely escaped jail terms in more than half of those places!" Robin went on, recalling narrow scrapes with the police and the nightmare it had been destroying certain incrementing photos. "I swear, the amount of trouble you get your perverted ass into is surpassed only by the amount of jail time you've weaseled out of serving!"
"Oh give it a rest!" Speedy punctured Robin's attempt at indignation. "the only laws I've ever broken were stupid, out of date renditions of legislated morality. I'm sorry, but the vice codes have just never made much of an impression on me, as you'll note by the fact that I'm not doing anything to stop what's going on down below us."
"And about that—" Robin almost got started complaining again, but Speedy cut him off.
"Don't you start—we agreed that trying to bust these assholes wouldn't serve any productive purpose!" Speedy overrode Robin's concerns for the umpteenth time. "These morons would go someplace to get high no matter what. At least here, there's a slight chance their friends can get them to the hospital if they crap out, and there are bar-tenders to cut the boozers off if they get out of hand. Granted the drug-dealers are friggen rampant, but hell—that's what this is for!" and Speedy held up his prize slingshot proudly, leaning over slightly to look over the edge. Robin followed his gaze, and in a moment, they were both scanning the area below. Soon, Speedy actually pulled a small device out of his belt, a mechanical scanner of some sort to be sure, and began examining the screen. Soon, he pointed out their first target.
"See that smarmy numb-nut with the big hair?" Speedy asked, pointing out a much older fellow in a fantastically ugly suit and wearing far too much jewelry.
"Falco Vinconi, the crack baron of the lower west side," Robin rattled the guy's name off from memory, his recent and rather reluctant exploration of mundane crime as a release for his pent up energy having yielded obvious gains. "That punk could hand out crack-sikles to kindergartners in front of city hall without even getting a dirty look, that's how powerful he is. He's got so many connections that the police can't touch him any more than we can."
"Not exactly…" and Speedy pulled a small marble out of a dispenser on the bottom of his quiver, holding it up for examination. "This is the S.T.A.R. labs premier model 'magic bullet.' It delivers a full-force impact, then evaporates into a colorless, odorless gas the next instant. Watch—And—Learn."
As Robin looked on in amazement, Speedy lined up his shot on the living scum who presumed to walk among actual people, most of them innocent enough—recreational drug users, compulsive carousers, and teenagers out to make an appearance at what had become known as a 'cool scene.' There was a long moment of tension, then Vinconi took a shot of whatever he was drinking, and Speedy let fly. The marble clocked the fiend on the side of his head at a stupendous velocity, and to all appearances, Vinconi just passed out under the strength of his drink, falling backward stiffly and hitting the ground with a resounding thud. His body was lost in the mash of partiers until his bodyguards could rush forward and help him up, but it was clear in any case that he wouldn't be giving out anymore free trial samples of cocaine tonight. Up on the scaffold, the two guys were lost in barely stifled laughter, the need to keep their perch from shaking around too much in conflict with the enormous hilarity of Speedy's marksmanship.
These antics went on for some time, the two continuing to nurse their liquor as Speedy went on to nail a heroin dealer with another 'can't hold his drink' ruse, got a gigantic bouncer to punch the living daylights out of an ecstasy dealer with a stinging pellet or two, and, to top it all off, knocked out two crystal-meth dealers in such a compromising spooning position as it looked like they were cuddling homosexuals passed out in a corner. Robin was just about to suggest—nay, demand that Speedy continue when there was a sudden alarm from the device the marksman had been examining earlier.
"Oh crap…" and Speedy looked down to see what they were dealing with. Robin continued to be a passive observer as Speedy was suddenly possessed by an incredible tension. "Why that lazy mother—!" Speedy cursed under his breath as he looked over the side and down at the bar, pulling back for another shot off of his catapult.
"What is it?" Robin asked, taking another sip of rum and felling things start to get truly slippery inside his head. He plopped back down onto the scaffold so as to accommodate himself to his altered balance while Speedy continued to try and hold his slingshot straight.
