Fic: Remebering Priorities; Tim Drake/Cissie King-Jones; Rish; Part: 1/4
Title: Remembering Priorities
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Pairing: Tim Drake/Cissie King-Jones
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, sex, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone's legal
Word Count: 5,500/~20,000
Beta: shiny_glor_chan
Author's Notes: For the Fic Exchange of Doom. This one is for lady_sarai. I hope you like it!
Remembering Priorities: Part 1
Part I
Cissie King-Jones was not drunk. She was, Cissie had to concede to herself, not entirely sober either, but she certainly was not drunk. Tipsy was, perhaps, the right word for what she was feeling right now. Delightfully tipsy.
Cissie smiled to herself and tilted her head back to better feel the evening breeze on her face. It was going on three in the morning, but the streets in Valencia were not even remotely deserted. It was Saturday night in the beginning of June and the college crowd was still out en masse. People wandered in and out of bars, chatted along sidewalks, and sat on benches that lined the streets.
The happy hum of conversation coming from the inebriated masses left Cissie with a feeling of good will. She hefted her gym bag higher on her shoulder and walked happily down the block in the direction of the hostel where she was holed up for the time being. If she decided to spend more than a week or two in Spain, she would look for more secure lodgings, but for now, the hostel was perfect for her. She didn’t spend much time there anyway.
She could have taken a bus or a train to make the trip back shorter, but Cissie wanted to be out in the night air. The cool breeze coming off the ocean to her left was having a nicely sobering effect. Valencia at night was a beautiful place, and Cissie wanted to take in as much of the city as she could before she decided it was time to move onto the next leg of her journey.
Cissie had decided, just before she graduated from Elias, that she would spend the summer between her last year in high school and her first year of university traveling around Europe. She had money saved from sponsorships and could see nothing at all holding her back.
Most girls her age, her peers and classmates, had opted to spend the summer with their families before moving out of the house and attending university full time. Cissie was fairly certain that while she and her mother had reconciled some of their more touchy issues, she would still commit matricide before the three months were up. It was far safer for both her mother and herself for Cissie to be half way around the world.
So she had left.
She'd been traveling for the past two weeks and had been to two different countries, so far, and six different cities. It felt nice not to have anywhere particular to be or anyone in particular depending on her. After the stress of finishing up high school, she was due for some down time.
Cissie had stayed with friends where she could and slept in hostels or boarding houses when she couldn't. She sampled museums, restaurants, the nightlife and of course archery ranges. Some days every minute of her time was filled with tourist attractions and tour buses. On other days, she just walked around the city to admire the architecture.
It was fun and exciting. She met new people, experienced new things, and even when she couldn’t speak the language, she still seemed to learn and enjoy herself. Her trip had only just begun, and she already felt like she’d gained enough funny stories for three lifetimes.
Cissie smiled to herself as she crossed a road and headed down a side street. She slipped past several bars in the nicer part of town. The bars in this three block area clearly catered to an older crowd of veteran drinkers. There were no young college students lining the sidewalks and chatted animatedly, just rough looking middle aged men with narrowed eyes, puffing at cigarettes and glaring at nearly everything.
Cissie passed them, trying not to make eye contact. She clutched her gym bag a little tighter to her side. She had her bow slung across one shoulder, clipped to her quiver. Resisting the urge to unclip it and carry it in her hand, Cissie continued forward.
She had met some really nice guys just around her age at the archery range just that afternoon. In point of fact, it was the very nice guys she had met at the archery range who had offered to take her to bars that evening. She had taken them up on their offer and hadn’t, actually, bothered to stop back at the hostel and change before hand. She had all her equipment close at hand, and for the first time that night, she was glad for it.
Cissie kept her eyes and ears opened as she hurried through streets and alleyways towards her hostel. The hostel was in a more residential area not too far from the local university. The bars and shops were just a few blocks further on. Some of the neighborhoods closer to the bars were a bit rougher.
The number of people on the streets, and the number of working street lights for that matter, decreased as she walked further along. While the area wasn’t terrible during daylight hours, Cissie was starting to re-think walking through them at night. While she could take care of herself, there was no point in flirting with trouble.
She pursed her lips and drew in a deep breath as she focused hard on her surroundings. Her ears strained and her nostrils flared as she used her senses to the fullest. She was three blocks away when she heard the scuffle.
The sounds of flesh striking flesh, groans and shouts and grunts carried through the warm night air to her attentive ears. Cissie pulled her bow from its clasp and grabbed an arrow, moving without conscious thought, towards the sounds of the fight. She didn’t think of anything other than of appraising the situation.
She rounded on the mouth of an alley way. She hugged the corner, keeping herself out of range of any weapons as she took stock of the situation. It took her a few moments to register what was happening. In close quarters combat, it was often difficult to decipher what was happening without several minutes of observation.
Cissie’s training, training she had put to the back of her mind as she lived her life, came back to her quickly and easily. It was like the alcohol evaporated instantly from her system. All trace of inebriation slipped away as she notched an arrow in her bow string and waited and watched.
There were five men in the alleyway. They were all in civilian clothes, jeans and t-shirts and boots. They all weaved in and out of her line of focus, but as they did so, one of the men in particular caught Cissie’s eye. The way he moved seemed naggingly familiar.
None of the other men moved as if they had any sort of formal training, but he did. She racked her brain trying to place the name of his art, and every time she decided on one, he did something that was unique to another style and threw her off again.
It wasn’t until he grabbed a nearby mop handle that it hit her.
It wasn’t the style she found so familiar; it was the movement itself.
Cissie King-Jones had spent a large portion of her adolescence studying the way Tim Drake moved. While she had not seen him in person for more than two years, she knew it was him. She knew it with the same dull certainty that guided her hands as she brought up her bow and aimed. It was a certainty born of years of ingrained study and practice.
She would save Tim Drake because that was what she had always done. An impulse drilled as deeply into her muscles and sinew as the motions of aiming and drawing her bow.
