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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"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.

That's enough to make Renee frown, thoughtfully. "She wasn't acting strange, as she?"

It was a long time ago, and by Renee's reckoning, not long after that cold conversation that had her quitting the bar. She hopes she's just gone home without telling anyone.

"No stranger than usual, for someone who refuses to let anyone know her real name here and who was nearly killed by someone she trusted and who is the last child of an entire family."

Well, he has that. Renee smirks a little, and thinks of the weirdness that was Helena from her time.

And how weird this conversation is about to get, considering.

"I like her."

"You like her...ah." He pauses. "You do know I liked her as well." He figures that Renee means that very specific kind of like.

Well, she could have used more specific words, but she's sure Charlie will forgive her for keeping it vague.

"Yeah," Renee replies.

"Which makes it even more awkward than it already is." She's had lots of straight male friends, but their interests have never overlapped like this.

"Yeah. Awkward, I guess." Pause. "But what we had was long ago and very short, and if you and she are interested in each other, that's fine." And unlike many straight men, the idea of an ex being involved with another woman is neither a blow to his ego nor a source of immature titillation.