"That cock-sucker down at the bar—he' just slipped some flunitraefulflf—" Speedy slurred badly, then tried again, "flunitrazepeshlel—flunitrazepam—right into that girl's drink!"
"Fluni-whatnow?" Robin wasn't exactly on the ball, though the chemical certainly sounded familiar.
"Date-Rape drug," Speedy qualified, getting that out without trouble, at least. In a moment, and with Robin looking on in interest, Speedy let loose with another shot, shattering the man's shot glass before he could even try to offer it to the young woman next to him at the bar. The explosion of fluid and glass sliced his hand open even as the pellet evaporated, and the man's shout of surprise and subsequent cursing was cause for great amusement for the two men up on high.
"Nice shot…" Robin said through a giggle, his voice trailing off as though he would say more, though he simply continued to sit and chuckle quietly to himself.
"Not really," Speedy managed to object, staring at his hand like there was something special about it, his vodka and slingshot laying forgotten to one side, "I was aiming for the bashtard's head. Very little annoys me more than lazy pricks who think they can use drugs to skip through the valalorush art of wooing a pretty lady." As Speedy spoke, he continued to slur very slightly, without even noticing it himself, and Robin took the moment to get a closer look at the bottle of absolut.
"Well hey man…" he paused to wince forcefully at the effort of focusing his vision with the intense music pounding in the background, "I'd say you're about four and change shots down this bottle… I'd be impresshhed you were shooting in the right direction."
"Yeah, yeah," Speedy snapped the bored dismissal again, and then plopped fully down onto the scaffold, his own balance becoming untrustworthy in the extreme, "guess its time to stop jerking around and shhtart on the real business."
"What was that again?" Robin asked detachedly, and Speedy couldn't tell if it was serious or not.
"Women," the marksman finally said, deciding it didn't matter if he'd actually forgotten or not, "and what you should do about yoursh."
"Ah nuts…"
"You know what your—what your specific problem is?" Speedy asked, not at all expecting his buddy to actually respond to his rather rhetorical opening statement. In truth, there was the expected long pause, but Robin rather than Speedy ended it by speaking up in a voice devoid of any trace of happiness.
"I'm trapped," he started out coldly, "in a situation where my previously existing feelings of unbreakable protective intensity are quickly ballooning into mind-contorting pangs of devotion and desire equally split between two magnificently wonderful and worthy women. The resultant situation begs a set of unacceptable solutions—either in the sense that it will end in a broken heart, or in the sense that the relationship is neither socially acceptable nor dynamically feasible." There was a slight pause, Robin himself stunned by and Speedy not having yet noticed the syllables flowing smoothly from his drunken lips. Robin blinked several times, shook his head as though to clear it of something, then finished, "it suckshs."
"Hey—No, no, no!" Speedy rejected Robin's words automatically along the line of the argument he'd already mostly prepared in his muddled head, then his dulled synapses actually registered what the other guy had actually said, and he paused to focus an indescribably dirty look at Robin. "Yes—actually, that's exactly right. Wait a minute…" It was Speedy's turn to pause as suspicions became certainties, and he was actually upset as he accused, "You're not drunk enough yet!"
"Chill!" Robin ordered, as the two moderately impaired guys began to struggle, Speedy trying to stuff the bottle of Jose Cuervo down Robin's throat. Robin still had a slight edge reflex-wise, and managed to get Speedy's arms trapped, though not before pungent tequila had poured all over the both of them. "Come on Speedy," Robin said, completely evenly, his dizziness dispelled mostly by the seriousness ruling his mind, "I don't need anymore liquor. I can see now—which means I'm just drunk enough."
"I disagree!" Speedy snapped, and the entire scaffold began to sway seriously as they rolled through another series of creative grapples, spreading liquor even further around and finally knocking the untouched whisky bottle clear out into the clueless partiers below. It spun down into the crowd and clocked some random speed-freak a harsh one, and this was around the same time Robin flipped around Speedy and pinned him to the scaffold with his arms pressed into his back.
