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Alec Hardison has known The Oracle since before she got the definitive article. Back when she was just oracle, no caps, lurking on the forums, swapping tricks and tips with the rest of them.
Eliot makes fun of it for him, but they’re friends. Internet friends maybe, but friends. They know each other, even if they don’t know each other’s names. ag30fg33k and oracle have been sending encrypted messages on servers to each other since Hardison was fifteen, and he knows her. He knows she had a foster daughter who was adopted by a friend of hers, and now she’s mentoring another girl. He knows she’s been engaged twice, used to date khaji-duh, and that she likes her coffee strong, has a fondness for superhero plushies, and that she uses a wheelchair.
He’s also like. ninety-nine percent sure that she used to be Batgirl, but it’s rude to ask that sort of thing, so he doesn’t. He does know that she knows Batman and a bunch of other superheroes, because when she gets really sleep deprived, she’ll text him a bunch of specific insults about whoever’s bugging her the most lately. They self-delete later, of course, all their encrypted texts do, but he savors the knowledge anyways.
So, when they go to Gotham to do a job, which is very unusual for them, because that place has a way too high supervillains-to-millionaires ratio to be worth their while, but this time an old friend of Nate’s asked him to help her save her free-clinic which is being threatened by some serious gentrification efforts, and Nate has that look in his eye that means that they’re probably going to end up going way too big, but Hardison is actually really excited, so he shoots Oracle a text message, asking her if she wants to meet up while they’re in town.
Sure. Your treat.
Absolutely. What’s the point of getting rich off a life of crime if you can’t treat the mastermind of the internet?
Grinning, he makes a note of the place she’s chosen, and then goes to start booking their rooms and supplies in Gotham City.
Parker is really excited to be going to Gotham! She loves Gotham! Gotham has lots of tall skyscrapers to jump off, lots of fancy art to steal, lots of gargoyles to perch on, and, best of all, it has Selina.
Selina is an old friend, who Archie introduced her two when she was little. Archie had trained Selina, like he’d trained Parker, and the two of them hit it off great, and the two of them do the best heists together.
She gets Hardison to give her Selina’s current address, which is some big house, and she breaks into it to ask her to go on a heist with her.
“Who the hell are you?” Demands a blonde, but not like, Parker blonde, fake-blonde. She’s mostly naked, and she’s sitting on top of a redhead. Oh, that’s a sex thing.
“I’m looking for Selina,” she says, squinting at the redhead to make sure it’s not Selina. Selina wears wigs, sometimes, but she’s never been green.
The redhead’s face emerges from between the not-blonde’s legs. “Get out,” she says, and nope, that’s not Selina.
Parker remembers what Eliot told her. “Sorry,” she says, and then she leaves.
She finds Selina in a room full of stuffed animals. “Parker!” Selina embraces her, doing the Sophie-thing that she does where she pretends to kiss both of Parker's cheeks. “I didn’t know you were in town!”
“You changed your phone number,” Parker says, which is true. Neither of them had exactly consistent cellphone numbers, and Parker wasn’t supposed to give out her encrypted thingy to people who weren’t on the crew. She and Archie had dead-drops, but she’d never arranged anything like that with Selina. Maybe she should? That’s a friend thing, right?
“True enough,” Selina says, laughing. “Oh, you’re just in time! One of the local museums has a wonderful exhibit, and they upgraded security. The main centerpiece is a stolen artifact from one of the local Tribal Nations, and I’ve got a friend who would dearly love her great-great-great grandmother’s necklace back.”
“Sounds fun!” Parker says. And Nate can’t even be mad! Hardison had made her that reading list of museum repatriation of artifacts, and so she can tell him, if he yells at her, that she’s being a good guy! She gets to have fun, and she’s helping people!
“Want to go case the place?” Selina offers her an arm, and Parker takes it, just like Sophie has taught her to. “Harley’s got a dress that should fit you just fine.”
“I think Harley’s busy,” Parker says. “But I’ve got a dress in my thief kit! Sophie says that it’s important to be ready for last minute black tie.”
