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The way things end with Jason is unfortunate, to say the least. Not her finest moment. Not a series of her finest moments.
Starting with:
She always knew it wasn't going anywhere good, making him Robin. Which is not to say that he's incapable, because he isn't. It also isn't to say that she regrets it, but the longer it went on the more it started to feel selfish, allowing it to continue. The more it started to feel like it was more for her benefit than for his. She thought that he needed it, an outlet for all that pain and rage she saw from the first time she met him, scrawny and fearless; and he did need it, she thinks. Or he needed something, anyway.
Regardless, by the time he's seventeen, he's like a wild animal that's outgrown its enclosure, no longer small and docile enough to be a house pet.
Dangerous.
It's not the decisive end to things, but the beginning of it goes like this: Jason shatters a man's jaw, despite her explicit orders to stand down, despite the fact that it sends him into shock, and despite the fact that doing so renders him decisively incapable of telling them what they needed to know to begin with. As a result, she benches Robin indefinitely.
Indefinitely was never supposed to be permanently. It was only ever supposed to be until she could figure out what else to do, how to get it through his thick skull that the road he was walking down was a bleak, consuming one. But days turned into a month, which turned into two, and then August rolled around and Jason turned eighteen and with nothing to prevent him from doing what he had apparently been planning on doing for quite a while, he left.
He hugged Alfred, who did not seem at all surprised by this turn of events, and made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of coming back, and then he left.
Four months later, due purely to circumstance, she goes to the circus.
Beth got herself a replacement, of sorts.
That, in and of itself, doesn't surprise him. He was expecting her to go lurking around the juvenile detention center, or wherever vigilantes find troubled teens these days, and show up with some other scrawny, angry boy to play the part of his understudy because Beth ultimately deals with most problems of a personal nature by pretending like there isn't one to begin with.
So, while he suspects that she, at an absolute bare minimum, misses having the back up, and while he had pretty thoroughly braced himself for the reality some other kid slapping on the boots and cape, he had not even remotely prepared himself for what actually unfolded in the aftermath of the dissolution of their partnership.
He sees it in the paper first, but it's all over the news – the lengthy series of court proceedings that culminated in Beth being inexplicably handed guardianship of a freshly orphaned pre-teen girl, memorialized in the Gotham Herald all pale-faced and clinging to her leg for dear life like she was convinced somebody was going to materialize to wrench her away at any second.
He does not think he can be blamed for not immediately assuming that Beth's next move would be to teach her hand-to-hand combat and take her out on the streets at night. In fact, it doesn't occur to him that he needs to have thoughts on that at all when he initially hears about it, which was was in retrospect woefully naive. Beth thought that the reasonable way of dealing with difficult experiences of any kind was fighting crime, and had a longer resume than most when it came to child endangerment. He really, honestly should've seen it coming.
The first thing that does occur to him when he sees them side by side in the paper is that Beth is absolutely not cut out to emotionally manage a traumatized middle school girl. Beth is, in his experience, not cut out to emotionally manage a pet rock. Her version of relating meaningfully to other humans mostly involved pointed looks and if she was feeling particularly gregarious, maybe a pat on the shoulder. She did not like to talk about feelings. Or talk at all, because that implied that there was ever any kind of back and forth with her, and not her simply announcing the way things would be like she was capable of willing them into existence through sheer force of stubbornness.
She did not, he suspects, know what she was signing herself up for.
This is all necessary context to explain the sheer depth of the bafflement that he experienced when, upon being strong-armed into making a rare dinner appearance by Alfred (his fool-proof strategy being guilt tripping and passive aggression in equal measure) he saw Beth coming around the corner with Rachel hanging off her arm, talking a mile a minute. Perhaps even more baffling and unsettling, Beth was nodding along and making periodic listening noises with a downright suspicious amount of patience, like this was a completely normal occurrence.
“Hi,” Rachel told him, interrupting herself and blinking owlishly when she noticed him.
“Hi,” he says back with a fair amount of incredulity before turning to Beth. “I'm here for dinner, as promised. Tell Alfred to call off the dogs.”
He very intentionally keeps his tone civil. He does not resist the urge to look at Beth like he thinks she might've been replaced by a pod person. Rachel, meanwhile, still has both arms wrapped around one of hers.
“Jason, Rachel, my ward,” Beth says brusquely, gesturing between the two of them after a beat of silence.
“Nice to meet you,” Rachel says, smiling, all teeth.
