Title: The Suit (pt 11)
Genre: fanfic (Batman Beyond)
Setting: sometime early on in the series
Rating: mild violence and swearing
Notes: Hey there! Long time no see! Once again, I promise we're moving toward the end here. Enjoy the rest of the ride...
XI.
Okay, so the entrance was a bit much. If the rich folks are digging glass shards out of their hair for the next few hours, well…at least they're not digging out bullets. Terry's man enough to admit when he's gone a little overboard. He's also man enough to admit that it's a good thing this cowl dramatically minimizes his facial expressions, because the way Ryerstad is looking at him is, quite frankly, freaking him out.
"You'll understand what I'm trying to do," Ryerstad is saying, eyes wide, looking at Terry like a little kid sizing up his Christmas stocking. Terry's always thought crooks were supposed to fear Batman, not fanboy him. This gig is just full of surprises.
"I understand you're taking your show a little outside your neighborhood, Ryerstad," Terry says. "Kidnapping charges in Blüdhaven not enough for you?"
Ryerstad looks confused, and Terry hasn't even hit him yet. "This isn't kidnapping, Batman."
"Really?" says Terry. He eyes the corner of the room, where Grayson and Wayne are untying the extremely rumpled-looking elite. "What do you call tying up a bunch of rich folks and carting them around town in the middle of the night?"
Ryerstad's pout is even more annoying than Matt's, and not nearly as cute. "They're the bad guys, Batman! Everything going on in the 'Haven – the corruption, the crime – you can trace it all back to them, and the people like them. Gotham's just the same, haven't you noticed? Wayne and that Powers guy own this town, and people are getting away with murder. Because they're rich. Because they have the power. The cops aren't helping, the government's shot to hell, and it's not fair. Someone has to stand up to them. Someone has to make an example. Someone has to take the law into their own hands." Ryerstad's eyes are a weird shade of pathetic ferocity. "I'm only doing the same thing you do."
Terry looks at the tear-streaked faces, the firmly-set jawlines, the mud-splattered outfits and disheveled hair. "This isn't what I do," he says.
Ryerstad frowns, suddenly more than a little petulant. "You're all the same, aren't you, with your stupid spandex costumes and your lame propaganda? You say you're going to protect the people, but all you do is form your little clubs and act like you're all above it, while people are stealing and dying and you don't do a damned thing about it!" He raises his gun so that it's pointing directly at Terry's face. "You're the disease," he says in a low, dangerous voice. "And I'm the cure."
"Not today," Terry says, and lets a Batarang fly at Ryerstad's wrist.
Might have been a bit more productive if he'd factored in total pandemonium.
The Batarang knocks the gun out of Ryerstad's hand, but Terry only gets a split second to see him hopping around, cursing and holding his injured wrist, before something enormous tackles Terry to the ground. Terry tries to control the roll but realizes too late that they're headed straight toward the line of prisoners who, helpfully, have started screaming their heads off and scrambling to get out of the way.
Terry ends up on the ground near the wall with Stan on top of him, huge fists around his throat, pleasantly having the life choked out of him. Through a haze of air deprivation and a soundtrack of squealing rich idiots, Terry notices Grayson crouched less than a foot away from him, grimacing and pulling his gun out of nowhere. Neat trick. "I'm on Ryerstad," he says under his breath to Terry, who considers mentioning something along the lines of, Hello, being strangled here, but even as he begins to get his mouth around the words, Grayson's sprinted away. Well goddamn the previous generation, leaving everything to the kids of today. Luckily, Terry's up to it.
Focused as Stan is on crushing Batman's trachea, he doesn't notice when Terry manages to pull out another Batarang, squirm a bit to get a good angle, and slam it into his leg. In fact, it takes a good five seconds before Stan realizes something is wrong, loosens his grip on Terry's neck, and looks down at his bleeding leg in surprise. He blinks stupidly, then lets out an ear-splitting howl – but by then Terry has rolled a safe distance away.
