sideshow 02c: 'and your hands, yet it seems'
A/N: Once again displaying my flagrant disregard for continuity: it's after the Crisis, but Kole isn't dead. Nyah. And Doctor Midnight (Beth Chapel) as opposed to either 'Doctor Mid-Nite,' was never actually a member of the JLA and got killed off pretty fast; I kick continuity in the shins because she is my favorite.
(On the other hand, the fact that Wally is currently dating the magnetic-powered Frances Kane aka Magenta is just canon.)
After stealing a minute to change back into costume, Dick supervises Wally's transfer up to the Watchtower. It's a wrench, considering last time he left his team alone in their home base for fifteen minutes, someone with his face broke in and hospitalized an Alpha-class metahuman, but they're on guard now and his double is in custody. He hangs around waiting for the critical-condition light to go out (for better or for worse), although Superman corners him partway through and spends a while telling him very seriously that he is not responsible for this, and he has to keep that in mind.
Dick loves Clark like a favorite uncle and a childhood idol wrapped up in one, because that's what he is, but sometimes he really wishes hitting him would hurt something other than your hand. Except no. If Clark wasn't indestructible, Dick wouldn't even be considering hitting him. (Probably.) But Dick is responsible, whatever Superman thinks. Wally was his guest in his Tower, and it has to have been Wally's trust in him that let the infiltrator get the drop on him.
He leaves once Doctor Midnight proclaims the Flash stable. His face is probably not what Wally is wanting to see right now.
(Thinking about that, he stops to arrange for Magenta to be beamed up. Wally will absolutely be down with waking up to see his girlfriend, and Frances will be seething to not have made it in time to help beat up the Nightwing impostor. At least he can get somebody the chance to feel useful.)
Back at the Tower, someone presumably feeling the need to engage in any action at all has cleaned up after the party. He announces his return, and Vic turns up to fill him in.
Nightwing's double has not been forthcoming in his absence. He turned out to have two serious-business combat knives on him when searched, one at the small of his back and one strapped to his calf, as well as a smaller folding knife and a multitool in his pants pockets.
Otherwise his gear consisted of eight hundred and fourteen dollars cash, in a fancy leather billfold that completely fails to match anything else about him and which Nightwing would normally assume was stolen, a length of thin wire cable that could serve as a garrote, a crumpled receipt for gas station coffee, two packets of crackers and one of that enhanced-electrolyte-glucose powder you can get to mix into water, for those situations where you'll need to maximize hydration uptake but for whatever reason can't haul a bottle of sports drink along, and a hotel room key. No other combat or infiltration gear.
They took away his clothes, just in case, and gave him a set of Dick's sweatpants and a workout shirt that had gotten mixed up with Kori's laundry. (It would've been okay if they'd gone into his room to grab clothes, really, but he appreciates the consideration for his privacy.) They checked him for makeup and masks, and found nothing.
Duplicate took all of that much better than anyone expected, after the biting incident. Being strip-searched apparently bothers the guy less than having his identity challenged. Noted.
The theory list right now, as brought up on a screen by Cyborg, starts with clone and meanders along through 'fetch' and 'shapeshifter' to 'induced mass hallucination,' which is the suggestion that always goes on the list when nobody actually knows anything. But apart from the insta-healed bruise, their mysterious intruder seems human. They don't have anyone trained to do a genetic workup, but Vic did all the scans he could and Raven left a note to say she's working on the problem. Hopefully she'll remember to get some sleep, too.
They've put the man in an interrogation room that's actually one of the smaller training rooms with a table hastily bolted down in the middle, and asked him a lot of straightforward questions, but he's stopped even insisting that his name is Richard Grayson. He hasn't said anything in hours.
Dick looks at the monitor screen, where his doppelgänger sits wearing his clothes, arms and legs cuffed to the chair, expression closed, and Pantha leans over the table, glaring, ears flattened, claws out, all her feline apex-predator menace brought to the fore.
"What. Do. You want?"
Not a flicker.
Dick shakes his head. This isn't going to get anywhere. This guy might have panicked when they first took him down, but he's not cracking for anything less than heavy-duty torture now. If there was a window, they missed it.