“Nice to meet you, too,” he says back, not nearly as cheerful.
Beth looks between the two of them and there's something in her expression for a split second that he can't identify, but it's gone before he has a chance to think much about it.
Dinner is awkward.
Awkward is putting it mildly, actually.
Under normal circumstances, he and Beth cannot be trusted to act civilly and so they mostly participate in an unspoken but carefully cultivated song and dance of interacting directly as little as possible, for Alfred's sake if nothing else, because otherwise it devolves into sniping, which devolves into shouting fairly quickly.
This time, this turns out to be a non-issue entirely because he and Alfred may as well have not even been in the room to begin with for all the acknowledgment they were getting. From the moment they sat down, Beth and Rachel were absorbed in their own world, muttering back and forth and making faces at each other; Rachel laughing occasionally, which makes him wonder what on earth Beth could possibly have been saying that constituted as even remotely funny.
He spends a good hour being held hostage by Alfred's calculated multiple courses, and the whole time Beth's eyes stay glued to Rachel, like she's the most interesting person who ever lived despite the fact that she's quite literally blathering on about long division and Olivia Newton-John from the sounds of it, Beth nodding like she has any idea who that is.
Once dinner mercifully comes to an end and Beth and Rachel have disappeared to go make friendship bracelets or – whatever, he turns to Alfred and says as calmly as he can manage, “What the hell was that?”
Alfred's expression sours slightly at his language even as his eyes dart off to the side like he's checking to make sure Beth isn't still in ear shot.
“Rachel is very attached to Beth. Understandably so, given the circumstances,” Alfred replies with practiced diplomacy.
“Yeah, I got that.” He pauses, squints at the lack of expression on his face. “I more meant, what the hell is up with Beth?”
Alfred is doing a very good job of keeping his expression entirely neutral. Only his brows furrow in the slightest of incriminates before smoothing out again.
“I'm rather unfamiliar with the sight, so I may be mistaken, but I believe she's happy.”
Despite the words, and despite the slight facetiousness of his tone, Alfred does not appear to be any more reassured by that than he is.
Rachel is clingy. In the sense that she trails after her like being her shadow is her full-time job, and in the sense that she's often actually clinging to her in one way or another, or laying across her lap, or climbing onto her shoulders, skinny thighs by her ears as she balances easily.
Alfred, she suspects, thinks she ought to tell her to cut it out.
But it doesn't bother her, so she doesn't.
She doesn't hold it against him, that he doesn't understand. She probably wouldn't have understood either, but she just – likes Rachel. Likes her more than anyone else, really.
Besides, she'd miss her if she stopped following her around, lying in bed next to her at night reading out loud from Nancy Drew books, heads side by side on the pillow.
She goes to some holiday party, vaguely work related although she only half-way recognizes most of the people there, and approximately five minutes into pretending to care about whatever insipid conversation Veronica Vreeland is trying to rope her into, all she's really thinking about is that she'd rather be home with Rachel, who no doubt has significantly more interesting things to say despite being thirteen.
Ten minutes in, she's mentally debating informing Veronica of this fact.
“Oh, but you run with those arsty types, Beth,” Veronica continues despite her lack of contribution to the conversation. “So, you know what I mean.”
She hums some approximation of an agreement and Veronica continues, oblivious.
Rachel's waiting in her room when she gets home, cross legged on the bed reading a magazine. She looks up and smiles brightly when she sees her, and a tension that she hadn't been previously aware of uncoils in response.
“You're back,” Rachel says, still smiling, tucking her bangs behind her ear on one side. “I missed you.”
She walks towards the bed before making a show of flopping down next to her on her back with an exaggerated sigh, Rachel laughing in response to her theatrics.
“I missed you, too,” she tells her, shutting her eyes as she feels Rachel shuffle closer to her, a hand running through her hair.
One of Rachel's fingers tracks gently over her eyelid and then down the side of her nose. She feels her lean closer so she's looming over her, but she doesn't open her eyes, turning so her forehead is pressed to her leg instead.
“Beth,” Rachel whispers, still tracing the shape of her face.
“Hm?”
“Can I kiss you?”
She opens her eyes to look up at her, confused by the question for a second given that Rachel kisses her on a regular basis, on the cheek, on the side of her head as she's coming and going. When she sees the serious, hesitant set to her face, the flush on her nose, she realizes what she means.
“Don't ask me that,” she says, voice much weaker than she meant for it to be.
