Before
“Damn, damn, damn, DAMN!!”
Cursing came easy to Ted Grant as he bounded up five flights of stairs, leaping the steps three at a time with an agility that belied his age. Time, which had once seemed so plentiful, now fought against him at every turn, reminding him with every chance that everyone’s clock must eventually strike twelve.
Grant had always been forthright, steadfast to the point of bullish, the only way was forwards and compromise was for those who didn’t know what they believed in. Gotham had turned him all about, left him standing the wrong way, left him believing that he needed more than he own two hands to get the job done. He ideology had been perverted, and now his stumbling about in another man’s methods was about to bite him on the ass.
Arthur Brown.
Cluemaster, thief, manipulator, criminal.
The man was many things, and none of them were flattering. He had become something else as of late, spooked, fearful, desperate.
Snitch.
Ted Grant’s snitch, his informant as the ‘Wildcat’ thought to reclaim some glory days, just one last hurrah as he brought some sense back to the streets of Gotham. But this wasn’t his arena, this wasn’t where he excelled, and now a man was about to die because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut.
He growled, frustration mounting as he zeroed in on the man’s apartment, a safe house that had proven to be anything but. The front door was already open but he smashed his way inside regardless, shoulder first with a splintering of wood. The clock was already well past twelve.
Anger was a frequent ally of Ted Grant, but tonight it evaporated following the gut punch of how utterly he had screwed up. Arthur Brown was dead; left to bleed out on his own floor, his eyes still open in regret.
Ted couldn’t find the words he wanted to curse with, not as he made his way over, right hand clenching as his senses absorbed the tangy scent of copper. He knew that he had to make the call; the Wildcat was no detective, before something caused him to hesitate.
A mumbling, a whimpering, a strangled cry of distress.
There was no hesitation, no thought for preserving the crime scene, forthright to the point of bullish he dragged the body of the deceased aside without a hint of ceremony. He threw open the door that the corpse had been blocking, revealing a child alone, a toddler who sat in a pool congealing blood, blue eyes numb with horror, her face patch worked with tiny handprints of crimson.
Ted Grant found he couldn’t breathe, his chest compressed beneath the staggering weight of his mistake.
Arthur Brown.
Cluemaster, thief, manipulator, criminal.
Father.
**********
Now
Adrenaline was the ideal companion for momentum, just as the skyline of the Narrows was the perfect playground for parkour. Stephanie Brown was blessed with both tonight, the teenager bounding from one obstacle to the next as blood pumped throughout her body like wildfire. A skip, a leap, a jump, there was to be no impediment to be found for the determined in her town, the forgotten District of Gotham overgrown, overpopulated and it’s buildings so ramshackle and close together that a single, death defying leap could carry you from one rooftop to the next.
There was no direction for her tonight, clad in a midnight guise of her own devising, Stephanie drove herself only forwards as she fought to silence the condemnation of an imagined jury. A flip, utterly unnecessary and yet intensely satisfying taking her from one ledge to another before a tuck, slide and tumble took her clean beneath a water tower, finding her feet again with heavy duty footwear before continuing her mad dash.
As her heart beat within her bosom, threatening to burst as she leapt, caught and grappled her way towards an even higher vantage, Brown found her senses flooded with an intensity of senses she had never before experienced. Everything was heightened as she battled against her body’s limits, survival instincts taking over as her subconscious could only imagine that she must be in some manner of danger, that every detail concerning her surroundings must be critical towards her continued well being.
This was the night, long imagined and yet never realised, this was the night that she would prove herself wrong, that she would prove everyone wrong, that she wasn’t...
She came to a sudden stop, the blonde almost stumbling as her boots struggled to secure purchase, her breaths coming out hot and heavy as reality came crashing back down around her, regardless of how hard she tried to outpace it. Stephanie stood with hands on hips, her head arched backwards as she almost padded in a small circle, a stitch burning down her side as though she had been stabbed.
“This is ludicrous,” she surmised, forcing herself to slow down, to stake stock for the first time since she had launched her small frame from out of her own window and into the night in a fit of indignation. “This is crazy,” Brown concluded, hands moving to her homemade bandana as she adjusted it, blue eyes once again being able to see out of the peepholes. “This is, this is not what sane people do.”
