sideshow 02h: 'the soot-smudged silhouette'
A/N: Haha nearly nine months. I kept holding this back until I could make time to reread the entire '85-'89 Titans run to make sure I had the details right, then finally remembered I officially don't care.
Kori's waiting for him in the hall when he comes out. Not right outside the door, not where Richard could potentially see her, but a little way up, near the corner that leads toward the elevator. He can tell as soon as he looks at her that she was in the surveillance booth during Sword Owl's Story Hour. She must have rushed down.
"Did you switch shifts?" he asks, because he memorized that schedule as soon as it was drawn up and this should be the middle of Joey's second round of guard duty. If she did switch shifts, then the cameras are currently unmanned, and he's going to have to scold her.
Kori shakes her head. "I stayed after mine was over."
"Kori." Nobody ever does what he tells them. It's awful. The only thing worse than being leader of this outfit would be not being leader, and having to do what somebody else told him. (It's amazing heroes ever work in teams ever.)
"I want to know. I won't gossip about it, Dick, but I…" The vulnerable face, he has no defenses against the vulnerable face, the one where her lips draw in until they almost make a circle and the arch of her eyebrows inverts and her eyes are all the way wide, without any of that brash confidence or serene indifference she brings against most obstacles. "When we first saw him standing over Wally, we thought he was you. We didn't know if it was…mind control, or possession, or—but I didn't recognize the difference."
"Kori, you…there's no reasonable way for you to know the difference between me being mind-controlled and my exact double accidentally impersonating me. In the middle of a fight, even."
Starfire shrugs. "Maybe not, but…when I didn't know this time…how can I be sure I would know if it had been done on purpose?"
Ah. Another of those questions. It's…not as bad as trying to be sure you personally aren't currently brainwashed, but it's another of those things where the search for true certainty can rip the ground out from under your feet. There's no easy solution. "I won't be mad if you start quizzing me whenever you start to wonder," he offers. "Just, no sex questions in front of people, okay?"
It works; Kori smiles, a burst of air out her nose that counts as about one third of a laugh. "Maybe I will. But right now, I…I need to study him. Until I understand the nature of the difference. Until I know."
He doesn't know if that will work, but he understands the impulse. Kori seems to read some hesitation in his body language, and her eyebrows bend again. "Or…do you need this to be private even from me?"
It by definition can't be private, there always needs to be someone watching for safety's sake, especially if Dick is in the cell because it's never impossible that Richard might incapacitate him, swap their outfits, and try to switch his way to freedom. It's embarrassing how much he feels like cutting down the audience size is a way to get some privacy anyway. "It's…okay as long as you don't gossip," he says.
"The story he told," Starfire says, too kindly, and Dick turns away.
Plenty of his friends are pretty handsy, so he could have done that in a variety of company and gotten a comforting grip on the shoulder, but Kori's the only one who presses herself up against his back, breasts yielding against shoulder blades; a moment later, her palm smoothing down his chest, her forehead resting lightly on the crown of his skull. (He isn't sure he's actually ever told her that he likes how she's taller than he is, makes a note to say it out loud sometime. Except how do you say nothing feels safer than the way your girlfriend can fold you up in her arms, without sounding pathetic?)
"I know it wasn't true, Dick," she says.
"Parts of it were."
He hesitates; Kori murmurs,
"Your mother…"
"Died falling. Extortion racket. It was petty," and it shouldn't surprise Dick how angry that still makes him, all these years later. His parents were killed for the sake of protection money from a circus. He loves the circus, but all their profits get funneled right back into the show, covering pay and upkeep and veterinarian's bills and all the rest of the overhead. It was the organized crime equivalent of shaking down a particularly stubborn first grader for lunch money, and Zucco had two of the world's greatest acrobats murdered for it.
It's not that it would be any better if it had been for a multimillion dollar scam, or pirate treasure or something, but. At least their lives wouldn't have been valued as so completely cheap.
Kori's exhalation ruffles the hair at the back of his neck. He's told her a little of this before, but they've never traded details. He knows she's been through a lot more than he has, has used words like tortured when she speaks of it, of what she went through after her father gave her up for the sake of Tamaran. But she only really talks about it when they're already arguing, when he isn't in a place where he can listen because he's too angry.
He doesn't want to pressure her. Kori isn't a secretive person; if she isn't talking about it, it's because she doesn't want to. When they're together, they usually focus on the present, on being happy. He's feeling a little guilty even now for dragging her down with his mood. Her thumb strokes the top of his collar bone, not quite hard enough to tickle. "A warrior's death in battle should never be a cause for shame."
"My mother wasn't a warrior."
Brave, certainly—out of a couple that lived death-defying odds, she was the risk-taker. Dick never feels closer to her than when he starts over somewhere new, learning a new city, reaching out to new neighbors and colleagues. But he never saw her fight anything. Not the way they fight, not with violence.
"Anyone can die a warrior, if they go down fighting."