Don't press, it what she really means.
“Okay,” Rachel says easily, not seeming to take it as much of a rejection which is probably fair, because it wasn't much of one.
One hand strokes through her hair. She closes her eyes.
Despite the profoundly awkward dinner, and despite his general inability to comprehend Beth's decision to make her Robin, circus training or no, it's not until the night of Rachel's fourteenth birthday that his feelings on the matter shift from low level discomfort and confusion to the beginnings of real alarm.
He suspects that he was only invited to begin with because Alfred considered it a reasonable excuse to do so. He also suspects that he intentionally neglected to inform Beth of this fact, considering that when he arrives, the face that Rachel gives him pretty clearly communicates that she thinks he's intruding.
Like the last dinner he attended at the Manor, he spends nearly all of it summarily ignored by everyone who isn't Alfred while Beth and Rachel proceed to act like the world's center of gravity exists somewhere in the foot of space between them. The fact that Alfred did not seem to think that was out of the ordinary did not do anything to staunch his rising unease.
“So, how have you two been?” he asks them eventually, obviously pointed.
Alfred averts his gaze somewhere to the general direction of the wall in response to his tone.
Rachel leans forward to look around Beth, raising her eyebrows like it's brazen of him to dare to interrupt them.
“Fine,” they both say in creepy unison after a second before turning to look at each other, Rachel releasing a snort of laughter at whatever face Beth is making at her.
What the fuck, he mouths at Alfred once tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum have gone back to ignoring him.
Alfred raises his eyebrows, presumably in disapproval of his language, but otherwise doesn't acknowledge him.
Cake and presents come and go quickly, all things considered, Rachel noticeably less moved by the whole birthday experience than most fourteen year olds would be.
“Did you get everything you wanted?” Beth asks her in the aftermath, wrapping paper contained and empty plates picked up.
“Almost everything,” Rachel replies lowly, leaning close to look up at her from under her lashes with intent, hand on her leg under the table.
He feels all the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
An uncomfortable second passes, a second in which Beth seems completely unaware of the tension permeating the room, her attention directed solely at the hint of a pout on Rachel's features.
Alfred clears his throat.
Beth visibly comes back to reality, looking away and sitting back in her chair. Rachel glances his way for a split second, and the only word he can think of to describe the little smile she directs at him is smug.
As he's leaving, he considers asking Alfred if he's crazy or if he also thinks all of this is – off. If he's also noticed that Beth treats Rachel more like a pet she carries around with her than a teenager in her care. Or like her wife. He's fairly confident Alfred wouldn't give him a straight answer to that question, so he doesn't bother to ask.
Convincing Beth to do most things involved easing her into whatever it was slowly enough that she could convince herself it was at least partially her idea. That, and a healthy amount of pouting. That was how she convinced her to be her friend to begin with, really.
Repeated exposure.
As far as she can tell, before her, Beth spent the majority of her free time floating around the house being lonely and miserable. Once she moved in, and once it became clear that Beth didn't know how to act any other way, she decided to demonstrate to her that she didn't have to live that way anymore, not when she could hang out with her instead.
Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly at all, Beth warmed up to the whole enterprise of best-friendship pretty quickly.
By the time she was Robin and they were making vows in the dark together, they were practically inseparable.
Convincing Beth to kiss her requires more wearing down than she expected. It's not like she doesn't know she wants to. She wouldn't have looked so guilty and caught out when she asked the first time, soon after they officially became partners, if she didn't; her face going all pale and turning away even as their legs remained tangled together under the sheets.
In the present, she rubs her face on her shoulder. Beth's hand strokes up and down her back, under her shirt. She presses a kiss to her jaw, right by her ear, and then pulls back so she can see her face.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks. Very politely, she thinks.
“Absolutely not,” Beth replies for the hundredth time.
She sighs, and makes sure that it sounds very put out, but relents anyway, pressing a kiss to her cheek instead. While it may not seem like it, the fact that she didn't pull away, looking all shifty and scandalized, is actually significant progress.
Like she said before.
Repeated exposure.
Jason stares at the phone for a long time before he picks it up. He holds it for even longer before he dials.
The thing is, Beth drives him up the fucking wall on a fairly regular basis, and is generally out of her mind, but he doesn't think she's a bad person. Not really. Not usually.
