Chapter Text
Come As You Are
1.01
Strange things live inside Rachel’s head.
When she was little, people around her would come to her in her dreams in coloured silhouettes, glowing and wailing, ripped into pieces by monsters that lurked in the shadowy corners of her mind. As she grew, the figures grew more refined, more recognisable, but they never stopped screaming; when she heard words, it was only the monster that spoke.
I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU, RACHEL
The years passed, and the dreams started to leak into the real world: she would see strange, fresh scars on Melissa’s arms while trembling in her arms after another DREAM; hazy, coloured halos followed people she knew and horrible things happened to people she hated; the monster would stare back at her in the mirror now, eyes inky black, leaking venom into her veins. TRUST ME, the monster would say, calm while everybody else screamed, and Rachel, well. After a point, she forgot to scream, too.
Then one night, she dreams of a little boy on the trapeze who watches his parents fall to their deaths, and the monster does something it has never done before: it laughs.
-
“Master Dick, I trust you received the package I sent you last week?”
Dick idly doodles a large ‘R’ on his notepad while wedging his phone between his shoulder and his ear. “I did, Alfred, it came in just this morning. Thanks. I, uh,” he makes the edges sharper, the ends like knife blades, “I should’ve called to let you know earlier.”
“Yes,” Alfred says crisply, “You should have.”
He twists the pad until it looks like the R is in motion, bounding across the page. Two tables over, Detective Oyode flings a casefile onto his desk in disgust. Across the room, Johnson is eyeing Dick with suspicious disdain. The air is heavy with the smell of stale coffee; there’s a lingering whiff of cigarette smoke from the balcony where Carter, Takashi and Mulligan take smoke breaks twice every hour, on the dot. The floor buzzes with steady chatter, the clicking of computer keys and ringing phones. Dick’s active cases tray is screamingly empty.
“I’ve been busy,” he says. “Settling in, and all that.”
“I see.” A pregnant pause. “And I suppose your new responsibilities as a police detective is the only reason you requested that I send over your modified batarangs?”
“Birdarangs,” Dick says, without thinking.
“Ah. Yes.” Alfred’s voice turns fond. “It’s been well over a decade since you came up with that convention, Master Dick; I must confess that it is good to hear it again. More than anything… it is reassuring to see that you haven’t decided to retire Robin altogether.”
A knot of anxiety tightens somewhere behind Dick’s sternum. This is about as secure a line as he can get without actually using the comms in his Robin suit, but it’s still jarring to hear someone just—just say it aloudlike that. Especially after—
Dick’s grip on his pen tightens and he scores across the ‘R’ with such ferocity that the nib tears through the paper. Johnson’s put his coffee mug aside and is starting to walk in his direction and if Dick tenses any more he’s sure he’s going to do something he’ll regret. “Sorry, Alfred,” he says. “Something’s come up; I gotta go.”
“Very well, Master Dick. I hope that you will continue to keep in touch.”
“Bye.” He slips the phone in his pocket, gets up, and tosses his ruined pad in the wastebin. He neatly sidesteps Johnson, swipes the abandoned casefile from Oyode’s desk, and hurries out of the precinct.
-
(it’s all right. you’re beautiful.)
Now that (she’s) put some distance between (her) and (her) attackers (hot metal projectiles where there should be nothing but fire, but she can’t—she can’t—), the molten panic that’s been fuelling (her) escape abates, just a little. (She) slows to a walk, pulling (her) coat close.
(it’s cold, but she’s known colder.)
The further (she) walks from the woods, the less desolate it is. There are more buildings here and more people, turning to look at (her) as (she) walks by them. Almost on instinct, (she) turns into a gas station and makes (her) way into the bathroom, coming to a stop in front of a grimy mirror. (She) is all edge and glorious skin, shining and sharp.
(beautiful. you will know it. and more importantly, they will too.)
(She) empties her purse to find documents and keys and a dozen little opaque clues as to (her) identity. (She) is Kory Anders, and the name is both everything and nothing at all. It is everything because it fits, slots into place effortlessly in her mind like she’s known it all along, but doesn’t trigger a cascade of memories, or anything other than flashes of light and bone-deep cold (and unimaginable pain).
No matter. She is Kory Anders, and this is as good a starting point as any. Besides, she is sure that the real her has a taste for adventure.
