Chapter Text
Calvin Rose had been the Talon of the last 9 years.
According to everything she'd heard — everything she'd sworn she'd seen, outlined by the main points and the words of others in the Court — he was one of the best of them. The first one to escape the labryinth.
The only one, murmured something flat in her thoughts.
And Cynthia Clarke — the daughter of the Grandmaster of the Court of Owls (for all that's worth, something she didn't agree with hissed in her brain) — was about to start her Talon training with him.
The door creaked open. The light in the door cast a silhouette that, if she squinted, looked kind of like an owl.
No pressure.
Nastasia wondered what made the Court of Owls decide on Talons.
There were so many other options, right? They could've called on other Birds of Prey, like eagles or vultures — oo, vultures would be cool. Especially with the new variety of Electrum stuff they had to —
Nastasia shuddered violently, charged with disgust and bile. Gross. Maybe she didn't want to think about that part.
But, seriously! Imagine that! A swarm of people you could never kill, not truly, descending on you in seconds, except they aren't people because people can be killed, they're Vultures. And you're already dead.
She was so going to write that into a story one day.
"Focus!"
Nastasia blinked back to reality and narrowly pulled her staff above her head in time to stop Calvin's fist short, her knee hissing as it hit the ground.
"You can't get distracted," Calvin said, a flash of gray sending Nastasia the rest of the way to the floor. She screwed her eyes shut against the cool, hard wooden floor. "Or you'll get killed."
Nastasia pulled her gaze up to Calvin's gaze, bird-yellow reflected in his. A borderline anxious laughed bubbled its way out of her throat. "You're not going to kill me, though." She said, the edges of her mouth involuntarily tugging up. "Right? This is just a training session."
Calvin frowned, she couldn't tell what for, and didn't give her an answer.
Yet another target stumbled around deliriously in the labyrinth below, blinded by glaring light on white tiles, lost in endless turns and their own mind.
Quilo watched impassively as they scraped their nails against the wall and a shrill scream cut through the silence.
Click, FLASH
Another photo for Father's indulgent collection.
Apparently "just getting it over with" wasn't a common, or a popular, idea among the Court.
Something scraped. Metal on marble. The Talon.
Quilo knew his name. He didn't use it.
"How do you want me to kill them?"
Something long, something bloody, something painful. The usual responses.
Quilo didn't blink as the Talon threw the target into the wall, kneed their gut, caved their chest in.
It was the same routine every time. He was getting bored of it.
But "just get it over with" had gotten him dropped from an Owl to a Talon-in-Training, so he didn't speak. He just watched, and if he played this game long enough, maybe he could claw control from his father before he had to be the one spilling nameless people's blood on sparkling marble floors.
Bambi pried off the lid to the container of owl pellets she'd collected from the Falconers earlier that day.
So what if her dad thought it was gross and unbecoming behavior? So what if he kept making vague mutterings about how broken she was?
…So what if it hurt?
Bambi started slowly prying apart the pellets, picking out bones from mice and rats and whatever other rodents the owls had eaten throughout the day.
She liked doing this, at the end of some days, when her dad assumed she was reading. It was comforting. A little gross, yeah, but it felt like digging into a sandpit and piecing together a fossilized skeleton of her own.
At least he called them interesting when she managed to mostly complete a skeleton and sat it carefully on her dresser.
"Cynthia?"
Bambi's head perked up and snapped to her door. Cracked just enough for a small beam of light to come through from outside, but nothing more. A shadow crossed over it. Not her dad's.
"Uh - one second!" Bambi called, her voice pitching into painfully obvious anxiety as she hurriedly tried to throw the lid back on.
A soft, undeciphered sigh. "It's just me, Cyn. It's Calvin."
"…Oh." Bambi paused halfway through shoving the container under her bed. "Come in."
Calvin opened the door and raised an eyebrow, arms propped on his waist. Bambi slowly pulled the container out again, and he laughed. "How many times has your father told you to stop playing with those?"
"I'm not playing." Bambi said indignantly. "I'm making fossils. He thinks it's cool when they're done. Sometimes." She looked back down at the pellets and started slowly pulling one apart again.
A long silence lingered where Bambi couldn't tell if he was skeptical or amused. She thought that was part of why they called her broken.
It didn't matter if it hurt. It didn't. He loved her all the same.
Right?
"Cyn…" Calvin said, and Bambi tried to ignore the feeling of her world tilting a little sideways, like sheets of ice sliding down a mountain. Where she suddenly felt a little out of herself and not herself at the same time, like she was periwinkle blue and now she was being touched with a bit too much purple. "Have you ever thought about what happens when you become a Talon?"
Too many answers cropped up in her head, too fast for her too get a hold on any of them. She stared blankly. She felt dumb. She wasn't dumb, she just needed a second. "Um —"
"Promise me something." Calvin said. Cynthia or Bambi or whatever the mess of periwinkle-purple-silver was right now pushed down the heat of frustration in their throat. "When the time comes, you'll do whatever it takes to stay alive. Okay?"
"Okay," her mouth said, and the word slipped off her tongue without permission.
"Promise me."
Everything felt a little fuzzy around the edges. She thought maybe she could fall into it for a little while.
"I promise."
It was just another mission.
That's what Calvin told himself as he carefully stepped across the parapet walls, roof shingles slick with rain and rolling thunder masking the sound of metal lightly scraping concrete. A flash of lightning illuminated the building across the street in white light, then plunged the city back into darkness.
If he didn't live in Gotham, he'd say his problem with this mission was the weather. The rain pelting him into the ground, the wind trying to fling him off the rooftops and into the flashing neon lights of the street below, the rooftops glistening with water that made every treacherous step a chance to slip.
But he'd been trained in these storms. Been taught by the Talon before him how to use the lightning and thunder to cover his sounds, how to grip curved walls running with water, how to keep his footing high in smoke-hazed skies when the winds roared in his ears.
No. That wasn't his problem.
His problem was that this target wasn't a thief or a meddling assassin or even someone who had betrayed the Court to live a life free of them — or, as free from the Court as you could be, really. It was a curious fifteen-year-old that got a little too close.
Acid bubbled in Calvin's stomach at the thought. Yes, he'd killed teenagers before. Kids, even, at the Court's call. He hated it every time.
But he hadn't since being given his own apprentice.
Cynthia, barely reaching shoulder-height when she went on her tip-toes and black hair falling in front of owl-yellow eyes that cut through the dark like torches. That pried pellets apart looking for mouse bones and named a hawk Vulture. That got lost in her head during training and turned away from him after he killed targets in the labyrinth, so painfully unaware she was set to do the same in his place.
And it made it so much worse. His stomach turned like he'd eaten rotten rats.
It was hard to look at any other kid and not see her. It was harder yet to look at her and know he was leading her to be the same monster the Court had turned him into.
But he had to do it. He knew what the Court would do to him if he didn't.
He slipped onto the windowsill, rain battering the metal of his armor and wind beating him into the brick walls, and peeked inside. A pink-haired teenager sat on the carpet surrounded by old papers and worn leather journals. Newspaper clippings had been cut down to references of owls and a laptop sat beside her with about a bajillion tabs listed at the top and an article on the ancient Gotham myths open.
The kid turned toward a journal and delicately untied it to read whatever had been preserved in the wrinkled yellow pages. He couldn't help but think her eyes were almost the same shade of blue Cythnia's used to be.
Calvin suppressed the shudder rolling up his spine. A deep, slow breath.
Just another mission.