#sahtw

[tablestoastandtime]

SAHTW: Trinity

So per that funny little poll, here's a snippet that's probably getting cut from the main fic of the sequel to Take It Back Now Y'all, but is kinda fun anyways. The current title for the whole project is Such A Heart That Will and all ficlets will have that in the title and the tags + a descriptor.

Bruce is having FeelingsTM and also an interrogation.

On his own, it would have taken months of planning. Even with the help of his family it would have been weeks. Within thirty-seven minutes of telling Clark and Diana that he needed to talk to Alvin Draper, a not insignificant member of the Gotham criminal element, openly and honestly after years of push, pull, and mysteries, the entire matter was handled.

There was always something humbling about the reminder just what the remarkable people he surrounded himself with were capable of.

In this case, that meant the Red Hood of Gotham seated and bound in the Lasso of Truth on the Watchtower.

His helmet was gone, but they’d left his domino as a professional courtesy, for whatever that was worth. It wasn’t much but it was a shred of privacy in what was bound to be a vivisection of a conversation. Bruce hoped it was better than nothing.

There wasn’t the space for that kind of mercy when it came to the questions even Bruce wanted to. The Lasso gave no quarter.

“Had you already been planning your takeover Park Row when we first met?” He needed to know, even if he doubted it. Back then the boy had barely been upright with illness, but time had proven Alvin a skilled liar. It wasn’t entirely out of the question that maybe the whole thing had been a play to bring his guard down. Bruce already knew that Alvin had somehow discovered his identity years ago. He might have already known back then. He might have use that, then.

Alvin barely blinked before the words were spilling out, honest in a way Bruce knew he would never be anywhere else. “It hadn’t’ crossed my mind in any meaningful way. The idea of controlling Crime Alley was a pipe-dream. I’ve seen people try and I’ve seen them fail.. Why would I be any different?”

“Any why were you?” Clark asked, gaze steady and incisive, all light and journalistic focus. “Different, that is. What do you have that they didn’t?”

Alvin twitched, the barest of flickers in his cheek and a tightening around the eyes for half a breath. In front of any other tribunal, the reaction might have gone unnoticed. Tonight, it didn’t.

“Training, knowledge, foresight, and a tired and true persona managed by a combination of deception, dramatics, and dumbass RNG.”

There were more questions than answers in that response, and Bruce paused to consider which angle to start unravelling them from. Who had Alvin watched fail to take over Crime Alley? Where had he tested his methods? Alvin’s resemblance to other criminals was a funhouse mirror, all warped edges and alien familiarity. He looked as much like an unusually brutal vigilante as he did a gang leader. Bruce could go try to pull apart the knot of his behaviour from any one of a dozen of threads, but which would get the most mileage?

Diana had no such compunctions. “What is Batman to you?”

A fair question, and one that cut to the root of so many of the questions and fears in the dark of Bruce’s lungs in a way that Bruce may not have thought to go for this early in the process. Certainly not something he would have thought of asking for the real reason he wanted to know.

He didn’t want Alvin to have lied about caring.

Bruce only had a moment to enjoy the warmth that flickered at Diana’s thoughtfulness before Alvin’s response crushed his ribs inwards.

“Well he’s my dad.”

His vision tunnelled ever so slightly, even as some part of his brain started doing the math. It didn’t make sense, couldn’t be true, the numbers just didn’t line up. And yet, somehow, it had to be the truth because otherwise Alvin wouldn’t have been able to say it.

Which meant-

Alvin was a good liar, but Bruce knew from experience that the Lasso didn’t work like that.

Which meant-

In every encounter they’d ever had, no matter Bruce’s disguise or name, Alvin had always looked at him with something Bruce had never been able to pin down. Something wary and judging and longing. Years passed and sometimes it was so secondary Bruce forgot to wonder what it meant, but from that first meeting with a child blinking through fever and cheap lighting to their last fight at the docks that ended with the Red Hood diving into the harbour, Alvin Draper had always looked at him like he wanted Bruce to know him but never expected him to be able to.

