Brotherhood
Chapter 7: Dancing With Devils In The Pale Moonlight
Damian looked at the young woman across from him in shock for a moment, before he recovered his bearings and grinned wolfishly.
"Blackfire, huh?" he asked as he leaned back slightly in his chair, his eyes memorizing every detail of her face with practiced quickness and precision. It really would be a shame to have to kill her.
"So tell me," he continued after a moment, "what's a Tamaranean like you doing in a place like this?"
Blackfire arched an eyebrow in surprise, a smile of her own appearing on her face.
"You know of my people?" she asked, and Damian nodded. "But you don't know who I am," she finished, her face falling just a little. As the drinks arrived, Damian took a long pull on his before speaking again.
"Well, that's not entirely true," he said, leaning forward again. "I assume you're related to the 'Starfire' that lives in Jump City, right? The resemblance is too close to be a fluke."
At the mention of the other Tamaranean's name, Blackfire's dejected expression quickly turned into a hard frown. When she spoke next, her voice was full of spite.
"That would be my sister," she said, her eyes briefly flaring with energy before she calmed herself back down. "She's the one responsible for this whole fucking mess. She's the reason I'm stuck here, in this festering sore of a city."
Blackfire stopped her rant long enough to lift the lowball glass to her lips, knocking back the whole drink in one gulp without even flinching. Damian took note: either Tamaranean biology let her do that, or she was someone who'd seen more than her fair share of hard times and was very good friends with the bottoms of bottles. Or maybe both.
"So what, did she force you into exile or something?" Damian pressed with as much tact as he could, choosing his words very carefully. He knew from past battles with Starfire that a pissed off Tamaranean was the last thing he wanted to deal with. Blackfire chuckled bitterly, placing her glass back down on the table and motioning to a nearby waitress to bring on the second round.
"I guess you could say that," she replied. "Or you could say that she got me thrown in prison. Twice. And maximum security, at that."
Damian winced, suddenly glad that Grayson was only his adoptive brother, and not a biological one.
"Ouch," he said after a moment, finishing off his drink just in time for the next one to arrive. "That really sucks."
"Oh, trust me," Blackfire parried with a slight hint of melancholy to her voice as she shifted her gaze to look up at the full moon, "it got worse. Much, much worse. But enough about me," she said, giving Damian a look over the rim of her glass that reminded him to an unsettling degree of a lioness sizing up her dinner, "let's talk about you, Damian Wayne. What's the heir to a multi-million dollar fortune like you doing in a place like this?"
Damian smiled to himself as he saw through her move, but knew it was better to play this one slow.
"I don't know about you, Blackfire," he said casually, "but I like a bit of excitement in my life, and sitting in a room listening to a bunch of rich, stuck-up assholes pander to you just because they want your money makes me want to puke. But, if I remember correctly, you said you'd tell me anything I wanted to know," he shifted back, making his next move. "And I still have some more questions."
"Do you, now?" the Tamaranean replied smoothly, hiding her frustration behind a smirk. This kid sure was persistent. Blackfire considered just reaching across and snapping his neck in two like a twig, but it was too soon for that right now.
"Yeah, I do, actually," Damian parried back, feeling the adrenaline start to pick up as he finally had the chance to match wits with someone who could keep up. "Because, y'see, I can't help but wonder why it is that someone like you, just escaped from a second stint in a maximum security prison and stuck here, so very, very far from home, would go around consciously drawing attention to yourself. It doesn't make very much sense to me at all, to be perfectly honest.
"Unless, of course," he continued with more force, upping the ante and leaning closer to Blackfire, "you were putting yourself out there to try and draw me in."
Blackfire felt her pulse quicken as he drew closer, but forced it back under control. She wasn't about to get beaten at her own game, and she had a job to do. Still, she thought appreciatively as her violet eyes stared into Damian's deep, intense brown ones, he's not lacking in the looks department, and certainly has more spine than any man I've seen in the past three years.
It really was a shame she had to kill him.
But as she began to charge up a beam behind her eyes, the sudden, cold feeling of steel being pressed up against her inner-thigh made Blackfire gasp and threw off her concentration.