“Now, she sounds like a woman I have to meet,” Selina purrs, and Parker laughs.
Eliot doesn’t particularly like Gotham City.
It’s not a good city. The food scene is terrible, the air is bad, the water is worse, and it’s dangerous. It makes him… itchy.
The only thing worth coming here for, besides the job, is the fact that Ted Grant has a gym there.
Ted Grant is a goddamn legend. Old school boxer, one of the best there ever was, in Eliot’s humble opinion. The man retired as the undefeated heavy-weight champion, and then the man decided to start one of the best self-defense clubs and training gyms in the world.
Gotham was the original. Eliot’s been to some of the others, but he’s never had a chance to see the man himself in action. He’s studied the man’s fights in earnest—he’s watched everyone that was publicly broadcasted, and even gotten Hardison to help him track down a few of the fights that were privately recorded.
But Ted Grant is working in the Gotham Gym this week, and Eliot has a day to himself between parts of the con, so he’s going.
Hardison knows; the man sent him an email of Grant’s itinerary, suggesting the best time to arrive at the gym if he wants to actually see the man fight himself.
The others probably assume he’s off attending a wine tasting or something. He doesn’t exactly want to advertise this, because it’s stupid and there’s a chance he’ll attract attention, even if this part of town isn’t near the con and Gotham’s a big city and—
He’s justifying it to himself, more than he should or needs to.
He shows up at the gym.
It’s a good gym. It’s not new, it’s not fancy, it’s not high tech, but he hasn’t let it fall apart, and someone designed the place well. It’s got good circulation, so it doesn’t stink to high heaven of sweat.
It’s the middle of the day, so there aren’t many people here. A young woman, probably no older than twenty, is in the ring, slowly circling a bulkier blonde who looks about a year younger.
The first woman is short, but her arms are packed with muscle, and she’s covered in scars. And her stance…
It’s a very distinctive stance.
Eliot stares.
She’s Chinese, with a messy bobbed haircut and a small smile. It’s larger than it used to be, though.
It’s her. He knows instantly.
She strikes, and Eliot winces instinctively, but the blonde manages to block. She’s broader and taller than her, but she’s not nearly as fast. But then again, few people are.
They’re not boxing; they’re doing some sort of mixed martial arts thing that Eliot’s inherently fascinated by. It’s also, very clearly, a spar. She’s holding back. The blonde’s not.
Then the blonde over-extends and—
Eliot winces.
“Do you see what you did wrong, there?” Grant’s voice is deeper, more gravel now than it was in the videos that Eliot’s religiously watched.
“Uh…”
“Over-extended your left side,” Eliot spoke up. “Your uppercut is good, but you’re not used to fighting people shorter than you. Left yourself wide open for your partner here.”
She turns towards him, and her eyes are wide.
She recognizes him too.
Her face lights up, and she leaps over the ropes and crosses the room in the space of a single heartbeat. He’s got an armful of a young woman who he hasn’t seen since she was eleven or so a moment later.
“Cassie?” Ted Grant calls, looking at him, totally confused. “You know this guy?”
“Eliot,” she says, pulling back.
“You remember,” he said, partially surprised, despite himself. He’s not particularly forgettable, but her… she’s met plenty of people. There’s no reason he should stand out, not with the kind of people she ran with.
She reaches out and placed a hand on his shoulder, where he’d been shot, trying to get between her and those men who had been trying to bring her back to her father.
“Yes,” she says, and she smiles at him again.
“My dear Violet,” Alfred says, extending his arms towards her.
“Alfred!” Violet Stratford, former aspiring actress, embraces her old friend and mentor, kissing him on both cheeks soundly. “It’s been too long!”
“It has indeed,” he says, beaming at her as the two of them enter the bistro that he had picked for their lunch. “What brings you to town?”
“I believe an old friend of yours, actually,” she says. “Leslie Thompkins? You mentioned her in one of your letters.”
Several of them, really, and in a very fond way that suggested there might be another layer to that relationship, but that was neither here nor there.