"Tell Pantha to pack it in," he says. "Get him to a detention cell." Interrogation rooms were not included in the building plans, which decision Vic may want to revise in the future, but holding cells? Absolute must.
"Give him a while to stew," Gar agrees. Dick would correct him, but he's right.
"And I'll draw up a roster for prisoner monitor duty," he concludes.
His double took down the Flash singlehanded. They're keeping eyes on him until the League decides to demand a custody transfer. Hopefully by then they'll have learned something other than 'my name is Richard Grayson and I don't stay bruised.' Martian Manhunter will probably be able to get a lot more out of him, and they'll be able to analyze his genetic makeup, but it stings Dick's pride to have what is clearly a Titans issue handed over to their seniors.
But at the same time, it was a current League member who was actually attacked. He's sure he'll be able to get someone to keep him in the loop. The League likes him. Some of them seem to like him more now that he's less closely connected to Batman.
He gets the roster drawn up, and Kori demands to go first, so he can't rely on her to help him keep a cool head, because she's downstairs watching the cameras on his evil twin. Sometimes Dick really misses being able to declare 'patrol time' whenever he was at loose ends. He does not miss obligatory nightly patrol. After two hours of unproductive theorizing, worrying, exercising, redrafting various protocols, getting in Vic's way as he overhauls security, and eating leftover party food, a call comes down from the moon. Wally is not only out of danger, he's conscious, able to dictate a report on the assault, and extremely relieved his attacker wasn't actually Dick. God bless speedster healing. Though he's on bed rest for a week. Anybody needs the Flash in the next several days, they're going to have to settle for less.
Dick catches three hours of sleep when he finds there's nothing else that he can claim urgently needs doing, and when he wakes up it turns out 'the dickier Dick' (Roy's choice of words before he left last night, apparently; what are friends for) is now taking a nap of his own, so he showers quickly before he goes down and joins Joey on monitor duty.
Turns out his double sleeps sitting up, which is interesting in that if he's paranoid enough not to risk lying down when he's already chained up in a cell, why is he willing to fall asleep at all? But not very stimulating to watch. Dick looks at Jericho, instead.
"So, up until the inevitable supervillain attack, what do you think? Good party?"
Joey smiles and shrugs. I had fun, he signs, without taking his eyes off the screen. Try again next year?
"But maybe not in the Tower." It's a fortress…but it's also a target. A very visible target. After getting their perimeter breached like this…they'll probably all relax better somewhere with less security and more obscurity.
Joey nods understandingly.
They chat, although Dick's eyes keep drifting to the monitor screen and Jericho has to snap his fingers for attention a lot, which he takes in good humor. Apparently Joey's mother and Kole, the not-quite-official-Titan who lives in their house and whom Joey is not-quite-officially-dating, have started conspiring about something, and he's started to be slightly terrified that he's going to get home from a mission and find out they've designed him an embarrassing new costume or something. Though Dick has seen Joey wear Tamaranean clothing without turning a hair, so he's not sure what he's afraid of.
Maybe shirtlessness is more embarrassing here, on a planet where there's a nudity taboo. Or maybe he doesn't trust their color sense. Or maybe it's reflexive wariness about his mother. Dick is certainly wary of the woman, would be even if she wasn't the head of an international mercenary spy firm. She married Slade Wilson. And later shot him in the face and kicked him out of her life. Both of those actions have to have required metaphorical balls of steel.
He suggests lots of lace. Joey gives him the finger. Everybody thinks Jericho's such a sweetheart. Hah.
Eventually, and with no drama whatsoever, the duplicate wakes, straightens without disturbing the chains strung to cuffs on his wrists and ankles, and faces the door, expressionless. Vic said that the prisoner has no detectable cybernetic components, but there's still something very robotic about him.
Shortly thereafter Dick excuses himself from the monitor room to bring his clone, or whatever, some food, because healing abilities or not he seems basically human so he probably needs to eat, it's been over eight hours since they arrested him, and they're not cruel. In Dick's sleeveless white shirt, it's more noticeable that he's thinner than Nightwing—Dick hasn't got much body fat to speak of, but his double has none, and somewhat less in the way of visible muscle bulk, too. Though with the world they live in and that healing factor, that doesn't mean Dick's going to bet high on himself in an arm-wrestling competition based on looks alone.