"Now, now, princess," Damian said, his attitude changing completely, from charming but aloof to playfully smug and supremely confident, "let's not get any funny ideas, not while I have a switchblade pressed up against your femoral artery. And I've studied my fair share of Tamaranean biology, so I know how much blood you stand to lose if I—" here he shifted the blade slightly, causing Blackfire to go rigid,
"Slip."
But far from being overwhelmed, the bold move only served to make Blackfire's warrior nature even more interested in her target. Maybe she would take her time, and have some fun with this one before snuffing him out.
"So, I see you're not just a pretty face after all, kid," she said, the tone of her voice dropping its earlier friendliness completely and replacing it with deadly intent and confidence. "But you seem to forget, Damian," she finished, leaning in even closer and putting her lips right next to his ear,
"Your femoral artery is in the same place as mine."
Now it was Damian's turn to freeze up as he felt Blackfire's hand come to rest on his own inner-thigh, the warmth of the touch signaling a starbolt ready to fire at a second's notice.
"It really is a shame I have to kill you, kid," she whispered again, and Damian had to fight back a shiver of something other than fear. "I feel like we could have had some fun together, you and I."
If it hadn't been for the hand at his thigh, Damian would have had Blackfire up against the wall by now. God, he hated when business got in the way of pleasure.
"Trust me, princess," he whispered in turn, his grip tensing around the switchblade that was the only thing keeping him alive, "the feeling is mutual."
The pair sat motionless, each one split between reason and instinct and wondering just what the hell they were going to do now.
Fortunately, someone else stepped in to make that decision for them.
"I never would've guessed that the Black Hood would be some little girl," a level, emotionless voice spoke from their left,
"Nor that we'd ever find Damian Wayne outside his mother's little den," a far more malicious voice spoke from the right. A gun barrel was placed right next Blackfire's temple, while a knife found its place at Damian's throat.
"I gotta say, Mr. Zsasz," the malicious voice continued, "I'm glad we decided to combine our resources this time."
"Likewise, Mask," Victor Zsasz answered, his voice unchanging in its monotone. "It's about time I added another tally to my collection, and this one will do quite nicely."
While the two new arrivals had been speaking, Blackfire and Damian had silently agreed to a ceasefire and had withdrawn their weapons from the others' thigh.
"Victor, Victor, Victor," Damian said easily, looking over at the scarred sociopath like nothing was wrong. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Far too long, shadow boy," Zsasz answered, his lack of emotion putting even Blackfire on edge.
"So, you're the 'Black Hood' then, I take it?" the more volatile of the pair asked Blackfire. "Didn't anyone tell you the word, sweetheart? There's only one person on these streets allowed to call themselves the 'Black' anything, and that's me:
"The Black Mask."
Damian's eyes widened at the name, and Blackfire began to wish that she was anywhere other than here.
"You mean, Roman Sionis? The mobster?" the Tamaranean asked, and the Black Mask laughed.
"Looks like this little girl's been doing her homework!" he crowed. "Yes, that's exactly who I am. And you, girl, clearly weren't watching your step, because the last person you killed worked for me. And I don't take very kindly at all to people stomping on my turf. Now get up, unless you'd rather have your brains splattered all over the wall."
"You sure you want me to do that?" Blackfire asked, calming herself down and looking across at Damian as she did so. The Tamaranean motioned down with her eyes once, something the young man across from her took as a signal to hit the deck very, very soon.
"Of course I'm sure," the Black Mask spat back, clicking back the hammer of his pistol, "or I wouldn't have told you to do it. Now get up; the longer you wait, the more gruesomely I'm going to torture you later."
Blackfire slipped one of her hands to the underside of the tabletop and smirked.
"Suit yourself."
The Tamaranean princess flipped the heavy table up into the air with one hand at the same time she used her other arm to elbow the Black Mask in the gut, causing his gun to fire off into the ceiling instead of shooting her in the head. Damian had a similar strategy in mind, elbowing Zsasz to get the knife far enough away from his neck that he had room to get on the floor, barely missing the table as it flipped over his head. Zsasz wasn't as lucky, though, and got clipped by the wood as it flew by.
