Fic Snippet: The world off its feet (DCU)
Title: The World Off Its Feet
By: Re White
Disclaimer: Theirs, not mine.
Ratings: R
Summery: “Fuck you, this ain’t Red Hood’s Home for Wayward Vigilantes.”
*
Eddie used to tell him it’s easy to disappear if you know what you’re doing.
*
He buys nine plane tickets to nine states. He registers at eighteen hotels and books passage on a cruise ship headed to the Gulf of Mexico. He buys two dozen bus tickets. He uses a piece of soap to write "Day One" across Ollie's bathroom mirror. Connor hitch hikes to Gotham, a wave of misdirection behind him.
*
There are tolls to pay and pangs of disappointment along the way. Reality proves less romantic compared to the original flowering of his dreams, but he eventually makes Green Arrow his own, and does his best to polish the smudged portions Ollie left behind.
There are battles (some he joined and a few he started), acts of heroism, and feats of triumph built on luck and valor and the fickle ministrations of good timing- it’s everything Connor thought it should be, everything his comic books and news paper clippings promised. He meets the ghosts of princesses, sees wonders and fights a dragon. He meets a man named Morgan who tells him about slipping between the folds of the world and falling into a new one.
He saw Superman plunge into the sun and watched Kyle bend the essence of the world around his whims.
Connor’s seen the horror men are capable of and the expenditure of goodness it takes to save the next sunrise in spite of them.
He’s seen people die to do it and watched them come back so they can do it again.
*
Eddie dies of a heart attack and he doesn’t come back.
*
Connor watches the ceiling for a long time, listening to the raised voices and hurried stomping that signal early morning in his father's house. Mia’s localized rampage between the bedroom and the bathroom, Ollie’s gruff hollers for her to hurry the hell up, Lian’s impatient squeals as Roy makes chocolate chip pancakes. There’s a phone ringing somewhere, and somebody overloaded the washing machine again. It knocks into the laundry room wall during the spin cycle, a distant *thud*, *thud*, *thud* seeping through the walls making Connor’s ears itch. (Eddie’s dead.)
Absurdly, for no good reason at all, he thinks of China, of boxes of Tidily Winks cookies and shot guns and Eddie’s exasperated face when he refused to use it.
“Tidily Winks,” he says to the ceiling.
You could at least curse like a grown man.
He hears himself make a really terrible sound and it doesn't stop when he presses his hand to his mouth.
*
Number Eight in Connor Hawke’s Newly Discovered Repertoire of Mostly True Things:
In Connor’s head, he and Roy have had the Bad Dad Fight. The one were they decide which of them got the short end of Ollie’s well intentioned but woefully deficient Parental Stick. Connor always wins. Connor always wins because neglect is no match for your father deciding to blow himself up instead of acknowledge you. In his head, Connor always tells Roy, “I’m mad, too. Of course I’m mad. He killed himself rather than deal with me and he never said he was sorry.”
*
He likes Gotham. He likes his neighborhood. Gotham would smash his face in with a speeding Buick given half a chance and he likes that too. It means he has to focus on the moment, on what he’s doing now, not what he will do.
*
Connor lives just far enough inside the really dangerous slum of Gotham to get weary looks whenever he writes his address on anything.
*
Kids on his block stop trying to pick his pickets after about two weeks.
*
His land lord wears a lot of black and keeps a grubby plastic Batman bobble head on his key ring.
*
Without the moon the desert night is a great black maw and Eddie races the car along a strip of road down through the middle of it. Yawning solitude and darkness and an unending track of white strikes pulling them across it at ninety miles per hour; Connor watches the road and feels completely at home.
“You’re getting the hang of it, kiddo.” Cigarette smoke curls around Eddie’s face, briefly, before it slips out into the night beyond the cracked window. It’s been weeks since Connor’s been bothered by the smell. “Anything can be replaced - except for your head. Know how many people tend to fuck that up?”
Connor turns towards him and smiles. “How many, Eddie?”
Eddie’s sideways smirk, illuminated in the green light of the dashboard is all about cold secrets and the things he’s done in the shadows of cities. “A lot. Makes my job a hell of lot easier.”
Out there with nothing but the mechanical hum of the engine and the crunch of ancient asphalt, the motel they left seems like a false memory, like a small dream thing that he’ll soon forget entirely. Connor knows that twenty minutes ago he was contemplating the water stains of the ceiling above his lumpy bed, waiting for Eddie, but it seems like it was so long ago it might as well have never happened. It seems like he’s always been here, doing this. Racing across the desert with Eddie.
“Books, pictures, clothes, your stuffed teddy bear - if you’ve got to go under, leave it all. Slip right off the edge of the world if you’re smart enough.”