The thing is, he and Beth were close at one point, as hard as it might seem to believe now. They used to be partners, sure, but they also used to be friends. Beth taught him the majority of what he knows about mechanics and practically everything else. They used to watch schlocky detective movies together. She's single-handedly responsible for his graduation from high school. They were not, however, anywhere in the realm of the to the exclusion of all others codependency that she and Rachel appeared to be orbiting within.
(The thing is, he's never been quite sure how much of Alfred's disposition is willful ignorance and how much of it is wishful thinking.)
So, he holds the phone.
When he finally works up the nerve to dial, waiting patiently for Alfred to pick up, he kills a few minutes making small talk before he says anything of substance. Alfred tells him the gardens are coming in nicely, that Rachel helped him plant the bulbs.
She's obsessed with her, he thinks of saying, but he's sure he already knows that.
I think Beth's doing something really wrong, he thinks of telling him, but he suspects that he would only pretend not to know what he was talking about.
“Alfred,” he starts, stops.
“Yes?”
“If Beth was – ” He stops again. “I don't have anything to worry about, do I?” he settles on, like a coward.
“What would you have to be worried about?” Alfred asks in return, and to his credit, he does sound genuine.
“Nothing, forget it. I'll let you go.”
“Goodbye, Jason,” Alfred says after a pause, one he chooses not to read into.
“Bye.”
When she kisses her on the mouth, Rachel releases a pleased little sigh through her nose in return, one hand curled in her hair, fingers tightening and then releasing again.
All of which is a result of what can only be described as a series of questionably escalating justifications.
Such as:
She loves Rachel. She would never do anything to hurt her. Rachel is her best friend. In comparison to everyone else, Rachel is the only real friend she's ever had.
And, on a certain level, she can admit that Rachel has never asked her for anything that she hadn't already thought of doing in some form or fashion, and simply set aside as not an option. Rachel loves her, but she doesn't understand what that means, not to her anyway, and she would never –
One of Rachel's knees slips between hers. She kisses her again and Rachel presses back in turn, all shifty movements under her, under the hand at her side, the palm pressed to her cheek.
Anytime she stills, Rachel curls back up to meet her, pressing kisses to her mouth, moving restlessly under her hands.
“Keep touching me,” Rachel whines out, as if to reinforce this point, reaching down to drag her hand up her side.
She's capable of drawing, but she never once felt the urge to do so just for the sake of it until the first time she saw the delicate curve of Rachel's narrow waist, slipping into the indents of her ribs, the beginnings of the curves of her hips.
Unfortunately, the only thing she feels more inclined to do than look is touch.
Both hands track up her sides, shirt sliding up to expose her stomach, her bellybutton, all soft and heaving as her breathing picks up, as she places another gentle, lingering kiss on her mouth.
All she's got on under the t-shirt is a pair of plain cotton underwear, body heat seeping through them where they're pressed close. Their lips slide together and Rachel moans, fingers curling weakly into the threadbare collar of her t-shirt. She pulls away, breaths against the side of her face, inhales against her hair, warm bubble of shampoo, sweat, toothpaste on her breath.
“Baby,” she says nonsensically into her ear, still stroking her side.
Rachel flexes her hips, digs up against the bone and muscle at the top of her thigh. Presses a kiss to her jaw.
It's not just her body heat she's feeling, she realizes; she's wet against her, underwear betraying a dark spot, not that it makes a difference with the way she can feel it as she presses against her with clumsy little rocks of her hips. The hand on her side slips lower, down near the line of her underwear.
“Are you going to touch me – there?” Rachel whispers, legs spreading, sounding far more eager than she should.
“Do you want me to?” she asks back lowly, like that's any kind of fair question, mostly focused on the glazed over look to her eyes, the flush spreading down to her collarbones.
“Mm-hm,” Rachel hums back, eyes fluttering shut, expression dreamlike, hips twitching in anticipation.
She's not some – monster. She doesn't want to hurt her. She doesn't think she'd be capable.
“I love you so much, Rachel,” she whispers into her ear as she reaches down between her legs.
He gets the distinct feeling that something is not right from almost the very beginning.
Beth devotes a nigh fanatical focus to apprehending Tony Zucco, after him like a hound on the scent of a fox. Any time that isn't being dedicated to that, she spends with Rachel, who became attached to her hip almost immediately. Rachel hasn't even lived in the Manor a full month when he realizes that she's been sleeping in Beth's room virtually every night, alongside spending practically every waking moment together as well.
