Subject: [OTL]: [Robin] In The Blood [11:11] Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 08:17:02 -0700 (PDT) From: D Benway In The Blood [11:11] Friday, June 8 drawn by Benway This story borrows some Bat-characters from DC for not-for-profit use. This story is not recommended for sensitive or innocent readers. __________________________________________________________________ I've been walking for hours in the darkness. My head really fucking hurts. It's not too dark, there's a full moon, so I can see where I'm going. There's not much out here, just grasslands. They're part of a county refuge. No-one developed them because of pollution from the steel mills and because the mob used to bury people here that they didn't want found. I found my father. They were waiting for me. They have a room set up, with a glass partition that will separate me from him. I tell them I have to see him up close. They aren't too happy about that, and I get the lecture about how I have to stand at least twelve feet away, out of spitting range. The room is painted pink. There is a table and five chairs, all steel and bolted to the floor. They wheel my father in, bound in a straightjacket, suspended by cables from a frame. They won't take off the surgical mask. I make them wait outside. I stare into his eyes. They're green, not brown like my own, but they have the same shape. His hair, if black not green and clean and cut, would not be unlike my own. It has the same wave to it. The nose, what I can see of it, is similar in shape, but a bit longer, and the only way I will see all of it is to take off the mask. They knew it was him. No. Bruce never knew, not until I started asking questions and Stephanie told him. She's his apprentice now not because she's careful in the field, but because she's careful and sneaky and clever in other ways and because she found out. She found me out four weeks after she met me because I called her from home and she had caller ID. She told him that she'd collected hairs from my car, and hairs from me. She talked her biology teacher into taking her on as a student lab tech in spite of her straight C grades, and she used their donated piece-of-shit gene sequencer to compare the results with samples she filched from the Wayne Medical Centre lab when she was working there. They had a vial of Bruce Wayne's blood in the back of a freezer, from one of the many times that Bruce was injured out of costume pretending not to know how to fight. She found out from a city directory that my house was next to Wayne Manor. She confronted him with the blots, and he gave in and took her on. He let her do the sequencing for our work, and one night she ran my blood against our file samples, just for fun. She didn't tell Bruce what she found. She didn't tell me. She knew for almost a year and she didn't tell me. I undo the surgical mask. The meadows are pleasant here, long stretches of them. You can walk for miles and not see a soul. The mask is soaked with drool. The meds never work. Nothing they tried has ever worked. I make my way back along the wall, staying at least twelve feet from his mouth as I've been told to. I think I left my staff back there, somewhere, when I slipped and fell on the bank of the creek. My fucking head hurts. I had two oxycodones left and I've taken both of them. His skin is paler than my own, not unscarred but just as unblemished. His face is longer, but the relative positions of eyes, nose, and mouth are also remarkably similar. He works his mouth from side to side, then lets loose a jet a of spit that lands just in front of my foot. I like to hunt Robins, he says. I like to use a crowbar and dynamite. It's messy but it's more fun that way. There are aspects to his face that are different from mine. After all, he's only half of me. What have I done now? he says. He sounds like he's half asleep, but his spitting is too accurate, or maybe he was accurate only by chance. He's the master of messing with people's heads. Why am I asking the questions? he says. Don't you want to know where I buried the loot? Don't you want to know what I'm going to do next, after I get out of here? It's all planned, all planned in my head, it's all in here and I'm not letting it out. He goes on for some time, but the more I look, the more I see. You know, staring is what they lock people up for in here, he says. Almost everyone in here is perfectly healthy, except that they like to stare at other people, and so they get locked away. The odd thing is, he's not raving as he says it, not screaming, not over-inflecting. It strikes me that I've never heard his real voice before. What do you want, son? he says. It's a turn of phrase. It has to be. Evan Hamilton, I say. Who? he says. You killed him, I say. So? he says. Ten years ago, on Christmas Eve, I say. That was a good one, he says. Is this twenty questions? He was a doctor, I say. What kind of doctor? he says. Hm. Fifteen questions left. I think I'm going to win. A doctor in the fertility clinic at Wayne Medical Centre, I say. Guess I'm not going to win, he says. Why did you kill him? I say. Oh, there was no-one specific I wanted to kill in that little event, he says. I had more of a holiday theme in mind. All those people just happened to make a really bad decision about which day to fly on. Oh, I say. That's not the question that you really want to ask me, is it? he says. He titters, though not loud enough to be heard outside. No, I say. I can't take my eyes off him. He's staring at me, deep in thought. You didn't put your mask on properly, he says. It's leaking. I want to take the mask off. I want him to be able to look me in the eyes. I can barely make him out through the tears as he goes on staring, but then I see the light of recognition come into his eyes. Cuckoo, he says, and his face splits into that grin. Cuckoo, cuckoo, CUCKOO! he screams. It's four o'clock in the morning. Do you know where your children are? He starts to laugh his laugh. They come running. Oh shit, says the doctor, I told you not to get too close. We've got the anti-venin right here. My face hurts. The doctor thinks my father spat on me and hit me with the smile venom. My father didn't have to do a thing, it was in me from the start. If they hit me with the anti-venin, I'll go into shock and they'll take what's left of my mask away. The doctor is coming at me with the needle. I take him down with my staff, and I'm out of there. Out through the service entrance, out across the grounds, out into the woods. The guards are as useless as they always are, and I lose them in ten minutes, and then I walk and I walk and I keep walking and I can't stop thinking about my three fathers. My first father sent me off to school because he loved me and cared for me and thought I was going off the rails. My first father sent me off to school so he could fuck a kid eight years older than I am and get it right this time. My second father was everything I ever dreamed of being, a man I loved and practically worshipped. My second father saw a movie with Dan Aykroyd in it and decided to play God with my whole fucking life. I don't know how Hamilton got it out of him, but my third father gave me half of everything innate within me. He gave me my lighting-fast mind. My third father is a psychotic mass murderer who killed the Robin before me and thousands of others. Bruce said he was chosen because Hamilton thought that there wouldn't be a statistically significant paternity effect unless the other father was the polar opposite of good old chaste, noble, selfless, morally upstanding Bruce Wayne. The whole experiment was fucked from start to finish. It's so fucking ridiculous. Heh. Heh. Heh. 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I'm breathing so hard, and it's all ruined, all gone. Everything. Everything except her. She's standing three feet away, staring at me. She's dressed in a black shirt, black pants, black shoes, black watchcap. She has my staff and my mask in one hand. She places them on the ground and kneels next to me. All gone, I say. She shakes her head. Everything ruined, I say. She shakes her head. Everything in my life is a lie, I say, and feel the laughter that killed my father's soul rising from within again. She puts her finger to my lips, and it's gone. The laugh, the terrible pain in my head. Not everything, she says. How can I tell? I say. I feel her touch my forehead, then my chest. How can I trust it? I say. My father is that thing. She shakes her head, but this time it looks more like frustration. She points to her heart. Trust, she says. She points to my heart. I am staring into her eyes as she says it. How can she know? How can someone that damaged know? She can't know, and neither can I. She lifts my left arm from the grass. She points to my hand. Missing, she says. Missing, I say. Not whole, she says. She shows me her right hand. Missing, she says. She places her hand in mine, and locks the fingers together. I try to pull away. She locks my hand in hers. No, I say. She nods. I'm the Joker's son, I say. So? she says. She places her other hand over ours. I reach up with my free hand to make her let go, but then place it over hers. Need us, she says. Need you. I sit, up, and look into her eyes. Need you too, I say. We stay sitting, side by side, hands held together, until the sun begins to rise over the derelict cranes of Gotham Harbour. FIN