The situation isn't looking good. Terry can see Wayne trying to usher the frightened ex-prisoners out of the warehouse, but they're too hysterical to really listen to him, despite how much he's waving around his cane and looking menacing. Meanwhile Grayson and Ryerstad, looking a little worse for wear after a bit of a tussle, have reached a standoff: Ryerstad, having retrieved his gun, is pointing it in Grayson's face, and Grayson is returning the favor.
"Come down all the way from the 'Haven to bring me in, Officer?" Ryerstad is saying, his face contorted into a sneer. "Couldn't catch me yourself, and now you need a bat to help, is that it?"
"Put the gun down, and I won't have to add armed assault to your already impressive rap sheet," says Grayson. Terry is a little surprised to hear the edge in his voice.
Ryerstad laughs humorlessly. "What about the right to bear arms? You cops, always running around with your guns, like it gives you some kinda privilege over the rest of us –"
"Nothing gives you the right to kill," says Grayson, and Terry realizes his gun is cocked and ready to fire. Okay, now there's a contradiction, to talk about not killing when it's looking an awful lot like Grayson is about to blow someone's head off.
Ryerstad's eyes narrow. "I haven't killed anyone."
"Sergeant Amy Rohbach, Blüdhaven PD. Ring a bell?"
Personal vendetta. This just keeps getting better.
Ryerstad considers. "Not really."
Grayson's frown gets uglier. "She was on duty the last night you were booked down in Blüdhaven. You decided you had other places to be. She disagreed with your plans, so you stole another cop's gun and shot her in the head. She had a husband and two kids."
Ryerstad shrugs. "She shouldn't have gotten in the way."
Okay, that's quite enough of that. Terry pulls out another Batarang and throws it in an arc so that it knocks the guns out of both men's hands. He's even got a good quip on the tip of his tongue, but he has to settle for biting it when Stan bowls him over yet again and sends them flying across the room.
"Think you can beat me, Batman?" Stan roars in his ear.
"That's the plan, yeah," Terry grunts, struggling against the massive arms that are wrapped around him from behind. This is getting really old really fast, and it's not nearly as interesting as keeping Grayson from shooting people. Terry flicks a switch and his boots ignite, shooting them over to the wall. Stan, caught between Batman and a hard place, smacks his head on concrete and crumples to the ground, down for the count.
Ryerstad and Grayson have resorted to fists, and Grayson appears to be winning, though they're both looking a bit bloodied for their efforts. Ryerstad's vicious, kicking and throwing his fists around wherever he thinks he can get a hit; Grayson, on the other hand, is agile and quick, parrying and punching with fluid motions, like it's a game he's got all the time in the world to win. Pretty impressive for an old guy. Not that Terry's about to tell him that.
Still, better to pull apart the bullies, since there are hostages to save and goons to lock up. Terry uses the jets to hustle on over and take Ryerstad out of the ring. He barely misses Grayson's fist as he shoves Ryerstad away.
"Stay out of this," Grayson hisses at him.
"Sorry, not in the job description," says Terry. "And seriously, stop trying to shoot people on my watch."
"I wasn't going to shoot him," mutters Grayson.
"Right, that's why you had the gun ready to fire."
"Move."
Generally Terry doesn't pay much attention in physics, but he's fairly certain that, with Grayson on one side of him and Ryerstad on the other, the bolt he's just heard being expelled from Ryerstad's gun ought to hit Terry in the back. So when he finds himself still standing, albeit shoved to one side, he has to remember to breathe, which he's heard from health class can help one's brain function. He's not really thinking about much of anything, but his body's on self-assured autopilot, and he realizes he's just thrown another Batarang and knocked the gun out of Ryerstad's hand. The gun hits the ground with a loud clank and slides across the floor and out of reach.
Still not really tracking well, Terry turns and sees that the reason he doesn't currently have a hole in his back is that Grayson is on the ground with a hole in his chest.
"Shit," Terry says.