"I can see now…" Robin managed to articulate, his voice cracking with deep misery, "I need to pick one—I have to give up one and endure the agony of her seeing her agony… because that's better than keeping us all in eternal suspense. It's… it's my responsibility… because I love them…" The alcohol was quickly blurring everything bothering Robin into one mish-mash of unrestrained agony, an unfortunately common effect of getting smashed that could only be cured with blinding amounts of additional liquor. As Speedy had said, he wasn't drunk enough yet.
"Heh… you think you know what you're talking about… but you don't," Speedy spoke his mind from the rather inescapable pin Robin had muscled him into, never having been a match for the nimble brawler in the extreme close quarters. "You think you've got problems? In love with two women are yah? I've got a problem that mops the floor with that dream-date, and it's taught me a little something that I should pass on to you now. Hell, it mighsh even help."
Robin considered his statement for a long moment, his utter, grim confidence that the conclusion he'd finally reached was quite sadly correct keeping his weight firmly on Speedy's back. The other guy wasn't even trying to struggle, just breathing heavily, as was Robin, attempting futilely to clear the buzzing in his head with gasps of air heated to a humid muck by sweaty humans. In the end, Robin realized, it was his weakness, his reaching desire to be wrong, to not have to face what he'd come to terms with, that had him pressing himself off of his old friend and snatching the last of the Captain Morgan from where it lay half-poured out on the scaffold as he plopped onto his rear.
"Do tell," he said simply, and then took a huge, gut-busting swig of hard rum to purge his own disgustingly depressing conclusions from his mind. Speedy finished prying himself off the scaffold, wiped some tequila off his uniform, licked his fingers compulsively, then winced away from the awful flavor, coming to clutch the bottle of Cuervo firmly so as to remind himself not to drink the crud anymore.
"It's like this," Speedy began as he watched Robin eradicate as many brain-cells as he possibly could with repeated pulls from the rum bottle, "you may have fallen for two babes… but I'm in love with all women. All of them."
"Wanting to nail them doshnt count ashh love," Robin muttered miserably, then slammed down his bottle and knocked it away as a crapload of rum hit his system all at once.
"I'm not kidding," Speedy went on, gratified to see that Robin had finally cleared his false understanding with a mind-eraser of cheap booze, "I was lying when I shaid I had nothing like your problem. I love em all. Every last God-blessed one of them holds a special place in my heart. I think women are probably the most wonderful thing in the entire world—and that, my friend, is a hard philosophy to live by. Because no matter what else, women are also one of the most terrible things alive."
"Woulju make up your mind?" Robin blurted, wrapping his arms around his knees and drawing them up to his chest, most likely to give him something to do with his shaking hands.
"Jush hear me out," Speedy begged, "women are wonderful, and a good man, a man that hashn't been warped by a crappy upbringing or his own inshipid self-worth, can't really hope to find a greater pleasure in life than meeting a woman he can love and then doing everything in his power to brighten her life. Theresh actually a whole line of built-in rewards that can drive any sane man wild—a blush, a smile, a laugh… a kiss… an embrace… and so on—and if you ask me, that's what a guy should live for—that's just the best thing you can get."
"Mmmm," Robin agreed, his stupor deepening slightly as more and more ethanol hit his brain, but he was still coherent enough to take what he heard to heart.
"The problem ish, there are some… less than scrupupulous—ahem, scrupulous women in this world, just like with men," Speedy qualified, snatching up the vodka for another small swig, then idly tapping that bottle against the mostly empty tequila bottle. "Such a woman will take advantage of this control they can exert over men, with a lady being just as willing and able to marionette a man around by his feelings as vicea versha. Because the way women affect us can be so fundamental, especially with total suckers like you and me, the potential for being controlled, for becoming some vapid whore's real estate to be paraded around and pitted against other guys for sport, is very real—friggen dangerous, in fact."