He never thought it was normal, or especially healthy. He particularly did not think that given that Beth would never have tolerated a fraction of that behavior from Jason.
Despite that, in the very beginning, a small part of him did find it to be almost endearing. Primarily because Beth, who was terminally unaffected by everything except her own failures, seemed to react to everything Rachel said and did with an almost equally childlike interest, conviction.
It could almost be considered funny, cute, when Rachel was twelve.
Now that she was approaching fifteen, it was decidedly not funny, or cute, and particularly not when Beth behaved that way in front of other people, like it didn't occur to her to think that not everyone would take her teenage ward as seriously as she does. He had to all but beg them to stop dancing together at parties, knowing how it looked, not silly and familial at all, but like some bizarre facsimile of intimacy.
Rachel threw a fit about that, he knew. He saw them dancing in the empty ballroom together later, Beth's arms wrapped around her waist, whispering something in her ear.
He couldn't see Rachel's expression with the way her face was buried in Beth's shoulder, so he chose not to ponder what it was that she was saying, what consolation she was making.
He's not sure if it's cowardice that stays his tongue, and if so, what it is that he's so afraid of. That nothing he has to say will make a difference, perhaps. Whatever the reason, he watches them dance that afternoon and then he watches the two of them in the cave that evening, discussing their plans for the night, completely absorbed in each other as per usual, and he says nothing.
Rachel – Robin – turns and all but flings herself at Beth, wrapping her arms around her neck as Beth catches her easily, her hands high up on the back of her thighs, more comfortable than either of them ought to be.
He turns away, and he pretends he didn't notice anything at all.
When Beth made her Robin, way back in the very beginning, they swore an oath by candlelight, back in the part of the cave that was essentially untouched. Some of it was about, you know, justice and thwarting crime, but more importantly, it was about being partners, forever, no matter what.
They didn't say in sickness and in health, but she felt like it was definitely implied.
They held hands and looked into each other's eyes as they said it, like it was just the two of them in the whole entire universe, just like she'd always imagined.
And most importantly, she already loved Beth, then. She loved her from the very beginning.
She doesn't know if Jason made the same oath. Somehow, she doubts it. Even if he did, she knows with absolute certainty that it wasn't the same. Not even remotely.
“I don't care what your stupid coworkers think,” she mumbles vindictively into Beth's shoulder before turning to press her face to her neck. “I don't care what any of those people think.”
“I know you don't,” Beth replies, nonplussed, but seeing as she spent the better part of the afternoon consoling her after the whole dancing debacle, she elects not start getting huffy about it.
Besides, Beth's hands are squeezing her hips, sliding down to her thighs and back up again, so she suspects she's only partially paying attention to what she's saying anyway.
“I don't think you really care all that much about what they think either,” she adds, which is one of those both true and not-true things she's become accustomed to.
Beth cares very little about social conventions, and even less about what other people think of her. Conversely, she also has several pressing reasons to not want people snooping around in their business.
Beth shrugs under her.
“It'll be different when you're older,” she says after a second.
“Different how?” she mumbles against her cheek. “Will you,” she trails off, shy for no reason. “Will you take me on dates?”
She feels the muscles in Beth's cheek move under her lips as she smiles, hand tracking up and down the back of her thigh.
“Sure,” she says easily. “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere,” she sighs back. “It doesn't matter.” Then, she pulls back so she can see her face, tilting her hips with her legs spread around her. “Will you kiss me in public?” she asks, less shy and more curious.
Beth's eyes are lidded and serious as she looks at her with the kind of single-minded focus that she, in turn, hoards possessively.
“Yes,” she says. “If you want me to.”
“I want you to,” she replies, lips brushing across her mouth as she says it, one of Beth's hands coming up to frame her face and bring her down to kiss her fully, searching, as the blood begins to rush in her ears. I want you to tell me that there's nothing you wouldn't do for me, she thinks but doesn't say as she gives into the base urge to press her whole body as close to Beth's as possible, hips bearing down and the fabric of her shirt scraping against her nipples. “You can't ever leave me,” she says into her mouth, uncaring if it sounds childish or needy. “I'll die, Beth.”
“I swear I won't,” Beth replies without hesitation, grip on her leg becoming bruising as if she's anticipating somebody bursting in to try and rip her away. It hurts, a little bit, but not as much as it makes heat rise in her face, not as much as it seems like something akin to measurable proof of commitment. “I swear,” Beth repeats, like she's resisting the urge to mirror her own words back at her.