Stephanie turned about, her hands once again on hips, looking back the way she had come. Her mind boggled, the distance she had covered, how far she had come from home, not once thinking that she should go back. She should go back though, that was the smart thing to do, the right thing, to slip back through her window and close the shutters.
That would be the safe thing to do...
The echo of the gunshot was as real as it always was in the cramp confines of the Narrows, the half dozen that she heard each night from the safety of her home all the more stark when outside of it. Her blood froze, from fire to ice in a single instant and her furious heart ceased beating. Stephanie Brown felt straggled, her hands trembling as she swallowed a lump of charcoal, a prickling of all too familiar fear creeping downward.
The scream...
The scream she heard was something different; she had never heard that beyond her shuttered window...
The blonde was caught, attired in midnight guise and trapped somewhere between home and danger, eyes of the brightest blue fixated upon mankind’s oldest dilemma, waylaid by indecision and unable to move forwards...
Fight or Flight.
**********
Sometimes you could see a mistake coming, that didn’t make them any easier to avoid. Ted Grant had made his fair share of them, perhaps more than he was entitled to, and yet still they approached with a sense of inevitability.
He fell back onto his couch with a groan that echoed from the grave and with an ache in his bones that felt far from natural. Perhaps he had miscounted, he pondered, popping the tab from off his beer, perhaps he had dropped a life or two when he hadn’t been paying enough attention, lost in the cracks of the decades that flowed together. Perhaps he had less time left than he thought.
His mortality no longer concerned him, he had lived too long for that, experienced too much to demand more and yet time, now more than ever, he could feel it slipping away from him. Time, which had once been so plentiful, was now finite, and towards the end he found that was when he needed it the most. That’s when she needed him the most.
Placing the beer down without drinking, Ted lent forwards, pulling a wallet that was almost as old as he was from out of his pocket before flipping it open. Inside the confines of the crumpled leather was memorabilia worthy of a museum, shedding light onto a time that was already under threat of being obscured by history, but there was only one item that concerned him today.
Inside was a photo, a picture of himself with a toothy grin, a small girl sat across his shoulders. All big blue eyes and blonde hair, she wore a dress that a friend had helped him buy for her, her hands bunched up into tiny fists as she attempted to look as mean as possible, something in which she failed spectacularly, not that anyone would tell her. His ‘niece’, his little wildcat, always trying so damn hard to prove that she was brave, she couldn’t see that she didn’t have to prove it.
Ted Grant could see the mistake coming, he had seen it coming for some time, and yet there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. The problem was choice, it always came down to choice, the veteran of perhaps one too many conflicts putting the wallet down and rubbing his weary eyes. Let her fly, or reign her in, those were the options left to him, one of them was a mistake, but he couldn’t fathom which.
He wouldn’t know, couldn’t know, until it was too late, and that had always been his problem.
**********
Stephanie stood on the precipice.
The toes of her boots poked over the edge of the ledge, the alleyway below wedged between two storefronts and littered with debris. She could scarcely see the concrete, bathed in shadow and far from the lights of adjacent streets, but the people, those she could see all too clearly.
Brown could scarcely look away as humanity reduced itself to its base natures, an endless pantomime unfolding between the powerful and the powerless. One young women crouched huddled in a corner, her back against the garbage and her cheeks tearful, whilst a young man knelt as equally fearful, a pistol pressed against his temple. Three men prowled around them, full of vigour and unrepentant, their parts in this drama rapidly ascending to a crescendo.
She shouldn’t be here, a voice reminded Stephanie that she knew was hers, her hands shaking as she tried desperately to still them. She should be at home, safe and warm and protected from her nightmares by Bunny Big Ears, it’s what people in the Narrows did. Stay at home and ignore the tragedies unfolding, someone would come to prevent them; someone else would come to do it.
Stephanie knew the lie just as everyone did, she could taste it on her tongue without even having to say it, no-one would come. This was the Narrows, no-one would ever come, not even a Dark Knight.
Brown closed her eyes and lifted her right foot out, daring destiny to force her hand.
“I’m not afraid,” she told herself, barely a whisper as she controlled her breathing, fingers clenching into firm fists. “I’m not afraid. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”
She was, Stephanie confessed with soul searing clarity, one foot raised out over the unknown, her eyes now open as she accepted the truth of it, she was afraid. This was the Narrows, she was afraid, and she always was.
They were all afraid, and no-one was going to save them.