She took out the man that had Tim by the throat with her first arrow. The next was for the man closing in on him with what looked like a pipe. She hit him in the hand with her next arrow. Tim quickly dispatched the third with his mop handle. Cissie didn’t dare offer him anymore help. He was moving too fast and too unpredictably for her to take another shot.
While Tim took down thug number three, thug number four paused to take stock of the situation. Clearly realizing the tables had turned, he took down the other end of the alley way. Tim was moving too much in the center of the alley for Cissie to get a clear shot. She cursed softly under her breath but kept her bow strung just in case.
Tim dropped his well-worked over thug to the ground and turned to watch the last one taking off down the alley way. He eyed the man for a moment before he took off down the alley after him, not even looking in Cissie’s direction.
Adrenaline had dumped into her system, and Cissie hid behind the stone wall at the mouth of the alleyway listening to see if the men she and Tim had felled would get up again and come after her this time. She stopped breathing, stopped thinking, and willed her heartbeat to slow.
She didn’t take another breath of air until she heard Tim’s footsteps making their way down the alley in pursuit of his quarry. She sighed in relief at the silence around her and slumped back against the wall, her bow still clutched in left hand. Her palms were sweating, and her heart was pounding in her chest.
It had been years since she had felt this way. She knew that in about twenty minutes her legs would be shaky, and she would be chilled from the inside out.
Cissie took a minute to catch her breath before she clipped her bow back onto her quiver and took off down the street. She slipped through several alley ways and bystreets, making sure she wasn’t followed. She walked around in circles for about half an hour before she made her way back to the hostel, pointedly not thinking.
She slipped inside through a back door near the cafeteria, making sure to stay quiet and not make eye contact with anyone who was still awake. Her room was thankfully empty when she unlocked the door. Her three roommates were still out.
Cissie dropped her bag and bow into the locker at the foot of her bed. She peeled off of her sweat drenched clothes, shivering as the cool air met her clammy skin. She quickly pulled on a pair of pajamas, and as she reached to toss her gym shorts into her laundry bag, her phone fell out of her pocket.
She gazed at it as it lay on the floor at her feet for several long moments. Then she snatched it up, quickly glancing at the wall clock as she punched in a number. It should be around nine in the morning where Cassie was. Cissie just hoped she picked up.
“’Ello,” Cassie voice answered her phone distractedly.
“Cass? It’s Cissie,” Cissie said, trying to keep her voice light and cheerful.
“Hey, what’s up? I how’s your trip going?” Cassie asked. She seemed genuinely happy to hear from Cissie. Kara was probably out of town then, Cissie reflected bitterly before tossing that thought aside and answering.
“Oh, I’m having a ton of fun!” she gushed. She told Cassie about a few of the places she had been, and the things she had seen. Cassie made all the right remarks and sounded interested as Cissie spoke.
After Cassie had gotten closer with Kara, she and Cissie had drifted apart. Cissie understood it; Kara was a part of Cassie’s life that Cissie had left behind. That didn’t mean that their wavering friendship didn’t bother Cissie.
She had thought spending less time with the other members of Young Justice was for the best.
She didn’t miss the excitement nearly as much when she spent most of her time with civilians, and as Cissie became less open to discussing Cassie’s extracurricular activities, Cassie got closer and closer to Kara. She missed the close friendships she had with the members of Young Justice, and no relationships she had formed since she left the team seemed to be even remotely close or as tight as what she had left behind.
“So have you heard from Tim recently?” Cissie asked Cassie, changing the subject.
Tim was another friend that she had drifted away from while she was trying out her civilian life. If talking with Cassie made slipping back into costume tempting, talking with Tim made her decision to stay out of the action all but unbearable. Tim’s life was the action. Everything else was just details.
That was even truer now than it had been when she had known him. She had heard what had happened to his family, to the Bats, to the Titans. She had known his life had taken a turn for the worst.
She had sent him e-mails, letters, and text messages after everything had happened. He had ignored them all, so she had assumed he hadn’t wanted to speak with her. Cissie had respected that, just as Tim had respected her decision to leave Young Justice.
Now, after seeing him tonight in that alley way, she suddenly wanted to know very badly what it was Tim was up to these days. Because whatever had caught his interest, it was dangerous, and he clearly didn’t have enough backup.
Cassie hesitated on the other end of the line. “To be honest, no one has really heard from him in a few weeks…”
“No one?” Cissie asked.
“He’s sort of doing his own thing these days,” Cassie replied.
Cissie was quiet for a few long moments. “On his own?” she finally asked, pointedly.
Cassie sighed. “When one of us tracks him down, he makes it clear he doesn’t want us around. He even gave Kon the cold shoulder.”
“You don’t know what he’s up to or what he’s working on then?” Cissie asked again.
“No one seems to. Not even Oracle. Why?”
“No reason, just worried about him, I guess,” Cissie said abstractedly.
Cassie snorted. “You and just about everyone else. You haven’t heard from him, have you?”
Cissie hesitated for a moment, considering telling Cassie what she had seen tonight before dismissing the thought. It was clear that Tim didn’t want the Titans to know where he was for whatever reason. She would respect that.
“No, I was just thinking about him today, that’s all. I miss him,” Cissie admitted quietly.
“Yeah,” Cassie agreed sadly, “I miss him too.”
They hung up shortly after that, both in a subdued mood.
Cissie leaned back in her bed and gazed down at the blank screen of her cell phone.
She thought about her conversation with Cassie. She thought about her decision to leave Young Justice. She thought about her archery training. She thought about her trip.
Then she thought about what she had seen a few hours earlier in that alley. She thought about that man’s hand around Tim’s throat. She thought about the four other men. She thought about pipe. She thought about Tim’s skull and Tim’s ribs and Tim’s face.
She thought about how alone he had been.
She thought about it all and came to decision.
Tim might not want the Titans for backup these days, but she wasn’t a Titan.
And he didn’t have to know.
^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^
Tim’s throat ached. He swallowed hard around the painful throb in his neck and continued to stolidly track his quarry. He stayed back at a reasonable distance just out of the man’s line of sight. He moved swiftly, silently, fluidly, just as Shiva had taught him.