The food is just breakfast cereal, in a Styrofoam bowl, and the spoon is the especially bendy plastic kind, but the doppelgänger still toys with it in his fingers like they've handed him a weapon. Well, even if he actually can weaponize the thing, the cuffs should slow him down enough to prevent it being a problem, and it's not like Dick intends to leave him unsupervised.
He hunkers down just inside the locked door—companionable, hopefully; his head is about three inches lower than the other guy's. That should cut some of the menace of being the jailor guarding the only exit. The little folding table he carried in is light enough that if his double kicks it at him, it'll just flop over.
"So," he says, when about half the Frosted Flakes have disappeared with smooth, precise movements and what's left are no longer crunchy, "I get that you think you're me," and here the copy shifts a little, blows out a little air through his nose, a fairly subtle sonata of scorn, so yeah, he's not accepting that interpretation of his reality any time soon, "and we're not arguing about that one right now, but what I don't get is, why'd you attack the Flash?"
The stranger with his face sticks another spoonful of sodden flakes into his mouth, with a little bend to his eyebrows like he doesn't understand why Dick's even asking, but whether he thinks it's stupid or not, his answer's important. They need to deal with him, and to do that right, to do it fairly, they need to figure him out. What he is. Why he's here.
So he waits, even as the other man chews methodically, swallows, and then sits in silence for another second.
His patience is rewarded. More or less.
"He wouldn't let me go."
The statement is devoid of emotion, in the same oddly formal cadence he used to insist about his name, but it matches what Wally could remember. That's the oddest thing about this whole situation, that the homicidal copy of him got in this far and then was trying to leave. They couldn't find anything out of place in the control room. No tampering. No access records on the computers, and no data-carrying devices on the infiltrator's person, so if he came for information, he was smuggling it out in his head, after erasing his tracks so well Cyborg can't find them.
He can't have been made for infiltrating Titan Tower, either, or he would've been trained to take advantage of his resemblance to Nightwing instead of attacking the first person who spotted him.
Dick pulls a wry face at the man whose reaction to being detained got him chained to a prison cot. "Overreaction much?"
The same pause as before, another puzzled bend of eyebrow and really, did they grow this clone completely brain-damaged? In case that was too confrontational, he adds, "I mean, I know Flash can be annoying, and he thought you were me so he probably wasn't respecting boundaries, but you didn't have to get that mad about it."
"I wasn't mad."
He says it quickly. Not hurried, but it's the least consideration Dick's seen him give any action besides the biting last night, and there's a shade more intonation this time—he sounds vaguely surprised that Dick thinks he was mad at the guy who he beat most of the way to death.
"Then what did you hit him so much for?" Dick fires back, with twice the bewilderment. No confrontation, careful now. Being casual seems to be working. He seemed to have lethal intent, but on the other hand he had weapons and didn't use them. Of course, if he'd taken the time to draw one he might not have managed to hit Wally at all. But still.
His double hesitates again, this time like he's gathering himself for a mighty effort. Sets the spoon down on the plastic table surface, and stares into the depths of the white foam bowl. "He wouldn't let me go," he repeats. "Couldn't hit once and run; he's faster. Had to make sure he stayed down."
Dick can follow the warped logic of that. "Okay, well, one, you could have tried asking him to let go, maybe? But a more important two, you sure seemed like you were trying to kill him, when the others got there, even though he was already down and out. What's up with that?"
Again with the eyebrows. They are really not reaching each other here. Duplicate doesn't seem surprised by the implication that Wally survived; maybe he knows Raven by reputation. "If he recovered, he'd want revenge. I have enough powerful men after my head without adding one who can search the planet on foot."
Combining the ideas 'Wally' and 'powerful man' in that ominous tone is actually pretty hard, even though with his current level of Speed Force connection he's right up there with the rest of the greats. There is still so much wrong with that speech. Dick doesn't even know where to start. "Didn't you think about everyone else who'd be after you, if you killed him?"
