and what if there are no damsels in distress...
The Great Meme Amnesty Project continues. Once upon a time, Adiva asked for any versions of Kite and Bryce and Ani DiFranco's "Not a Pretty Girl." And then it turned into Sunnydale!Kite and Bryce and why Bryce should never, ever, ever try to make her Robin.
earned my disillusionment
OC + Nolanverse + crossovers all up in here
The costume fits like a glove.
It’s not really a surprise, given the amount of money Bryce has to throw around. Armored and padded, it hides her curves, although not as thoroughly as Bryce’s suit. Dark red panels reinforce the chest and torso, which gives the press their ‘Robin’ nickname inside of a week. Kite’s mask only covers her eyes, but a hood shields her tightly braided hair from view; something about the fabric keeps it from slipping back unless she manipulates it herself. It’s the greatest thing she’s ever worn.
Kite teeters on the edge of the roof and lets the wind pull her over.
A sister of one of Bryce’s boarding school peers, that’s their story. Taking some time off before graduate school, in need of a change of scenery. If she decides to stay longer, they’ll think of something else. Until then, she drifts through functions and fundraisers and gallery openings like she’s underwater.
The money bothers her here the way it doesn’t when it’s Tony’s. One afternoon, she skips out on a charity luncheon to wear her old clothes and ride the bus past the Narrows and into the South Side. She comes back to Wayne Manor after midnight with a split lip, $500 in cash and three phone numbers. Alfred lets her in and Bryce never says a word to her about it. She does end up having to go to the opera two days later, so she guesses that’s Bryce’s idea of punishment for dodging responsibility.
Kite watches Bryce laughing with a flock of socialites and knows there are three cracked ribs under that evening gown. She thinks about counting them with her tongue, wonders what kind of reaction she could pull from her. Bryce has never looked at her that way, but Kite thinks spitefully that she could make her.
Six months in, and Kite is not sure she should ever have come. She is starting to hate this city where they can waste half a night running from the police because the Bat is a criminal, the Bat is a murderer and she wants to grind the truth into people’s eyes to make them see. The city’s hatred serves a purpose, Bryce claims, and Kite doesn’t argue, just forces it down into the space below her heart and lets it seethe.
She can’t keep calm forever, though. She breaks more bones than she ought to subduing prisoners, especially when Bryce is not there to watch her.
(Bryce’s public departures and arrivals are never quite the same as her actual ones; it would not do for someone to be able to draw a straight a line between her schedule and the Bat’s. Still, some trips are unavoidable, leaving Kite with the run of Gotham. Kite tries to be a good steward, but she is not a perfect one.)
Mostly, she misses Sunnydale, where it was acceptable to kill the monsters you met on the street.
Kite is alone in the city tonight, except for the three blurs chasing her over the roofs of the Narrows.
‘Chasing,’ she decides after ten minutes, is the wrong word.
They are herding her.
Months ago, she would have found this fun, but now she is tired and angry down to her bones. She guesses their path, circles around to break their line of sight and end up ahead of the left-most observer. He runs headlong into her and she throws him into the side of an air conditioning unit.
“What do you want?” she roars, wondering if she has time to dislocate his shoulder before his friends catch up.
He tells her where she must go and she leaves him with everything unbroken.
A man is waiting for her on a balcony on the fifty-second floor of Wayne Tower. She knows his face because Bryce showed it to her.
(Bryce was very thorough in her education, laying out the details of every major incident that had taken place under her watch, including files on individuals of particular interest. Bryce told her that this man is dead. But Bryce also keeps folders on geothermal anomalies and something called the Lazarus Institute that she hasn’t let Kite read in full.)
“What should I call you?” she asks, perched on the railing, ready to run.
“Whatever you like,” says Ra’s al Ghul.
She talks to different people at parties now. Men and women, never the same individual twice, but she knows who sent them and why they are here. (Soldiers in a Shadow army--her army, if she will lead it. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds exactly like what she wants.)
“I need more time,” she tells them at the art museum, and the policeman’s ball, and in Bryce’s own goddamn house.
“Of course, ma’am.” They nod, as if they expected no other answer, then turn the conversation to modernism or charity work or the Wayne family rose garden.
Bryce thinks she is fitting in, smiles at her in a way that’s almost kind. Kite hates herself, but that is nothing new.
Six weeks after the meeting on Wayne Tower, Bryce crawls into bed for a few hours of sleep and Kite doesn’t. She takes a shower, picks up the bag she packed five days earlier, and climbs down the trellis.