His body moved with a grace and ease born of hours upon hours of practice. His legs were steady and his spine was straight. His head barely bopped as he ran through the dirty alleyway. Tim’s gaze was unblinking, and his breathing was even and controlled.
He kept his mind firmly rooted on the task at hand, completely ignoring the feel of phantom fingers tightening against his throat.
Timothy Drake hated being throttled. It was a terrifying experience that seemed to engender in him a horrible feeling of helplessness. The buzzing in his ears, the spots dancing across his eyes, each symptom that drew him closer and closer to unconsciousness only served to increase his panic and horror.
It was a reaction he had never been able to train himself to overcome.
He hated that, too.
It was just another weakness that could be exploited.
Ti m was painfully aware of all his weaknesses. Both Shiva and Bruce had worked hard to bring each and every one of them to his attention. They did it make him better. They did it to make him self-aware. They did it to show him that no matter how hard he trained or how much he worked, there would always be things that could bring him to his knees.
They did it to teach him how to find those weaknesses in other people.
Tim had.
He had found Shiva’s weakness and he had exploited it. He had always known Bruce’s weaknesses, even before he had been Robin. Dick’s too.
If Tim could find the weaknesses of some of the greatest martial artists in the world, finding the weaknesses of a smuggling cartel should be simple work. They were only human and all humans made mistakes. Greedy humans, Tim had found, made the most.
Unfortunately, that was not turning out to be the case.
Tim had been put onto the possibility of a potential smuggling operation when he was doing surveillance on a shipping yard. He had been watching for signs of one of Ra’s midlevel men trying to sneak into the country. The man had connections in Spain and Tim was counting on him using them.
However, Tim had found something altogether different than a fleeing assassin.
When Tim made the decision to take down the League he realized he wouldn’t be able to do it on his own. Tim had decided that the best option would be to pit the Council of Spiders against the League of Assassins.
It had worked wonderfully.
Ra’s had managed to get most of the leadership in the Council killed via various different methods. He was far more ruthless and through than Tim thought he could ever be with his resources and moral compass. Shortly after Ra’s systematic destruction of most of their unit, Tim set a trap for the remaining members.
Tim had posed as a member of the remaining leadership branch that had survived Ra’s attack. He set up a meeting with the surviving members. Before the meeting was to take place, an ‘informant’ dropped off a thumb drive full of evidence on every single man and woman at the meeting to a high ranking member of Interpol. They were all picked up and all charged with murder. Only three of them escaped conviction but their numbers had been so thoroughly decimated that Tim wasn’t too terribly concerned with them.
He kept his eyes and ears open for word of them, but he didn’t actively track them.
Unlike Ra’s remaining men.
The Council of Spiders had done their work well. Ra’s League was in terrible shape before the conflict between them had come to a head. By the time Ra’s had worked his magic on the rest of the Council, the League was in dire straights.
Tim hadn’t been able to set up a large scale take down of the League as he had with the Council. They were on their guard now and Tim was having a difficult time laying a trap. There were too many of them to take down individually.
Tim had spent every moment since he made his move against Ra’s tracking down the members that had slipped through the cracks. He hoped to find the one thing that would be the key to taking down then entire unit.
He had settled on cash flow. None of them could operate without a steady supply of money and Tim was fairly certain they wouldn’t want to. He suspect their loyalty to Ra’s, despite all the posturing, was based mainly on money and power rather than any real sort of respect or awe.
The League had been more extensive than Tim had realized when he made his move. He estimated that approximately twenty of Ra’s men had escaped the battle with the Council of Spiders.
That was more than enough men to regroup and rebuild. Tim was trying to keep his activities on the covert side in an attempt to lull them into a sense of security in hopes that they would try to come back together. It would be far easier to take them down as a whole.
Tim wasn’t sure how aware Ra’s was of his involvement in orchestrating the ultimate battle between the League and the Council. Ra’s wasn’t stupid, but then Tim hadn’t been stupid either. He had worked hard to make sure Ra’s wouldn’t know he was behind the whole thing. Not just Ra’s either, but everyone.
The last thing Tim needed was for the criminal class to be more wary of him. Tim preferred it when people underestimated him. People would not underestimate him if they knew he had, almost single handedly, taken down the two largest assassin organizations in the world.
The only person who was aware of the exact details of what had happened was Tam Fox and she was back in Gotham under the carefully watchful eye of her father. He doubted she would tell anyone. No one would believe her even if she did say something. Sometimes he was almost sure that Tam didn’t quite believe what had happened herself.
Tim couldn’t really blame her. The whole thing had to be pretty surreal for someone who wasn’t accustomed to the caped lifestyle.
The man Tim was pursuing paused in front of a building and looked around furtively. Tim slipped back against a wall about a block away and willed himself to become just another shadow in a side street. The man didn’t seem to notice him. He pulled keys from his coat pocket and turned towards the front door of the building.
Either exhaustion or adrenaline made his hands shaky because it took several moments for him to get the door unlocked. He stumbled inside and the door slammed shut behind him.
Tim took stock of the buildings that surrounded the one his quarry had disappeared into. He selected one with a good view and a sturdy looking fire escape and scaled it, swiftly and silently. He settled himself on top of the edge of a rooftop and sat and waited.
He as he watched, one of the darkened windows on the second floor lit up. He saw a nervous figure pacing back and forth in front of the window. Tim pulled a small pair of binoculars from one of his pockets. He lifted them to his face and focused them on the building.
The man inside was pacing quickly and gesturing furiously. Tim could see the man’s mouth move as he spoke but Tim couldn’t see a cell phone in his hand. Tim fished in his pocket with his free hand and pulled out his communication device. He flicked it on and glanced down for a few seconds, pulling up a program and that picked up other cell signals in the area.
The communicator had been a gift from Barbara. She had sent it to him after Tam had left. He had been taking a short breather in London. One afternoon, there had been a package sitting on the front stoop of the small apartment he had been renting there. There was a note written on the inside of the brown paper wrapping. It was from Barbara, explaining that, since he wouldn’t call or write, or ask for help in any way, she might as well give him access to her equipment. That way, if he did get killed, it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t done all she could to save his stubborn ass.
