sideshow 02g: 'or the glare of wings overspreading'
A/N: Today's Titan talk is, Donna was the most physically powerful Titan of her generation, but Kori could beat her because her training was better.
Pantha (who as I've mentioned is a sign that I'm ignoring Titans Hunt) is a rogue experiment from recurring foe the Wildebeast Society. Her arc centers around issues of identity; she doesn't actually know if she's a woman they made more like a panther or a panther they made more like a woman, but she gets really offended if you call her human. She is angry absolutely all the time and has special ragged speech bubbles and font to express just how gravelly her voice is.
They give it a few more hours, for their own sake and Richard's, and because the League hasn't called asking for him yet so maybe they won't. Dick hits the gym after all, and finishes off with a sparring session against Donna that involves being thrown into a large number of walls. She's been the physically strongest Titan on every version of the team she's belonged to, and it's honestly a little nostalgic fighting her because Dick needs to go back to the tactics he used as a kid, when everyone he fought was out of his weight class and getting pinned down was the worst thing he could let happen.
Not that he doesn't need that approach in real fights a lot still, considering the kind of opponents they face, but it's rarely fun when he's this overpowered.
"Yield," Troia recommends when she finally catches him, pressing down a little harder.
"This could be considered a compromising position," he points out, because he's a jerk.
She snorts, and is not at all flustered. He never thought he'd miss when they were fifteen and she had a minor but embarrassing crush on him. "Say uncle."
"Second cousin!"
"Close enough." She lets him up.
"Whew." Dick comes to his feet, brushing at the back of his head where he knows there will be dust in his hair. It builds up faster than the vacuum-bots can handle it.
"I get winner," Pantha rumbles from the sidelines, and Dick gestures grandly, presenting Donna to her as a gift.
The gym door hisses open almost as soon as he's yielded the mat, and Cyborg ambles in. Working out is fairly pointless for him these days, when all his limbs are metal, but he has specialized physiotherapy exercises to maintain his remaining muscles and often comes down here to test new adaptations even when he isn't in the mood for a spar. Whatever he came down to do, though, his eyes fall on the current match in progress and he heads over to join Nightwing spectating, as Pantha eels bonelessly around a jab.
"Hey," Dick greets.
"Hey."
"Anyone heard from Raven since brunch?"
Vic shrugs. "She's meditating. She asked me to turn off all alarms in her room except the 'Tower destruction' one, because anything short of that was less dangerous than being startled out of what she's doing."
Dick shakes his head and wishes for the millionth time that they had another mystic capable of, if not keeping up with Raven, at least keeping an eye on her and following her trail if need be. The closest they have is Lilith, and she isn't here and doesn't truck with astral projection anyway. It bothers him to have a teammate technically in the Tower, but utterly cut off from support. "Thanks for the heads-up," he says.
Pantha loses her bout, to no one's real surprise. She's good, but she fights mostly on instinct still, and you need a lot of technical cleverness to beat an Amazon of Donna's skill level without overpowering might. (Even if she's not, technically, an Amazon.)
Donna bounces on her toes, one fist high. "Oh yes, winner and still champion!"
"Do I have to call my girlfriend down here to pound some humility into you?" Dick jokes.
"No. Shut up, I'm having a moment."
Pantha hisses resentfully and hauls herself up into her customary crouch. "You cheat."
"You overextend all your lunges."
"You fly."
"And you have claws. If you can think of a way for the two of us to fight without powers, I'll take you up on it," Donna says, not sounding like she thinks it could ever happen. "And I'll still win." She winks, though, and Pantha doesn't get any angrier.
She twists her head to look up at Dick instead, and her tail lashes. "The Talon…" she says. Which shows the power of the Titans gossip chain, considering that information was first shared with five people that don't include her about three and a half hours ago. "He really believes he's you."
"He's not," Dick feels the need to clarify. "I'm me."