"You're… rambling," Robin warned him distantly, sinking further into a state of mind that wouldn't be able to appreciate Speedy's advice, which he at least seemed to think was highly relevant.
"Oh—yeah, you're right," and Speedy hastily shook a haze from his eyes before continuing, "What I've been meaning to say is that, that pinch you feel, the one right here," and Speedy pointed to his chest just below his heart and just above his stomach, "is the eppishenter of those strong feelings us guys can have—well most of them anyway—and it's giving you false signals—it's making you want to do things that aren't in anyone's best interest, just because you, like me and so many other decent men, can't help but want to bring pleasure and happiness into the lives of the one, or ones, we love."
Speedy had pinpointed Robin's pain exactly, and this, more than anything else, is what lent him a tangible credibility in Robin's mind, a force of truth that drove much of the drunken stupidity out of the Boy Wonder's brain and made at least these few words stick.
"You feel responsible," Speedy went on with conviction, "like it's no one's problem other than yours that you feel beholden to the deshirers of two mistresses in your heart—but that's not true. It's isn't only your problem, and the reason you're so damn misherabible—miserable—is because your entirely unreasonable heart is dragging your completely overwhelmed mind in absolutely the wrong direction. What I'm trying to say is," and Speedy was really working at cutting out his effusive circumlocution, "who are you to just up and decide which of those women is going to get to be with you? Don't they get a say?"
Robin's mind tried to work around this concept for a little while, but hit a few walls that he didn't hesitate to inform his friend of.
"I'm not shom… not shom prize ham Speedy!" Robin muttered angrily, his body wavering slightly even as he sat down now that he was feeling the alcohol's bite in earnest. "I'm my own man! I can't jushsh-jushsh-jussht sit around and let them duke it out over me! Ish not… Ish not…"
"It's not now things are usually done, I know," and Speedy was actually becoming more coherent, at least in comparison as Robin's BAC leapt past his, "and when it is done, it's so often for selfish reasons, like some kind of sick egotistical pleasure an asshole might gesh from watching women brawl over him. The trick here—the trick is to nosh confuse yourself with those guys out for nothing but tail—"
"Like you," Robin accused, cutting off Speedy's increasingly difficult to understand lecture, belligerence rearing its ugly head out of the rum's embrace, giving his distant tone a poisoned sound.
"No, no!" Speedy protested, his own buzz making hard not to go straight to the fight right there, "that's not why I do it. I love sex, of coursh, but I'm not out to get myself off. If that were the case I'd jush use this:" and he held up his right hand, still clutching the tequila bottle. When Robin suddenly began to giggle in a bout of drunken humor, Speedy looked over at his right hand, saw the offending bottle, and switched it over to his left, holding out his right hand again. "To all thosh guys that think all sex is about getting some pretty girl to help you squeeze off a round or two," Speedy said, drawing Robin's attention back by being both exceptionally vulgar—and even more serious than the other guy was drunk, "I shay… marry old Righty… she won't do ya wrong."
For a very long moment, Robin tried to take this as a serious statement. He really made a physically visible effort. Unfortunately, he was seven or eight shots of rum gone, and so a burst of laughter finally exploded out from where he'd been containing it, so forceful that it lay him out on the scaffold and sent him into slow rolling motions as he gripped his stomach.
"Sho—sho—sho you're trying to tell me that your skirt-chashing and-and-and blazing pervershsishsty—pervershity—per-ver-sit-y…" Robin had to exert a new and intense effort to get these words out past his mirth, "are all your way of-of-of—"
"Of expressing my love of all women," Speedy confirmed while wearing an enormous smile, so utterly smug now that Robin actually began to calm down a little in confusion. "I'll try and explain something to you Mr. Virgin Romeo," Speedy started when he had the other guy's attention again, "women aren't all 'commitment and demure sighs' like polite society and all that televishhd bullshit would have you believe. You gave me the stink eye about it when I said it earlier, but some women—in fact all women, on shome level—are in contact with a much more short-term relation, immin-in-min-in-immanently carnal side. Whereashh the cliché is that guys are pretty well always on the lookout for a fine 'piesh of ass,' and women are into something… deeper, the truth is that a woman can be jusht as mindlessly attracted to a guy's body. I think you know that now."