Dick shakes himself a little, and the hand that has been drawing soothing circles on his chest pauses, starts to draw away. He presses his weight back against her, and she understands, holds on. "How did you know that was the part that was bothering me?" he asks, smiling a little. She hasn't exactly been able to help, but she knew exactly what to focus on. "Why not Batman?"
"You tend to smile, when you worry about him."
Dick pulls away involuntarily, then continues the motion enough that he can twist around and stare at her. "I do what?"
"It annoys you, to worry about Batman. Probably because he will never stop giving you reason to be worried. Being angry about being worried usually makes you…" She pauses, looking for the right words, which is really uncommon with her these days. "Aggressively cheerful," she decides.
She knows him entirely too well. Dick lets out his breath, and lets himself sink back into the curve of her arm. If he was feeling just a little more burned out, he'd probably rest his head on her shoulder, but he doesn't. If he thought she would let him get away with it, he'd probably kiss her hard and let things go on from there until they needed to move things to one of their rooms, and put this conversation off indefinitely. "You've got me there," he admits. "So if I wasn't being aggressively cheerful to teach my worry a lesson, what did I look like?"
He's thinking more than usual about his own facial expressions, having spent so much time trying to read Richard's.
Kori is silent, for a moment. "Very sad," she concludes. "And very private. You never talk about your parents," she adds.
And she's right, taking everything into account; from her perspective it must have been obvious it was the use Richard's story made of his parents that was getting to him most. He hopes no one else can read him so well.
He's glad it was only her and Joey, in the surveillance booth. There aren't many people he trusts more. Maybe no one. Well, there's Donna.
Once upon a time, he trusted Batman with everything in him, but he's not a child anymore. (After everything they've been through, it's hard to wholly trust anyone, anymore. And if he feels that way, his double…)
He sighs. "They're in the past," he said. They belonged to Dick Grayson, and even though he'd trusted his friends here with that name years ago and they called him by it, Titans Tower has always been Robin and then Nightwing's place. Dick Grayson tends to retreat to a public face and an identity to slip back into in private downtime, and he knows it's a bad habit but it comes so naturally. "I finished mourning them a long time ago." And Richard hasn't, he realizes, that was what was so disquieting. It's a rawer wound than Bruce's parents even are, and that's strange.
Kori squeezes him, comforting with softness over hard muscle and actually she and his mother would have gotten along really well, wouldn't they. He's never thought about it before. Maybe he didn't know his mom that well, losing her when he was only eight, but he's almost sure he's right. Mary Grayson would have liked Starfire.
(The Goose Girl wasn't the only story she used to tell him with princesses in it.)
Dick straightens up, and Kori lets him go. He tips his head up to drop a kiss on her cheek, a thank-you, and then turns to head up the hall. "Come on, I want to check in with Vic. I'm kind of amazed we haven't had any new emergencies yet."
Kori does come along, and follows him into the elevator. "Jinx," she says.
"I'd knock on wood," Dick replies dryly, "but our Tower is too futuristic for that."
Vic's back in Operations, just like Dick expected, even though he finished checking for signs of system intrusion hours ago. "Did you eat?" he asks. Because he can hardly throw stones at anyone else for being too keyed-up to relax as long as they have this Talon thing hanging over them, but shuttling back and forth between the computers and the gym is not a lifestyle.
Cyborg rolls his human eye. "Yes, Mom. There's pizza in the fridge." He picks up a stack of papers, stapled at one corner, that don't look like they were run up on the printer here. "Here. We got the results back, on the cheek swab we took from our guest last night. DNA tests all say he's you. No anomalies, nothing to account for the magic healio deal even."
Cyborg offers him the print-out, and Dick takes it, flips through absorbing only half the information. "Thanks Vic."
Vic rolls his eyes. "Don't hurt yourself. Listen, I'm up on the monitor roster in a couple hours, is there anything you want me to watch for?"
"Based on the data so far, if he does anything without a visitor to prompt it we'll all be surprised."
"'Anything,' roger that," Vic tips a two-fingered salute. Kori laughs. Dick accepts the ribbing philosophically, and Vic adds, "There's an open file on the LAN labeled Subject Strigiform where people have been jotting notes. There's no tag for who created it so I assume it was Chase. I'll just add anything I notice to that."
Nightwing makes a note to read that, too. "Sounds good."
"And hey, Dick." Cyborg's voice has sunk into a register you very rarely hear, a little too gentle for his usual style of reassurance, and without the bleakness or the anger that comes in when he's upset for himself. "Remember this guy is dangerous. Okay?"
Dick grins. "Of course I know he's dangerous, Vic. He's me, but meaner."
"You but brainwashed and crazy," Vic mutters, then realizes what he said and winces. "Aw, sorry man, I didn't mean it like that."
Dick holds up both gloved hands. He'd say it happens to everybody sometimes, but that would be jinxing the people on the team it hasn't happened to yet, so he won't. "Hey, I got my butt kicked by this team while brainwashed and crazy, we've got this."
Vic laughs at him and kicks him out. Fair enough, even if he doesn't actually have the authority to do that. Kori comes with and they go grab lunch before splitting up again. Kori is probably going to go spy on Richard some more.