With a near silent yip, the girl clad in midnight stepped off her precipice, and plummeted into the abyss.
**********
“Come on, Barry, really, a girl?” Tristan Chetwind scolded, his tone filled with malicious merriment, dismissively waving one hand whilst wielding a pistol with the other. He pressed the barrel of his weapon against the temple of his victim to accentuate his question, finger twitching on the trigger, “I feel we made ourselves pretty clear before Barry, did I stutter, is that it? Because I gotta say Barry, breaking my trust like that, for a girl, it’s hurtful. Bros before Hoes Barry, you know, Bros before Hoes.”
“She doesn’t know anything,” the young man pleaded, penitent on his knees whilst one of his former associates held a gun to his head, another two corralling his weeping girlfriend, Rebecca’s grip on his sanity slipping beneath the weight of fear. He was forced to kneel, paralysed, his eyes rimed red and limbs turned to lead, horror gripping his every muscle in an iron vice. “I didn’t tell her anything.”
“Oh, well, I guess that’s fine then,” Tristan dismissed, leaning down to press his crooked grin closer to his old subordinate. “Just so long as you didn’t tell her anything, too bad the same can’t be said of Gotham’s Finest, can it? All because you had a change of heart? I mean really Barry, was it that good? Be honest, she strikes me as a seven at best.”
“Leave her alone,” the young man dared to turn his head and nothing else, “please.”
“I’d consider it,” Tristan scoffed, standing straight again before cocking back the hammer, “if you hadn’t begged.” Chetwind stepped back, preparing to deliver the coup de grace, “Tell me Barry, you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlit...”
He never had the chance to finish the sentiment, not as every single pound of Stephanie Brown smashed Tristan to the ground. With the teenager arriving feet first, Chetwind was almost visibly planted into the pavement beneath the splintering of several broken bones and a straggled yelp. His pain was mercifully short lived, the man almost immediately knocked unconscious as his head struck the pavement with a wet crack.
He twitched, and then laid still, the first of Gotham’s criminal’s to be struck down by its latest vigilante.
**********
With every single inch of her slight frame protesting from the sudden impact, one that sent jolt right up the length of her spine like a bolt of lightning, Stephanie tucked and rolled with the momentum of her rapid descent, leaping back up onto her feet with a less than stellar stumble.
“OH SH*T!” she shouted, instinctively patting herself down and ensuring that all of her limbs remained intact, looking back up to the ledge high above that she had just jumped from. “Did you SEE that?” she asked breathlessly, shock threatening to take hold in the face of her own audacity, looking back down at the crumpled, unconscious mess of a human being that she had landed on. “I wasn’t even aiming for this guy!” she paused, gripped by sudden concern, looking to the two remaining assailants as they watched on in disbelief.
“He was with you, right?”
The taller of the duo answered with a scowl, shaking off his stupor and advancing rapidly, Stephanie exhaling a deep sigh of relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she smiled, despite the flutter of outright panic that threatened to take hold in the face of an advancing thug. Muscle memory took over, Brown making a mental note to thank her Uncle later, the young women deftly stepping back and securing her balance before pirouetting her entire frame about in a glorious spinning high kick! The heel of her boot cracked the man clean across his jaw, spittle escaping from his lips as his angry eyes instantly turned vacant. With limbs turning into noodles, he tumbled sideways, his head bouncing off a wall before he slumped down beside a dumpster.
“Could you imagine if I totalled a civilian?” Brown continued explaining as though the gent could still hear her, “I’d never hear the end of it.”
Stephanie stepped sideways, her eyes snapping open wide as the final assailant came at her fast, right arm extended with a knife in hand, and his shout incoherent as she avoided the attempted stabbing. “Use your words,” she chided as his momentum took him straight on past the girl who was half his bodyweight, the masked vigilante a bullfighter avoiding his charge.
He turned about, teeth bared, tightening his grip on his blade before advancing again, scarcely holding in his aggression as he swung wildly. Brown sidestepped, once, twice, before snapping her own arms up in a defensive stance, her wrists locked into a V and catching his between them, halting the downward momentum of his slashing strike. With a swift rotation of her palms, she gripped his forearm and twisted, superior leverage making up for the disparity in strength. Stephanie rolled the man’s shoulder and forced him to drop forwards with an uncontained yelp, the entirety of his limb contorted and pointed in incorrect directions to the point of breaking, his weapon slipping free from numb fingers.