The communicator tapped into Babs’ systems and had a few nice toys of its own. Tim could pick up cell signals, track calls, and scan fingerprints. It had tracking programs and programs to alert him as to whether a certain name or alias was being used anywhere in the world.
There was no doubt in his mind that Babs was using the communicator to track him. However, Tim was more than willing to concede a bit of his freedom for the new toy. He had only had it for a few weeks but it had already saved him considerable time and effort.
Tim reminded himself, not for the first time, to get Babs and amazing Christmas gift.
Possibly a small island that she could call her own.
Tim watched with his binoculars as the man reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell. He punched in a few numbers and Tim hit the start button on his communicator. He flicked through various different signals, listening to the sound and timbre of voices in an effort to find the man he was pursuing.
He finally flicked to a channel where an agitated voice was speaking in rapid Arabic. The sounded very much like the voice of the man he had tangled with earlier that evening.
The man had been speaking Spanish when Tim spotted him for the first time but Tim still recognized the voice. He and his friends had taken offense to Tim’s presence in their favorite bar. They thought he looked shifty and didn’t want him around. Tim had tried to leave before he drew any more attention to himself but that hadn’t worked.
The men had followed him into the alley way and made their displeasure known. Tim had been lucky to escape with minor injuries.
Tim lifted a hand to his throat and rubbed at the tender, bruised flesh as he listened in to the phone conversation. Tim had made an effort to learn a bit of Arabic when Bruce had first brought Damian home. He could understand about seventy percent of what the man was saying.
Tim was relieved to realize that the man hadn’t made him. He was concerned that the police would happen upon the unconscious bodies of his comrades and start asking questions. The last thing this man seemed to want was cops poking around his neighborhood.
Tim tapped the button on the screen of his communicator to record and track the phone that was on the other end of his quarry’s cell signal.
He got a number and looked up the GPS coordinates of the phone that was receiving the call. While the man on the other end of the line reassured Tim’s new friend that everything was fine, and that he would send a man out to check on their comrades; Tim was plotting the quickest route to get to his location.
Tim disconnected his communicator a few seconds after the other men hung up their phone.s He slipped down the fire escape and made his way back to where his bike was parked.
While his throat still ached and his ribs were heavily bruised, a triumphant feeling was echoing in Tim’s chest as he straddled his bike and keyed it on. He was on the right track. He knew it.
That conversation had told Tim three things. The first was that he was looking at drug smuggling. People trafficking and arms dealing was a bit more difficult to pull off. They were more cautious because it was easier for them to get caught. Their cargo was larger and a lot harder to hide. A hiding spot in a heavily populated area was more likely to be drugs.
The second being that there was something in that bar that required Tim’s attention. He suspected that the upper rooms of the building were used to cut, package and otherwise make drugs street ready. It was a nice central location and near a university. There wasn’t a lot of police presence and it wasn’t a residential area where people would notice a quantity of unfamiliar faces going in and out of a house.
The third thing was that there was a Middle Eastern connection to this smuggling operation. The last Tim had heard, Ra’s had gone to ground in the Middle East. It was a region of the world that made it very easy to go about unknown and unremarked.
Ra’s had been known to use drug trafficking and sales to line his coffers in the past. While he considered drugs vile and a poison, he didn’t mind weeding out some of the ‘weaker’ members of humanity.
Tim was determined to look deeper into this operation to see if he could find any hints of Ra’s influence, or that of any of his underlings. Tim had Bruce’s extensive notes on Ra’s illegal operations and Tim had taken the time to appropriate some of Ra’s own files before he had upped the conflict between the two assassin organizations. He had enough information that he could easily draw connections if they were there to be found.
Tim’s belly roiled with self satisfaction as he plugged the coordinates of the other man’s cell phone into the GPS on his bike. He took off down the streets of Valencia and headed toward A3. The man’s signal originated in Madrid. Tim had about a four hour drive a head of him.
He was feeling victorious and was riding high on the thrill of being on the right track.
He half wished he could call Tam.
When they had worked together on the League of Assassins job, she had insisted on being kept in the loop every step of the way.
“I want to know exactly what you plan to do to piss the crazy ninja killers off so I know when to expect one of them to attack me while I’m showering,” she had informed him acidly. “I’ll keep exploding shampoo in there with me. You have that, don’t you?”
So Tim had kept her in the loop. They had shared victories and failures together. Worked and reasoned and fought and ultimately succeeded. It had brought them closer together and Tim had enjoyed that closeness.
It wasn’t until he had safely deposited Tam back in Gotham city that he realized just how dangerous that closeness between them was.
He missed her when she was gone and Tim couldn’t afford to miss anyone else. He just didn’t have the emotional energy left for that sort of entanglement.
It was easy for he and Tam to slip into a close sort of friendship and that had scared Tim. It scared him more than facing off against Ra’s Al Ghul did. While that, in and of itself, was troubling, Tim couldn’t help but admit it was true.
Tim was self aware enough to know that being more afraid of friendship and affection than of murderous, nigh immortal megalomaniacs was not a good sign. But then, Tim’s entire life was sort of backwards at the moment. It was too tempting to cling to something, to someone, solid and steady and dependable.
That, however, was just as unfair as it was troubling. Tim wasn’t about to drag Tam into his life, into his world, just because he needed her. That would be cruel and potentially dangerous.
So Tim didn’t call her. He didn’t call her and he didn’t call Babs. He didn’t call Cassie or Kon or Bart. He just clenched his fists around the handle bars of his bike and drove.
He had larger concerns now than the state of his personal life. In fact, it was probably just better to have a moratorium on Tim Drake in general and his feelings in specific. There were dozens of different people he could be and it was more than past time that he threw himself into this case. There was more than enough evidence to warrant a deeper look. It was a promising lead and the last thing Tim needed was to be distracted in the middle of a case that potentially involved Ra’s Al Ghul.
