milliways_bar | (no subject)

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If you'd been thinking that Renee has been avoiding the bar to stay in her room and heal, you'd be absolutely right.

Right now, though, there's an ex-cop out on the training grounds, standing on one had on a railing, her legs bent back over her head. There's just not enough space in her room for her usual style of meditation.

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For a few moments, Charlie is silent as he watches Renee calm herself. He knows it's just plain rude to interrupt such deeds.

"Does Tot freak when he sees you do that?"

He's just plain rude, it would seem.

She cracks an eye open and smiles, not moving the rest of her body in the slightest.

"Does mild and constant reminders that he disapproves of my methods count as freaking?"

"No. I would call that being a grumpy old man." He steps closer and takes a seat on the slightly muddy ground. "What doesn't he care for specifically? Or is he just in anti-vigilante mood?"

"I think he thinks meditation should happen sat down, and cross-legged," Renee reflects, slowly shifting her pose so her weight is on the other hand, "preferably while saying 'om'."

"He does have a way of being close-minded despite being a man of science. It was one of his charms.

"Are you getting along with him?" He knows it was a forced arrangement. He doesn't feel like it was a bad idea, but he sometimes wonders what might have happened if he has actually asked Tot first. Maybe the old man would have said yes.

"We're managing."

Things are definitely better than they used to be.

"He's got this idea about going online, setting up a website for me. You know, like dubdubdub ask the Question dot com."

"Well, you could set up a Questionsignal and wait till the cops call you. But then you would have to be all mysterious." He smirks with a rather strange gentleness. "It's not a bad idea, if you don't mind sifting through spammers, cranks, people with cats in trees, and the odd request that should be sent to the League or the Titans." Or whoever's still in business.

"I don't think he'll mind," Renee says, "I think he's kinda looking forward to it. Give him something to occupy himself."

The oblique reference to Batman, though. That has her thinking, and she gently bends her body back, starting to dismount.

"I was hoping he would return to research some day. But making him useful in other ways isn't bad." He knows that Tot has his reasons for never going into a lab again. But such so smart a man be valet to costumes? Or is that a better calling. Charlie can't say.

"Anything else going on?" He doesn't budge an inch from the ground.

Eventually, Renee joins him on the ground, despite her earlier dismissal of doing so.

"Not right now. We sort of had a big going-on just before I came in." A wry, but forced, smile. "Baby's first Crisis."

"Didn't we just have one?" We...he still feels connected to his world. And always will. "Luthor involved again? Max Lord?" Yes, Max was dead, but he can't imagine that will last. Bastards like that never stay dead.

Renee shakes her head. "That was years ago, Charlie."

When she had a badge, not a mask. When Crispus was alive and he and the Spectre were two different people. And Batman was never going to die.

"This was Darkseid."

He was going to say that he's been dead longer than he realized. But that one word stops in his tracks.

"God." He does not mean it ironically.

She still takes it ironically, and smirks.

"Yeah, pretty much. Me and Helena ended up facing down Cain in Gotham Cathedral."

"Cain? The assassin?" He smiles at the idea of Helena working with Renee. He bets they make a lousy team, with Helena's attitude.

Renee grins. "No, not David Cain. Cain. Of 'and Abel'. Running wild in the body of Vandal Savage."

"You're serious, aren't you? Because if anyone else told me this, I would not believe a word of it." Even the "of." "You faced down the most dangerous of warriors, possessed by the spirit of a figure from the Bible." Which is apparently real. He might owe his teachers at the orphanage an apology. "And won?"

Renee's smirk is kind of huge. "Well, we had help. But yeah, H and I totally kicked his ass. Even after we both got stabbed."

"Richard trained the both of you well after all." Not that he doubted. "You call her H to her face?"

"Not..." Renne trails off, and adjusts her position so one knee is up in front of her chest. "Not the one here. I haven't seen her since I left... and we didn't leave on the best of terms.

"Sorry, Charlie, for not saying goodbye."

He goes quiet for a moment. "You mean before you went off to save the world?

"I don't know that you have to apologize. I hated goodbyes. I probably still do. I don't think I actually say goodbye to you when I died, did I?"

"No," Renee admits. "But you weren't sayiing much, near the end."

This conversation took a morbid turn. Renee blames Helena.

"True. But I think we are even now.

"And if you want to say goodbye to me next time, then feel welcome to."

Yes. Morbid. But sometimes the dead are as morbid as the last surviving daughters of mobsters.

"I'll try not to leave in such a hurry next time anyway," Renee says. "I'm going to be here while I deal with the fallout from everything. And I need to talk to her.

"Have you spoken to her recently?"

"Not since Ash Wednesday, I think. She has a way of being..." Mysterious? "...A recluse. At least back then. It's good to know she mellows." Though not enough to make her easy to deal with in his meetings with her in life.