*
By: Re White
Disclaimer: Theirs, not mine.
Ratings: R
Summery: “Fuck you, this ain’t Red Hood’s Home for Wayward Vigilantes.”
*
Eddie used to tell him it’s easy to disappear if you know what you’re doing.
*
He buys nine plane tickets to nine states. He registers at eighteen hotels and books passage on a cruise ship headed to the Gulf of Mexico. He buys two dozen bus tickets. He uses a piece of soap to write "Day One" across Ollie's bathroom mirror. Connor hitch hikes to Gotham, a wave of misdirection behind him.
*
There are tolls to pay and pangs of disappointment along the way. Reality proves less romantic compared to the original flowering of his dreams, but he eventually makes Green Arrow his own, and does his best to polish the smudged portions Ollie left behind.
There are battles (some he joined and a few he started), acts of heroism, and feats of triumph built on luck and valor and the fickle ministrations of good timing- it’s everything Connor thought it should be, everything his comic books and news paper clippings promised. He meets the ghosts of princesses, sees wonders and fights a dragon. He meets a man named Morgan who tells him about slipping between the folds of the world and falling into a new one.
He saw Superman plunge into the sun and watched Kyle bend the essence of the world around his whims.
Connor’s seen the horror men are capable of and the expenditure of goodness it takes to save the next sunrise in spite of them.
He’s seen people die to do it and watched them come back so they can do it again.
*
Eddie dies of a heart attack and he doesn’t come back.
*
Connor watches the ceiling for a long time, listening to the raised voices and hurried stomping that signal early morning in his father's house. Mia’s localized rampage between the bedroom and the bathroom, Ollie’s gruff hollers for her to hurry the hell up, Lian’s impatient squeals as Roy makes chocolate chip pancakes. There’s a phone ringing somewhere, and somebody overloaded the washing machine again. It knocks into the laundry room wall during the spin cycle, a distant *thud*, *thud*, *thud* seeping through the walls making Connor’s ears itch. (Eddie’s dead.)
Absurdly, for no good reason at all, he thinks of China, of boxes of Tidily Winks cookies and shot guns and Eddie’s exasperated face when he refused to use it.
“Tidily Winks,” he says to the ceiling.
You could at least curse like a grown man.
He hears himself make a really terrible sound and it doesn't stop when he presses his hand to his mouth.
*
Number Eight in Connor Hawke’s Newly Discovered Repertoire of Mostly True Things:
In Connor’s head, he and Roy have had the Bad Dad Fight. The one were they decide which of them got the short end of Ollie’s well intentioned but woefully deficient Parental Stick. Connor always wins. Connor always wins because neglect is no match for your father deciding to blow himself up instead of acknowledge you. In his head, Connor always tells Roy, “I’m mad, too. Of course I’m mad. He killed himself rather than deal with me and he never said he was sorry.”
*
He likes Gotham. He likes his neighborhood. Gotham would smash his face in with a speeding Buick given half a chance and he likes that too. It means he has to focus on the moment, on what he’s doing now, not what he will do.
*
Connor lives just far enough inside the really dangerous slum of Gotham to get weary looks whenever he writes his address on anything.
*
Kids on his block stop trying to pick his pickets after about two weeks.
*
His land lord wears a lot of black and keeps a grubby plastic Batman bobble head on his key ring.
*
Without the moon the desert night is a great black maw and Eddie races the car along a strip of road down through the middle of it. Yawning solitude and darkness and an unending track of white strikes pulling them across it at ninety miles per hour; Connor watches the road and feels completely at home.
“You’re getting the hang of it, kiddo.” Cigarette smoke curls around Eddie’s face, briefly, before it slips out into the night beyond the cracked window. It’s been weeks since Connor’s been bothered by the smell. “Anything can be replaced - except for your head. Know how many people tend to fuck that up?”
Connor turns towards him and smiles. “How many, Eddie?”
Eddie’s sideways smirk, illuminated in the green light of the dashboard is all about cold secrets and the things he’s done in the shadows of cities. “A lot. Makes my job a hell of lot easier.”
Out there with nothing but the mechanical hum of the engine and the crunch of ancient asphalt, the motel they left seems like a false memory, like a small dream thing that he’ll soon forget entirely. Connor knows that twenty minutes ago he was contemplating the water stains of the ceiling above his lumpy bed, waiting for Eddie, but it seems like it was so long ago it might as well have never happened. It seems like he’s always been here, doing this. Racing across the desert with Eddie.
“Books, pictures, clothes, your stuffed teddy bear - if you’ve got to go under, leave it all. Slip right off the edge of the world if you’re smart enough.”
*