By anything.
Part II: In which Cissie is cold and Tim wears a scarf.
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Pairing: Tim Drake/Cissie King-Jones
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, sex, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone's legal
Word Count: 5,500/~20,000
Beta: shiny_glor_chan
Author's Notes: For the Fic Exchange of Doom. This one is for lady_sarai. I hope you like it!
Remembering Priorities: Part 1
Part I
Cissie King-Jones was not drunk. She was, Cissie had to concede to herself, not entirely sober either, but she certainly was not drunk. Tipsy was, perhaps, the right word for what she was feeling right now. Delightfully tipsy.
Cissie smiled to herself and tilted her head back to better feel the evening breeze on her face. It was going on three in the morning, but the streets in Valencia were not even remotely deserted. It was Saturday night in the beginning of June and the college crowd was still out en masse. People wandered in and out of bars, chatted along sidewalks, and sat on benches that lined the streets.
The happy hum of conversation coming from the inebriated masses left Cissie with a feeling of good will. She hefted her gym bag higher on her shoulder and walked happily down the block in the direction of the hostel where she was holed up for the time being. If she decided to spend more than a week or two in Spain, she would look for more secure lodgings, but for now, the hostel was perfect for her. She didn’t spend much time there anyway.
She could have taken a bus or a train to make the trip back shorter, but Cissie wanted to be out in the night air. The cool breeze coming off the ocean to her left was having a nicely sobering effect. Valencia at night was a beautiful place, and Cissie wanted to take in as much of the city as she could before she decided it was time to move onto the next leg of her journey.
Cissie had decided, just before she graduated from Elias, that she would spend the summer between her last year in high school and her first year of university traveling around Europe. She had money saved from sponsorships and could see nothing at all holding her back.
Most girls her age, her peers and classmates, had opted to spend the summer with their families before moving out of the house and attending university full time. Cissie was fairly certain that while she and her mother had reconciled some of their more touchy issues, she would still commit matricide before the three months were up. It was far safer for both her mother and herself for Cissie to be half way around the world.
So she had left.
She'd been traveling for the past two weeks and had been to two different countries, so far, and six different cities. It felt nice not to have anywhere particular to be or anyone in particular depending on her. After the stress of finishing up high school, she was due for some down time.
Cissie had stayed with friends where she could and slept in hostels or boarding houses when she couldn't. She sampled museums, restaurants, the nightlife and of course archery ranges. Some days every minute of her time was filled with tourist attractions and tour buses. On other days, she just walked around the city to admire the architecture.
It was fun and exciting. She met new people, experienced new things, and even when she couldn’t speak the language, she still seemed to learn and enjoy herself. Her trip had only just begun, and she already felt like she’d gained enough funny stories for three lifetimes.
Cissie smiled to herself as she crossed a road and headed down a side street. She slipped past several bars in the nicer part of town. The bars in this three block area clearly catered to an older crowd of veteran drinkers. There were no young college students lining the sidewalks and chatted animatedly, just rough looking middle aged men with narrowed eyes, puffing at cigarettes and glaring at nearly everything.
Cissie passed them, trying not to make eye contact. She clutched her gym bag a little tighter to her side. She had her bow slung across one shoulder, clipped to her quiver. Resisting the urge to unclip it and carry it in her hand, Cissie continued forward.
She had met some really nice guys just around her age at the archery range just that afternoon. In point of fact, it was the very nice guys she had met at the archery range who had offered to take her to bars that evening. She had taken them up on their offer and hadn’t, actually, bothered to stop back at the hostel and change before hand. She had all her equipment close at hand, and for the first time that night, she was glad for it.
Cissie kept her eyes and ears opened as she hurried through streets and alleyways towards her hostel. The hostel was in a more residential area not too far from the local university. The bars and shops were just a few blocks further on. Some of the neighborhoods closer to the bars were a bit rougher.
The number of people on the streets, and the number of working street lights for that matter, decreased as she walked further along. While the area wasn’t terrible during daylight hours, Cissie was starting to re-think walking through them at night. While she could take care of herself, there was no point in flirting with trouble.
She pursed her lips and drew in a deep breath as she focused hard on her surroundings. Her ears strained and her nostrils flared as she used her senses to the fullest. She was three blocks away when she heard the scuffle.
The sounds of flesh striking flesh, groans and shouts and grunts carried through the warm night air to her attentive ears. Cissie pulled her bow from its clasp and grabbed an arrow, moving without conscious thought, towards the sounds of the fight. She didn’t think of anything other than of appraising the situation.
She rounded on the mouth of an alley way. She hugged the corner, keeping herself out of range of any weapons as she took stock of the situation. It took her a few moments to register what was happening. In close quarters combat, it was often difficult to decipher what was happening without several minutes of observation.
Cissie’s training, training she had put to the back of her mind as she lived her life, came back to her quickly and easily. It was like the alcohol evaporated instantly from her system. All trace of inebriation slipped away as she notched an arrow in her bow string and waited and watched.
There were five men in the alleyway. They were all in civilian clothes, jeans and t-shirts and boots. They all weaved in and out of her line of focus, but as they did so, one of the men in particular caught Cissie’s eye. The way he moved seemed naggingly familiar.
None of the other men moved as if they had any sort of formal training, but he did. She racked her brain trying to place the name of his art, and every time she decided on one, he did something that was unique to another style and threw her off again.
It wasn’t until he grabbed a nearby mop handle that it hit her.
It wasn’t the style she found so familiar; it was the movement itself.
Cissie King-Jones had spent a large portion of her adolescence studying the way Tim Drake moved. While she had not seen him in person for more than two years, she knew it was him. She knew it with the same dull certainty that guided her hands as she brought up her bow and aimed. It was a certainty born of years of ingrained study and practice.
She would save Tim Drake because that was what she had always done. An impulse drilled as deeply into her muscles and sinew as the motions of aiming and drawing her bow.
She took out the man that had Tim by the throat with her first arrow. The next was for the man closing in on him with what looked like a pipe. She hit him in the hand with her next arrow. Tim quickly dispatched the third with his mop handle. Cissie didn’t dare offer him anymore help. He was moving too fast and too unpredictably for her to take another shot.