“Oh yes,” Alfred said. “She said she was recruiting outside help. I didn’t realize you were working with that particular… company.”
“The manager is a dear friend,” Violet says, wrapping a positively lascivious spin around the word friend. “How could I say no? Afterall, your Leslie sounds delightful.”
“I’m pleased to know that,” he says. “I was worried. This… Nathan Ford has a fine reputation and all, but…”
“There’s something to be said about a friend’s personal touch,” Violet agrees.
They sit at the table. It’s elegant and expensive, but not overly showy, as befitting for the parts they’re playing. Him, the long-time family retainer of the wealthiest man in Gotham, and her, a failed Shakespearean actress who now does work for a PR company.
He orders a bottle of excellent wine, and she orders the appetizers.
“So,” she says, not bothering to try the normal tricks that she would need. Alfred knows what she’s here for, has known her for longer than almost anyone else, and has every reason to assist her. “Tell me everything. You always skimp on the Gotham social scene! Oh, yes, that looks perfect, let me just—oh that’s delicious, Alfred, try this—thank you, that’s wonderful. If you have another, please set it aside, I’ll suspect we’ll need it!” Violet Stratford takes an elegant sip from her glass. “In your last letter you were telling me about the Elliot family. I must know more.”
He takes a sip from his own glass, and smiles at her the same, small, crooked look he’d always given her before he’d gone on stage.
Nate steps into Thompkins Park Row Free Clinic.
There are five Free Clinics in the Thompkins Network throughout Gotham City. There is this one, the original, but there’s also the Thomas Wayne Memorial in Bowery, the Martha Kane Memorial in Robbinsville, the Jason Todd Memorial in Burnley, and the Gavin King Memorial in the Hill.
The place is teaming with humanity. The waiting room is overflowing with mothers holding their children sitting next to gang members sitting next to sex workers sitting next to teenagers skipping school.
Three front desk workers are directing the flow with practiced efficiency. Two nurses bustle through the room, making sure that no one is having an emergency, while other nurses, PAs, and physicians duck in and out of the waiting room, calling for patients to follow them into the back for their vaccinations, their consultations, their exams, and everything else.
The furniture is battered and mismatched, most of its donations since Leslie Thompkins puts as much of her clinic’s money as possible into medicines and equipment.
“Hi, Nate Ford, I have an appointment with Doctor Thompkins,” he says to one of the assistants, a bulky man with a scar running along the side of his face. He lets the faintest hint of a Gotham accent curl around the edges of his words.
The man nods, barely glancing at him. “Oh right, she said you were coming. She’s in her office, I’ll take you there.”
Leslie’s office was more of a cubicle than a proper office. The desk takes up most of the space. An ancient computer wheezes and groans to protest the use of its processing power, and most of the desk’s surface area is covered in paperwork.
The walls are equally crowded with photos of Leslie and her patients, her colleagues, her friends. Nate can see the one of himself, Maggie, and Sam with Leslie towards the back, held in place with green thumbtacks.
Leslie herself is the same as ever. Steel-grey hair cropped short because it’s easier to deal with that way, well-tailored slacks, and a soft looking grey turtleneck.
When Nate had first met her, her hair had been salt-and-pepper, but nothing else has changed.
“Leslie,” he says, knocking on the door.
“Nate!” She gets to her feet and hugs him tightly. “You made it.”
“Of course I did,” he assures her. “Lunch?”
She looks torn.
“You need a break,” he tells her, ignoring the fact that he knows that, were any of the crew on the comms, they would be laughing themselves sick at the hypocrisy. “And we should catch up. I need to know what’s happening if I’m going to help.”
She nods. “Alright. Well, I need to go to the Hill Clinic this afternoon anyways.”
“So we’ll get lunch in the Hill,” Nate says. “Is Benji’s still open? They were always Maggie’s favorite.”
“You don’t have to pretend with the accent, Nate,” Leslie scolds him, but she gets to her feet and locates her cardigan—a pink thing with a glittery pin that says ASK ME ABOUT VACCINATIONS stuck to the front—and gets ready to go.