Dick goes back to the gym and spends some time on the rings, trying and failing not to think too hard.
He remembers, not that long ago, the Hybrids that Mento sent against them—fighting for their lives against people who had control of little besides their tongues, at best, but who used those to talk endlessly about how they didn't want to hurt them, how they had no choice because of Steve Dayton's mind control, how if the Titans would just let them rescue their captured comrade, they could go away without Dayton forcing them to kill anyone.
(Wally got turned to stone in that incident, actually, but it didn't last long.)
Dick sends himself somersaulting off the rings—much too low to get the quadruple in, but he started upside down and spins through two and a half full rotations and sticks the landing like you can almost never afford to do in the real world, and as he flies he remembers Pteradon, a courteous and cooperative captive especially for someone with wings bound down to a chair, more than willing to tell them all he could, getting halfway into the second sentence before breaking off to scream with the pain, to beg please, master, please, don't hurt me, don't kill me!
And then seconds later burst his bonds and lunged at them, smirking, because it was his master's command.
They forgave Dayton, in the end. All the Hybrids. They'd been dying before he mutated them—they might be monsters now, but they were alive, and they had one another for company. He had burned away the powers of the Mento helmet along with the madness it had kindled in him, so he had been harmless, and he had been so sorry.
It still made Dick uncomfortable, leaving them with him, when he had violated them so horribly—he didn't like to think of Pteradon having anything to do with the person who'd made him say please master don't hurt me. But it wasn't Nightwing's decision to make.
He swings himself back up onto the rings. Iron Cross.
Besides, Dayton was so broken. And still paraplegic. He needed someone, and his whole family is dead, except Gar. Just because their ghosts had convinced him to start accepting that fact didn't mean it was going to be easy, and Changeling might love his adopted father but he doesn't like him, let alone want to become his caretaker. They'd kill each other within a week, albeit probably in a more metaphorical sense than Dayton had been trying while insane.
(Gar and his adoptive father make Dick and Bruce in comparison look like they're still the well-oiled machine they were when Dick was Jason's age, or even Gar's. It's sort of impressive, just how dysfunctional a relationship can get between people who don't actually wish each other any harm.)
Maltese Cross. Hold.
If Dayton hadn't been a hero before he became a villain, the Titans' decision might have been different, but with the madness gone…he was one of them. And the Hybrids had the right to choose for themselves. Dick knows that.
Raven was so proud, to have been able to save everybody for once, and Gar was so relieved. And it was good, great even, a resolution where nobody died, or even went to prison. And yet.
What Blood did to his mind, both times…what Trigon did to Raven…the mind control Dayton used…Mad Hatter's little tricks in Gotham…on and on, each type has its own unique footprints, and while the mutely horrific force of psychic or magical brainwashing is faster, and harder to resist, it's also easier to put behind you. It segregates itself. Not perfectly, and Dick still wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes thinking he can feel the foreign fingerprints on his brain, but for the most part what's real and what's a construct are pretty easy to distinguish, once you're in a position to start sorting it out again. A lot of the time, without active maintenance those constructs collapse all on their own.
The simpler stuff is actually harder to shake off, the ordinary forms of mental conditioning, things like the work the Church of Blood put in to break him and Raven down, to soften them up for the direct attacks—that's real damage, organic harm, things the mind did to itself in reaction to what was done to it, and that's harder to get rid of, because it stays no matter how defeated the villain is. It lingers. It scars.
(Every muscle in his body is trembling with exertion from holding himself parallel to the floor this long, and he finally lets himself relax, until only his hands are still stiff, holding fast to the rings as he dangles in place. He could let go, but he won't.)
Dick knows that, even though he doesn't usually think about it. The best way to make that kind of thing go away is to ignore it, to act like everything is okay, until it is again. That's what everyone he knows does. It works, mostly. He starts swinging his weight back and forth again, idly, working out the tension that tries to set in.
Richard…the genescan came back as a perfect match, which makes it more likely he really is a clone with implanted memories, not an existing person altered into a Nightwing copy. And that is a forcible brainwashing case, but without the handy segregating effect because there was no real self before, to go back to.
Richard could still build one, though. In fact, it seems like he's been trying.
And in that case, does it really matter whether he's the childhood kidnapping victim shaped by old-fashioned conditioning he believes himself to be, or a clone with implanted memories?
Aside from how he should relate to the memories of killing, if there were no real deaths to regret. But Dick isn't sure Richard even understands guilt, yet, so that's not an immediate problem. Either way…if he'll let them help, they should. He's terrifying, but he's a victim.
Hanging upside-down with his toes toward the ceiling, Dick lets out a sigh. He's too close to this, he knows. His judgment about his own double is not going to go as far as he'd like.
A/N: Btw the 'Team Titans' storyline that was retconned out by Zero Hour brought us Future Nightwing, who eventually turned out not to be Dick Grayson but some random guy forcibly altered to look and think exactly like him. So if you thought Dick's body/brainwashing theory was stupid, know that this is an actual thing he is scheduled to encounter in his actual life. :D