sideshow 02e: 'to you than all the force'
A/N: If I had not pretzeled time as I have, Danny's presence would indicate that Joey's doom drew nigh, but since Pantha's here too, wheeee ignore doomful timelines! Everybody is Titans forever. XD
'Terry' is Donna's husband Terry Long, by the way. He is an ass. Also, Dick tends to treat Donna more like a sibling than any of his actual adopted siblings, presumably because they actually grew up together, albeit starting from around age fourteen on the other side of a universe-rebooting Crisis.
"Talon?" Kori asks, when Dick gets upstairs. It's almost eight in the morning at this point, and she (gorgeous as always) and Gar and Raven and Danny and Donna are hanging out at the breakfast bar, even though two minutes ago they were apparently downstairs with Joey, watching the monitor feed from Richard's cell. Must have scrambled to beat him here, while he was standing still and getting his head straight. They know him too well.
"This is not a TV special," he tells them all dryly, and sinks into a chair near enough to the bagels to grab one without getting up again. "Cream cheese?"
Danny levitates it right to him, which is the kind of thing he does when he's trying to be ingratiating. Dick raises an eyebrow at everyone impartially as he cuts his bagel open. "Talon. Yes. Have none of you ever heard the rhyme before, seriously?"
"I have," says Danny, and Gar nods.
"Yeah, but…" their green shapeshifter adds, with a wavy hand gesture that means something like, 'I'm pretty sure you know more than I do about this; spill.' Donna raises an eyebrow. Starfire and Raven are both serenely patient; it looks like Raven made Kori her special tea. Man, Dick wants caffeine.
He shrugs and makes a grabbing gesture at the coffee, which Gar obligingly grabs for him and passes over. "It's all I've got either. It's an old nursery rhyme," he tells the girls, as he pours. Kori's from another planet, of course, and Raven from another dimension, and he guesses this is just one of the many little things that got left out of Donna's celestially arranged early life story. He'd be surprised that Arella never sang it to Raven, but he knows they were never all that close, and that kind of creepy poetry was probably not welcome in Azarath anyway. "From Gotham, originally, but it's spread pretty far, for something too creepy to get published in your average Mother Goose collection."
"Sounds about right for a Gotham heritage piece," says Donna, grinning, and Dick rolls his eyes.
"Yeah, we get some of the same kind of tourists looking for the Court of Owls that hang around Poe's grave in Baltimore. Even higher percentage of them wind up in need of rescuing than normal tourists."
"What does the rhyme say?" Kori prompts, and Dick shrugs, brandishes his cheese knife, and recites,
"'Beware the Court of Owls / that watches all the time / ruling from a shadowed perch / behind granite and lime. / They watch you at your hearth / they watch you in your bed / speak not a whispered word of them / or they'll send Talon for your head.' Accounts vary on what Talon actually is," he adds, scooping up some cream cheese and slathering it on generously. He needs some comfort food right now. "A giant owl that eats naughty children, mostly."
Batman got mistaken for it a couple of times when he was starting out, looming in windows at night with the ear-spikes and the cape.
"But that's not what the poem says," Raven states, eyes narrow with consideration beneath her white hood. She's the only one in costume besides him, which means she's probably been up and working for hours already, but she doesn't have that bone-china look she gets when she pushes herself too far, so someone must have made sure she slept. "Talon is sent if one discusses the secret rulers. Of—where?"
"Uh, Gotham," Dick allows. "Sometimes people still say it with 'Gotham' in the third line, but it makes the line too long and makes it less creepy if you're not actually in Gotham, so mostly not."
"He's an assassin," states Gar baldly and, okay, Dick knew that. He just wasn't thinking too hard about it.
"Was," he points out. If his inferences are correct, Richard rescued himself. That's not easy. That's one of the hardest things there is. "He got out. And keep in mind who he said 'made' him."
Bruce Wayne.
No way in hell.
Even if Richard doesn't lie, his information is suspect.
"It was a very good interrogation," Kori says into the slightly uncomfortable bagel-munching silence that ensues. She smiles, all warmth, and he's so lucky to have her. To have her back. He doesn't even care that she's technically still married. She's here.
Donna kicks him under the table with a smirk and he tries to get rid of the unprofessional expression he was presumably making at his girlfriend. (She's lucky Terry's off peering over shoulders at an excavation, is all he has to say. He is not above petty vengeance.)