"Meh…" the alcohol was doing its job well here for Robin, and the memory was more of a blurr of embarrassment rather than a terror, though the bruises still managed to throb slightly, even through the cottony ethanol-induced haze surrounding his brain.
"My problem—my inability to hold any single woman in my heart—leavsh me in a pretty—a pretty fine situation-ation," Speedy started up again, his slurring worsening, "howsh a guy supposed to brighten the life of thash many women? Flowersh? Diamonds? You and me together aren't rich enough for all that. So I've learned to give of—of myshelf!" and now he sported a truly goofy smile, apparently extremely satisfied with that explanation of his rampant promiscuity.
"… Sho… you're a philan-phil-philant—a self-sacrifishing man-whore?" Robin asked, giving his friend a cock-eyed glare through a liquor-induced grin a mile wide. It was pretty obvious what he thought, but he slurred it out anyway, "Thash the mosht arrogant pile of-of-of nashty stuff I ever heard yoush say!"
"No—really," Speedy said, his head lolling forward, then rolling limply on his shoulders as he blinked through his splitting vision, "Its really very—very different than what you're thinking," and he held up a hand as though to beg Robin's patience.
"Bull," the other guy said flatly, both having completely forgotten about his problem for the time being, "tell me whysh you… are different… from any other sex crazshed teenage prick."
"Responsibility and commitment to exshellence," Speedy said right away, as though he'd been begging Robin to ask the question. If it sounds like a business motto, it would be because it very nearly is. "I—mush to my notoriety—," he continued to wear that stupid smile, and so the two wound up giving each other equally blank grins, "have taken promis-prommmisshh—gettin' laid a lot—and made it from a sin… into a science. I'm currently batting a perfect record as far as partner satisfaction goesh, and I've got every—"
"Oh shtuff it you… you…you!" Robin ordered, unable to come up with an insult right on the spot like that in his current condition, "I'm not gonna sit here an lishen to you toot your own friggen horn. Brag on someone else's time."
"It's not bragging!" Speedy protested weakly, "I gosh all these rules and methods and thingsh to make sure it all works out perfect. Like-like-like I got strictures: don't do it when your high—cause if your high it's not really your descision—not really conshensual. And: alwashy use as many different kinds of contra-tra-tra-contraceptive ash you can right?—cause that way you get exstra coverage 'gainst makin babies—no 'scue not to. The conservatives don't want you to know thish—but sex is only dangeroush if you're stupid and irreshponsibible 'bout it …course, too bad sex makes guysh stupid—all that thinking with the man bits and whatnot…" At this point, Speedy had completely lost track of where he was going with the whole issue, and Robin wasn't too drunk to notice this fact.
"Thash IT, I—I—I—I'm out of here," Robin managed to get it out eventually, trying his best to stand and finally managing it by pulling himself up on one of the wires attaching the scaffold to the ship's deck above them. "I donsh have to lishen to you be a dick!"
"No, wait!" Speedy tried to turn the situation around, remembering that there was a point to be made in all that he was saying, unfortunately becoming fixated on the most recent one of his explanation rather than the relevant one of Robin's problem. "I have this scanner thing see—" he nearly shouted into his microphone, pulling out the box he'd been messing with earlier, "not only dosh it detect drugsh, but ish a bio-scanner that can detect EshhTeeDees right away. Latesh technolgigy!" and he was giving Robin a much more genuine smile as he tried to interest the other man again. Robin wasn't biting, rather, he was trying his best to see a straight path down the narrow scaffold, past his ex-friend, and back up onto deck for some fresh air. It wasn't working out too well.
"Jush shut the F'ing hell up!" Robin demanded, Speedy's continued antics doing nothing at all to keep the world around him from spinning, spinning, spinning away, throwing even his legendary balance completely out of whack. It was the wrong move.