“Who’s faking? I lived here for ten years,” Nate says.
She rolls her eyes at him. “I know you, Nathan Ford,” she says. And she leaves it at that.
The two of them walk out of the clinic in silence, one that’s not quite comfortable. There’s a little too much grief running between them, that is always going to be there, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
It’s what happens when a friendship is formed while fighting for insurance coverage for a life-saving treatment.
Babs is excited to see Hardison in person for the first time…ever, really.
She’s only met a handful of her online contacts in person over the years, but she’s known Hardison since she was getting started. She’s read his FBI, CIA, and Interpol files, and carefully edited them. At the tender age of sixteen, he had shown her his favorite backdoor into the Pentagon, and she had realized, with a jolt, that they were friends.
Over the years, they’ve grown closer and closer. He knows her real name, and he sends her ridiculous presents on irregular bases; things like cable-covers that don’t trip up her chair, or a local pizza place that she liked that had been about to go out of business, only now she’s suddenly the owner of, or a first edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the novel with the first modern superhero.
They swap lists of targets regularly, and occasionally work together on running hacking attacks on certain scumbags who really need it.
But Hardison’s been running with his team since he was nineteen, and they generally avoid Gotham City, the city where Nate Ford had lost his son, and so, they have generally ended up not ending up in the same vicinity for a drink.
“Barbara!” Hardison’s smile is blinding. She had known this from security cameras and photos, but it’s different in-person. It’s so much wider, so much more genuine.
“Alec,” she says warmly. He leans over to hug her.
“Girl, it’s great to finally meet you,” he gushes. “Oh man did you design that chair yourself, it’s badass.”
“I have a contact,” Babs says.
“Man, you know I’ve never been to Gotham?” Hardison says, as the hostess comes up to them to guide them to their table. Kudos to him, he doesn’t try to grab the back of her chair and steer her—not that her chair has handles, but he doesn’t look for them or try anyways, and instead just keeps pace with her, chattering about all of the things he’s heard of to do in Gotham.
“Are you signing up for a Bat Tour?” Babs asks, once their waiter has arrived, taken their drink orders—orange soda for him, coffee for her—and left.
“Nah,” he says. “Not too much time for tourism stuff. Honestly, we’re going to be pretty busy, once the con gets rolling, but I’m doing “research,” right now.”
“Are you?” She raises an eyebrow, trying not to grin, but not quite succeeding.
“Well obviously!” He says, beaming at her. “I’m consulting with the queen herself! And Gotham’s your backyard, so I figure if anyone knows what’s happening here, it’d be you!”
She can’t stop her smile. “You didn’t say what your job was.”
“You don’t already know?” He looks honestly surprised.
“I’m not actually omniscient, Alec. I just play one on TV.”
He snorts. “Fair enough. Yeah, so Nate’s got a friend, Leslie Thompkins? I think you know her; I saw your name on her donor list.”
He also probably saw her name in Leslie’s database, since Leslie’s physical therapy center is the only one that Babs trusts these days. But he’s too polite to say it.
“Anyways, so there’s a new stadium project in the Hill, and what do you know? The stadium is going to be taking out a huge chunk of affordable housing, several important community landmarks, and, yep, Doc Leslie’s clinic in the area.”
The Hill was one of two neighborhoods in Gotham that was majority-Black, and it was one of three neighborhoods in Gotham where affordable housing projects had actually managed to get started.
“They’ve been talking about that for ages,” Babs says, frowning as the waiter sets her coffee cup in front of her. “I didn’t realize they’d managed to get it that far. I thought Bruce Wayne was fighting it.”
“He was,” Alec’s eyes gleam. “But here’s the weird thing, you know. So about six months ago, Bruce Wayne started acting weird. He started throwing money around like candy, but not towards his usual projects. Community “revitalization,” stadiums, investments in some really shady startups, a bunch of things that look good on paper, but all have really serious bite. You know, says they’re making jobs but really, its bulldozing entire neighborhoods and displacing a lot of people. And that’s not normal for him. The man might trip over his own two feet into a pool of Jell-o while juggling Rolexes, but his donations? They’re thoroughly researched, and he’s super careful about where he puts his money normally.”
