An Outsider

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

<Snipped quote by Sep>

I mean, in Scotland maybe.

@ErsatzEmperor

Hey, he doesn't represent the rest of us!

Justice League: Shadow of the Gods (Always Open)

Flamebird

F L A M E B I R D

_{[ ◈ ] N A M E}

---

James Alfred Grayson

_{[ ◈ ] A L I A S E S}

---

Flamebird

_{[ ◈ ] A G E}

---

Mid twenties

_{[ ◈ ] B I R T H P L A C E}

---

Gotham City

_{[ ◈ ] A L L E G I A N C E}

---

Justice League

_{[ ◈ ] P O S I T I O N}

---

Commando/covert operative/soldier/spy

_{[ ◈ ] A P P E A R A N C E}

---

I’m not describing myself. Why? Because I'm not a douchebag, that's why. Just look at the photo up top. What? I can’t remember where it was taken, some Wayne Foundation charity gala probably. Those things are a dime a dozen. Ironically.

What does the Flamebird suit look like? Not much to tell, really. It’s a dark crimson body suit with a crimson domino mask and a giant gold phoenix emblazoned on the chest. Exciting, I know. Imagine a colour-swapped Nightwing costume, and you’ve just about got it.

_{[ ◈ ] A B I L I T I E S // S K I L L S // E Q U I P M E N T}

---

Wow, you really want me to list them all? Skills, and equipment? How much time have you got? Because if you’ve got anywhere to be in, oh I don’t know, the next week, you don’t have enough. And that’s not me being arrogant, or at least not intentionally.

See, you’ve got to bear in mind that I’m a bat-brat. Second generation, sure, but we all go to the same Bat-cave prep school. We’re the swiss army knives of vigilantes, what we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. The family's been doing this for a few decades now, and we've got the training regime down to a fine art. Ideal results, every time. Bonafide peak human/borderline super-people, or your money back. We’re taught martial arts, investigation skills, stealth techniques, advanced sciences, advanced driving, advanced catering - ok, that one was all Alfred, but still, surprisingly useful. Our unspoken motto is to prepare for everything, and brother, we take it seriously. If we didn’t what right would we have to stand alongside the Supermen and Wonder Women of our world? None, is the succinct answer.

So yeah, lets you and I save some time, and have you just assume that any skill that jumps to mind when you think ‘I bet a regular guy would need to know how to do this to just have a hope of hanging with the Legion of Doom when they start getting world conquer-y’, I know.

As for equipment, picture the best that money can buy. That’s the kind of stuff I carry. The best armour, the coolest gadgets, the sharpest weaponry. Again, not trying to sound arrogant, but I’m the freaking James Bond of superheroes, so you better believe I’ve got an exploding pen or two hidden up my sleeves. Along with several throwing knives, a grapple gun, smoke bombs, shark repellent ...

Seriously, we've got all the wonderful toys.

_{[ ◈ ] L I M I T A T I O N S // W E A K N E S S E S}

---

Bullets. Knives. Poisons. Gluten … look, is this necessary, because it feels pretty freaking morbid. I’m just a regular dude, most things kill me. Use your imagination, God damn.

_{[ ◈ ] B I O G R A P H Y}

---

Richard Grayson. Barbara Gordon. Better known to the world at large as Nightwing and Batgirl. You know the names, you know who they are. We all do. Well what you might not know is that Nightwing and Batgirl fell for one another – perhaps not all that surprising considering that when they first met they were just kids, and you know what happens when you couple a teenager’s raging hormones with intense, high octane situations like getting shot at and fighting colourful super criminals.

So followed a long and storied on-again, off-again romance. There were a few bumps in the road for the couple – including, but not limited to Dick getting involved with a smoking hot alien princess that resulted in a Tamarian/human hybrid love child – but the two bat-brats were fighters through and through, and they never fought harder than when they were fighting for one another.

Eventually they managed to force the pieces to fall in to place, which resulted in the kind of storybook wedding you can only read about in pulp fiction novels and comic books (Seriously, Poison Ivy transformed the bouquet into a flower golem and made it attack the wedding guests, while the Joker masqueraded as a catholic priest to marry the happy couple. I’ve seen the wedding videos. It was crazy.) Not half a year later the Grayson’s embarked upon what they would later describe as their greatest and most challenging adventure: Parenthood.

That’s where I come in … I just realised, I forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I? Well, no time like the present, I guess. James Alfred Grayson’s the name. James, not Jim. Let’s be very clear on that.