“A knife, in a fist fight?” Stephanie chided again; scarcely able to prevent a smile from encroaching upon her features, her heart beating a thousand miles an minute, “not exactly civilised.”
She was met only with more growling, menace lacing every unspoken syllable, Brown about to add further salt to his verbal wounds before she failed to take notice of a disturbance behind her. The second assailant had recovered, scraping himself off the pavement and grappling her from behind, muscular arms slipping beneath her own and a set of palms slapping down hard behind her exposed neck, locking the much smaller young women in a viciously firm Full Nelson.
Stephanie struggled but leverage was no longer her advantage, the blonde tied up into a knot, mounting pressure being applied against the top of her spine at the base of skull. Eyelids fluttered as the third assailant, freed from his arm lock, rolled his shoulder before smiling viciously.
He pulled back and advanced, grinning as he slammed his right fist into the girls exposed gut, Brown explosively exhaling almost every ounce of air from her small body. “Better,” she snarled, following up with an explosive cross, knuckles cracking into Stephanie’s temple and setting her ears to ringing. “Much bette...”
Brown’s survival instincts kicked into overdrive, right leg jackknifing upwards almost explosively, the shin of her heavy duty footwear slamming into the thirds assailants’ unprotected groin. With eyes threatening to pop clean out of his skull and onto the pavement, he dropped like a proverbial sack of manure, a quivering mess of smashed scrotum.
The man who held her captive within his embrace was not to be spared either, boots that was made for kicking equally good at stomping. She brought her heel down with unrepentant vengeance, breaking a few toes and forcing a howl to escape her would be capture. He released his hold, Stephanie slipping free and, scarcely a moment lately, threw her own cranium backwards, slamming the hardest part of her skull into his far more fragile nose. Cartilage exploded in a spray of crimson and, teetering for a second longer, he finally collapsed for the rest of the evening.
Brown was free to shake her own noggin, blinking rapidly as she fought to regain her own bearings, ears still ringing and vision blurry. She wasn’t the only one recovering, much to her dismay, the man she had just punted in his nethers exhaling deeply and struggling to stand with wide eyed indignation.
“Oh come on,” Stephanie shook her head, taking a moment to lean forwards and catch her own breath, “you know, if it makes any difference, if you stay down, I won’t think any less of you.”
He wasn’t listening, blood staining his lips from where he had bitten the inside of his own cheek, “Do you know who we are?” he demanded, swallowing his own pain as she stood upright, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I WORK FOR!?!”
Stephanie spread out her own arms, quite literally not caring, “Do I strike you as a Detective?”
The final assailant grit his teeth, eyes filled with murder, advancing rapidly with a straggled cry.
Stephanie stepped back, arms upraised and defensive as she found her calm and balance, the very image of her Uncle as she unleashed a haymaker that he would be proud of, flattening a man twice her size with a knockout punch...
**********
No time had passed, on some level she understood that, and yet it felt like an eternity. Her hands were shaking, Stephanie looking at them in disbelief as they did so, her body flooding with a dangerous concoction of adrenaline, excitement, relief and crippling fear. She was still in the ally, surrounded by the unconscious bodies of three men who had been prepared to kill her, and in the very moment that the last one fell it was as though she were awakening in someone else’s body.
Brown could barely bring herself to form new thoughts as shock fought against heightened awareness, stark clarity against numbing disbelief. Her hands continued shaking as she patted down her attire, somehow finding that everything was still in one piece, and yet a wave of exhaustion threatened to drag her downwards into a foetal position.
She was alive...
A whimper broke through her distorted grip on reality, a strangled cry of distress.
Stephanie turned about, blinking in an attempt to find focus, a young man and women crouched huddled in a corner, seeking cover in the smallest alcove of the Narrows that they could find, huddled as best they could be from danger. “Are you,” she stammered, holding her hands out in peace, “are you afraid? Are you afraid of me?”
They did not answer, only looking on in uncertainty.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” she asked of them, a lump forming in her throat where there should not be one, “Please, please don’t be afraid of me.”
“Who are you?” one of them ventured, in later days, Stephanie would not be able to recall which. She could only remember being struck by a sudden, overwhelming sense of clarity, understanding there and then, this orphan of the Narrows, that she didn’t have an answer.
“Who do you want me to be?”
