Chapter Text
i.
“There’s someone here for you.”
Richard Grayson is going to be ten on Thursday. He has a rough, brown policeman’s coat over his shoulders that he can feel scratching off the coarse glitter of his stagewear, raking his skin off with it. It’s so heavy it makes his hands feel like weights. When he tried to push it up he just got red all up the corduroy and stained it bad.
There is a lump in his throat. He tries to explain. “I don’t—” he bites down on his tongue, on the salt from his tears. “I don’t—have anybody.”
The policeman glances down at him dismissively, dark eyebrows like caterpillars crawling up his big white face. “I don’t know what to tell you, kid,” he says, like it doesn’t matter, all sandpaper-voiced, “Somebody’s here. Blood relative.”
Richard stops in his tracks, looks down at the ground. It’s dirt. He swallows but the lump doesn’t go away, it just grows until he can barely speak. He points at the big tent, its striped nylon billowing in the wind, hollowed out from the last flush of the audience. “All my family’s—” his voice trembles, “all my blood is in there.”
Leaching into the wet, dark ground.
The policeman pauses for a moment, clicks his teeth, looks at him sharply. Then he starts moving forward again, pulling Richard by the wrist, blood smearing onto his big fingertips.
ii.
“I’m so very sorry, Richard.” Big white hands on both his cheeks. Just like his dad used to. Forehead pressed against his. “I got here as soon as I could.”
His grandfather is tall and soft and brown-eyed and he looks so much like John Grayson that Richard wants to throw up. He doesn’t. He just stands there in the pelting January wind until his eyes feel raw from the cold and the hot tears and his grandfather scoops him up. He buries his face in the man’s shoulder, whose coat isn’t scratchy like the policeman’s so he curls his fingers tight into it and tries to make himself breathe right. He smells like camphor, like cashmere, like gray tea.
His grandfather’s murmuring something to the policeman, rubbing circles up Richard’s back all the while, and between the wind and the peacoat he only catches the end of it: “—taking him home now, officer.”
“Home?” whispers Richard, the words a half-breath that his grandfather must only catch because he says it in the crook of his neck; the man shifts, grip tightening around him. His eyes burn star-hot. “I don’t, I don’t want to see the trailer, I don’t want to, I don—”
“Shush,” soothes his grandfather, pressing his chin into the crown of Richard’s head, a weight.
iii.
“Again.”
An inch off of the carotid.
“Again.”
A millimeter.
“Again.”
Richard hesitates.
Grandfather is beside him in a second, crouching, his face a hair’s breadth away from Richard’s cheek, and Richard fights the urge to flinch away—unbecoming. Instead, he closes his eyes. “I was close.”
“Yes,” agrees Cobb, forcefully, “you were, yet you could have been closer still. So throw.”
“But—”
“Throw. Now.”
Richard does. He knows it meets the carotid because of the way that the Talon’s whole chest jerks, the rush of black blood, the way it arcs into the air and splatters across his and Cobb’s faces, their feet.
Grandfather pats his cheek approvingly with the back of his hand before he draws himself to his feet. “Now retrieve them.”
Richard obliges then too, walking over to the Talon to pluck the gold knives out of its chest. The second and third knife slide out like butter, but he has to brace both of his hands and crouch to lever out his first blade, which is stuck in the hard bone of the Talon’s ribs. He must have used more force in this one. Chips of hard, wet bone slide sluggishly off of the gold as he holds it up to Cobb for approval.
Grandfather nods, lips quirked up, and he catches the wet knives between his fingers effortlessly when Richard throws them back. “Your aim needs work. But your arm is as excellent as always.”
Richard bites back a grin, keeps his back away from his grandfather so he doesn’t show it. There’s no place for pride in training. Instead, he kicks the steel toe of his boot into the growing pool of black shining under the Talon’s dead weight. “...He had a lot of blood this time,” he observes, trying not to preen.
“It,” corrects Cobb. “Not he.”
Cobb corrects him a lot. Richard makes a lot of mistakes.
But he’s feeling brave—bold—today, so, “Pedant,” he shoots back, peeling up the Talon’s black mask to see who he skewered this time. Cobb is partial to using the older Talons in training, always says that they have to serve some purpose and that they’re hardly serviceable after being iced for so long.
It’s not realistic, though. The Talons wake up and warm themselves after they revive. Most people won’t. Still, black blood is easier to remove from the black training uniforms than red, and if Richard can force a blade through an organism strengthened by electrum and hardened by centuries of freezing, then he’ll have no problems breaking an unaltered human’s soft skin.
It still makes him uneasy. This is a person. When Richard completes his training and is chosen to be the Court’s champion—mere years from now, according to Cobb and the heavy, hushed murmurs of the Owls—he will have to defeat his grandfather, at which point Cobb will be frozen and only awakened from the slumber when the Court so decrees. Cobb will be like this—like it.
