#this chapter is huge and madcap babes i'm so sorry

[flowerflamestars]

Robin fic snippet

“Kid.” He looked up, vivid, heartbroken anger adulterated by a scrunch between his brows, “You want me to kneecap him?”   “Yes.” Tim drummed his fingers against the wood, shockingly loud, “No. I want”-   “Someone to tell you you’re not crazy.”   Tim said nothing.   “There are no one way bonds,” Elle settled on saying. “Death echoes are not a coincidence. I know nothing about clones and less about aliens, but I do know that what you’re feeling is real, okay?”   Tim swallowed. “When Jason came back, you felt it, right?”   Like a supernova. A sunrise. A falling star, and then just a speck of light, for more than a year, before the Pit’s tide rolled fire back in. Gotham had revived him first, all at once, six feet under and so divorced from humanity it did not understand immediately, the diminished return of life without air.   “I felt it,” Elle said. “Warmth.”   Tim met her gaze. “Sunlight.”   No easy kind of kinship- what Elle would, frankly, wish on exactly no one.   But there was something to be said about the way magic drew people together. Every coincidence in Elle’s entire life- and Gotham itself, the power she’d pulled not calmly spooling away, but sitting up on her ribs in steady weight. Like a cat, purring.  Pleased.   “You have to tell me,” Elle began, settling her fingertips on the edge of the ash tray, lip thick enough it was probably a proper baccarat. In this house, there’d be nothing else. “What the hell not human enough to die, means. Especially if I ever find myself in an alley with this guy.”   “Not a lot of alley’s in Kansas.”   “Do you know,” Elle said, spinning kryptonite between her fingers, “There’s a minor breed of demon that lives only in cornfields. You could summon one with fifty pounds of sugar and half a wish.”   Tim laughed, the sound ravaged. “If you tell me what the hell Jason was thinking, giving you a gun.”   Not a surprise that he’d clocked her- but maybe one that it was questionable.   “I don’t know,” Elle planted her hip against the desk, “Blow big holes in anyone who fucks with you, I assume?”