END
“Damn, damn, damn, DAMN!!”
Cursing came easy to Ted Grant as he bounded up five flights of stairs, leaping the steps three at a time with an agility that belied his age. Time, which had once seemed so plentiful, now fought against him at every turn, reminding him with every chance that everyone’s clock must eventually strike twelve.
Grant had always been forthright, steadfast to the point of bullish, the only way was forwards and compromise was for those who didn’t know what they believed in. Gotham had turned him all about, left him standing the wrong way, left him believing that he needed more than he own two hands to get the job done. He ideology had been perverted, and now his stumbling about in another man’s methods was about to bite him on the ass.
Arthur Brown.
Cluemaster, thief, manipulator, criminal.
The man was many things, and none of them were flattering. He had become something else as of late, spooked, fearful, desperate.
Snitch.
Ted Grant’s snitch, his informant as the ‘Wildcat’ thought to reclaim some glory days, just one last hurrah as he brought some sense back to the streets of Gotham. But this wasn’t his arena, this wasn’t where he excelled, and now a man was about to die because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut.
He growled, frustration mounting as he zeroed in on the man’s apartment, a safe house that had proven to be anything but. The front door was already open but he smashed his way inside regardless, shoulder first with a splintering of wood. The clock was already well past twelve.
Anger was a frequent ally of Ted Grant, but tonight it evaporated following the gut punch of how utterly he had screwed up. Arthur Brown was dead; left to bleed out on his own floor, his eyes still open in regret.
Ted couldn’t find the words he wanted to curse with, not as he made his way over, right hand clenching as his senses absorbed the tangy scent of copper. He knew that he had to make the call; the Wildcat was no detective, before something caused him to hesitate.
A mumbling, a whimpering, a strangled cry of distress.
There was no hesitation, no thought for preserving the crime scene, forthright to the point of bullish he dragged the body of the deceased aside without a hint of ceremony. He threw open the door that the corpse had been blocking, revealing a child alone, a toddler who sat in a pool congealing blood, blue eyes numb with horror, her face patch worked with tiny handprints of crimson.
Ted Grant found he couldn’t breathe, his chest compressed beneath the staggering weight of his mistake.
Arthur Brown.
Cluemaster, thief, manipulator, criminal.
Father.
**********
Now
Adrenaline was the ideal companion for momentum, just as the skyline of the Narrows was the perfect playground for parkour. Stephanie Brown was blessed with both tonight, the teenager bounding from one obstacle to the next as blood pumped throughout her body like wildfire. A skip, a leap, a jump, there was to be no impediment to be found for the determined in her town, the forgotten District of Gotham overgrown, overpopulated and it’s buildings so ramshackle and close together that a single, death defying leap could carry you from one rooftop to the next.
There was no direction for her tonight, clad in a midnight guise of her own devising, Stephanie drove herself only forwards as she fought to silence the condemnation of an imagined jury. A flip, utterly unnecessary and yet intensely satisfying taking her from one ledge to another before a tuck, slide and tumble took her clean beneath a water tower, finding her feet again with heavy duty footwear before continuing her mad dash.
As her heart beat within her bosom, threatening to burst as she leapt, caught and grappled her way towards an even higher vantage, Brown found her senses flooded with an intensity of senses she had never before experienced. Everything was heightened as she battled against her body’s limits, survival instincts taking over as her subconscious could only imagine that she must be in some manner of danger, that every detail concerning her surroundings must be critical towards her continued well being.
This was the night, long imagined and yet never realised, this was the night that she would prove herself wrong, that she would prove everyone wrong, that she wasn’t...
She came to a sudden stop, the blonde almost stumbling as her boots struggled to secure purchase, her breaths coming out hot and heavy as reality came crashing back down around her, regardless of how hard she tried to outpace it. Stephanie stood with hands on hips, her head arched backwards as she almost padded in a small circle, a stitch burning down her side as though she had been stabbed.
“This is ludicrous,” she surmised, forcing herself to slow down, to stake stock for the first time since she had launched her small frame from out of her own window and into the night in a fit of indignation. “This is crazy,” Brown concluded, hands moving to her homemade bandana as she adjusted it, blue eyes once again being able to see out of the peepholes. “This is, this is not what sane people do.”