Pantha rolls her eyes at him. "When he finds out he's wrong," she says, and even through her customary gruffness just enough vulnerability shows for Dick to wince internally. Of course Pantha identifies with Richard. With having been made and having to find your way to who you are. She may even pity him, as much as she's able; at least she never had to deal with emthinking/em she knew who and what she was and having it ripped away. "He'll take it hard," she grumbles.
Vic says, "Can you think of a good way to break it to him gently?" Cyborg is another who knows the feeling of not being entirely human, of having to doubt you're even a person. He's never lost as much as Pantha, never had to face such extreme doubt as to who or what he is because he's always had his memories, but.
"Too late for that," Dick says, after giving Pantha a beat to proffer any ideas, as unlikely as that was. She doesn't exactly do gentle. "It's already been made clear we think someone made him. The weird thing is," he continues, because this is the really bizarre thing, even more than Richard's having no particular reason to be here that he'll admit to; that he insists on claiming Dick's identity while blithely claiming that Bruce Wayne created him to serve as Talon to the Court of Owls, "so does he."
No one else knows what to make of that either.
"Go talk to him again," says Vic.
Dick does, because at this point anything else would just be procrastinating.
"Hey, Richard?" Dick doesn't knock, because he isn't actually offering options about whether he enters, and pretending to would just be tacky. He probably doesn't need to give a warning, either, since he wasn't moving all that sneakily and his double is solidly trained, but the courtesy costs nothing. He starts entering the code. "Coming in."
The door unseals, he pulls it open—and pulls up sharply, because Richard has raised his head and smiled at him. It was clearly a deliberate gesture, and the problem with it wasn't that it was stiff and unnatural—it was perfect, it looked almost exactly like he does when he smiles. (At least, when he smiles where he can see himself.) But it somehow still got nowhere near the eyes.
And even so, for the first time since the initial shock of seeing his doppelganger mobbed by half his team, Dick's ability to set up a clear distinction between them wavered, in that second. It's like looking at himself, if he'd had his soul scooped out. (It's nothing like the recordings of himself broken by Blood, and it's everything like it, and Dick acknowledges that he is way too emotionally dependent on having somebody to punch for his emotional equilibrium but he would really like somebody to punch right now.)
He shakes it off, gets inside, closes the door again. Knows he gave away his gut-punch horror all too clearly for that split-second.
"People do that," Richard observes. There's a studied disinterest in his voice that Dick is pretty sure is his approach to dry humor, though maybe that's wishful thinking. "Only sometimes. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong."
"It's the eyes," Dick says, though he probably shouldn't. Right now, Richard can only impersonate him briefly, except maybe to strangers. In fact, maybe that was the real point of this whole endeavor—to get Dick to spend enough time talking to his duplicate that Richard has the chance to learn all his mannerisms and tics.
Probably not. He doubts there's enough to be gained from that to be worth giving up the advantage that comes with no one knowing there's such a thing as a spare Richard Grayson walking around, to make them wary of possible impersonation. You could learn to do a perfectly serviceable Dick Grayson impression based on fairly readily accessed video footage—hell, you could do better than Richard has so far based on just that one TV interview he did when he was sixteen.
"The eyes," Richard muses tonelessly. "I've practiced the shape. Sometimes it works."
"When you're feeling something else, it tends to show through," Dick informs him. As someone much better at smiling in general, he's still had fake smiles betrayed by pain in his eyes. How nothingness fits into that he isn't sure, but obviously it does.
Richard looks dubious. "I don't make…unconscious expressions."
Dick shrugs. "I think your feelings show more than you think." Because no, Richard doesn't make expressions like normal people do, but he does emote, occasionally. The fear and anger they could see on him when he was first captured weren't conveyed normally, but they were there. In the tension of his wrists and shoulders and the speed with which his eye flicked from one Titan to the next, not panicked but hyperalert. It was probably easier to pick up for them than for most people, being used to trying to read teammates and friends who aren't as human as they look, or don't look as human as they are.