-
When the fight’s over, Dick changes into regular clothes a couple of dead-end alleyways over and limps back to his car, trying very hard not to think about Batmobiles, or Batcaves, or anything bat-related whatsoever. His shoulders ache with tension and his knuckles feel pulverised—he isn’t quite used to being the ones delivering all the punches yet. There’s blood and glass in his hair and the acrid stench of used smoke pellets lingers around him like a miasma; he’s stuffed his costume and weapons back in the case, but there are still red smears around the lock and—
—he’s not even entirely sure he’s managed to leave the site of the fight clean; or if he’s gotten all the security cams in the alley; it’s been so longsince he’s done this and even longer since he’s done it alone—
(All right. Deep breath. Deep breath. Another one. And another one.)
Everything feels even more absurd when, later in the night, he’s stuck in downtown traffic, trying to breathe past bruised ribs and the bite of glass shards in his fingers. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; moving this far from Gotham was supposed to be the start of a clean break. He’d been slowly working up to visiting Wayne Manor one more time (one last time, but he can’t—he can’t bring himself to—) to return the Robin costume, trying to reconcile the memories of safety and comfort he had under Bruce and Alfred’s care with yawning isolation of that gigantic mansion, the stomach-dropping terror that he would be abandoned (again) if he failed (again), and the anger that never seemed to stop simmering regardless of how much he punched, how much he cried, how much he laughed.
Being Robin without Batman feels like something vital’s been cut out of him, but just being Dick Grayson isn’t enough for all the evil in the world.
Dick stumbles into his apartment building, trying very hard not to make carrying a giant silver briefcase in the dark seem suspicious. He enters his apartment—dangerously open to the world but devoid of shadows—and lets himself slump onto the sofa. He’s going to (clean his costume and equipment, scrub the security cam feeds, clean the car of bloodstains and evidence, destroy the copy of Oyode’s file that he’d made, type up a report for his personal log) but for now he closes his eyes and—breathes.
Just—
Just for a minute.
-
The city is drab and cold in ways Rachel is entirely unused to; for some reason, she thinks of old white bedsheets turned grey from use and wear and repeated washing over years and years. Melissa ripped one of them into rags the last time Rachel DID SOMETHING STUPID, knocked over a vase, cut her hand on the shattered pieces, and dripped blood all over the kitchen floor. Melissa’d spent an entire afternoon scrubbing at bloodstains, refusing to answer to Rachel’s tearful apologies. (The voice told her to break the next vase over Melissa’s head, which made Rachel want to vomit.)
Melissa had washed the blood out of those rags as thoroughly as she could, leaving them even more dirty-grey than they were. That’s what the city looks like: wrung of colour, washed and washed again into grey submission—
“We’re here,” the officer in the front seat of the car says, dropping Rachel abruptly out of her thoughts. She’s taken into the precinct and asked to sit inside a windowless room; it isn’t until the officer that’s trying to get her attention touches her shoulder and she flinches, light and sound and terror rushing in, that the numbness abates and the voice snarls KILL HIM!
can’twon’tdon’t—
The officer looks shocked for a moment before his expression softens and he backs away. “Somebody will come talk to you now, okay?” he says, and leaves. Rachel waits and picks at the fraying edges of her sleeves, wishing—not for the first time—that she’d brought her phone along. It’s not like she has anybody to call, really; she just wants something to do that’s not staring at the walls (of an interrogation room, this is an interrogation room) and trying not to think about how desperately alone she is right now.
A few minutes later, Detective Dick Grayson walks in and introduces himself. Rachel jolts at the sight of him; she can hardly hear what he’s saying over the chorus of holy shit! holy shit! that’s taken over her mind, because holy shit—this is the little boy on the trapeze. He glows blood-red, and every movement of his leaves behind smudges of light and colour and life in this otherwise cement-grey room.
She holds his hands, tells him, you’re the boy from the circus; he frowns, but doesn’t tell her she’s crazy, or stupid, or BADWRONGEVIL. Dick Grayson promises to help her, and for the first time since watching her mother fall to the floor with a bullet hole through her head, Rachel feels hope.
-
Kory Anders is on a plane to the United States.
Twelve hours ago, she didn’t know her name; now she not only has an identity, but a destination, a purpose (a mission). Everything from swiping cards to speaking a dozen different tongues to summoning fire to her fingertips to the clean, beautiful effortlessness of throwing an asshole across a hotel room has been… intuitive; she thinks as she does, moves as she feels, learns as she touches. She doesn’t know what she will find when she lands (knows without really knowing that where she is going is both impossibly vast and comically small) but she’s going to start with looking for the girl in the photo and see where that leads her.
(–to a bubble suspended in infinite nothingness, shackles around her wrists and feet—)
And if that means burning up a few more entitled assholes along the way, so be it.