"Oh right—!" Speedy shouted indignantly, getting up onto his own unsteady feet and standing between Robin and where he was trying to stagger, "you ungrateful bashtard! I'm tryin' to help you out—and you don't know how good you've gosh it! I have to jump through hoopsh to have safe sex, but you have the friggen alien Aphrodite pulling your pansh off—a babe you can't ever get pregnant—a girlfriend you never have to worry about kocking up—"
Well, let's just say, that was about the time Robin stopped listening. Or rather, the red haze that enveloped his mind at this point was quite impenetrable to words, and suddenly, Speedy, all three of him spinning around in vagrant circles with the rest of the room, became Robin's solitary target.
"Why you vulgar sonuva--!" he screamed, while his punch, though weighty and well engineered, flew spectacularly off-target, and as he went barreling forward off balance, he smacked right into Speedy, bowling the other guy right off his feet and sending them both into a hard sprawl on the scaffolding's flimsy metal floor.
As they were both knocked around by the fall, the sudden movements and rushing air, not to mention the swinging of their perch on its steel wires, did much to replace Robin's anger with a much more immediate, even more undeniable urge. His eye's widened, his mouth watered uncontrollably, his guts lurched, and it was all he could do to roll off Speedy and get his head over the edge of the scaffold.
"BWEAHHHH," was the general ghist of it, and I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say that it was spectacular, at least in its volume considering how little Robin had had in him besides those chocolate shakes. Suffice also to mention how extraordinarily this scene entertained Speedy, who couldn't stop laughing as he watched Robin puke his guts out into the crowd below them. He actually managed to get up and rub his friend on the back to help him choke it all out, all bad-blood forgotten in the haze of drunken amiability ruling his thoughts. That amiability only faded when he realized that the shouts of people below were actually louder than the deafening music, and that when he tried to get Robin moving, to get them both out, that the other guy was quite utterly passed out. Oh brother.
When Robin woke up, it was to have a disgustingly acrid flavor in his mouth, a splitting headache, and surprisingly, not a whole hell of a lot else wrong. He opened his eyes, felt the fresh sea breeze on his back and face, and looked straight forward for quite some time before he realized what he was seeing.
"AHH!" he shouted reflexively, pushing himself back away from the brink of the platform he was on, having woken up with his face hanging off the edge of a tower of suitably frightening height. He barreled backward until he hit something solid with a loud clang, then began to groan as he came to a stop, a splitting agony assaulting his skull for the crime of moving so much. As he began to recover from the first knee-jerk of his reaction, he realized that his head was still a long way from clear.
"Speedy?" Robin finally managed to hazard, once he'd been able to spit some of the nastiness out of his mouth.
"Yo," the other guy answered, and it came from the other side of the platform on whose edge he'd awoken. As he looked around to find his friend exactly, Robin quickly gathered that he was on top of the tanker's bridge and living area, and the thing he was leaning against was the base of its radar dish. Speedy turned out to be exactly on the opposite side of the dish's base.
"Hey man, what happened?" Robin asked, more as a reintroduction than because he was confused. He knew exactly what had happened, and he said as much with, "Did you use the buzz-kill?"
"Yep," Speedy answered with a measured snip, "one shot for each of us, as per usual."
Buzz-kill was something else from the cutting edge of carousing-oriented pharmaceuticals. The wonderful, non-habit forming, non-toxic, highly-expensive drug cleared alcohol out of the system at an accelerated pace, compressing about seven hours of drying-out into a few minutes. It was miraculous stuff, and the two had been using it since well before its FDA approval had been blocked by the coalition of temperance-minded Christian factions who'd feared its affect on their 'nothing but abstinence' strategy toward every vice they hated. You'd be surprised what you could get a hold of with enough money and the right corporate connections.
"Man, that is some good stuff," Robin commented idly as he gathered the strength to really move, "Where would we be without it?"
