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It’s cold as balls and Jessie’s bus is late for the third time this week. She’d expected it to be which is why she got here ten minutes later than it’s supposed to arrive but she’s still been standing underneath the shelter outside of the building for fifteen minutes. It’s not so bad except, really it is because it’s freezing and now, she’s going to be late for work. The last time she was late for work her boss wrote her up, even though he saw her arrive on the bus and knew that the only bus before this was two hours earlier. He said to take the early bus. Jessie told him to go fuck himself. She got written up again.
Just as she’s melodramatically imagining breaking her bosses face in with a bat — which really paints itself a nice image, in her mind, given all the blood splatters over the walls and the ground and not on her shoes — a young man taps her on the shoulder and starlets her.
“Sorry, do you mind telling me when the 323 bus is supposed to arrive?” He asks, seeming kind. He looks to be around mid-twenties and attractive — all sharp cheekbones and a sloping noise. His hair is windswept, dark brown locks somehow falling perfectly around his tan face. He must be foreign, she decides, because people from Bludhaven don’t tan and never leave the city anyway. Also, there’s a distinctly thick Jersey accent that’s not from around here — maybe Gotham but those people are miserable and wouldn’t trust a person or the timetable shown in front of them.
Jessie blinks at him for a moment. He seems vaguely familiar, like she’s seen him before but Jessie never forgets a name and she’s coming up blank. Maybe she’s met him on the side of the street before, seen him in passing. Yeah, that’s it.
“No, sorry. The timetables here don’t really matter, the busses kind of — arrive when they want to,” she says, shrugging at him. He frowns, disappointed, and nods. Muttering a thanks, he moves away from Jessie and stands off towards the lane where the 323 bus is supposed to dock. Jessie thinks back on the timetable she looked at briefly upon arrival and thinks that the 323 comes from out of state. It will definitely be late then. There was another bomb on the interstate last night coming into Bludhaven and even if the weirdo in the fetish suit saved the people on time, the road was badly damaged.
Jessie spends time on her phone, internally bemoaning the fact that se forgot to charge her headphones before leaving and now has to listen to the outside world rather than whatever song she’s obsessed with at the moment. She thinks it’s a Sir Mix A Lot one but she can’t be sure, she’s not overly fond of checking the titles. In the time it takes for her to check Instagram, the Snapchat messages she’d been avoiding, and then her emails because why not, a tall woman has stood next to the kind man and they’re conversing. She decides to listen in for lack of any form of entertainment outside of them, and also, her bus still hasn’t arrived.
“Are you serious?” The man is basically snarling, angry and puffing up, a striking difference from when Jessie spoke to him. He’s practically frothing at the mouth. The woman beside him, dark skinned and draped in a crisp green dress with gold accents and a frankly terrifying pair of heels, remains stoic. “You call me here for no reason, leave some convoluted riddle about the bus, and then refuse to tell me why? Last night wasn’t appreciated either.”
“Yes. Be patient for once in your life.” Her accent is thick and somehow effortlessly regal. Jessie used to know someone who would pretend to have that sort of accent but it came across so forced, they stopped doing it a week into the bullying. The man huffs and turns to leave but her hand snaps out to grasp his arm, face contorting into a scowl. Rage plays across the mans face and she worries for a moment that she was wrong, he wasn’t a kind man, and makes an aborted movement to help the other woman. She proves to Jessie that she needs no such help when she turns and hisses something at him, towering over the man. His face smoothens out and, despite the way he steps away from her, stays at the docking point. “Although you do struggle with it very much, don’t you, Richard?”
“It’s Dick! Always has, always will be,” the man — Dick, apparently, which is downright unfortunate in a city like Bludhaven — snaps before taking a deep breath. She tries to puzzle out their relationship because honestly, the way he stands around the woman and the way she talks to him speaks of a sort of familiarity, but they’re so clearly aggressive with each other. Maybe this Dick is a native of the city and his parents were immigrants, like so many before him. Maybe they stayed, like so many didn’t. Once they discovered the violence of the city, it being cheap didn’t seem worth it.
Still no bus.
Jessie stays tuned in on their conversation.
“Yes, I know how childish you are. While you’re name remains Richard on your birth certificate, that shall be the name I’ll call you.”
