milliways_bar | (no subject)

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[oom: finding the way]

The last few days have been... intense is a word, incredible is another. Barry's not sure where he lies between the two at the moment as he steps out of Iron Heights prison and into...

"The bar?" He looks around a little stunned, and then he smiles. It's a little weary, he's been wrung out physically and emotionally, but he's recovering steadily from both.

Letting the door close behind him he swipes at his face with his hand, wiping away the last of any tears that might have been left from a visit with his dad. Straightening the sweater he has on over his t-shirt and blue jeans he walks across the bar.

Remembering from his first visit to Milliways how time can be weird here he wonders how much has passed from then to now.

Approaching the counter he sits down on a stool carefully, looking down at the bar top and hesitantly offering a greeting. "Hi, I don't know if you remember me, but-- "

A plate loaded with chicken alfredo appears and beside it a napkin with note that reads Welcome back, Barry.

Barry blinks at the food and the note, then laughs.

"Thanks," he says and starts digging in, suddenly aware that he's starving. Bar subtly provides refills as he works through the food and in between bites Barry takes in the place.

Yeah, he's pretty glad to be back.

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"Your friends and family? It's not easy, managing their fears and hopes as well as dealing with the shifts in your own identity."

"It's amazing how the bigger weird puts the smaller ones in perspective." He chuckles.

"Question for me, to put things in context before I start. You have a Batman in your world? At least that you know of?"

"I think the hardest part is just not being able to tell them," he replies with a touch of disappointment. "Joe, he's my foster dad, he found out and the first thing he made me promise was to not tell his daughter Iris. Which is gonna be really hard because she's my best friend."

He sighs and shakes his head, pacing a few steps back and forth as anxious energy builds up.

"Then I went and saw my dad and realized I couldn't tell him, either." Barry just couldn't worry him like that, not after putting the man through nine months of a coma where he couldn't even visit his son.

"So yeah, it's been... " he throws up his hands in a helpless gesture, because that's mostly how it feels.

He's still moving when Jay starts talking about batmen, but Barry's eyes are on Jay to show he listening.

"Not that I know of. That's not some weird bat-human hybrid thing, is it?"

Jay starts walking towards the lake, not to go anywhere but because he can tell Barry needs movement, no matter how slow. "It's not an easy secret to keep. Even of you are doing it to protect people. Who you are has changed and it will be hard to hide that. Not just your abilities, but who you are inside." Jay sympathises. "That's one of the reasons this place can be good for people like us. It's a place you can lower the mask and feel safe. Not everyone gets that at first, it's not easy to relax if you've had secrecy hammered into you but it is safe."

Jay can't help but chuckle. "There's that too but no. I figured that might be the case, seeing you didn't react to me being from Gotham. In the timeline I'm from, there's a vigilante called Batman who protects Gotham. He's a sneaky, dark and generally grim bastard who occasionally teams up with others in the community to deal with bigger threats. He was who I trained under." Jay's face darkens. "I was his sidekick." The way he spits the word is pure bitterness.

'People like us.'

The idea that he isn't the only one actually helps a lot.

Barry walks with Jay, keeping pace with him and having a bit of a look around while listening.

"I still feel like the same guy," he says, not sure about the whole inside thing. "I don't think I've changed a lot, I mean, it's literally been three days. I remember a little bit about the storm and being hit, and then I'm waking up. I've heard what happened in between, but it's not really real for me, you know? I wasn't actually there, so it isn't really affecting me.

"But everyone else... " he sighs, running through all the things he's missed. "Joe has a new partner because his was killed that night, Iris has a boyfriend and I don't-- " have anything to say to that, given the way he swallows the words and settles for shaking his head.

"It's just a lot has changed, but I don't know how much I have." He glances at Jay to see if any of that made sense.

Walking along, looking up towards the sky he realizes it doesn't align with anything he knows, which is interesting. Not letting himself get distracted by it, though, he looks back down at Jay when he hears the venom in his voice at that word.

"You... didn't like being a sidekick?" It's obvious, but asking gives Jay a chance to explain if he wants to.

"Abilities are like money. They amplify both the best and the worst in people. They don't change who you are, just how you deal with things. And give you different options. The trick is remembering that it's not the only solution and remember how you would have approached something before you had the other option." He shrugs. "I don't have abilities but I went from nothing to an heir to very old money. It took a lot of adjusting."

"Children shouldn't be soldiers. Not now, not ever. It's one of the issues I have with the Ollie from my world. He did the same thing."

"You mean like how I would've approached a metahuman before?" he asks, amused by the thought. "I probably would've died. Or been hurt really bad."