Determined not to miss his chance, Damian used his position to sweep-kick Zsasz's legs out from under him, sending the sociopath falling to the ground with a short grunt. Springing quickly to his feet, Damian brought his foot down hard on Zsasz's chest. The killer didn't so much as flinch, remaining perfectly composed as he slashed out with his knife, carving a gash into Damian's shin. The other warrior cursed sharply, letting rage take over as he shifted his boot from Zsasz's chest to his head. Right before he let his foot drop in a fatal blow, though, Zsasz lunged upwards and buried his knife into Damian's side, striking deeply.
Pulling the knife out quickly to make sure the bleeding wasn't staunched, the sociopath rose to his feet and began circling his enemy like a wolf, while Damian had to simultaneously fight through excruciating pain and focus on dueling an expert knife-fighter at the same time.
Blackfire was having an equally hard time with her opponent. Even though she'd managed to disarm the Black Mask and get down to hand-to-hand combat, the little cockroach just refused to die. And worse than that, it was like the more she hurt him, the stronger he got; like he thrived off of the pain.
"You're certainly hiding a lot of strength somewhere, kid," the mobster said after taking a blow that had broken his jaw in at least one place like it was nothing, "and I can certainly respect that. But as much as I might respect how you operate, that doesn't change the fact that you gotta go."
The Black Mask drew a second pistol from within his suit jacket and fired, catching Blackfire square in the shoulder. The Tamaranean staggered back a few steps, her eyes more confused than enraged. The mobster could have drawn the gun at any time, but he'd just waited and waited, taking the beating.
"You know," The Black Mask said, "it's not very smart to stand there staring blankly when the guy across from you's holding a gun."
Blackfire came back to herself just in time, rolling sharply to the right to avoid getting hit a second time. Angered by the fact she'd even let herself get wounded by a human and determined not to hold back any longer, the princess let loose with a starbolt the moment she was back on her feet. It caught the Black Mask in the same place on the shoulder where she'd been shot, followed up quickly by another bolt right to the chest. Blackfire continued to walk forward, rage in her eyes as she powered up a final starbolt and prepared to plunge it into the Black Mask's skull.
"Too fucking slow!"
Blackfire was caught completely by surprise as the Black Mask lifted his head up and struck forward with the speed of a viper, putting his gun to Blackfire's midsection and firing. The Tamaranean took the slug with a groan and staggered backwards, while the mobster just laughed.
"Y'see, that's what happens when you're a criminal in Gotham for all of these years, sweetheart," the Mask jeered as he advanced, his eyes shining with madness as his jacket parted to reveal layers of body armor underneath. "You learn to deal with the freaks!
"Now," he said as he kicked Blackfire in the chest at the same point he'd shot her, forcing her to the floor before standing over her, brandishing a butterfly knife, "I know how good you are at dishing out pain, but I've always thought that the real measure of someone is how well they can take it."
Damian circled Zsasz in a lethal give-and-take, dodging the quick, lashing strikes and trying to find an opening in the sociopath's defenses. Glancing out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blackfire getting outclassed by the Black Mask and knew he had to finish his own fight quickly if they were going to have a chance of getting out of this alive.
"Where exactly are you looking?" Zsasz asked dispassionately as he struck out again, this time catching Damian along the arm. "If you want to die that badly, stop squirming and I'll make it quick."
The other fighter's eyes lit up suddenly at the words, and Damian smirked.
"Deal," he said, stopping his circling and standing completely still. Zsasz hesitated for the briefest of moments before lunging again, which was exactly what Damian had been counting on. Twisting to the side at the last possible moment, he grabbed Zsasz's scarred arm and bent it back hard at the elbow, driving the blade up and into the sociopath's forehead.
Not wasting another second, Damian pulled the knife out of his former opponent and raced over to where the Black Mask was getting ready to put a butterfly knife's blade right in between Blackfire's eyes. Before the mobster could turn to see him, the assassin jammed the bloodied knife he'd taken from Zsasz through the Black Mask's neck. Quickly knocking the knife out of the mobster's already-slacking grip, Damian took a second to make sure that the Black Mask was dead before reaching down and helping Blackfire to her feet.