Stephanie turned about, her hands once again on hips, looking back the way she had come. Her mind boggled, the distance she had covered, how far she had come from home, not once thinking that she should go back. She should go back though, that was the smart thing to do, the right thing, to slip back through her window and close the shutters.
That would be the safe thing to do...
The echo of the gunshot was as real as it always was in the cramp confines of the Narrows, the half dozen that she heard each night from the safety of her home all the more stark when outside of it. Her blood froze, from fire to ice in a single instant and her furious heart ceased beating. Stephanie Brown felt straggled, her hands trembling as she swallowed a lump of charcoal, a prickling of all too familiar fear creeping downward.
The scream...
The scream she heard was something different; she had never heard that beyond her shuttered window...
The blonde was caught, attired in midnight guise and trapped somewhere between home and danger, eyes of the brightest blue fixated upon mankind’s oldest dilemma, waylaid by indecision and unable to move forwards...
Fight or Flight.
**********
Sometimes you could see a mistake coming, that didn’t make them any easier to avoid. Ted Grant had made his fair share of them, perhaps more than he was entitled to, and yet still they approached with a sense of inevitability.
He fell back onto his couch with a groan that echoed from the grave and with an ache in his bones that felt far from natural. Perhaps he had miscounted, he pondered, popping the tab from off his beer, perhaps he had dropped a life or two when he hadn’t been paying enough attention, lost in the cracks of the decades that flowed together. Perhaps he had less time left than he thought.
His mortality no longer concerned him, he had lived too long for that, experienced too much to demand more and yet time, now more than ever, he could feel it slipping away from him. Time, which had once been so plentiful, was now finite, and towards the end he found that was when he needed it the most. That’s when she needed him the most.
Placing the beer down without drinking, Ted lent forwards, pulling a wallet that was almost as old as he was from out of his pocket before flipping it open. Inside the confines of the crumpled leather was memorabilia worthy of a museum, shedding light onto a time that was already under threat of being obscured by history, but there was only one item that concerned him today.
Inside was a photo, a picture of himself with a toothy grin, a small girl sat across his shoulders. All big blue eyes and blonde hair, she wore a dress that a friend had helped him buy for her, her hands bunched up into tiny fists as she attempted to look as mean as possible, something in which she failed spectacularly, not that anyone would tell her. His ‘niece’, his little wildcat, always trying so damn hard to prove that she was brave, she couldn’t see that she didn’t have to prove it.
Ted Grant could see the mistake coming, he had seen it coming for some time, and yet there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. The problem was choice, it always came down to choice, the veteran of perhaps one too many conflicts putting the wallet down and rubbing his weary eyes. Let her fly, or reign her in, those were the options left to him, one of them was a mistake, but he couldn’t fathom which.
He wouldn’t know, couldn’t know, until it was too late, and that had always been his problem.
**********
Stephanie stood on the precipice.
The toes of her boots poked over the edge of the ledge, the alleyway below wedged between two storefronts and littered with debris. She could scarcely see the concrete, bathed in shadow and far from the lights of adjacent streets, but the people, those she could see all too clearly.
Brown could scarcely look away as humanity reduced itself to its base natures, an endless pantomime unfolding between the powerful and the powerless. One young women crouched huddled in a corner, her back against the garbage and her cheeks tearful, whilst a young man knelt as equally fearful, a pistol pressed against his temple. Three men prowled around them, full of vigour and unrepentant, their parts in this drama rapidly ascending to a crescendo.
She shouldn’t be here, a voice reminded Stephanie that she knew was hers, her hands shaking as she tried desperately to still them. She should be at home, safe and warm and protected from her nightmares by Bunny Big Ears, it’s what people in the Narrows did. Stay at home and ignore the tragedies unfolding, someone would come to prevent them; someone else would come to do it.
Stephanie knew the lie just as everyone did, she could taste it on her tongue without even having to say it, no-one would come. This was the Narrows, no-one would ever come, not even a Dark Knight.
Brown closed her eyes and lifted her right foot out, daring destiny to force her hand.
“I’m not afraid,” she told herself, barely a whisper as she controlled her breathing, fingers clenching into firm fists. “I’m not afraid. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”
She was, Stephanie confessed with soul searing clarity, one foot raised out over the unknown, her eyes now open as she accepted the truth of it, she was afraid. This was the Narrows, she was afraid, and she always was.
They were all afraid, and no-one was going to save them.