His laugh sobers and he gives Jay a concerned look.

"How old were you?"

"And knowing that, you'd think about what to do, rather than just run in. Engage this," he points to Barry's head, "rather than putting all your faith in these." He kicks lightly at Barry's ankles, connecting with a very light tap.

Jay walks on a moment before answering. "When I started I was thirteen. It got me killed just before I turned sixteen."

Barry hops a step, chuckling, but also considering what Jay is saying and nodding.

"That makes sense. I know I'm not invincible, so I'll try and remember it." He flexes his arm, thinking about how damn much it had hurt when he'd broken it.

Looking over at Jay his brow furrows. "Your dead?"

"I've known very powerful metas who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. And powerless humans who could out-fight, out-think and out-plan entire squads of metas. It's all about how you use what you've got."

"I was. It didn't take. As far as I've been able to work out, I was dead six months at least, maybe more."

"Like Oliver, he does everything without powers," he says, then, apologetic, "I know you don't like him, but on my world I think he's really a good guy. Now that he uh... stopped killing people with all the arrows."

He doesn't know what to make of Jay's resurrection. Sure Barry had been dead to the world for nine months, but that's hardly the same as being literally dead.

"How is that even possible?" he asks. "What happened? How are you alive now?"

"Actually his willingness to cross that line when needed was one of the few things I liked about him. How he treated his sidekick, which in your world he may not have, was what I disliked about him."

"To this day, no one knows. Not even the personification of Death. Well, the one from my world anyway. The one who comes here is a bit of a prick. And a scary one at that."

He scuffs his feet as they walk. "I... took on a monster I wasn't strong enough to fight. One I'd grown tired of watching my mentor catch and lock up, only to see him escape and kill again, over and over. Beat me to within an inch of my life then left me to watch the seconds tick down on a bomb I could reach to disarm."

He shrugs, hands in pockets and shoulders high. "I don't remember much before Death took me aside for a milkshake and a chat. She couldn't explain it, which she wasn't pleased about, but I had to go back. Woke up inside my own grave."

Barry starts to comment on the killing thing, then decides now isn't really the time for that particular discussion so he steps right around it and shakes his head to the sidekick thing.

"No. I mean, he has people he works with, but I don't think either one of them would qualify as a 'sidekick'. I'm actually pretty sure they'd be pissed if he referred to either of them that way." Diggle is pretty intimidating in his own right, and Felicity was super nice, but Barry believes she also holds her own and wouldn't put up with something like that.

"Not that he can't be a jerk. He was pretty upset with them when he found out they'd told me his secret identity thing, but to be fair to him he had just woken up from almost dying and I did inject him with rat poison, so... " Barry shrugs. He can be very forgiving, even under crazy circumstances. "I'm also mostly sure he wasn't really going to put an arrow in me."

That's said with about ninety-eight percent confidence.

Listening to Jay talk about Death, Jay's and the personification (which... whuuuut?!), Barry doesn't really know what to say. There's a lot in there, from the way he died and the reason, to his chat with Death and return.

"Maybe... it just wasn't your time," he offers at last, looking over at Jay. "Lot of people talk about wanting a second chance, and for whatever reason, you got one."

Best not. It's kinda rough territory with Jay.

"Rat poison? You needed to thin Ollie's blood for something?"

Jay chuckles. "Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. I suspect whatever it was, I was just a side effect. I don't know about your world but mine, magic has costs. Serious costs. I might not have been my choice but I paid."

Barry grins, because Jay gets it.

"Yeah, yeah, I did. Oliver had been injected with something and it was causing intravenous coagulation." It has been pretty scary seeing the man laid out on the table like that.

"He was getting ready to stroke out, and the rat poison was there so... " Barry shrugs awkwardly. He'd made a call and luckily it worked out.

Barry shakes his head about the magic thing. "We don't have it in my world. It's honestly really weird to have it relied upon so heavily as an explanation here." Especially as a scientist.

"H--how did you pay?"

"What causes clotting that fast?" Jay asks curiously.

He scuffs his feet again. "Thing about waking up inside your own grave is you're in a wooden box, under six foot of dirt. By the time I kicked, punched and clawed my way out, I'd been without oxygen too long. I has sustained serious brain damage."

"I wandered the streets in a fugue state, surviving in instinct. I don't know how long, or what I'd did during that time but a... an acquaintance found me."

"Her father has control of a very powerful source of healing, known as the Lazarus Pit. It straitened out the damaged parts of my body and brain. But if left the rage. The only thing that has sustained me."