"Yeah, he was all clammed up," Gar agrees brightly, flashing teeth in his best Hollywood grin. "And you got him answering everything. Way to go, man."
Dick shrugs. "It wasn't exactly an interrogation; that's why it worked. He was sitting down there waiting for us to break out the thumbscrews, and I'm pretty sure he was determined to refuse to say anything just on principle." He squints a little at the far wall, turning Richard over in his head. "I'm…not sure anybody's ever been nice to him before."
Raven nods. "He was resigned to torture," she announces. "Angry. He confessed his fears honestly, though not exhaustively. You confuse him."
It's handy to have an empath around. Enough to make him let go his annoyance at having his conversation spied on. And Dick can't help grinning wryly at the last item she lists. It's mutual.
"So you wouldn't say he's lying?" Donna asks, rolling a grapefruit across the table at their mystic.
Raven shakes her head and slices open the grapefruit, passing the larger half to Kori. Melancholy half-smile. "He doesn't know what we want to hear."
As good a reason as Dick has ever heard for resorting to the truth. He wonders what Richard is going to keep hiding, and what inaccuracies he's going to share with them, all in honesty.
"Why'd he bite me, anyway?" Changeling inquires, through a mouthful of banana, brandishing the band-aid that covers the tooth marks on his wrist. He sounds less angry than he was last night; apparently he's not holding a grudge.
Dick thinks he can actually answer that one. "Dominance behavior," he says. "Wasn't it?" he asks, when he's collected a funny look or two, especially from Danny. "You were staring him down. Like a dominant animal, a wolf or something. I think he was warning you off as hard as he could."
Gar snorts, does not take offense, and swallows. "So assassin-you is feral? Great."
Dick shoves about a quarter of his bagel into his mouth and shrugs while chewing. He knows what he saw. Combined with the idea that his clone (or whatever, Dick can keep an open mind) is apparently on the run and has been at least long enough to check into one hotel, buy one cup of coffee, and steal at least one wallet, and with the fact that for all his insistence on his existence and his name, he didn't resist being referred to as something that was made…biting Gar might be a good sign. Not of mental stability, admittedly, but of independence and honestly not wanting to be used again.
Of course, that kind of rage at being controlled could spiral into a murder spree, especially if he starts to chafe at capture or confinement. Dick's seen it before. He'd rather not see it from someone with his face.
They'd best go carefully.
"So about Bruce Wayne…" says Danny, and Dick shakes his head. "What?" their youngest team member asks, all blinking innocence. He doesn't really do innocent very well. "You really won't talk about it?"
Dick swallows the big lump of bagel all at once, wincing a little. "Nope. And from now on, only the person on duty is allowed to monitor his cell. I was serious about this not being a TV show."
"But it's interesting," Danny persists. The young genius has presumably long since bagged and tagged the evidence vis-à-vis Batman that Dick has been kind of sloppy about around team members, and which Richard's insistence on the full name last night can only have bolstered, but it's never been explicitly discussed, and the idea that Bruce might be behind some kind of hideous cloning-and-brainwashing project apparently strikes the teenage spy as kind of juicy. Dick gets it, and he actually trusts Danny not to report these things to CBI or he wouldn't have him here, but damn this kid needs sensitivity training.
Probably his job, if anyone's. Dammit.
"I know," is all he says. "But he's not a in a good place, mentally, so I'd like to give him as much space as we can. I don't want to go down there, get him to open up, and then come upstairs to find out people are laughing at him."
"We weren't laughing," says Kori.
"I know, Star."
"You're sure the Court of Owls isn't real?" Donna asks abruptly. Everyone looks at her, and she shrugs. "I know it's an urban legend, nursery-rhyme kind of thing, but myths and legends…"
"Are true kind of a lot," Gar agrees, gulping down a grape. Point. Donna got her powers from the mythical Titans and Raven is half archdemon, and plenty of people in Gotham itself don't even believe in Batman.
Everyone's looking at Dick expectantly. He takes a swallow of coffee and admits, "I've never had any reason before today to think they were, but…no. I'm not sure." He makes a face. "I'll…talk to Batman."