Fair enough. Jessie almost respects it even if it’s an asshole move. She clicks a few times on her phone to make it seem like she’s not listening in on them, pulling up Instagram again to see if her friends have finally posted their engagement announcement. It honestly probably won’t be up for a while, until closer to the wedding, because the ring is nice and they live in a dodgy neighbourhood. If the wrong person saw it, they could be robbed, like her other friend Cormac. That was a weird time since they took the ring and, strangely, his socks.
While there are no news on the engagement, there is a little notification from the bus app that her bus will be another ten minutes late. The app itself is fairly useless but the timing is fairly alright, especially given that her bus is a local one and isn’t a newer route. The time line is better known, meaning the predications are better estimated. The two remain mostly silent, sometimes side eyeing the other or even going as far as to openly glare, especially in the mans case. Jessie begins to get a little bored of them, to be honest, because they’re no longer speaking to each other.
"Are you going to tell your father you've seen me?" The woman asks, speaking softly. Her hands are still grasped behind her back, tightly wound, but she's looking off towards the left now, towards Jessie. She tries not to make it seem obvious that she's listening because this woman is intimidating as fuck and she bets she could rock her world like nothing else. Not in the fun sense, though.
"Bruce?" Dick spits, offence to clearly written in his tone that it's downright venomous. "No, we don't speak to each other anymore." That's a little sad. Jessie's dad wasn't the best, and they've have their fair share of fights, but she talks to him every Sunday for an hour because she knows he gave up his entire life for her. He was going to be an engineer and gave it up when her mom was pregnant to get money, dropping out of college. It doesn't really matter but... she feels a little bad for the guy, is all. Dick seems nice enough, if a bit bitter. There are probably things there that Jessie doesn't know, though, and only gives it one last thought.
"Is it because of Jason?"
It's silent for a while. Jessie listens to the sounds of everyone else in the station, people coming in and out, talking on the phone, ordering something to eat at the coffee shop in the station. A woman walks past in a pair of heels, clicking awkwardly on the ground. Dick doesn't say anything. When she chances it, he's looking at the ground, frowning.
"Kind of," he starts and then clears his throat, "not that it's any of your business." The woman hums, tilts her head a little, then sighs.
"Why is the public transport here so atrocious?"
"It's a bad city," Dick mutters, nearly too low for Jessie to hear it. They don't seem like talkative people. Jessie is almost annoyed given she's got nearly a hundred questions. The more the conversation goes on, the less sure she gets that these guys have any relationship at all -- they talk like they do but they don't have any respect for each other, are downright distasteful and viscous.
Who's Jason? Why does he seem so important to Dick, and also, his relationship with his father? What relationship does the woman have with the father? These guys don't look alike, aside from how the skin tone could match if you squinted and assumed the father was the whitest person around. Jessie regrets listening in on their conversation because it's left her with a million questions and not a single satisfying answer.
A few people have left the docking point for her bus, giving up and heading outside to walk to whatever destination they're going towards. At this point, it might do Jessie better to walk as well but she's a little too stubborn to try. If her boss gives out to her, then he does. She's beyond caring right now.
"Honestly," the woman scoffs, and then crosses her arms, "why he chose to travel by bus, I'll never understand. He could have arrived with me."
Dick looks at her sharply, curious and scrutinizing at the same time. The woman starts to tap her foot on the ground and Jessie notes that Dick rolls his eyes at her, most likely annoyed by her silence. They're not very conversational people and she could have chosen anyone else to listen to, though she's too interested in their conversation to let it go now. She plans on doing a quick google search of this "Dick" guy though because he seems more and more familiar the longer time passes.
Jessie watches a bus pull in, feels a burst of hope that it's her own bus starting to dock but she sees the number, 323, and sighs. Of course it's the weird people's bus who gets here first, not her own. And it's coming from out of state! This is ridiculous! At least she'll be able to watch whatever's going to happen go down, she supposes, even if her own foot has started to tap irritatingly on the ground. Jessie checks her watch, biting the inside of her cheek to stop herself from screaming, and pulls out her phone to text her co-worker she's going to late and to pretty please cover her with their boss.