"I had it under control," she said, trying to put up a front to hide her pain and failing. But Damian didn't mock her for it, instead bracing her with his shoulder as the two of them limped out of the now-empty bar and back into the moonlight.
"I know," he said softly as he laid the wounded Tamaranean down on the ground. "But I couldn't wait for him to give you an opening."
Blackfire shivered as the cool wind blew over her fresh wounds, inwardly seething with anger at her position. She was a warrior, damn it, not a damsel in distress!
"And now I suppose I owe you one, huh?" she asked disdainfully. "I hate being in debt."
But rather than reply, Damian just shook his head.
"Don't talk," he said after a moment, producing his own, clean knife and cutting away a large swath of the black fabric Blackfire wore beneath her cloak. As he saw the bullet wound in her abdomen, Damian hissed out a curse. It was deep and infection was already starting: if he didn't act fast, Tamaranean or not, Blackfire was going to be in pretty bad shape. Ignoring the pain searing in his side as the knife-wound Zsasz had given him flared up, Damian grit his teeth and focused.
"I'm going to go ahead and apologize in advance, princess," he said, readying his knife, "because this is going to hurt, probably worse than being shot in the first place."
"I don't care, just get the damn thing out of me," Blackfire urged, her pupils dilating and breath quickening slightly in shock.
"Your wish is my command," he quipped, before moving in with the knife. Doing his best to shut out Blackfire's snarling and curses, some of which were quite imaginative, Damian worked as quickly as he could to remove the bullet. Fortunately, he was aided in his efforts by the Tamaranean's naturally zealous immune system: it had recognized the bullet as foreign and dangerous, and was trying to get it out as fast as possible. It was eventually extracted by a combination of knife work and extremely angry bacteria, but when Damian went to work on the other bullet lodged in Blackfire's shoulder, she stopped him with a surprisingly strong grip on his arm.
"That one can wait," she said seriously, "it's not near anything lethal. We need to get that cut of yours treated, though, or you're gonna bleed out and die."
Damian chuckled bitterly, wiping the blade of his knife clean and pocketing it again.
"Well," he said with a smirk, "isn't that what you came out here to do to begin with?"
"Change of plans," Blackfire shot back as she forced herself to her feet, standing over Damian now. "And like I said, I hate being in debt."
"You have enough energy left in you to fly?" he asked, tying the strip of cloth he'd cut loose from Blackfire's clothes around his abdomen to staunch the wound's bleeding. The Tamaranean initially scoffed at the question, but when Damian suddenly wretched and cried out in pain, Blackfire's expression switched instantly from scornful to worried. Her worry increased as he began to spasm, coming down to normal only several heartbeats later.
"What the fuck… was that?" Damian forced out, before slipping two fingers underneath the improvised bandage and holding them to the wound. Bringing the now blood-dampened fingers back up to his nose, he sniffed quickly and his brown eyes widened in terror before narrowing in defiant rage.
"Cyanide," he ground out, Damian's anger growing by the moment as he realized that this might be how he died, poisoned by the tainted blade of some Arkham-grade psycho. "That bastard dipped his knife in cyanide. God damn it!"
Blackfire immediately lifted her would-have-been assassin into a secure hold, pushing off of the ground despite Damian's feeble protests.
"Shut the fuck up and just tell me where to go," she growled at him. After a moment's hesitation, he gave in. Blackfire flew off into the night as fast as she could, fervently hoping she wasn't too late.
A few minutes later, a white burst of energy in the shape of a raven emerged out of the ground in front of the bar, opening and disappearing to reveal Raven and Beast Boy. While the shape-shifter turned into a bloodhound and sniffed the air for signs of Damian's trail, the empath just stood silently and looked down at her hands, as if she wasn't sure what they were.
"Why… why was it so hard to use my powers just now?" she asked herself. "Am I drawing them from a different source now that Rage is gone? And if that's even possible, what the hell could that source even be?"
Beast Boy changed back into his normal appearance and shook his head, frustrated.
"Damian was definitely here, that's for sure," he said, "but then he left, and the trail gets really confusing right about at this spot: a whole bunch of scents just come together and screw it all up. I say we should just go back to the base; I'm sure he'll get back there just fine."
Raven nodded absentmindedly, feeling completely drained despite only having performed one simple teleport.