Babs’s heart speeds up as her mind starts putting the pieces together.
Six months ago, Thomas Elliot, while Bruce was lost in time, had gotten plastic surgery to look like Bruce and had impersonated him and started throwing money around. They had tried to collar him, and made sure that someone was reviewing his purchases, but if it was all like this, the kind of thing that was plausibly philanthropic but was actually hurting people…
It could have slipped under the radar.
Bruce was back, now, but they couldn’t take the money back, couldn’t change what Elliot had done over the months, and… oh this was bad.
“So Wayne pulled his opposition?”
“And gave a couple million to assist, yep,” Hardison says. “I think there’s blackmail or something, because that man was acting weird, let me tell you.”
Babs leans forward. “Who do you think is behind this?”
His grin is slow, excited, and smug. “Girl, who do you think you’re talking too?”
She grins back at him. “Okay, fine. Who do you know is behind this?”
“Now you’re talking.”
And he takes out his cell phone and starts telling her.
What Selina Kyle had always admired about Parker was her complete and utter lack of fear.
Archie Leach was a great thief; still is, but he’s retired.
He’s a bastard, but he’s decent enough. He refers to Selina as his niece, applauded her when she learned to disable a security system, and whenever she pulls off a spectacular heist, he sends her flowers.
Parker is his daughter. Not his biological daughter, but she’s his. Parker’s sleight of hand is so delicate that even Selina barely notices it, and the way she lays out a heist is art. She loves the thrill of it, the experience of it. She loves it when security systems get upgraded, is thrilled when a guard is good at their job, and lives for that moment when the alarm fails to go off.
Archie had introduced Selina to Parker when Parker wasn’t yet seventeen. “She’s a bit like you,” he’d said to her. “Acrobatic. Unfortunately, these old bones can’t keep up with her, but I was thinking you two might have some fun.”
And they had.
Parker is strange, her mind working in its own exact way, but Selina doesn’t care with how Parker adds together two and two as long as it still equals “stolen paintings and jewels.”
She’s changed a lot, these past few years, darting in and out of Selina’s view. She’s been working with a crew, and they’ve changed her, taught her about rules that Parker had never bothered to care about before.
She still doesn’t care, but she knows about them now. She still doesn’t meet Selina’s eyes, but she fakes it so well Selina almost can’t notice. Now, she lies, and can blend in. She can make small talk and be charming, and she knows about things that she never would have bothered too before.
“You don’t have to pretend, kitten,” Selina says. “Not with me.”
Parker looks at her, tilting her head. “Are you sure?”
“Of course,” she says. “We’re cousins, aren’t we? Family. You don’t need to grift me into liking you. I already do.”
Parker’s answering grin is delighted, and she grips Selina by the wrist and starts excitedly talking about the new LexCorp laser grid surrounding the paintings in a breathy undertone.
After a while of scoping out the exhibits and identifying a few ethical to-be-repatriated items, Parker takes hold of her wrist again.
“Selina,” she says, quiet and almost… almost worried. “Hardison is talking with one of his internet friends and he says—he says that this bad guy we’re after is your bad guy.”
“Parker,” she says, frowning.
“Catwoman’s bad guy, at least,” Parker says. “Since you’re a superhero.”
“Not exactly, what most people would call it.”
Parker rolls her eyes. “Thomas Elliot?” She asks.
Selina goes cold. She feels her heart skip a beat and she has to stop herself from pressing a hand against her chest to remind herself that it’s still there.
“I see,” she says. “You’re going after him?”
“If he’s like… a bad guy bad guy, will Batman stop us?” Parker asks, practical. “I think Eliot—my Eliot, not your Elliot—can take him, but he’s got all of those little minion-clones, and it might be harder if he’s outnumbered.”