The difference between emotive cues trained by culture and the basic animal communication written into instinct, maybe. There really is something feral about his double.
Richard takes a second to frown, and that at least looks natural; kind of stiff and definitely intentional, but not wrong. This may indicate sincerity. "What do you want?"
"From you?" Dick shrugs. "Well, more information is always good. We're still trying to figure this whole thing out."
The tip of his head, the almost pouty way his lips poke out—sardonic, but not the way Dick does it, not even the way Bruce does, and that's possibly the most disconcerting thing yet. "You don't believe me," Richard points out.
"I don't think you're lying," Dick replies.
Richard smiles at him. That plum-lipstick smile again, thin and cold and bitter. He hasn't given up, but he has no trust in him, either. "How kind."
Dick takes a sharp breath. That expression did touch his double's eyes, but he's not sure that didn't make it worse. And Richard clearly doesn't believe for a second that he isn't real. He remembers a whole life—and the only way to measure how real it's likely to have been is to drag his life story out of him. One curt sentence at a time.
Nightwing feels exhausted just thinking about it.
Once again, he crouches beside the door to Richard's cell, and looks across the room and slightly up, at the man occupying the cell's chains and cot. "I don't know what to tell you," he says. "We honestly want you to come out of this okay, if you can. I, personally, don't want to keep you locked up forever. But right now all we've got on you is a bunch of mysterious pronouncements and the way you almost killed the Flash. The faster we learn, the more control we're likely to retain over what happens to you."
It isn't a lie, though threatening a prisoner with the Justice League is weird. Dick has way more loose cannons on his team. He is willing to acknowledge this has to do with the Titans' far less stringent membership requirements.
He wonders what Bruce would do, if he had Richard in for interrogation. Batman's methods of gathering intelligence can get really violent, sometimes. But there's no urgency here, no race against a clock. No reason to beat or break or threaten.
(And maybe Batman would already know everything they're trying to ask but no. Dick cannot believe that of Bruce, even if Nightwing feels obligated to suspect it of Batman. It's what he was trained to do, after all.)
"You can torture me," Richard says. Not with defiance, or even grim acceptance. It's casual, an offer—an invitation, almost. You can call me up if you need a ride. You can crash on my couch tonight. You can torture me.
It was one thing hearing Raven say he was resigned to it; this is another.
"I won't," Dick says. And that's the truth. He thinks Richard almost believes him. "We won't."
Whatever life he's lived or been forced to remember living, that makes him expect that and not even bother to fight it, Dick is determined that his team will not be reinforcing it. And he knows as he thinks it that what professional detachment he'd managed to hold onto has now collapsed.
If Richard is playing him, he is damn good.
Dick says, "I wish I understood." Because saying he understands would be condescending. There's too much he doesn't know and too much he can't believe for that to be fair.
"No you don't," is the reply, so scornful he might as well have saved himself the trouble and taken the ruder, less vulnerable option.
"Yes I do," he snaps back, because he may pity this bastard but that doesn't mean Richard gets to tell him what his own feelings are.
His double looks up, and God, do his eyes get like that when he glares? He doubts it. He hopes not. (It's not very useful for the terrifying in his glare to be in the eyes, anyway; they're usually hidden.)
"Let me tell you a story," Richard says. And he's speaking especially clearly, which Dick is now certain is a sign of tension, and his body's not-moving seems a little more rigid. The flare of expression is gone again already, and his face is a mask, but he's still holding Nightwing's eyes.
"Okay," Dick says, even though he doubts his agreement is actually required. Lack of protest would probably have been more than adequate. He's sure this will be enlightening, one way or another.
"Once upon a time," says Richard, and there's that reckless challenge in him again, just faintly in the angle of his chin and the way he still isn't looking away. "There was a family of birds. Little birds. Robins."
Dick tries not to react.