The woman straightens up a little bit at the bus in front of them and Dick looses a bit of his tension, perking up in curiosity. To keep herself unsuspicious, she looks around, only to notice the sheer amount of people looking at the two. A few other tan people, wrapped up in fairly discreet clothing and covering their faces outside of their eyes with books and newspapers, random items people in bus stops have. A tall ginger man with a green snake? dragon? tattoo on show is ordering at a till but turning his head every now and then to look at them. Two women, one read head and a woman with dark raven hair, sit side by side on a bench and, despite how they seem to be gossiping, are watching the pair as well.
Just who are these people?
Also, how has no one else noticed this? No wonder why so many people in Blud get murdered or robbed, they've got zero situational awareness. Jessie accidently makes eye contact with the (woah, attractive) ginger man and looks away quickly, cheeks burning. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the people on the 323 bus have begun getting off the bus.
A slew of people coming off, each of them breathing a sigh of relief, and a select few have begun to stretch their arms above their heads and crack their backs. The woman peers above them, trying to pin point one of them, and Dick watches her silently. A few of the "random" strangers littered around the station have begun to move closer, and a faint sense of danger comes to Jessie. She feels like she shouldn't be listening, which she'd felt like the whole time, but now it really feels like she shouldn't be listening. The people who are trying to blend in, more towards the shadows and the obscure parts of the station, are giving her the worst vibe.
Just as the what she thinks the final person to come off the bus, and as Dick turns angrily to the woman, a small sound pierces through the station. Clack. Clack. Clack. The bus driver, clearly annoyed at how slow the person is on getting off the bus, turns to give out to them -- there's no manners to be found in a city like Bludhaven -- until they see who it is and huff, guilty, turning back around in their seat. Jessie restrains from arching an eyebrow. What an odd thing to do.
It becomes clear why the driver didn't yell at them to get off when she actually sees the final person. It's an older teenager, maybe around seventeen, with curly mahogany hair. He's wearing a pair of headphones around his neck, a red jumper covering most of his body given the sheer size of it. A pair of black skinny jeans with a studded belt, a keychain with cherries hanging off it jingling in the front, and a pair of beat of shoes complete the outfit and, for a second, Jessie wonders why the bus driver didn't rip into this teenager like they would have any other. Then, she sees the cane.
It moves so fluidly that it hides the limp he's got in his left leg, and the brace underneath the baggy jeans only pokes through as he moves off the bus and has to bend it much more than usual. Now that she's properly looking, and unashamedly eyeing them, she sees that one of his eyes is a pearly white and he's got a long scar going through it. He's got quiet a few scars on his face and neck, actually, burns more than anything. Jessie feels bad for him. Whatever happened to him must have been awful.
She feels three times worse when she realises whatever happened must have been truly awful when the man, Dick, stands up straighter and gapes for a long moment. The boy gets off the bus, a gear bag slung low across his chest and a backpack on, waving goodbye to the bus. Grumpily, the driver waves back before changing the location on top to "OUT OF SERVICE" and getting off to go get his lunch, maybe. Jessie keeps watching the boy.
Her own bus has arrived and a line is forming but it gives her the perfect excuse to stand closer to the two, now three, strangers who've got the most interesting life apparently. As she turns to queue, she sees that the attractive red head from before has dropped his coffee cup on the ground, left it there, and is making his way over quickly. So are the two other woman and a second ginger man she never noticed, moving much faster than the other three. They all seem harried and worried, but also insanely relieved to see a teenager.
"Jason?" Dick chokes out, voice warbly and tender. He sounds near tears. Jessie perks up. An answer! Finally! Though it does beg the question why Dick was never able to see this Jason. Was his father keeping the two apart? Is that why they never speak anymore? Jessie wonders if maybe Dick was right and this city really is terrible because for a second she's got the idea that maybe this illusive father is the one responsible for this poor boys injuries and the woman was keeping him safe.
"Hi," the boy says shyly, dropping his bag down on the ground after he moves closer. The woman takes a step forward to grab it but gets side tracked when Jason hauls her into a hung, face pressed against her shoulder. He's a scrawny kid but sort of tall. Not taller than any of the adults around him, something that seems awfully unfair given the sheer amount making their way towards him. "Thanks for letting me go that way. Gave me some time to think about everything -- but especially B. I don't... I don't want him to know yet."