"If I'm not mistaken, we'd be dead in a gutter in Moscow. I… had a bit too much vodka… and you had to get me up and moving before the Russian Mafia could ask questions about the rather crooked American flag I tagged onto their gang car with all three colors of spraypaint."
"Ah yes, Moscow… not as crazy as Tokyo or Amsterdam, but pretty nuts." The conversation had officially become strained, and Robin's head wasn't hurting any less. Despite this, he muddled through the last hour of his consciousness. He then groaned expansively.
"Ohhhh man… I remember everything… I'm… sorry," Robin was quite sincere, the remnants of the booze in his system leaving him quite emotional.
"Yeah, right," Speedy sounded even more morose than Robin had at the night's entertainingly innocent beginning, and feeling terrible—really, crushingly, terrible—Robin used the inactive radar dish to stagger around the platform they were on until he could see the other guy, who was sitting much as Robin had been with his back to the dish, staring out at the moonlit bay, still absently clutching the basically empty bottle of Jose Cuervo.
"Hey man, seriously," and Robin hunkered down woozily next to his old friend, who was currently refusing to look at him, "I didn't mean any of that. I know…" he hesitated for a moment, then got over whatever was bothering him, "I know you only act like a perv to get a rise out of me. I know that around women you are actually a decent and upstanding guy." This completely unexpected admonition exacted a slow, wide-eyed stare from Speedy, who turned to focus it on Robin with an incredible expression of surprise. "Whoa now!" Robin hurried to correct any misinterpretations there, "I still think you have sex a little too tightly wired into your brain—" and Speedy's face fell into an exasperated smirk at his prudish friend, "but I'll apologize and admit that you do at least care about women. In your own twisted little way."
"Well, you certainly have a way with apologies," Speedy teased, but it was clear he'd recovered from any fears Robin might have inadvertently instilled into him. The last thing he needed was some doubt lingering in his soul that he was somehow similar to the scum that used women as tools to masturbate with, and he didn't only mean rapists. Lazy, inconsiderate, and pushy boyfriends also fell squarely within his hate demographic.
"Alright then, if we've cleared that up," Robin started again, after a long pause in which he got a good whiff of how terrible they both smelled, "I seem to recall you trying to impart some kind of small wisdom unto me, your humble student in the ways of love."
"It's simple really," Speedy readily began to detail the plan he'd so hopelessly strayed from during their drunken raving, "a hell of a lot more effective than you just agonizing over which one you pick, then leaving one of them shell-shocked and heartbroken when you don't pick her. Just… really, just have them compete."
"Ahh…"
"No, really," Speedy went on in a powerful, emphatic tone, "once you wake them up and make certain that everything is cool after those drug-induced antics, you know, that you apologize for not handling it better, that you don't blame them or anything, that you aren't terrified of Starfire—no matter how you might actually feel" he cut off any comment Robin might make there, "just set up a series of dates. Over time, one of them is bound to grow on you. It'll give you time to discover if you can really handle how strong Starfire is, or if your feelings for Raven are actually love or just some weird cocktail of physical attraction and pity. And the best part is, this way, when you do get one rather than both, the other will at least know she had an even shot, had her free chance in open competition rather than some arbitrary decision from you. It'll still be sad, but at least it'll be fair."
Robin was quiet for a long time. He smiled slowly, and as the time wore on, his smile grew wider and wider, a rather cheerful tinge coming to the tail end of his buzz, even through the headache.
"When did you get so smart?" he asked eventually, and then cut off Speedy before he could respond, "seriously—when? Batman always said you were this terrible influence on me, that you got me into all kinds of trouble, and hell, maybe you have. But that… that's friggen inspired! That might actually work! And I mean, at least it's the first feasible approach to all this I've heard since I started stressing about it all!"
"Ahh… well," Speedy put up a mockery of modesty as he basked in the praise. Right up until Robin's sudden—
"But—" the great depressing one said, "what if I should happen to go on these trial dates… and come to realize 'hey, there's no way I could ever pick one of these spectacular women over the other'? What the hell am I supposed to do then?"