"The mother and father were famous fliers, and their one little chick was already learning, even though his flight feathers had not grown in. A prodigy! they said, and showed him off to everyone."
There was no real intonation in that last sentence, no overt mockery. Just a sing-song recitation, as though this was a real nursery story.
"The robins lived in a moveable nest, traveling with other creatures with special talents, and one day, they came to a city of owls. The king of all the owls saw the smallest robin flying without wings, and said, What a clever little bird. I want that bird as my servant. And all the other owls said yes, of course, because he was King, and because that was much better than giving him any of their own fat, stupid chicks.
"So one day, when Mother Robin and Father Robin had left the nest, some of the owls stole in among the traveling beasts and carried the little bird away to court, where the king passed him through fire and steel to reforge him into a feathered sword. The Owls taught him to fly soundless through the night, and rend and tear their prey for them, and never to sing into the dawn as little birds do, because he was the Sword of Owls, and there is no singing there.
"But Mother Robin and Father Robin had found their empty nest and sent up a cry. And all about the Owl-King's forest they went, with their little voices, Where is our fledgling? Who has been in our nest? Everyone in the City of Owls turned them away, told them to be silent, but they twittered on. Until the King sent two weasels to catch both birds, swallow them down and scatter the bones.
"Mother Bird bit back hardest, leaving her beak's mark in weasel flesh, but both Robins were killed, and the owls told the stolen fledgling that he had been sold by sire and dam into their service, and in time he believed them, and began to forget he had ever been anything but an Owl."
There is a note of finality to this sentence, and for the first time since he started to talk, Richard moves, a convulsive flex of his fingers almost exactly like a raptor sinking talons into its prey. Dick can almost see the blood.
That breaks the spell, somehow.
"That isn't the end of the story, though," he points out steadily. "You got away."
Richard blinks at him, then rolls his shoulders as if the stillness is a physical prison he has to break out of, flicks his fingers in an obvious gesture of dismissal, as though to suggest that it was the end of the part of the story that matters.
"And then," he says, like he's doing Dick a huge favor, "one night the Sword Owl was sent into the nest of the Prince of Robins to slaughter the chicks there, but the Prince heard them screaming as they died and came to fight him off, and so the smallest fledgling did not die of its wounds, though it would never sing again.
"The Sword Owl was afraid to go back to his King with this failure, and fighting the orange-breasted Prince had reminded him of when he, too, had been a Robin. And so he looked and found that his charcoal wings had grown in, and flew away into the sun. The King of Owls and the Prince of Robins both swore to hunt him forever. The End."
That still wasn't the end, of course, but it comes a lot closer.
Robins. Holy God.
"Okay," Nightwing says. "Okay. Thank you for the story."
"It's the true story."
"I get that."
"I had parents," Richard says, implacable. "They fought for me. My mother died with our enemies' blood on her teeth."
Leaving aside that disturbing imagery, which Richard seems to consider comforting, it's obvious that continuing to challenge this belief would be equal parts stupid and cruel.
If someone tried to tell him his parents—or Bruce, or Alfred, or Kori, or old Jack Haley, or even Babs or her dad, or Roy or any of his friends, anyone he cares about, let alone everyone—was a figment of his imagination, or a false memory someone had written into his mind, he'd fight it. Of course he would. What with the world he lives in, the possibility of some of his memories being false, in spite of all the mental defense techniques Batman trained him in and all Raven's attempts to help him keep his shit sorted, is very real, and when he thinks about that…well, he tries not to. Dwelling on that kind of thing is a good way to drive yourself crazy.
"Of course they did," he says, even though he doesn't believe it. "I'm sorry."
Richard smiles that awful smile again, and then goes dead.
After a full minute of half-lidded eyes and nothing but shallow breathing to indicate that his double is more than a vaguely malicious mannequin, Dick decides to accept the hint that the interview is over.
He wanted out, anyway.