B? Their father? No, if it was the father, surely he'd have called him 'dad' or 'pop'. Dick makes a short sound, high like a whine, and then is pulling Jason away from the woman and crushing him in his own hug. The cane nearly drops onto the ground if not for the second ginger man catching it, laying a hand on Dick's shoulder for support or to make sure it's real, she'll never know. He seems faintly shell shocked.
The rest of the adults arrive, each of them standing just shy of Dick. The woman raises her eyes at them, especially the tallest of the group -- the orange haired woman who is actually taller than her, a feet Jessie didn't think possible after taking in the size of the elegant woman, and is glowing softly. Another meta, she thinks, rolling her eyes. They all flock here from Gotham because they're afraid of that cities freak, the one dressed like a bat. Nevertheless, she turns from the gaggle of people around them and lays a hand on Jason's shoulder.
Once he turns to her, still half in Dick's grasp and leaning against him now that his cane is being held by someone else, she softens immeasurably. Her hands reach up to cradle his face, the boy leaning into the hold, and she tucks a curl behind his ear.
"Our time together has been wonderful, habibi, but we must part for some time now. As soon as your father learn how I've deceived him, he'll be furious. Myself and," with a meaningful glance towards Dick she pauses and revaluates her words, "our friend will have to hide for a time. I'll be in touch. Please do not rush yourself too much and, please, be safe."
It's a little sad to listen to, to be honest. Her earlier assumption that maybe she wasn't his mother was maybe wrong given the way she speaks to this boy, so softly and kindly. Maybe they're half siblings, sharing a father only, and that brought tension? Jason seems tan enough but he's got a splattering of freckles and the wrong face shape, if she's remembering the whole thing clearly. It's mostly blocked by the woman's hands now.
"You too, Talia," he says genuinely, wide eyes shining and sorry, "tell our friend I'll miss him. And that maybe we can see each other soon." Even if his voice lilts up into a question, he doesn't say it as such, and then smiles slowly when the woman, Talia, nods. She hesitates a moment, casts a look at the room around her, and then leans down to kiss his forehead. Dick seems perturbed, even if he's taken a turn to being sorrowful and crying a little.
Without another word, Talia lets go of Jason and leaves, heals clacking softly on the ground. As she passes Jessie, heading towards the side door rather than the main one, she sees her cheek shine with a single tear. It's never wiped away, hands hanging loosely by her side as she walks, and then she's out the door. Gone.
The bus driver has arrived back from running to the bathroom and opens up the doors for people to get on. Since Jessie is towards the end of the line, she'll likely have to sit next to someone else -- though, it won't bother her now that she's got this interaction to think of for the entire drive, perhaps the rest of her life. It's moving slow enough she catches the hushed conversation behind her, how Dick never thought he'd see Jason again and he's so sorry for not being there and so, so confused.
Jason explains little and everything. He says that after the accident, he woke up with Talia. Apparently, he'd been hit by a car after the "accident" (is the accident what gave him his burns? and the limp? or was that the car? how much tragedy can fit into a teenagers life) and, when rendered comatose, Talia took him to heal him. He says something about her father, presumably his grandfather, and then Dick sobs. Jason continues to explain for the people around him, how he'd woken up just before something awful (she's nor too sure what it is, something called a "Pit"? It makes the people around him shudder, so she assumes) and recovered naturally.
With a serious look on his young face, he tells Dick that the only thing that brought him through the tough times was thinking of reuniting with his brother. The attractive man leans forward and catches him in a hug as well, the rest of them piling on until they're one big group smushed together. A few are crying, but none as loudly as Dick.
Jessie climbs onto the bus, robotically paying for her ticket, and sits on the last available window seat. A woman sits beside her, immediately pulling out her phone to scroll through a reading app. From the window, Jessie sees the woman with long black hair pick up the duffle bag and the other woman take his bag off his back. Jason's cane is returned to him and he smiles, big and abashed. She can't tell what they're saying anymore but Dick shakes his head, rubs his cheeks and then tilts towards Jason to hold him close again.
As the bus leaves the station, the driver grumbling about time tables and the woman beside her starting an obnoxious face time with her boyfriend, Jessie watches Jason and Dick leave, pressed together and smiling. The adults trail behind them, watching in awe as the boy limps along, clear eye settling on nothing. They seem so happy, so alone in their tiny world revolving this boy, that it leaves her shocked.
This city really is depressing but Jessie supposes moments like those are what make harrowing cities the best kind.