The thought makes his heart jump. He doesn’t want to be alone or apart from the only family he has left. He certainly doesn’t want to see any more of his family’s own blood spilled. He would kill anybody else. Anyone. As long as it wasn’t any more of his family.
A lurid vision of Cobb’s face under this Talon’s, eyes glazed and black veins split open, spilling onto Richard’s fingers, strikes him. His fingers scrabble along the Talon’s cheek as he tears the mask up.
It’s only Alton under the mask. Richard pats the fabric back down, relief washing over him like ice water, and he rushes back to Cobb, who is appraising the Talon’s prone form, the mirror-sheen of the blood.
“High accuracy, low precision,” muses his grandfather when Richard ducks under his arm, cheek against the man’s ribs. He drapes an arm over Richard’s shoulder—a warm weight that he turns toward. “You’ll do it again and you shall do it better, but in all,” he slips his palm down to Richard’s arm, fondness even in his touch, “excellent work, my heart.”
iv.
Richard sits cross-legged in the center of the austere marble room, his bare, bowed head a stark contrast to the white, smooth-masked council. Even Cobb, perched far above in the tritorium, wears his black shroud over his face, amber goggles glinting occasionally in the dark.
“You,” says the Grandmaster—newly chosen after the deposement of her predecessor, with transparent socks and glittering gems and a booming, savage voice—“have been initiated, Talon.”
The empty vial in her palm clinks against her thin, ruby-set rings; even now the sound of it buzzes in Richard’s ear, louder than it should be, louder than it really was. He swallows, the empty, bitter taste of liquid electrum subsumed into his mouth—the drinking of it being perfunctory, almost ceremonial in nature and only occurring after the actual injection had already happened.
The pit of her eyes is as deep as her voice when he tilts his head up at her.
It’s an insolent move. He was beaten for it often enough in his early years—stabbed, too—but both punishments were fair when the Court leveled them, usually fulfilled by Cobb’s own hands. ‘A blow for every year,’ Cobb said, and had translated Richard’s then twelve years into a knife between every rib.
If the Court orders Richard to kill Cobb, then it will be fulfilled. The Court is fair. Richard would prefer to be as gentle as Cobb was when he was small, but nineteen-oh-one, his birthyear, might cost more knives than even the Court owned, and it would certainly cost more blows than he could stand to give to the last blood that he has.
One blow is already too much to stand.
He expects a backhand, perhaps, for the upward glance. He deserves one.
None comes. Instead, the initiation concludes; the Owls drain out; the Court is kind today.
Even Heraclitus couldn’t have described the Grandmaster title—it changes constantly, fluxing as the tides of affluence turn in the Court; the Court deposes almost one Grandmaster a year. The face behind the mask changes, but the role does not, nor do the rules; the past reigns. Initiations center around the ending of another face behind a mask for the sake of the maintenance of tradition.
“How progressive of her.” Cobb’s tone is dry, his throat unslit. He says nothing else.
He does not speak even when they stalk back. Their steps are noiseless. Silence fills the dim marble hallways that spill into their quarters, broken by the sudden, austere screech of one of Richard’s carved metal boots when he draws to a stop. Cobb stops too.
“I wouldn’t kill you,” Richard tells Cobb finally, the words falling out of his mouth. “I couldn’t. I won’t. You’re my—we’re family. I couldn’t.”
Cobb stares at him for a long, quiet moment more. “You look like your grandmother,” he says, softly. His words are quiet, his eyes pale as lightning. His voice drops. “But I wouldn’t hesitate.”
v.
“Bruce Wayne,” calls Cobb, haunting and dark and final, “the Court of Owls has come for you.”
The man—tall and immense with eyes the color of water—is mid-sabrage, the long green neck of a glass bottle in one palm, a saber in the other, which both serve as sufficient weapons to smash over Cobb’s shrouded skull. Lincoln March scrabbles against the long marble floor of the hall, out of the bloodshed to come.
Richard nods curtly at him, curling his fingertips around the cold silver of his own blade. March nods back, sharp eyes flitting to Cobb—the shattering green glass—the scraping rings of metal against metal—the thunder-crash of the breaking window.
Wayne is falling.
There is instinct, and nothing else. Talon plunges after him on the long, coursing fall down and drives its blade cleanly through his heart. Wayne’s eyes are open—dark—his mouth agape and rattling with the rush of gravity.
Talon says, “Bruce Wayne, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”
vi.
It’s clear now that the Court mostly authorized the coexistence of two Talons to fight the growing bane of superheroes in their city. Even with the death of Bruce Wayne, the majority financier of Batman Incorporated—a fulfillment that the Court received with giddiness, such success, such extravagance; finally the dark, rich bane perished—there are swarms of them. Strewn across the Parliament’s enclaves, greatest in Gotham but now elsewhere, too: Antibes, Bludhaven, Poznan. The new Grandmaster must have noticed.