Selina knows Parker’s Eliot only from broad strokes of what Parker has told her. The picture that Parker has painted for her is a man who is grumpy, but indulgent of Parker, who cooks and sings and teaches her self-defense.
The fact that Parker believes that Eliot Spencer can take on Batman is… concerning. She might have to call Archie and find out just who it is that Parker has been running with. Selina might have been more negligent in tracking her wayward cousin’s activities than she’d realized.
“Depends,” she says, slowly. “What are you going to do to him?”
Parker narrows her eyes, and Selina realizes that Parker saw something, in her response.
“How much do you want him to hurt?”
“He’s dangerous, Parker.”
Parker shrugs. “Lots of the bad guys we chase are.”
Selina breathes in, and breathes out, and tries to think.
“A lot,” she admits. “I would want him to hurt a lot.”
The squeeze on her wrist—Parker was keeping an eye on her pulse, the sneaky girl—is gentle and reassuring.
“Then I’ll tell Nate it has to hurt a lot,” she assures her.
Selina gives Parker air kisses on the cheeks. “I should be able to keep Batman and his little birdies busy, then.”
Cass met the man who she would later know as Eliot Spencer when she was about ten years old, give or take.
She had been on the run for two years from her father, somewhere in Mongolia by her figuring.
It had been cold, and she had been tired, and hungry, and so she had gotten sloppy and actually gone into one of the local villages to scavenge for food.
Someone had seen her, and someone had sent word to David Cain that his daughter was nearby.
That small village in Mongolia whose name Cass didn’t know was not the first time her father had sent someone after her, nor was it the last. She would lose him for good after stowing away on a cargo freighter to America when she was twelve, but she was still several scrapes out of that.
Eliot Spencer had been the man who had been hired to bring her back.
She hadn’t known his name, then, obviously. All she knew was that he was a fighter, he was dangerous, and that he was… adrift.
He had been looking for the One Who Was All, and he hadn’t known how old she was. She had seen it in his face when she had realized he was there for her, and she had shown herself just enough to lure him out of town, because sometimes, the men her father sent for her would attack nearby people to try to find out information about her, so the sooner she could get him away from other people, the better.
He had followed her, but he hadn’t attacked her, hadn’t tried to grab her.
The man with long hair had stayed nearby, but never approached. He left food out for her, spoke in her direction, and he was… kind.
He left one day and came back with a warm jacket and shoes in her size, things she was badly needing.
It was that day, when he had begun cooking, that she had joined him by the fire.
He had shown her some useful things. He showed her how to pitch a tent and use a can opener, how to hotwire a car, and how to drive. He had done this all in a forceful way, as if he couldn’t believe that she didn’t know how to do these things already, but his teaching had been patient and kind.
The two of them stole a car and they took turns driving far, far away from that village where she had been spotted.
He didn’t have a plan, and neither did she. In those days, there was no plan. There was survive, and there was stay away from Cain.
The others had come from them somewhere in Russia. She thinks, now, that it was Moscow, but she is not sure.
They’re ambushed outside of a place he is taking her to get… something? She still isn’t sure. She thinks it was a place to get fake papers, or maybe real ones, but quickly? She remembers him taking a photo of her, which indicates that he perhaps was trying to get a passport, but it could have been sentiment.
There are twelve of them, and the two of them drive them off.
He doesn’t kill, he doesn’t use guns, but he knows how to do both of those things.
It was the first time she had seen him fight, and it was the first time that she had someone fight, for real, with the goal to incapacitate, not kill.
They ran, through the streets, but more came. The next time there were twenty, then thirty, then fifty.
She could hear the long-haired man murmur her father’s name, cursing it. Sometimes he did it into a phone, and she wondered if he was speaking to him, if he was going to trade her.
But he never seemed to contemplate it.
The last time they caught up with them, it was on the boarder of Ukraine. They had been running long and hard, and both of them were running on little sleep and less food, when it turned out the boarder guard had been bribed to detain them.
Eliot had put himself between her and them. There were so, so many of them, and she could see the fear in his face.