Beth, she sometimes suspects, was never happy until she met her – didn't know how to be, or even how to know what she was missing. Privately, in a mean little fanged part of her head, she's glad that Jason never made her happy like she does. Privately, she thinks that nobody in the whole world is as good at loving Beth as she is.
“I know you can't marry me,” she says, rubbing against her shamelessly as Beth's hand on her hip encourages her, “but we can pretend, can't we?”
If it's desperate and pathetic and if she's still grinding against her in some kind of blind, shameless fervor as she says it, then Beth doesn't react like any of that is a problem, hand still digging into her hip, eyes locked on her. She brings the hand cupping her jaw closer to her mouth as Beth watches with laser focus, brushing her lips across her fingertips until she takes the hint and slides them into her mouth, the moan that prompts being loud enough to make her flush, the knee-jerk embarrassment only compounding everything as Beth feels along her tongue in an almost proprietary manner, her back teeth, fingers sliding along her lips as the cut of her hip digs up into her harshly.
“It's not pretend to me,” Beth tells her, and the earnestness in her voice makes her feel so full that she could burst with it.
At first, he doesn't register what he's actually seeing, which is a testament to Beth's finely honed ability to disguise herself.
At first, he thinks it's just some random pervert with his hands all over a girl who doesn't look old enough to drive unsupervised, let alone drink. The only reason he's paying attention is because he's gearing up to intervene in a situation that obviously needs intervening in, and the guys going after jailbait always had glass jaws.
Then, the girl turns so she doesn't have her back to him anymore, and he realizes he's looking at Rachel. Done up like a streetwalker, but indisputably her.
Which meant that the man currently pinning her to the pool table by her hips, pressing a wet kiss to the underside of her jaw like shame was just a five letter word for a good time, was not a man at all, because Beth would have anyone who so much as held prolonged eye contact with Rachel swallowing their teeth before they had time to pick on someone their own size.
Over her shoulder, Rachel makes direct eye contact with him and scowls. Then, she puts a hand to the side of Beth's face, reeling her in to press their mouths together, one of Beth's hands starting to creep dangerously close to the hemline of her skirt.
He finishes his drink, pays, and leaves.
He is, needless to say, not expecting it when he crawls out of bed sometime around three in the afternoon the next day to find Rachel sitting primly on his couch, nose all wrinkled up like she's the Queen of England.
“Hi, Jason,” she says pleasantly when he stumbles out of his bedroom and blinks groggily in her general direction.
“Where's the ball to your chain?” he grumbles on his way to the coffee machine. “I thought you two had to be within three feet of each other to function.”
He looks over after a second when that fails to illicit the bratty response he'd been expecting only to find Rachel giving him a pretty goddamn calculating look for a teenager.
“I know you saw us.”
“Saw you what?” he says back as he pours water into the coffee machine.
“Don't play stupid. You know what I'm talking about.”
She folds her hands in her lap and raises her eyebrows at him as if to say, your move.
“I'm not trying to get you in trouble,” he replies after a long pause, although he's looking at the coffee machine as he says it.
I'm trying to help you, he doesn't say, because it doesn't really feel like the truth.
“I know,” Rachel replies, patient, like she's talking to a real idiot. “You want to get Beth in trouble.”
He does look back over at her then, if only because he can't interpret the tone of her voice. When he looks, her face is set. Resolute.
“I just wanted to make sure that we understood each other,” She continues, still nearly conversational. “If you go to anyone with some made up story about Beth, I'm going to say something way, way worse about you.”
He opens his mouth, closes it.
She continues glaring at him for a moment as if to impress upon him how serious she is.
“Mind your own business,” she practically hisses at him, pointing a finger in his face, and then she's gone, door slamming behind her.
It's not the worst part of it, but somehow the part of that conversation lingers with him the most is her conviction, the fact that he never for a second doubted that she'd do it, and that he was sure she was perfectly aware that Beth could probably kill somebody right in the middle of the Hall of Justice and nobody would do a thing to stop it.
He wants to help her. He really, really does.
What keeps him up at night more than anything else is that it's simply much easier not to.
Lewis: And in that case human destiny is simply to be human, not to be transformed, caught up into the moments of the dance of divinity-and-humanity in one.
Kennedy: Can you say that less poetically?
Lewis: Yes. Are we born to become big men or little gods?
– Between Heaven and Hell, Peter Kreeft