The route she takes off the property is circuitous at best, but Bryce enhanced the Manor’s perimeter security as part of the rebuild. Cameras and motion sensors are not her friends. When she hits the main road, she walks two miles before a town car pulls up beside her; she climbs into the back seat.
“Ma’am,” says the driver, who would salute if he could. (She knows this. He is hers now. They are all hers now.)
“Drive.”
(She takes the suit with her. It’s not as if anyone else could wear it.)
No one knows quite what to make of it.
The Robin is gone from Gotham City. She’s been sighted in Metropolis, in Bludhaven, in points west. She is wanted for questioning in relation to a dozen homicides. Rumors say that the Bat is looking for her too, interrogating everyone she comes across.
Maybe they were never working together at all.
In other news, Roberta Wayne’s pretty little houseguest stops coming to parties. Roberta brushes it off, says she went back to her sister’s; gossip says there was an incident with the GCPD, drunk and disorderly, a police report run through the shredder. When pressed about it, Roberta’s smile is strained, and soon enough everyone finds something else to talk about.
(Bryce starts another folder. This one fills with blurry surveillance photos from Bahrain, Colombia, Pakistan. A dark haired young woman is the subject of each; in the most recent shot from Greece, she is laughing. Her companion is out of frame.)
“Guess who.”
It’s a charity benefit for cancer research at Gotham General. Bryce turns slowly, carefully, and sees Kite Morian in the flesh for the first time in five years. Her cocktail dress is short enough for her to throw a roundhouse kick and she cradles a glass of champagne.
Bryce’s whole face lights up in a smile; they step closer to each other, trading air kisses. “How was the Carribbean?”
(The trip to the Caribbean was a trip to Santa Prisca, to a prison as old as the mountains. Inside the prison was a cell filled with books and a man who brushed the ceiling. Kite carried ten knives and there was an eighteen-man fire team at her back; she did not think it would be enough if things went less than well.
“You are a long way from home, little girl,” said a voice like mass extinction.
“If you only knew, señor.” She opened her hands. “I’m here to present you with an opportunity.”)
“Words don’t do it justice,” Kite says, smiling. “I really can’t describe it.”
They are standing on the fifty-second floor of Wayne Tower and below them, Gotham is burning.
“This will be over,” she tells Bryce, “when you bury me.”
It’s the last lie Kite ever tells her.
Burying her is someone else’s job now.
This entry was originally posted at http://walksbyherself.dreamwidth.org/226652.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
earned my disillusionment
OC + Nolanverse + crossovers all up in here
The costume fits like a glove.
It’s not really a surprise, given the amount of money Bryce has to throw around. Armored and padded, it hides her curves, although not as thoroughly as Bryce’s suit. Dark red panels reinforce the chest and torso, which gives the press their ‘Robin’ nickname inside of a week. Kite’s mask only covers her eyes, but a hood shields her tightly braided hair from view; something about the fabric keeps it from slipping back unless she manipulates it herself. It’s the greatest thing she’s ever worn.
Kite teeters on the edge of the roof and lets the wind pull her over.
A sister of one of Bryce’s boarding school peers, that’s their story. Taking some time off before graduate school, in need of a change of scenery. If she decides to stay longer, they’ll think of something else. Until then, she drifts through functions and fundraisers and gallery openings like she’s underwater.
The money bothers her here the way it doesn’t when it’s Tony’s. One afternoon, she skips out on a charity luncheon to wear her old clothes and ride the bus past the Narrows and into the South Side. She comes back to Wayne Manor after midnight with a split lip, $500 in cash and three phone numbers. Alfred lets her in and Bryce never says a word to her about it. She does end up having to go to the opera two days later, so she guesses that’s Bryce’s idea of punishment for dodging responsibility.
Kite watches Bryce laughing with a flock of socialites and knows there are three cracked ribs under that evening gown. She thinks about counting them with her tongue, wonders what kind of reaction she could pull from her. Bryce has never looked at her that way, but Kite thinks spitefully that she could make her.
Six months in, and Kite is not sure she should ever have come. She is starting to hate this city where they can waste half a night running from the police because the Bat is a criminal, the Bat is a murderer and she wants to grind the truth into people’s eyes to make them see. The city’s hatred serves a purpose, Bryce claims, and Kite doesn’t argue, just forces it down into the space below her heart and lets it seethe.
She can’t keep calm forever, though. She breaks more bones than she ought to subduing prisoners, especially when Bryce is not there to watch her.
(Bryce’s public departures and arrivals are never quite the same as her actual ones; it would not do for someone to be able to draw a straight a line between her schedule and the Bat’s. Still, some trips are unavoidable, leaving Kite with the run of Gotham. Kite tries to be a good steward, but she is not a perfect one.)