"In a high enough dose any Antifibrinolytic could potentially cause a rapid reaction," Barry replies. "Cyrus Gold, that super-strong guy I told you about? Oliver was fighting him inside a pharmaceutical warehouse. It apparently went really bad."

There's a quiet horror that shifts into Barry's expression as he listens to Jay talk about what happened to him, and a cold chill definitely runs down his spine at the idea of waking up in your own grave.

By the end he's frowning, looking over Jay with a concerned eye, just to verify that Jay is alright now. And alive.

"I can't even image that's-- " he shakes his head, at a loss for what to say. "But the rage... what do you mean by that? You still have it?"

"Oh yeah, that's ah, never going to end well. He was lucky to have you. Even if he had to work it out the hard way."

Jay chuckles lightly, a little too lightly. "Oh yeah. I still have it. It's still in me but I learnt to channel it. Talia recognised the signs and pointed me in the right direction. I spend a year under the training of a group called the All-Caste, learning to channel that rage. Of course, that's where it got complicated."

"More lucky his team had his back," Barry replies. "They were worried enough about him to trust me."

That chuckle makes Barry frown, and he gives Jay a dubious look, "That's when things got complicated?" This whole story is already crazy enough as it is.

Edited 2017-03-24 12:55 (UTC)

"Team?" Jay lifts a curious eyebrow.

"Talia's father found out she used the Pit without his consent. And like I said, magic has a cost. If ever you encounter Ra's al Ghul, you'll understand. He is... one of the most powerful people on earth. The cost of my life was service. To him and to the League of Shadows."

"Fortunately he allowed Talia to choose my assignment. Generally within my... moral scope. It was okay, for a while. But then I was ordered to do something I... wasn't willing to do. To protect someone who didn't deserve protection."

He shrugs, not meeting Barry's eye. "I don't do well around child molesters."

"Yeah. They help him out with his... crime... fighting," Barry replies, then adds, "They aren't sidekicks."

Just to make that perfectly clear.

"Diggle is like his bodyguard, I think... And Felicity, she does the computer stuff for him. Accessing traffic cams, running facial recognition through the criminal database, stuff like that. She's great." The assertion about Felicity has a little bit of fondness attached to it; Barry really did like her.

"Ra's al Ghul? Sounds Bond villain-y," he comments. He listens to the rest, stopping when Jay gets to the end and asking, "So what did you do?"

"Interesting." Jay hums, "She sounds very talented." He's hot teasing, really he's not.

"He does sound it but there's no high back chairs or stroking white cats. The League of Shadows are no joke."

He kicks a rock and watches it skitter. "I'm fairly sure he wishes I killed him." Jay muses, "but I didn't. I did take apart his little Empire and blow up his diamond mine, made sure the workers he had indentured to him got the profits."

He shrugs, "I can't give back the families he tore apart but at least some panther children were able to be repatriated."

"Needless to say, Ra's wasn't pleased."

Barry gives Jay a pointed look, the kind a friend who really isn't teasing (but totally is) gets.

"She's just a friend." A beat, and he adds with a flash of an embarrassed smile, "Though we did dance."

Barry gets that this al Ghul guy and situation isn't something to joke about, so he doesn't make any more cracks.

"But you stopped him, and saved people," Barry says, trying to point out the good.

"What did Ra's do?"

"Danced, huh?" Jay refuses to give up teasing. It's too much fun.

"He sent assassins to remonstrate with me. Not very good ones, which he knew. I suspect he picked people he didn't like because they didn't last long. Not after they killed someone I cared about in the crossfire."

"After that, he sent his best. Talia." He opens his shirt, showing three neat knife scars to his shoulder, chest and abdomen. "Her strikes were surgical - missing all major organs but putting me out of commission for a while. I was here healing for the better part of half of a year. It was her idea of mercy."

Edited 2017-03-25 12:21 (UTC)

Barry shakes his head, trying to act annoyed, but more bemused and embarrassed then anything.

"Yeah. She... asked me to a party at Oliver's. And we danced."

It had been really nice.

Nothing about Jay's story is nice, though. Barry's eyes widen when he sees the scars.

"Who-- who did they kill?" he asks, slowly dragging his eyes away from the wounds to Jay's face.

"Does she know about your speed? Or haven't you seen her since then?"

He lowers his shirt and touches a string of beads at his wrist, almost unconsciously. "His name was Ali. He was from the village I free from the diamond mine. He had the most eyes I've ever seen." He closes his eyes for a moment. "We hadn't known each other long but I was in love with him."