While Tim took down thug number three, thug number four paused to take stock of the situation. Clearly realizing the tables had turned, he took down the other end of the alley way. Tim was moving too much in the center of the alley for Cissie to get a clear shot. She cursed softly under her breath but kept her bow strung just in case.
Tim dropped his well-worked over thug to the ground and turned to watch the last one taking off down the alley way. He eyed the man for a moment before he took off down the alley after him, not even looking in Cissie’s direction.
Adrenaline had dumped into her system, and Cissie hid behind the stone wall at the mouth of the alleyway listening to see if the men she and Tim had felled would get up again and come after her this time. She stopped breathing, stopped thinking, and willed her heartbeat to slow.
She didn’t take another breath of air until she heard Tim’s footsteps making their way down the alley in pursuit of his quarry. She sighed in relief at the silence around her and slumped back against the wall, her bow still clutched in left hand. Her palms were sweating, and her heart was pounding in her chest.
It had been years since she had felt this way. She knew that in about twenty minutes her legs would be shaky, and she would be chilled from the inside out.
Cissie took a minute to catch her breath before she clipped her bow back onto her quiver and took off down the street. She slipped through several alley ways and bystreets, making sure she wasn’t followed. She walked around in circles for about half an hour before she made her way back to the hostel, pointedly not thinking.
She slipped inside through a back door near the cafeteria, making sure to stay quiet and not make eye contact with anyone who was still awake. Her room was thankfully empty when she unlocked the door. Her three roommates were still out.
Cissie dropped her bag and bow into the locker at the foot of her bed. She peeled off of her sweat drenched clothes, shivering as the cool air met her clammy skin. She quickly pulled on a pair of pajamas, and as she reached to toss her gym shorts into her laundry bag, her phone fell out of her pocket.
She gazed at it as it lay on the floor at her feet for several long moments. Then she snatched it up, quickly glancing at the wall clock as she punched in a number. It should be around nine in the morning where Cassie was. Cissie just hoped she picked up.
“’Ello,” Cassie voice answered her phone distractedly.
“Cass? It’s Cissie,” Cissie said, trying to keep her voice light and cheerful.
“Hey, what’s up? I how’s your trip going?” Cassie asked. She seemed genuinely happy to hear from Cissie. Kara was probably out of town then, Cissie reflected bitterly before tossing that thought aside and answering.
“Oh, I’m having a ton of fun!” she gushed. She told Cassie about a few of the places she had been, and the things she had seen. Cassie made all the right remarks and sounded interested as Cissie spoke.
After Cassie had gotten closer with Kara, she and Cissie had drifted apart. Cissie understood it; Kara was a part of Cassie’s life that Cissie had left behind. That didn’t mean that their wavering friendship didn’t bother Cissie.
She had thought spending less time with the other members of Young Justice was for the best.
She didn’t miss the excitement nearly as much when she spent most of her time with civilians, and as Cissie became less open to discussing Cassie’s extracurricular activities, Cassie got closer and closer to Kara. She missed the close friendships she had with the members of Young Justice, and no relationships she had formed since she left the team seemed to be even remotely close or as tight as what she had left behind.
“So have you heard from Tim recently?” Cissie asked Cassie, changing the subject.
Tim was another friend that she had drifted away from while she was trying out her civilian life. If talking with Cassie made slipping back into costume tempting, talking with Tim made her decision to stay out of the action all but unbearable. Tim’s life was the action. Everything else was just details.
That was even truer now than it had been when she had known him. She had heard what had happened to his family, to the Bats, to the Titans. She had known his life had taken a turn for the worst.
She had sent him e-mails, letters, and text messages after everything had happened. He had ignored them all, so she had assumed he hadn’t wanted to speak with her. Cissie had respected that, just as Tim had respected her decision to leave Young Justice.
Now, after seeing him tonight in that alley way, she suddenly wanted to know very badly what it was Tim was up to these days. Because whatever had caught his interest, it was dangerous, and he clearly didn’t have enough backup.
Cassie hesitated on the other end of the line. “To be honest, no one has really heard from him in a few weeks…”
“No one?” Cissie asked.
“He’s sort of doing his own thing these days,” Cassie replied.
Cissie was quiet for a few long moments. “On his own?” she finally asked, pointedly.
Cassie sighed. “When one of us tracks him down, he makes it clear he doesn’t want us around. He even gave Kon the cold shoulder.”
“You don’t know what he’s up to or what he’s working on then?” Cissie asked again.
“No one seems to. Not even Oracle. Why?”
“No reason, just worried about him, I guess,” Cissie said abstractedly.
Cassie snorted. “You and just about everyone else. You haven’t heard from him, have you?”
Cissie hesitated for a moment, considering telling Cassie what she had seen tonight before dismissing the thought. It was clear that Tim didn’t want the Titans to know where he was for whatever reason. She would respect that.
“No, I was just thinking about him today, that’s all. I miss him,” Cissie admitted quietly.
“Yeah,” Cassie agreed sadly, “I miss him too.”
They hung up shortly after that, both in a subdued mood.
Cissie leaned back in her bed and gazed down at the blank screen of her cell phone.
She thought about her conversation with Cassie. She thought about her decision to leave Young Justice. She thought about her archery training. She thought about her trip.
Then she thought about what she had seen a few hours earlier in that alley. She thought about that man’s hand around Tim’s throat. She thought about the four other men. She thought about pipe. She thought about Tim’s skull and Tim’s ribs and Tim’s face.
She thought about how alone he had been.
She thought about it all and came to decision.
Tim might not want the Titans for backup these days, but she wasn’t a Titan.
And he didn’t have to know.
^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^
Tim’s throat ached. He swallowed hard around the painful throb in his neck and continued to stolidly track his quarry. He stayed back at a reasonable distance just out of the man’s line of sight. He moved swiftly, silently, fluidly, just as Shiva had taught him.