Mostly, she misses Sunnydale, where it was acceptable to kill the monsters you met on the street.
Kite is alone in the city tonight, except for the three blurs chasing her over the roofs of the Narrows.
‘Chasing,’ she decides after ten minutes, is the wrong word.
They are herding her.
Months ago, she would have found this fun, but now she is tired and angry down to her bones. She guesses their path, circles around to break their line of sight and end up ahead of the left-most observer. He runs headlong into her and she throws him into the side of an air conditioning unit.
“What do you want?” she roars, wondering if she has time to dislocate his shoulder before his friends catch up.
He tells her where she must go and she leaves him with everything unbroken.
A man is waiting for her on a balcony on the fifty-second floor of Wayne Tower. She knows his face because Bryce showed it to her.
(Bryce was very thorough in her education, laying out the details of every major incident that had taken place under her watch, including files on individuals of particular interest. Bryce told her that this man is dead. But Bryce also keeps folders on geothermal anomalies and something called the Lazarus Institute that she hasn’t let Kite read in full.)
“What should I call you?” she asks, perched on the railing, ready to run.
“Whatever you like,” says Ra’s al Ghul.
She talks to different people at parties now. Men and women, never the same individual twice, but she knows who sent them and why they are here. (Soldiers in a Shadow army--her army, if she will lead it. It sounds ridiculous. It sounds exactly like what she wants.)
“I need more time,” she tells them at the art museum, and the policeman’s ball, and in Bryce’s own goddamn house.
“Of course, ma’am.” They nod, as if they expected no other answer, then turn the conversation to modernism or charity work or the Wayne family rose garden.
Bryce thinks she is fitting in, smiles at her in a way that’s almost kind. Kite hates herself, but that is nothing new.
Six weeks after the meeting on Wayne Tower, Bryce crawls into bed for a few hours of sleep and Kite doesn’t. She takes a shower, picks up the bag she packed five days earlier, and climbs down the trellis.
The route she takes off the property is circuitous at best, but Bryce enhanced the Manor’s perimeter security as part of the rebuild. Cameras and motion sensors are not her friends. When she hits the main road, she walks two miles before a town car pulls up beside her; she climbs into the back seat.
“Ma’am,” says the driver, who would salute if he could. (She knows this. He is hers now. They are all hers now.)
“Drive.”
(She takes the suit with her. It’s not as if anyone else could wear it.)
No one knows quite what to make of it.
The Robin is gone from Gotham City. She’s been sighted in Metropolis, in Bludhaven, in points west. She is wanted for questioning in relation to a dozen homicides. Rumors say that the Bat is looking for her too, interrogating everyone she comes across.
Maybe they were never working together at all.
In other news, Roberta Wayne’s pretty little houseguest stops coming to parties. Roberta brushes it off, says she went back to her sister’s; gossip says there was an incident with the GCPD, drunk and disorderly, a police report run through the shredder. When pressed about it, Roberta’s smile is strained, and soon enough everyone finds something else to talk about.
(Bryce starts another folder. This one fills with blurry surveillance photos from Bahrain, Colombia, Pakistan. A dark haired young woman is the subject of each; in the most recent shot from Greece, she is laughing. Her companion is out of frame.)
“Guess who.”
It’s a charity benefit for cancer research at Gotham General. Bryce turns slowly, carefully, and sees Kite Morian in the flesh for the first time in five years. Her cocktail dress is short enough for her to throw a roundhouse kick and she cradles a glass of champagne.
Bryce’s whole face lights up in a smile; they step closer to each other, trading air kisses. “How was the Carribbean?”
(The trip to the Caribbean was a trip to Santa Prisca, to a prison as old as the mountains. Inside the prison was a cell filled with books and a man who brushed the ceiling. Kite carried ten knives and there was an eighteen-man fire team at her back; she did not think it would be enough if things went less than well.
“You are a long way from home, little girl,” said a voice like mass extinction.
“If you only knew, señor.” She opened her hands. “I’m here to present you with an opportunity.”)
“Words don’t do it justice,” Kite says, smiling. “I really can’t describe it.”
They are standing on the fifty-second floor of Wayne Tower and below them, Gotham is burning.
“This will be over,” she tells Bryce, “when you bury me.”
It’s the last lie Kite ever tells her.
Burying her is someone else’s job now.
This entry was originally posted at http://walksbyherself.dreamwidth.org/226652.html. Please comment there using OpenID.