With a near silent yip, the girl clad in midnight stepped off her precipice, and plummeted into the abyss.
**********
“Come on, Barry, really, a girl?” Tristan Chetwind scolded, his tone filled with malicious merriment, dismissively waving one hand whilst wielding a pistol with the other. He pressed the barrel of his weapon against the temple of his victim to accentuate his question, finger twitching on the trigger, “I feel we made ourselves pretty clear before Barry, did I stutter, is that it? Because I gotta say Barry, breaking my trust like that, for a girl, it’s hurtful. Bros before Hoes Barry, you know, Bros before Hoes.”
“She doesn’t know anything,” the young man pleaded, penitent on his knees whilst one of his former associates held a gun to his head, another two corralling his weeping girlfriend, Rebecca’s grip on his sanity slipping beneath the weight of fear. He was forced to kneel, paralysed, his eyes rimed red and limbs turned to lead, horror gripping his every muscle in an iron vice. “I didn’t tell her anything.”
“Oh, well, I guess that’s fine then,” Tristan dismissed, leaning down to press his crooked grin closer to his old subordinate. “Just so long as you didn’t tell her anything, too bad the same can’t be said of Gotham’s Finest, can it? All because you had a change of heart? I mean really Barry, was it that good? Be honest, she strikes me as a seven at best.”
“Leave her alone,” the young man dared to turn his head and nothing else, “please.”
“I’d consider it,” Tristan scoffed, standing straight again before cocking back the hammer, “if you hadn’t begged.” Chetwind stepped back, preparing to deliver the coup de grace, “Tell me Barry, you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlit...”
He never had the chance to finish the sentiment, not as every single pound of Stephanie Brown smashed Tristan to the ground. With the teenager arriving feet first, Chetwind was almost visibly planted into the pavement beneath the splintering of several broken bones and a straggled yelp. His pain was mercifully short lived, the man almost immediately knocked unconscious as his head struck the pavement with a wet crack.
He twitched, and then laid still, the first of Gotham’s criminal’s to be struck down by its latest vigilante.
**********
With every single inch of her slight frame protesting from the sudden impact, one that sent jolt right up the length of her spine like a bolt of lightning, Stephanie tucked and rolled with the momentum of her rapid descent, leaping back up onto her feet with a less than stellar stumble.
“OH SH*T!” she shouted, instinctively patting herself down and ensuring that all of her limbs remained intact, looking back up to the ledge high above that she had just jumped from. “Did you SEE that?” she asked breathlessly, shock threatening to take hold in the face of her own audacity, looking back down at the crumpled, unconscious mess of a human being that she had landed on. “I wasn’t even aiming for this guy!” she paused, gripped by sudden concern, looking to the two remaining assailants as they watched on in disbelief.
“He was with you, right?”
The taller of the duo answered with a scowl, shaking off his stupor and advancing rapidly, Stephanie exhaling a deep sigh of relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she smiled, despite the flutter of outright panic that threatened to take hold in the face of an advancing thug. Muscle memory took over, Brown making a mental note to thank her Uncle later, the young women deftly stepping back and securing her balance before pirouetting her entire frame about in a glorious spinning high kick! The heel of her boot cracked the man clean across his jaw, spittle escaping from his lips as his angry eyes instantly turned vacant. With limbs turning into noodles, he tumbled sideways, his head bouncing off a wall before he slumped down beside a dumpster.
“Could you imagine if I totalled a civilian?” Brown continued explaining as though the gent could still hear her, “I’d never hear the end of it.”
Stephanie stepped sideways, her eyes snapping open wide as the final assailant came at her fast, right arm extended with a knife in hand, and his shout incoherent as she avoided the attempted stabbing. “Use your words,” she chided as his momentum took him straight on past the girl who was half his bodyweight, the masked vigilante a bullfighter avoiding his charge.
He turned about, teeth bared, tightening his grip on his blade before advancing again, scarcely holding in his aggression as he swung wildly. Brown sidestepped, once, twice, before snapping her own arms up in a defensive stance, her wrists locked into a V and catching his between them, halting the downward momentum of his slashing strike. With a swift rotation of her palms, she gripped his forearm and twisted, superior leverage making up for the disparity in strength. Stephanie rolled the man’s shoulder and forced him to drop forwards with an uncontained yelp, the entirety of his limb contorted and pointed in incorrect directions to the point of breaking, his weapon slipping free from numb fingers.