He said words to her.
She knows now that they were to “run.”
She hadn’t run, not then, not until he lunged forward to catch a bullet meant for her, since her father hadn’t bothered to tell them not to shoot her, since he had thought she could survive anything that they threw at her.
She probably could have survived. But it might have slowed her down, might have let them catch her.
He took the bullet through her shoulders and shook his head when she tried to carry him.
She understood, then.
These men didn’t want him. They were after her. And he, with his injury, would only slow her down.
And so she had ran and left the first person who had tried to protect her behind.
And now… he was here, in Ted’s gym, and she was giddy.
“You made it,” he says to her, in awe.
She sniffs. “Of course.”
“Cass?” Steph calls, cautious. “Who’s this?”
She opens her mouth, but she doesn’t know it.
He smiles, and it’s sweet, and earnest. “Name’s Eliot Spencer.” He looks at her. “Cassie, or Cass?”
“Cass,” she says. “This is Steph, and Ted.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Eliot says, nodding to Steph.
“It’s okay,” Cass tells Steph, who doesn’t trust charming, smiling men, especially not ones who move like Eliot. “He saved me. He didn’t have to.”
“You didn’t need saving,” he snorts. “Ten years old and you were lapping me.”
“There’s more than one way to save,” Cass says.
Because it’s true.
He had been kind, and he hadn’t had to be. He had given her tools, to survive on her own, and the way he had fought…
She hadn’t wanted to fight, for so long. Oh, she had when her father’s people had her cornered. But she had fled whenever possible, and hated her own hands, her own body, for what they had done. They were tools, and tools only good for something deadly, or for the play-fighting of her training.
He hadn’t taught her to fight, hadn’t shown her how to adapt any of her lethal blows, but he had done it himself.
And it had shown her… that it could be done. And it had helped her decide that she wanted to.
“If we’re counting those ways, then you saved me too,” he said, a slight curve of his grin.
“So you worked for Cain, then?” Steph asks, because she’s good at putting those puzzles together.
“It was a contract,” Eliot says. “He didn’t say it was his daughter, or that she was his kid, just that one of the world’s premier fighters needed an escort back.”
“You and how many others?” Steph’s hands are rested on her hips.
“Just me.”
Steph snorts. “Seriously?”
Eliot grins, acknowledging the joke at his own expense. His pride isn’t bruised, and he’s not offended. “I’m a retrieval specialist. And I don’t work well with others.”
“I knew I recognized you from somewhere!” Ted crows. “You were in that fighting ring out in Nebraska, weren’t you? I had a friend out there send me your video.”
Eliot blinks, off balance. “That’s right,” he admits.
“Great form. Not perfect, mind you, but you’re a bit all over the place style-wise so that makes sense,” Ted praises.
Eliot looks pleased.
“Steph, why don’t you take him for a spin? He’s got the weight-class you need to be working on. I want to see this man in action, and Cassie would spin him around too fast for these old eyes.”
Cass laughs.
Eliot turns his eyes over to Steph and looks her up and down. Not in the gross way that some men do when they walk into Ted’s gym, but in a way that takes Steph in. Her stance, her muscles, her scars.
He grins. “If you don’t mind?”
Steph looks at Cass, uncertain.
“It’ll be fun,” Cass promises.
Steph crosses her arms. “Alright, Mister Spencer. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Alfred has known Violet Stratford for years now. The poor woman has the worst case of stage fright that he has ever encountered. She’s perfect when she’s off-stage, with an eye for emotion and a gift for reading an audience.
But on stage, she gets too in her own head. She trips and doubles back upon her own words, spluttering over lines that she knows backwards and forwards and upside down. She pays too much attention to herself, becomes self-conscious, and she loses her grip upon the audience.
It’s a tragedy, in Alfred’s opinion. She could have been a magnificent Shakespearean actress… if only she had ever been able to use her talent there.
But he can’t comment on her alternate career, since it’s about to be very helpful.
“Your Doctor Thomas Elliot sounds like a handful,” Violet says.