A shrug, like being wanted for murder by the entire hero community is everyday life, and much less worrisome than personally offending the Flash. (Dick is going to need to get second and third opinions on everything he's reading into these gestures; he thinks he might be projecting. He's not used to reading his own face.) "No one would have known it was me."
"Yeah, thanks for trying to pin that on me," Dick grumbles, stomach twisting at the thought. A second Flash dead in two years, all the evidence pointing to one of his best friends…
Shrug again. "Didn't know about you."
Bizarre. Dick shakes his head, tries to set aside his preconceptions. They are getting in the way. "What were you even doing here?"
"Don't know." Tiny shrug, and then the copy sets his plastic spoon down in his foam bowl, tilts his head and offers, "Happy to leave."
It's a joke, Dick realizes, which is awesome in terms of the creepy factor—makes him seem significantly more human, even if his expression still didn't change—but not helpful when it comes to deciding what to do with this dangerous stranger who looks like him. Who is very clearly a person, an individual, and to all appearances completely convinced that he is the real Richard Grayson.
Who does he think he's talking to, Dick wonders. Are they both looking across the cell and thinking 'he doesn't know how to act like me?'
He blows out a sigh and scrubs a hand through his hair. Leadership is such hard work sometimes. "Okay," he says, with a quick smile, deciding on a new tack, "what do you really, really not want us to do?"
His clone looks at him with such blankness for so long he nearly cancels the question and tries again, but then My-name-is-Richard-Grayson replies. "Please don't…set me free with all my weapons and money?"
For a second Dick takes him completely literally, thinks it has something to do with knowing he's a danger to others and wanting to be contained, but then something in that non-expression, the way the funhouse mirror head's still tilted, clues him in, and he can't help laughing. Another joke. This guy is full of surprises. "You," he informs the prisoner, letting his grin linger, "are no Bre'er Rabbit."
"I was thinking of the Goose Girl," is the calm reply, and Dick hisses through his teeth. Not so much at the reference itself, the impersonator tricked into outlining her own hellish punishment, but because that was a story his mom used to tell him. Somehow, this impostor knows.
But it isn't said cruelly, so he keeps his peace and shakes his head again. "I'm not trying to trap you. I just want to get a sense of what you don't want, so we don't accidentally stick you inside your worst nightmare trying to keep you from hurting anyone."
Eyes that just fail to match what he sees in mirrors search his face, and then the false Grayson dips his head. No trust, but a risk analysis that falls on the side of answering. He's decided he has nothing to lose by exposing this weakness. Which means he thinks it's likely enough to happen anyway that admitting he's afraid of it can't make a difference.
Or he's running an actual con, of course, but then why make the briar patch joke? Multi-level reverse psychology? "My hunters. Don't let them have me."
Powerful men, he'd said. Dick nods, absently. "Who?" he asks, more out of curiosity than anything. They do need to find out that kind of thing, especially if the people in question are likely to come knocking, but really at the moment it's not a top priority. They aren't handing this prisoner over to anyone but the Justice League. He just wants to know.
It once again takes the man a little while to decide whether to answer him, but Dick knows his considering face now, and crouches patiently while his duplicate finishes the bowl of cereal and pushes it aside. This is just what he was hoping for, after all: some of his earlier questions probably gave away more than he got out of the answers, but the Titans are in a position of power right now; they could afford it. And now he's established some level of rapport.
"The Owl," the prisoner confides at last, with a gravitas not at all due to the name of somebody Dick's never heard of.
He makes a note to look into this Owl person, and then forgets it completely when the prisoner adds even less willingly, "Slade Wilson."
Nightwing starts up out of his crouch, unthinking. "Slade's after you?" They've almost been getting along with the Terminator lately, in a hostile distrusting kind of way. They have an uneasy peace. Horrible suspicion settles in his gut. "Did he make you?"
The clone looks at him with a face that says, I believe you're stupid, but not that stupid. It's almost identical to one of Bruce's expressions, actually, but Dick has never seen it aimed at him with this undertone of murder if the implicit command is not obeyed. (Other people, yes. Not him. And he's never believed in the homicidal intent this way.) "Of course not," the man with his face says. Clicks his teeth together, and adds, withering, "Bruce Wayne did that."