His body moved with a grace and ease born of hours upon hours of practice. His legs were steady and his spine was straight. His head barely bopped as he ran through the dirty alleyway. Tim’s gaze was unblinking, and his breathing was even and controlled.
He kept his mind firmly rooted on the task at hand, completely ignoring the feel of phantom fingers tightening against his throat.
Timothy Drake hated being throttled. It was a terrifying experience that seemed to engender in him a horrible feeling of helplessness. The buzzing in his ears, the spots dancing across his eyes, each symptom that drew him closer and closer to unconsciousness only served to increase his panic and horror.
It was a reaction he had never been able to train himself to overcome.
He hated that, too.
It was just another weakness that could be exploited.
Ti m was painfully aware of all his weaknesses. Both Shiva and Bruce had worked hard to bring each and every one of them to his attention. They did it make him better. They did it to make him self-aware. They did it to show him that no matter how hard he trained or how much he worked, there would always be things that could bring him to his knees.
They did it to teach him how to find those weaknesses in other people.
Tim had.
He had found Shiva’s weakness and he had exploited it. He had always known Bruce’s weaknesses, even before he had been Robin. Dick’s too.
If Tim could find the weaknesses of some of the greatest martial artists in the world, finding the weaknesses of a smuggling cartel should be simple work. They were only human and all humans made mistakes. Greedy humans, Tim had found, made the most.
Unfortunately, that was not turning out to be the case.
Tim had been put onto the possibility of a potential smuggling operation when he was doing surveillance on a shipping yard. He had been watching for signs of one of Ra’s midlevel men trying to sneak into the country. The man had connections in Spain and Tim was counting on him using them.
However, Tim had found something altogether different than a fleeing assassin.
When Tim made the decision to take down the League he realized he wouldn’t be able to do it on his own. Tim had decided that the best option would be to pit the Council of Spiders against the League of Assassins.
It had worked wonderfully.
Ra’s had managed to get most of the leadership in the Council killed via various different methods. He was far more ruthless and through than Tim thought he could ever be with his resources and moral compass. Shortly after Ra’s systematic destruction of most of their unit, Tim set a trap for the remaining members.
Tim had posed as a member of the remaining leadership branch that had survived Ra’s attack. He set up a meeting with the surviving members. Before the meeting was to take place, an ‘informant’ dropped off a thumb drive full of evidence on every single man and woman at the meeting to a high ranking member of Interpol. They were all picked up and all charged with murder. Only three of them escaped conviction but their numbers had been so thoroughly decimated that Tim wasn’t too terribly concerned with them.
He kept his eyes and ears open for word of them, but he didn’t actively track them.
Unlike Ra’s remaining men.
The Council of Spiders had done their work well. Ra’s League was in terrible shape before the conflict between them had come to a head. By the time Ra’s had worked his magic on the rest of the Council, the League was in dire straights.
Tim hadn’t been able to set up a large scale take down of the League as he had with the Council. They were on their guard now and Tim was having a difficult time laying a trap. There were too many of them to take down individually.
Tim had spent every moment since he made his move against Ra’s tracking down the members that had slipped through the cracks. He hoped to find the one thing that would be the key to taking down then entire unit.
He had settled on cash flow. None of them could operate without a steady supply of money and Tim was fairly certain they wouldn’t want to. He suspect their loyalty to Ra’s, despite all the posturing, was based mainly on money and power rather than any real sort of respect or awe.
The League had been more extensive than Tim had realized when he made his move. He estimated that approximately twenty of Ra’s men had escaped the battle with the Council of Spiders.
That was more than enough men to regroup and rebuild. Tim was trying to keep his activities on the covert side in an attempt to lull them into a sense of security in hopes that they would try to come back together. It would be far easier to take them down as a whole.
Tim wasn’t sure how aware Ra’s was of his involvement in orchestrating the ultimate battle between the League and the Council. Ra’s wasn’t stupid, but then Tim hadn’t been stupid either. He had worked hard to make sure Ra’s wouldn’t know he was behind the whole thing. Not just Ra’s either, but everyone.
The last thing Tim needed was for the criminal class to be more wary of him. Tim preferred it when people underestimated him. People would not underestimate him if they knew he had, almost single handedly, taken down the two largest assassin organizations in the world.
The only person who was aware of the exact details of what had happened was Tam Fox and she was back in Gotham under the carefully watchful eye of her father. He doubted she would tell anyone. No one would believe her even if she did say something. Sometimes he was almost sure that Tam didn’t quite believe what had happened herself.
Tim couldn’t really blame her. The whole thing had to be pretty surreal for someone who wasn’t accustomed to the caped lifestyle.
The man Tim was pursuing paused in front of a building and looked around furtively. Tim slipped back against a wall about a block away and willed himself to become just another shadow in a side street. The man didn’t seem to notice him. He pulled keys from his coat pocket and turned towards the front door of the building.
Either exhaustion or adrenaline made his hands shaky because it took several moments for him to get the door unlocked. He stumbled inside and the door slammed shut behind him.
Tim took stock of the buildings that surrounded the one his quarry had disappeared into. He selected one with a good view and a sturdy looking fire escape and scaled it, swiftly and silently. He settled himself on top of the edge of a rooftop and sat and waited.
He as he watched, one of the darkened windows on the second floor lit up. He saw a nervous figure pacing back and forth in front of the window. Tim pulled a small pair of binoculars from one of his pockets. He lifted them to his face and focused them on the building.
The man inside was pacing quickly and gesturing furiously. Tim could see the man’s mouth move as he spoke but Tim couldn’t see a cell phone in his hand. Tim fished in his pocket with his free hand and pulled out his communication device. He flicked it on and glanced down for a few seconds, pulling up a program and that picked up other cell signals in the area.
The communicator had been a gift from Barbara. She had sent it to him after Tam had left. He had been taking a short breather in London. One afternoon, there had been a package sitting on the front stoop of the small apartment he had been renting there. There was a note written on the inside of the brown paper wrapping. It was from Barbara, explaining that, since he wouldn’t call or write, or ask for help in any way, she might as well give him access to her equipment. That way, if he did get killed, it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t done all she could to save his stubborn ass.