Which meant-

Beneath the domino mask they’d left him, Alvin’s face twisted. That seemed right, because Bruce had no idea how to untwist the knife he felt buried in his lungs.

“I wish you hadn’t asked that.”

[tablestoastandtime]

SAHTW - Birds, Boats, and Ballistics I

An installation for my currently tumblr only Such A Heart That Will series/fic/thing. No a lot of context is needed for this, but its still the post-Take It Back Now Y'all setting. This is theoretically about half of the chapter it would be. Cheers.

In which Dick chases down a lead, and surely nothing could go awry from here.

There was a time and place for rebellion, and after a long year on the streets and several weeks of rehab after a run in with Two Face, Dick was a master at picking his.

Bruce had set a rule about anything to do with the Red Hood. Don’t engage alone, don’t actively seek out unless there was a strong reason to believe he was apart of an ongoing investigation, and under no circumstances assume you can sneak up on him without him noticing. That last one Dick found a little offensive. Sure Hood was good enough to catch onto when he was being tracked by a giant man in a kevlar composite cape, but Dick was sneaky and had managed to find ways to stay unnoticed while dressed constantly in bright colours. Despite the similarities, Robin and Batman were not playing the same game. If Dick didn’t want to be seen, he wasn’t going to be.

That last rule alone would have made the Red Hood a tempting target for some under the table recon, but that was without even getting into the jerkface himself. In his multiple encounters with him, Dick had found the Red Hood to be arrogant, obnoxious, and way more dangerous than he had any right to be. Whoever he was, he was a professional. To get that good someone had to make him that way, and if Dick could gather enough intel to start point fingers at who, then they might be in business as to figuring out what exactly this guy’s deal was.

And Dick was well aware that Bruce was both obsessing over that question and basically clueless. He was letting some of those early interactions and some weird behaviour by residents blind him to the reality that Red Hood wasn’t just some guy because if he was then he wouldn’t be anything like the way he was. Red Hood was lying to them, lying to everyone, and Batman and Robin were the only ones with anything close to a full picture.

If Batman couldn’t be objective about the case, then Robin had to be.

So really, for all that he was definitely breaking an explicitly set rule, Dick was doing his job to support the team more than anything else. Bruce would probably even agree with him if he wasn’t too busy using his orphan-tinted glasses.

Which meant that there was less than no reason to hesitate as he made his way to Crime Alley on a school night.

The key to any good investigation was in the groundwork. Going to the right places, finding the right evidence, talking to the right people, was the only way to really get insight into a situation. Sure Batman seemed omniscient, but that was only because he spent hours cataloguing every kind of gravel in Gotham so that the one time it mattered he’d have the answer ready to go. If Dick wanted to understand the Red Hood, he was going to have to be that meticulous. With someone like this, there was no such thing as a clue too small.

So he started simple; boots on the ground and eyes in the sky.

Crime Alley was always a weird place to patrol. Bruce was never entirely comfortable there, and it showed in the set of his shoulders and the way his usual quiet notes were nearly entirely absent when they passed through. While Dick got it, personally he still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t throw up if he went back under a bigtop for all that he missed the lights and flights, Bruce’s reticence left him at a disadvantage now.

The other big barrier was of course the fact that while Robin was a target, a deliberate one but a target nonetheless, there wasn’t a disguise Dick could use that would keep him safe. Kids in coats were just as at risk as kids in capes, at least in this part of town.

So in the end Dick opted for the extra armour and snuck out in costume, ducking in and around air conditioning units that belched dust and exhaust pipes that stank of burning.

Red Hood didn’t have an official territory yet, at least not one on the Cave’s maps of the city, but there had been rumours for a while about the Ibanescus being ousted and no one had successfully moved into their streets since. It was as good a place to start as any.

For the first two and a half hours, Dick mostly hid dead ends. There was a suspicious amount of activity visible through the windows at a couple of sites, but even as Dick thought through the logistics of setting up a stakeout without Bruce finding out, the movement revealed itself to be children. Some were ducking in and out of what were primarily back entrances, others just seemed to move back and forth behind the blinds, giving Dick only the general note of their heights and speeds. Enough to tell there was at least six occupants and none of them tall enough to be adults.