Richard won’t complain—can’t. Not when it means that the Court allows such mercies as this—as his own blood, his own great-grandfather, the man who loved and cared for and raised him since he was small. The Court is flush with kindness.
“What a delicate thing,” muses Cobb, blade lifting off of the whetstone to relieve the air of the awful scraping sound. He holds the sword flat in his palms, gaze cast down on it like it’s a baby. “So easy to misshape.”
“What?”
Cobb lifts the sword up obligingly; it has been used too much, its parts lopsided—too well-sharpened, too well-loved. His expression is thoughtful. “I’ve used this since—”
“Since Turner was called Talon,” Richard finishes automatically, “yes, I know, you’ve only said so a million times.”
Grandfather glances up, the edges of his mouth quirking pleasedly even as he tuts and shakes his head. “Insolent boy.”
“You raised me.”
“I shudder to think.” He resheathes the blade, holding it up for show. “This is one less heirloom from me to you.”
“It doesn’t matter. I have your last name. I have your title. The Court says I’m the best they’ve ever had—their greatest, even better than you. I don’t know what else I could possibly take from you.”
Cobb’s eyes flash. “The mission, perhaps.”
Richard pauses. “I thought we would do it together. Like always.”
“I’ll be there, of course. But you would do well to prove your abilities independently. It’s a simple enough mission—these imposters, pathetic as they are in fighting, unworthy of their name.” Cobb’s lips curl. “But nevermind. If you truly think my presence and participation are necessary to carry out the sentence, I’m flattered, though I won’t be able to rest. I’m terribly old, remember, almost one-hundred-and-twenty.”
“You haven’t aged for a whole century,” he replies absently. But the possibilities are crawling in his head. There is something warm about the showered praise the Court lays out—when he killed Bruce Wayne, there was satisfaction, and pride, and excitement. Cobb tapped his cheek with the backs of his knuckles the way he did when Richard was only a child—contact, a warm, heavy contact like summer wind. All that to follow the only thing there is in any moment: instinct. A small price. There have been other kills. There have always been other kills, but those victories were split—Richard usually the slender shadow of his grandfather; the victory over Wayne was nearly his alone.
Instinct. He can do that.
And he does—he lets instinct carry him with the blade to the throats of the men and a dagger through the diaphragm of the woman, to the words that rush out of his mouth: “Nightwings all, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”
There is instinct, diamond-sharp, hot, and nothing else. It feels important and new and unfamiliar being in the black gauntlets and gold lenses all at once again, as if he is thirteen on his very first mission again, not yet comfortable with the weight in his hands—being alone.
There is nothing else. There is nothing else. There is nothing else.
There is instinct.
He hesitates.
vii.
A single failure is not a condemnation. There is another chance to prove himself. A greater one. An immediate one—hours after the failure. New electrum spills down his throat as he swallows it, shivering, in front of the Grandmaster.
“Redeem yourself,” says the Grandmaster, each word like the strike of a pendulum. “Redeem yourself, Gray Son—tonight.”
viii.
“Shush,” says Talon, when the girl opens her mouth to speak.
“Who are you?” she whispers, arms coming over the top of her bed’s wooden railing, pajama sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Louder, she says, “‘M I dreaming?”
“Shush .”
Talon wraps a sharp, dark hand around her mouth, muffling her before she finishes the third word; the mayor is not to see the scene—the consequences of his actions, the fruit of defying the Court—until daybreak. The moon is a sliver in the sky’s rich black center now, hours yet to come.
She stares up at him placidly—at the white glint off of his blades; the soft, bright turn of his goggles; the way the blackness of the suit strips the streetlights of their worth—transfixed. Her eyes are shiny, are brown, are unbothered.
Talon has mercy to repay. “It will only be four,” he explains softly, crouching, using his freed hand to click one blade out of his sash.
He skims fingers over her neck, draws the blade closer to her jugular, mimes the motion four times—a blow for every year. “ One ,” he breathes, but his hand doesn’t move any lower, frozen.
Instead, she moves, pudgy hands leaning up to grab his wrists as best they can. Then they crawl up his arms to his face, until their positions mimic each other—one hand over the mouth, the other on the neck. The width of her hands doesn’t span the entirety of his throat; and he realizes how small she is, only made to seem larger because of her big dark eyes and loud words and an imperious tilt to her spine like even at four she knows the importance of being the mayor’s daughter and there is something so wrenchingly familiar about that—that—
He swallows, draws his hand from her mouth to drape it over her eyes. “Don’t look.” His voice shakes.
The thought is there: not you, not you, not you, anybody, anybody else.
“Amelia James, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to,” and the word hangs there, strangles there. He can’t. His hands drop. But her fingers draw up to his eyes, slithering under the lenses of his goggles, sending them clattering to the cold, wood ground.