It's completely likely that, if Bruce has uncovered an ancient conspiracy lurking in the shadows of Gotham, he wouldn't have told Dick. He's not in town, after all; he doesn't need to know. And if Bruce has no information but there is something like that stirring, possibly gearing up to regain power, then Batman needs a heads-up, stat, before everything goes to hell. Especially since if Richard's any indication Bruce is likely to be their first target.
And Dick is both more and less reluctant than usual to talk to him, because even though he knows Richard is wrong, he could really use some reassurance that Bruce can't possibly be responsible for this…but he's not convinced a conversation with the man is going to be a source of reassurance. Not that he thinks Batman's gone evil. But he could have done something stupid and had it go wrong, and not told anybody. He's not a big sharer.
Maybe he should call, but try to get Alfred on the line, or Jason. Bruce replaced him, after all. He's not likely to try cloning someone he's given up on. Right?
Dick wishes Jason hadn't been too busy with 'stuff' to come to the party. Then he could have been counted on to report everything to Bruce, saving Dick the trouble.
…Richard mentioned that his replacement was thirteen years old. Jason turns fourteen soon.
Jason is sometimes a brat, but Dick would never want anything bad to happen to him.
"Sounds swell, Dickster," says Danny, levitating the coffee pot over to himself to refill his mug. There was a brief period of struggle over whether he should even be drinking coffee right after he joined, which he met with a statistical analysis of the caffeine content of several major soda brands aimed at children, and photographic evidence of himself drinking coffee under his parents' supervision.
Since Dick went through a similar routine with Bruce around the time he started high school, he didn't fight that one that hard. Though Danny's 'if I'm old enough to risk my life in the field, I'm old enough to drink stimulants' made him wince a little. "He seemed thirsty, can I bring him a bottle of water? Sound him out?"
Sending someone else in with a bottle of water is actually a pretty sound idea, but Dick frowns. "Aw, come on," Danny complains. "I've done a lot of preliminary interrogations. People always underestimate me because of my age."
"Gar," says Dick. Changeling's good in close quarters; most people find it hard to manhandle a gorilla, especially one that suddenly turns into a boa constrictor. "You do it."
"Me?"
"Yeah, you. See if he's holding a grudge over whatever exactly made him bite you, see how he reacts to your bandage. You can try if he goes a couple of days without a violent incident, Danny." Teenage scoff-sigh, and a scowl at Gar, but acceptance. "Changeling? You up for this?"
"Sure," Gar shrugs. He's out of grapes, and doesn't seem willing to stop slouching back in his chair to get more. "He doesn't bite nearly as hard as I do. Now?"
Dick doesn't have to think about it before he shakes his head. "No. Give it about an hour."
"If he's that thirsty…" says Kori. She's much more comfortable with outright violence than cold-blooded cruelty, which they have in common even if she doesn't take inflicting combat deaths nearly seriously enough.
"He just had a bowl of milk, and I want to give him a little while to unwind."
If he is a recently made clone, a lot of Richard's uncanny behaviors might be the result of being badly undersocialized, in which case he might burn out on conversation pretty quickly.
Raven's smiling slightly, which is always a good sign. She stands up. "I should get back to work," she says. "I will tell you if I learn anything," she tells Dick, as she brushes imaginary crumbs off her dress. (There has to be magic involved in the stain resistance of that outfit. Dick grew up with Alfred doing his laundry and his whites never stayed that white.) He nods an acknowledgement, and as Kori thanks Raven for the tea Donna says,
"See if you can get him to commit to a position on Wally's condition, would you?"
Gar shrugs, glances at Dick. "What do you think, Fearless Leader? Am I cleared to risk provoking the feral assassin-wing?"
The most unique thing Dick's duplicate was carrying, come to think of it, besides the probably-stolen billfold, was the packet of hydration supplement. He can't be that thirsty at present or he would have drunk the milk right away rather than ignoring it for their whole conversation, but maybe he's had bad experiences with having fluids denied, or something. Or just chronic dehydration.
"Make sure he gets the water," Dick says. They're trying to build trust here, after all. "Even if you have to throw it at him."
Gar grins. "Can do. Okay, about an hour, you said? Want to hit the gym until then?"
Dick is tempted. But. "No can do," he sighs. Duty calls. Donna, whose fault this is since she cornered him into it, is smirking at him again, and he makes a face. "I have to go call home."