“A knife, in a fist fight?” Stephanie chided again; scarcely able to prevent a smile from encroaching upon her features, her heart beating a thousand miles an minute, “not exactly civilised.”
She was met only with more growling, menace lacing every unspoken syllable, Brown about to add further salt to his verbal wounds before she failed to take notice of a disturbance behind her. The second assailant had recovered, scraping himself off the pavement and grappling her from behind, muscular arms slipping beneath her own and a set of palms slapping down hard behind her exposed neck, locking the much smaller young women in a viciously firm Full Nelson.
Stephanie struggled but leverage was no longer her advantage, the blonde tied up into a knot, mounting pressure being applied against the top of her spine at the base of skull. Eyelids fluttered as the third assailant, freed from his arm lock, rolled his shoulder before smiling viciously.
He pulled back and advanced, grinning as he slammed his right fist into the girls exposed gut, Brown explosively exhaling almost every ounce of air from her small body. “Better,” she snarled, following up with an explosive cross, knuckles cracking into Stephanie’s temple and setting her ears to ringing. “Much bette...”
Brown’s survival instincts kicked into overdrive, right leg jackknifing upwards almost explosively, the shin of her heavy duty footwear slamming into the thirds assailants’ unprotected groin. With eyes threatening to pop clean out of his skull and onto the pavement, he dropped like a proverbial sack of manure, a quivering mess of smashed scrotum.
The man who held her captive within his embrace was not to be spared either, boots that was made for kicking equally good at stomping. She brought her heel down with unrepentant vengeance, breaking a few toes and forcing a howl to escape her would be capture. He released his hold, Stephanie slipping free and, scarcely a moment lately, threw her own cranium backwards, slamming the hardest part of her skull into his far more fragile nose. Cartilage exploded in a spray of crimson and, teetering for a second longer, he finally collapsed for the rest of the evening.
Brown was free to shake her own noggin, blinking rapidly as she fought to regain her own bearings, ears still ringing and vision blurry. She wasn’t the only one recovering, much to her dismay, the man she had just punted in his nethers exhaling deeply and struggling to stand with wide eyed indignation.
“Oh come on,” Stephanie shook her head, taking a moment to lean forwards and catch her own breath, “you know, if it makes any difference, if you stay down, I won’t think any less of you.”
He wasn’t listening, blood staining his lips from where he had bitten the inside of his own cheek, “Do you know who we are?” he demanded, swallowing his own pain as she stood upright, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I WORK FOR!?!”
Stephanie spread out her own arms, quite literally not caring, “Do I strike you as a Detective?”
The final assailant grit his teeth, eyes filled with murder, advancing rapidly with a straggled cry.
Stephanie stepped back, arms upraised and defensive as she found her calm and balance, the very image of her Uncle as she unleashed a haymaker that he would be proud of, flattening a man twice her size with a knockout punch...
**********
No time had passed, on some level she understood that, and yet it felt like an eternity. Her hands were shaking, Stephanie looking at them in disbelief as they did so, her body flooding with a dangerous concoction of adrenaline, excitement, relief and crippling fear. She was still in the ally, surrounded by the unconscious bodies of three men who had been prepared to kill her, and in the very moment that the last one fell it was as though she were awakening in someone else’s body.
Brown could barely bring herself to form new thoughts as shock fought against heightened awareness, stark clarity against numbing disbelief. Her hands continued shaking as she patted down her attire, somehow finding that everything was still in one piece, and yet a wave of exhaustion threatened to drag her downwards into a foetal position.
She was alive...
A whimper broke through her distorted grip on reality, a strangled cry of distress.
Stephanie turned about, blinking in an attempt to find focus, a young man and women crouched huddled in a corner, seeking cover in the smallest alcove of the Narrows that they could find, huddled as best they could be from danger. “Are you,” she stammered, holding her hands out in peace, “are you afraid? Are you afraid of me?”
They did not answer, only looking on in uncertainty.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” she asked of them, a lump forming in her throat where there should not be one, “Please, please don’t be afraid of me.”
“Who are you?” one of them ventured, in later days, Stephanie would not be able to recall which. She could only remember being struck by a sudden, overwhelming sense of clarity, understanding there and then, this orphan of the Narrows, that she didn’t have an answer.
“Who do you want me to be?”
END