While it was weird to see this many kids in one place, Dick didn’t see how it could have anything to do with Hood. Kid gangs were a survival strategy, from what he understood. Trying to interfere would make him a threat to their very way of life unless he could convince them he wasn’t trying to hurt them or turn them in. The cape might be enough, but Dick wasn’t really in the mood to fight a bunch of kids for no reason.

He’d circle back if he couldn’t find anything else.

The next hour, it started to rain, and Dick very much did not curse the way water slipped in the tops of his boots and soaked down his socks. He was a professional, and he’d chosen this outfit. He could suck up any design disadvantages, especially when he was on a mission.

Wet surveillance of people mostly just minding their own business was not more fun than dry surveillance. At least when he went to the docks just about everything was wet, including a bunch of guys unloading large tubs and buckets from a fairly small freighter in the middle of the night, so it wasn’t a Robin-exclusive problem. It kind of helped to make it a team sport. Everyone in the city versus the sky, and unfortunately this inning wasn’t going well.

But the buckets looked promising! First glance they looked like they were industrial, which was as vague as it was useful. There were a lot of industrial buildings in Gotham, but almost all of the reputable ones were on the other side of the city and usually got their deliveries from the mainland rather than the bay, and industrial buckets were one of the laziest ways to hide weapons Dick had seen. Cheap, yes. Deeply boring and uninspired? Also yes.

If the Red Hood was planning to make an official claim in Gotham, he was going to need weapons to get his point across. And Dick had a hunch he’d just found one of his shipments.

The thing was though, if Dick didn’t prove these were weapons, and if he lost track of them, there was no way he was going to be able to convince Bruce to act on it. Oh it might be enough to get him to look into the shipment, but there was no way he’d link it to the Red Hood unless that smug jerk was picking up the weapons in person. And that was assuming he didn’t lecture right over Dick’s discovery and then cut him out of the case entirely for being biased.

So Dick had to prove that’s what this was, that that’s where these were going, and then he could call in the big bad Bat.

He needed to get closer.

Getting off of the warehouse roof he was perched on was easy enough, a story and a half landing he could make blindfolded and in his sleep. The rain offered enough noise coverage and turned the night shades of slick-black that ought to let him get close without having to pull out his best impression of a barrel. He’d put work into that one, and while it was enough to get Alfred to crack a smile, he hadn’t had the chance to field test it yet.

Probably best not to pull out new tricks when he didn’t have backup.

As he crept closer, he caught the dull sound of voices shouting over the wind. Not really the smartest thing to do if they were trying to get away with a crime, but plenty of the criminal element in town had a few screws loose and it was cold enough out Dick could see how they might think they were all alone out here.

Too bad for them they were wrong.

He couldn’t make out specific words, but that was secondary. He flicked the recording device in his belt on and he could review the audio later. There might be something useful in the back and forth, but if Dick wanted to get home with anything useful tonight he needed to keep his eyes on the prize.

The men were moving their cargo onto the back of a truck. Suggested either they weren’t going to a site elsewhere in the docks, or whoever they worked for had the foresight to check the weather reports. Dick wouldn’t trust Hood’s consideration for his employees as far as he could throw Croc. Hood was pretty scrawny, Dick was confident he could toss him at least a few metres if he caught him off guard. Moving Croc anywhere he didn’t want to be on the other hand required a kind of advantage Dick wans’t getting without multiple levers and a pulley or two.

These barrels, though, Dick was pretty sure he could throw at least a few feet. Even if they were full of guns and sand, he’d been working on getting past his regular body weight exercises into moving real amounts of iron. Dick was finally tall enough after his last growth spurt to be able to help with evac of potentially unconscious civilians without risking drag injuries, so now he needed to be able to move them easily and comfortably, and Bruce had stepped up his training to match.