Alfred nods.
He doesn’t like trying to dwell on those years, doesn’t look to see if, with the benefit of hindsight and the loss of affection for the man that boy would become, he can identify the warning signs of what he would become.
“I assume, since your Leslie asked us to assist, rather than someone more… local, that your family can’t interfere?”
It’s one of the wonderful things about Violet. She’s remarkably sharp, and he has so rarely needed to explain anything to her.
She hums and takes a sip of her wine. “It seems to me… that we might need to ask you some questions… just to make sure that we have… all the correct information.”
When Leslie had said she was calling an old friend to deal with Thomas Elliot attempting to bulldoze half of the Hill, including her clinic, through all of those perfectly legal channels, he had been skeptical. Surely, their efforts would be better spent coordinating with the protest movement or by stalling through the courts? Sure, they had lost a lot of time while trying to untangle the money trail, but there were plenty of things that they could still do.
But with Violet here, he did feel better.
Violet Stratford was a stage name, of course. She had plenty of others. Alfred knew a handful, including the one she used most often.
Bruce owned a rather impressive art collection, most of it on display in free art museums around the world. And as such, Alfred kept in regular contact with that world.
And it was hard not to know as many people as Alfred did in the art world and the world of intelligence without knowing the name Sophie Devereux.
Knowing that she was here to help?
It did a lot to soothe his nervousness.
He rather looked forward to seeing dear Violet run her rings around Doctor Elliot.
The man would deserve every inch of it.
“So he’s doing all this… out of spite?” Nate doesn’t sound as shocked as she had been when she first put it together.
Leslie laughs, exhausted. “He’s always resented Bruce.”
“But he can’t go for him too directly, so he’s going at it sideways,” Nate muses.
“By destroying everything that Bruce has worked for.”
“And you, Leslie.”
She sighs. “Yes. And me. And hundreds of families who will get displaced by this project.”
He looks at her, as he waves down a cab. “Do you want to come to the briefing? Explain the… rest of it, to the team?”
“I suppose I should. It’s hard to explain that kind of plastic surgery without someone who was there,” Leslie admits. She gets into the yellow cab next to him. For a moment, they sit in silence, before she has to ask. “Are you sure this is the kind of problem you can help with, Nate? I know that you prefer to deal with the mostly-legal, not the…”
“Supervillains?” Nate asks, quirking his mouth at her.
Oh, how he’s changed. For the better.
Grief had been eating him alive, destroying his very soul. But in the end, his team had dragged him back from that ledge. He’s still a hurricane of a man, still brittle and angry and broken… but there’s the spark, that he had lost, when Sam died.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nate assures her. “This is exactly our kind of scheme.” His hand flies up to his ear, and he frowns for a moment, before it smoothes out. “But you know, since we are dealing with costumes… well. I think we might be bringing in backup.”
“Backup?”
He opens the car door for her, and they walk into the hotel.
Nate’s team has chosen a middling, anonymous hotel. They could afford to be in the Diamond District, or Old Gotham, or even across the bridge in Bristol, but they want to be close to the work, and that means sticking in Uptown.
“My team has contacts in the city,” Nate explains. “It seems that they all came to the conclusion that I did. That even though it’s our kind of job… we should be prepared for it to become not our kind of job.”
“So they’re bringing in their contacts?”
“Don’t worry,” Nate says, as the elevator opens, and he leads her to the suite that the team has. “I think you know them already.”
Leslie doesn’t even have time to turn it over in her head, before the door to the hotel room opens, and she sees who’s inside.
She can’t help but smile.
Cassandra and Stephanie are eagerly talking with a blonde woman who must be Parker, while Selina chats with a brunette woman who she assumes is Nate’s Sophie, Barbara chats with a gangly-looking young man that has to be Hardison, and Alfred is earnestly discussing with Eliot Spencer the proper way to prepare tea.
She relaxes immediately.
“I think this should do just fine,” she assures Nate, before following him into the room, and beginning to say her hellos, and make her introductions.