#ramshacklemuses

“ So I think you're really gonna be impressed with my sketch,” Gwen told the other girl with a wide smile. The paper was clutched to her chest as if it was a big secret that warranted a grand reveal. A moment later the blond flipped over the sheet and held it at eye level for MJ to view. She laughed the entire time the other girl was looking at it. The drawing consisted of two stick figure, a sun drawn into the corner of the page, and a house in the background. In Gwen’s honest opinion it looked like this drawing should be hanging up in a kindergarten classroom. “ Alright now it’s time to show me what you’ve been working on. If you’re ready to show me I mean.” 

“Are you – are you testing me?”

Dick’s tone was accusatory. Bruce resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“It’s your first solo mission,” Bruce said, voice level. “Did you think I’d have you busting a human trafficking ring?”

“I didn’t think you’d put the training wheels back on,” Dick spat. “I already passed your stupid gauntlet. I’ve been in the field with you for two years. Have I earned even a shred of your respect? Your trust?”

“You’ve been in the field with me for two years,” Bruce pointed out. “And I was the one running that gauntlet. This time you’ll be on your own –”

“Yeah, in the kiddie pool,” Dick pouted. Bruce counted to ten and tried not to think about chucking his teenage ward out one of the manor’s windows.

“Look, one way or another, Kite Man needs to be dealt with,” Bruce said. “You can either handle it, or you can stay home while I do.”

For a moment Bruce really thought that Dick would remain stubbornly seated at the Batcomputer, curled grumpily in on himself, dwarfed by Bruce’s massive chair.

The angry tirade that he’d launched into had left him exhausted in all the ways. The fire had faded almost as quickly as it’d started, his limbs leaden and the space under his eyes hollow as he poured himself a coffee and plied it with sugar. He didn’t even remember the specifics of what he’d said, just that it was something to do with people judging situations without having the proper understanding required to do so. Really, he wasn’t entirely sure.

Wash hadn’t been sure this morning and he wasn’t now that he was standing, knocking on the front door of one of the people in group. She’d invited him round for dinner. Something about meeting her kid. He’d said yes. Why had he done that? He hadn’t been over at anyone’s place for dinner since...well, ever, really.

He thought.

It was frighteningly normal.

He’d called his sister for help. She’d talked him through it. He supposed it kind of made things a little easier to know that he’d never known how to go round for dinner, that the difficulty here wasn’t a direct result of Everything, it was just that it...didn’t help. For all that he knew that Joy’d been through some shit, knew some specifics of the situation (couldn’t for the life of him recall how he knew, but what else was new there?), it was weirdly startling how out of his depth he was.

But here he stood, reminding himself to knock, and knocking on her door with a lip gnawed raw and a bag of oranges clutched in his hand. He was late, a side effect of losing time management. Not too late, but late enough to be noticeable, and as he registered the door beginning to open, he was speaking,

“-- Sorry. Sorry, I...lost track of time. But oranges, though?”

T’Challa’s own smile drifted a little, the corners turning up in sorrow rather than mirth. “It is,” he said, finally. The pain in his expression was subdued, but it was there, and he did not try to pretend it wasn’t. “It is very young. I was not prepared, and I am so much older- so to be only sixteen...” His chest rose and fell with a deep, regretful sigh. His feelings on his father were... complicated at best, now, but that did not make his death a welcome thing. 

Ollie would’ve been bitter about having had to move to America, but he wasn’t, because that wasn’t the kind of person that he was. Rather, he regarded this, as yet another thing that was happening, a non-permanent thing that he’d very easily be able to rectify once he a) became a legally independent adult, and b) figured out what to do. Frankly, the way he saw it (heh), everywhere was fucked these days. Best just to make do with what he had.

He also wasn’t particularly bitter about having been transferred into a school with a seeming penchant for being attacked by supervillains or whatever. At least it was exciting, he supposed? Not that that factored into his feelings towards being at a new school. It was just like any other, just with more of a chance of death. Statistically, they (he and the cousins who were also at this school) were more likely to die of America than of supervillains.

Still, that didn’t make it any less of a pain to navigate the halls of Midtown High, with its uniform doors and uniform halls and uniform lockers and zero landmarks, with all the information in tiny details that (shocker) he couldn’t see, even with the handy-dandy assistance afforded by carrying a cane. Thankfully, the teachers had made it a little easier on him, and typically let him leave the classroom five minutes earlier so he could actually find where he was trying to go.

On the plus side, this meant that with five minutes to lunch, he had a head start on, y’know, trying to find the fucking cafeteria. On the down side, having been here for long enough (by the school’s standards, anyway) to be supposed to know where he was going, considering he had no idea where the cafeteria was, and considering there being no one else around, it being before lunch, after all, he had no idea how to find the fucking cafeteria.

This was it, this was the way that he died. Standing next to some unknown locker, squinting at the blurs around him to try and figure out where the fuck he was supposed to go.

Wait. W a i t. Was that...footsteps? It was footsteps, and footsteps that grew louder, at that. He waited a moment longer, confirming that they were close enough to like, y’know, hear him. Assumedly. Right. Time to swallow the nerves that always came with talking to people, “-- Uh-- Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but...uh... Yeah, I’ve no idea where I am. D’you have...any idea how to get to the cafeteria from here?”

[ text ] Nah it was my baby cousin she’s three