The communicator tapped into Babs’ systems and had a few nice toys of its own. Tim could pick up cell signals, track calls, and scan fingerprints. It had tracking programs and programs to alert him as to whether a certain name or alias was being used anywhere in the world.
There was no doubt in his mind that Babs was using the communicator to track him. However, Tim was more than willing to concede a bit of his freedom for the new toy. He had only had it for a few weeks but it had already saved him considerable time and effort.
Tim reminded himself, not for the first time, to get Babs and amazing Christmas gift.
Possibly a small island that she could call her own.
Tim watched with his binoculars as the man reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell. He punched in a few numbers and Tim hit the start button on his communicator. He flicked through various different signals, listening to the sound and timbre of voices in an effort to find the man he was pursuing.
He finally flicked to a channel where an agitated voice was speaking in rapid Arabic. The sounded very much like the voice of the man he had tangled with earlier that evening.
The man had been speaking Spanish when Tim spotted him for the first time but Tim still recognized the voice. He and his friends had taken offense to Tim’s presence in their favorite bar. They thought he looked shifty and didn’t want him around. Tim had tried to leave before he drew any more attention to himself but that hadn’t worked.
The men had followed him into the alley way and made their displeasure known. Tim had been lucky to escape with minor injuries.
Tim lifted a hand to his throat and rubbed at the tender, bruised flesh as he listened in to the phone conversation. Tim had made an effort to learn a bit of Arabic when Bruce had first brought Damian home. He could understand about seventy percent of what the man was saying.
Tim was relieved to realize that the man hadn’t made him. He was concerned that the police would happen upon the unconscious bodies of his comrades and start asking questions. The last thing this man seemed to want was cops poking around his neighborhood.
Tim tapped the button on the screen of his communicator to record and track the phone that was on the other end of his quarry’s cell signal.
He got a number and looked up the GPS coordinates of the phone that was receiving the call. While the man on the other end of the line reassured Tim’s new friend that everything was fine, and that he would send a man out to check on their comrades; Tim was plotting the quickest route to get to his location.
Tim disconnected his communicator a few seconds after the other men hung up their phone.s He slipped down the fire escape and made his way back to where his bike was parked.
While his throat still ached and his ribs were heavily bruised, a triumphant feeling was echoing in Tim’s chest as he straddled his bike and keyed it on. He was on the right track. He knew it.
That conversation had told Tim three things. The first was that he was looking at drug smuggling. People trafficking and arms dealing was a bit more difficult to pull off. They were more cautious because it was easier for them to get caught. Their cargo was larger and a lot harder to hide. A hiding spot in a heavily populated area was more likely to be drugs.
The second being that there was something in that bar that required Tim’s attention. He suspected that the upper rooms of the building were used to cut, package and otherwise make drugs street ready. It was a nice central location and near a university. There wasn’t a lot of police presence and it wasn’t a residential area where people would notice a quantity of unfamiliar faces going in and out of a house.
The third thing was that there was a Middle Eastern connection to this smuggling operation. The last Tim had heard, Ra’s had gone to ground in the Middle East. It was a region of the world that made it very easy to go about unknown and unremarked.
Ra’s had been known to use drug trafficking and sales to line his coffers in the past. While he considered drugs vile and a poison, he didn’t mind weeding out some of the ‘weaker’ members of humanity.
Tim was determined to look deeper into this operation to see if he could find any hints of Ra’s influence, or that of any of his underlings. Tim had Bruce’s extensive notes on Ra’s illegal operations and Tim had taken the time to appropriate some of Ra’s own files before he had upped the conflict between the two assassin organizations. He had enough information that he could easily draw connections if they were there to be found.
Tim’s belly roiled with self satisfaction as he plugged the coordinates of the other man’s cell phone into the GPS on his bike. He took off down the streets of Valencia and headed toward A3. The man’s signal originated in Madrid. Tim had about a four hour drive a head of him.
He was feeling victorious and was riding high on the thrill of being on the right track.
He half wished he could call Tam.
When they had worked together on the League of Assassins job, she had insisted on being kept in the loop every step of the way.
“I want to know exactly what you plan to do to piss the crazy ninja killers off so I know when to expect one of them to attack me while I’m showering,” she had informed him acidly. “I’ll keep exploding shampoo in there with me. You have that, don’t you?”
So Tim had kept her in the loop. They had shared victories and failures together. Worked and reasoned and fought and ultimately succeeded. It had brought them closer together and Tim had enjoyed that closeness.
It wasn’t until he had safely deposited Tam back in Gotham city that he realized just how dangerous that closeness between them was.
He missed her when she was gone and Tim couldn’t afford to miss anyone else. He just didn’t have the emotional energy left for that sort of entanglement.
It was easy for he and Tam to slip into a close sort of friendship and that had scared Tim. It scared him more than facing off against Ra’s Al Ghul did. While that, in and of itself, was troubling, Tim couldn’t help but admit it was true.
Tim was self aware enough to know that being more afraid of friendship and affection than of murderous, nigh immortal megalomaniacs was not a good sign. But then, Tim’s entire life was sort of backwards at the moment. It was too tempting to cling to something, to someone, solid and steady and dependable.
That, however, was just as unfair as it was troubling. Tim wasn’t about to drag Tam into his life, into his world, just because he needed her. That would be cruel and potentially dangerous.
So Tim didn’t call her. He didn’t call her and he didn’t call Babs. He didn’t call Cassie or Kon or Bart. He just clenched his fists around the handle bars of his bike and drove.
He had larger concerns now than the state of his personal life. In fact, it was probably just better to have a moratorium on Tim Drake in general and his feelings in specific. There were dozens of different people he could be and it was more than past time that he threw himself into this case. There was more than enough evidence to warrant a deeper look. It was a promising lead and the last thing Tim needed was to be distracted in the middle of a case that potentially involved Ra’s Al Ghul.
By anything.
Part II: In which Cissie is cold and Tim wears a scarf.