"That works for me," she said, "but I'm going to have to take some time to recharge before we can teleport again."
Beast Boy would have offered to just fly them both back, but the adrenaline rush from his battle against Rage had all but worn off, leaving him exhausted as well. And so he just laid himself down on the ground and looked up at the moon and the stars, a smile spreading across his face as he felt Raven settle down next to him a few moments later.
Blackfire finally arrived at the hidden entrance to the League's headquarters after a solid five minutes of flying, almost ripping the iron door from its hinges in her haste to get it open. Only the sight of an injured Damian in her arms kept the guard ninja from alerting the other soldiers down below, but the two of them still shared an incredibly confused look as Blackfire blew past them.
The Tamaranean princess raced through and over the long, winding path to get to the true entrance, settling for kicking down the large steel doors when they refused to open for her. Blackfire was immediately met with a score of hostile stares as she rushed into the main room of the compound. Before the small army of guards could attack, however, they were stopped by Talia Al Ghul's commanding voice.
"Wait!" she called out, recognizing her son's form resting in the arms of this strange intruder. The soldiers halted and Talia walked forward, her eyes never leaving those of the girl.
"You," she said imperiously, "who are you, and what are you doing with my son? Explain yourself, before I resort to simply taking him out of your grip once your limbs are dead and cold."
Blackfire felt her pride raise its hackles at the insulting tone and was about to reply, when Damian stirred in her arms and spoke softly, with great strain.
"Don't," he said. "Leave this one to me." Turning his head so that it was facing his mother, Damian took in a deep breath and spoke.
"I know this looks weird, mother," he began, the volume of his voice surprisingly close to normal, "but just trust me when I say she's not an enemy. And before you even start," he continued sharply, cutting off Talia's retort just as she opened up her mouth, "I want you to know that I got stabbed in the gut a few minutes ago by a cyanide-poisoned knife. So if you want me to live past thirty minutes from now, please just shut the hell up and tell her how to get to the medical wing."
This seemed to sap all of Damian's strength, and he fell silent with a sigh, his eyes closing.
"It's through that door, down the hall and to the right," Talia said, pointing to the door on the left side of the room and taking a closer look at the young woman in front of her.
"You're the Black Hood," she asked pointedly, "aren't you?"
Blackfire just nodded, too worn-out for words. Talia gave a small smile.
"Thank you."
The Tamaranean was surprised for a moment, but quickly shook herself out of it and hurried out of the main room. She ran down the hall and through the door on the right, just as Talia had instructed, stumbling into the medical wing. It was large and unexpectedly well lit, staffed with plenty of people in white uniforms. The events of the evening were finally starting to wear down on Blackfire, and she barely had the awareness to say that Damian had been poisoned by cyanide before she felt her eyelids get heavy and she passed into sleep right where she stood. One of the doctors took Damian gently from her arms, while another braced Blackfire's slumping fall and placed her onto a bed of her own, beginning work right away on getting the bullet out of her shoulder.
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A/N: Hope you enjoyed the chapter, and as always, reviews are highly appreciated. Thanks again to the Fantastic Four who have reviewed so consistently, Phantom, Dwarg, anon and Wolvmbm. This is probably going to be my last update for a few weeks, as exams are coming and I need to study for them in earnest, unfortunately.
But the next chapter, when it comes, will finally show what the bad guys have been up to in Jump City in the long day following the defeat of the Titans. Should be good times.
And now, onto the Glossary for this chapter!
The Black Mask: Vicious Gotham City mobster kingpin, real name Roman Sionis. On-again-off-again childhood friends with Bruce Wayne, and later one of his deadliest opponents once Wayne became Batman. Master tactician, sadist, masochist and expert torturer.
Victor Zsasz: Sociopath, institutionalized at Arkham for being a batshit-crazy nihilist serial killer. Very skilled knife fighter, and has an odd habit of carving a tally mark somewhere on his body for every person he kills. To the point that, by now, his entire body is covered in those scars.
Oh, and for anyone who's curious, the chapter title is a reference to Jack Nicholson's famous line as The Joker in the original Batman movie, "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?" Still gives me the chills.
See you next time!