"Pshh, duh," Speedy spat at his concern, shaking his head and growing a smile Robin really didn't like. "If it comes down to that, we just use plan 'B.'"
"…Plan 'B'?" was the exceptionally skeptical response.
"Uhh, yeah," Speedy said it like he was talking to an idiot, "Plan 'B.'"
"Do I even want to know—"
"It'll be a bikini mud-wrestling contest. Winner gets to date you. I'll be the judge."
Robin wound up to smack him one, and Speedy was already flinching dramatically in expectation. However, when the blow never fell, the red-head looked back up, and there was Robin, smile a mile-wide, shaking his head sadly. Soon, the two were filling the night with laughter, mostly at the thought of how little would be left of any rube stupid enough to actually suggest Plan B to the two women in question. It was a really great feeling.
"The bonus round could be K-Y jelly wrestling!"
(SMACK)
Man, I beginning to love writing Speedy this way, he's probably going to end up featuring in one way or another in a lot of my work, but I digress, this is about now.
Why not two?—I ask myself as I sit and edit this enormous piece. Clearly the initial rescue scene is distinct and separate from the raid at the rave scene, and through a simple manipulation of Word, I could have had two chapters rather than one. The answer: that wasn't how I thought it up. When writing this, I considered the two portions intimately linked and united for some reason that eludes me right now, and so, hey, what the hell. Less reviewing for you readers to do, though it may be a little hard on the eyes. (Shut up, I read it twice through in a row to edit right after finishing the last scene, so yours can't hurt as much as mine!)
Fangirl—I'm not sure if anyone actually acts like this, that's why it's called a parody. I thought it was hilarious, though I hope any level-headed or demure thirteen year old girls out there don't take offence at the stereotype. I was just having a little fun.
Robin gets blasted—I had to think this scene through for quite a long time. Really, with the slurred speech and all, it easily took three times as long as the opening sequence to write. I feel it wound up about as compelling as it could be, even if it's sometimes hard to interpret the intentional misspellings I used to emulate the complex activity of speaking while wasted. The entire idea was, at one point, in need of massive rewrite, because it struck me rather early that there was no way either of the two would ever attend a completely unsupervised rave like this, or that if they got into one, that people would be even mildly comfortable with their presence. I eventually worked around it by instituting the 'they don't usually fight regular old criminals' paradigm, and then manipulated the opportunity to screw with some plain old crooks as an excuse and justification for nicking some Jesus juice and getting cotton-mouthed. (such a wonderful world of slang for these things)
Love/Hate—The best kind of friendships can endure constant bickering because the understanding just runs that deep. I figured, as long as I'm writing them as virtual blood-brothers with a history of antics predating the Teen Titans, why not have them be just that kind of buddies? Add the potential of being plastered and you get some truly hilarious, and at times, rather sad and dramatic interaction, particularly Speedy's horny, drunken raving and Robin's exaggerated disdain right at the end.
Solution, what solution?—yes, well, seeing as how this story is such a blast to write, I figured I'd leave room to extend it for a few extra chapters. Robin didn't get an answer to his problems so much as a course of action that makes sense, and this will hopefully pan out into more awesome romance and angst in the not too distant future. I for one can't wait.
Future—Chapter Four: Man of Her Dreams—considering how much trouble 'Purgatory in Deep Blue' is giving me, this could well be out before that. The idea right now is to pause and leap away from the guys' situation and switch to some rather revealing dream sequences the ladies are suffering through during their drugged stasis. If there was ever any doubt about what they were feeling, it won't survive this next chapter. Ahh, I wonder how it'll feel to mix fluffy, romantic dreams with drug-induced nightmares of rather sick proportions? We'll see I guess. --Chapter 5-- probably whereI pick up the guys' story and tie up the many bits of loose end and foreshadown I've strewn so carelessly about.
Review—you know you want to.