He was pretty sure that would carry over into moving barrels full of crime. Probably.

And he only needed to move one far enough he could take a peek and some pictures, maybe throw a tracking device or two in there, and then he could go back home, get dry, and show Bruce that he was right, that Red Hood was dangerous and no degree of sad orphan vibes made him any less of a threat to the people they were supposed to be protecting.

Easy. Dick bet he could even convince Alfred to make him some hot chocolate when he got back if he pretended he’d gone out in the rain to finish his homework in the gazebo out on the grounds.

Dick took another few minutes to watch the rhythm of work, to find the beat of it and learn the gaps. There weren’t many, but they were there. Clearly no one was too invested in watching their sixes in the dark, and they were all darting between what little covering the awning that ringed the edge of the boat and the lip of the nearest warehouse offered to try to stave off the worst of the wet. That left the barrels in the middle of the boat unattended, at least for now. Dick would have to accept getting completely soaked, but at their current pace of work he’d have at least a minute or two to get his evidence.

Waving goodbye to the concept of being dry and embracing his future as a semi-aquatic bird, Dick waited for a man in a threadbare yellow rain slicker load another barrel precariously onto a dolly before slipping past him, sticking to the shadows of the dock lights and leaping onto the side of the boat.

His brother in inadvisable canary attire wheeled away the barrel down the ramp, and Dick thanked the last round of R&D Bruce had done on their gloves. The old design wouldn’t have had the grip to keep him from slipping into the harbour. As it was, he was able to twist himself up and over the lip of the boat, landing in a very quiet squelch as his socks pressed into the reinforced soles of his boots.

Urgh.

Maybe at the end of this Dick was going to need to find wherever it was Hood kept his wardrobe and dump water in all of his shoes or something. There had to be some kind of karmic retribution for this.

All around him, the sound of the rain had grown cacophonous, hitting the water, the steel of the drums, the deck beneath his feet. It was like he was in a bubble of sound and shifting pressure, and Dick couldn’t help feeling like he was an explorer of some kind, coming up on something old and untouched. He just hoped there wasn’t a surprise giant boulder hidden somewhere around here.

The barrel he’d set his sights on was indeed not that hard to move and there was a semi-reflective corrosives sticker plastered to the side of it, which to Dick cemented the reality that whatever was in here was a lie. Any corrosive in appropriate protective insulation ought to be heavier than this, just on sheer density. In the work of seconds Dick was able to teeter the barrel around the corner of the boat’s central cabin, not much space but hopefully enough for what he needed to do, and then it was just a matter of working the edge of a batarang under the lip of the lid, seesawing it back and forth until the steel popped loose.

Carefully, carefully, he took the lid in both hands and set it quietly on the deck. Then he took a look at its contents.

Just like he’d thought, the first thing he could see was sand going about three quarters of the way up. Dick snapped a quick picture and then leaned in to start digging one-handed. The other braced his weight on the edge so he didn’t tip headfirst in. One swipe, two, sand clumping together in the wake of his wet gloves and clinging to the creases in the fabric, and then- yes, contact with something plastic-wrapped and hard, metal for sure and made of edges. Dick wrapped his fingers around what he was giddily sure was a completely different kind of barrel, and let his tipping momentum carry him back and out.

It was still dark when his boots squelched onto the deck for the second time, but no amount of night or haphazard packaging could hide that he was now very clearly holding a partially assembled weapon that absolutely did not pass through Gotham’s firearm screening process.

Dick had his proof.

He took another few photos and then tossed it up and over the edge of the boat. Even if it was just the one, semi-automatic weapons weren’t the kind of thing Dick could let hit the street when he could do something about it. If he had the time, he’d dump out every barrel on board into the bay. And maybe after he’d presented the case to Bruce and gotten that hot chocolate, they’d come back just the two of them, the Dynamic Duo, to chase down this shipment and turn the weapons over to the police before they could hurt anyone.

The thought was a filament running through his chest, loops of glowing warmth wrapping themselves under and through his ribs. All he had to do was get home.