Anyway, as you might guess I didn’t quite have the typical childhood. My grandad was freaking Batman after all. Don’t get me wrong, I was a happy enough lil guy, and there’s nothing quite like getting a katana for Christmas from uncle Damian, but I was always very aware that mine wasn’t the standard experience. Mom and dad were always very up front with me with who they were, and while Mom slowed down the vigilantism - taking on a backseat role as the resident computer wizard for the bat-family and Justice League so as to have more time to spend with her little guy - they would both still disappear for weeks, sometimes months at a time with very little explanation, fighting off outer-dimensional incursions or cosmic tyrants.

Don’t even get me started on all the birthdays they missed because of Infinite Crises.

As I grew older I started to become aware that there were certain ‘expectations’ of me that didn’t seem to apply to my peers. For example, most pre-teens have to cut the lawn and take out the trash to earn their allowance. I had to learn the twenty-three most effective ways to disarm an armed assailant, and the best ways to escape from standard issue handcuffs … while underwater.

Those extra-curricular activities seemed to get more and more comprehensive until one day, without really realising that it had happened, I was wearing a cape and mask, a yellow ‘R’ on my chest, and spending a lot more time brooding on rooftops than is probably healthy for a sixteen-year-old. Hey, I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, most kids would have killed to be in my pixie boots, but it’s a lot to put on a kid, the weight of the world on their scrawny shoulders, when they should still be chasing girls and squeezing pimples.

All that said, I think I turned out alright. I mean, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if I was the first member of the bat-family to wind up in therapy, but all things considered, I think I’m doing fine. (In case you’re wondering, I am, of course, joking. Us cape and cowl types aren’t allowed to visit shrinks. It makes us seem too human. Nobody want’s their superhero to be, y’know, a flawed human being. It kills the power fantasy. Besides, the shrink always turns out to be some Hugo Strange-style super-villain, and just uses the opportunity to try and brainwash us into becoming their own personal attack dog. Every. Freaking. Time.)

Eventually I upgraded from the chainmail speedos to tights and an alter-ego of my very own, one that wasn’t just a hand me down from dear old dad. And with that Firebird was born. I picked an inauspicious time to graduate to my big boy pants though, as the very next month the Legion made their big play for world domination. I was still a Titan back then – a real one, I mean, not one of those kids they churn through the Academies nowadays – and spent the first two days fighting alongside my team. Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Vulkan, Damage, Spitfire, Bloom, Blue Paladin. Nightstar – my half-sister – had recently left the team to join the Justice League proper, which had left yours truly in charge. Something about being a part of the Bat-family always seems to automatically propel you into a leadership position whenever the super-teams get together, regardless of whether you’ve earned the spot or not.

We … We lost a lot of good people. Too many, seems like now.

I struggle to remember all the details now. I look back, and all I get are fragments. Sharp, jagged, shards of memory. I go back to them now and then, and if I’m not careful they cut me. Funny that, don’t you think? You’d imagine memories like that would get less painful with time, that if you handle them enough you’d eventually start to round-over all those sharp corners. Never works like that though. If anything, I’ve just sharpened them, honed the edges until they’re razor.

…

Look, I’m going to move on, ok? Ok.

When things started to settle down I could have really used a vacation from the superhero biz. I mean, I deserved one, right? I’d just been fighting on the frontlines of World War Three, only instead of jackbooted teenagers with pip-pip machineguns I was fighting power-ring wielding Yellow Lanterns and dudes who could lift buses over their head while blowing lighting out their noses. Stressful doesn’t even begin to cover it. Well, the battle might have been over, but the war was just beginning, so unfortunately for Ol’ James here any and all time off had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. There was just too much to do, and not enough time to do it in.

Not enough people to do it, either, as it turned out. All that fighting had left the League’s ranks with more holes to fill than a good Swiss cheese, so I suddenly found myself thrust into the big Leagues. For a while I went wherever I was needed (which felt like everywhere at the time). Like I mentioned earlier being a part of the Bat-family, even as junior a part as me, lends you an authority that people automatically respect, and seeing as gramps was getting a touch long in the tooth to be personally handling every Legion related disturbance that cropped up, it came down to the rest of us young’uns to handle the day to day shenanigans, so he and the other big-heads could deal with the major stuff.

It all suited me fine really. I’ve since come to terms with the fact that I’m not comfortable making the big decisions. Having so many people dependent on you, on the choices you make, that’s just too much responsibility for me. Batman has to be in charge, Nightwing was born to fly, but me, James Grayson, I prefer having my boots on the ground. I guess I get that from the Grandpa Jim. Sure, he’s mayor of Gotham city now, but I think in his heart he’ll always be a beat-cop, a regular guy who does what he knows in his heart is right. It might surprise you to know that in my darkest moments I ask myself “what would Jim do” long before I start wondering how Batman would handle the situation.

See, that's the thing no one tells you growing up in this family. When you're a kid, you want to be the hero. You want to wear the cape and punch the badguys, to swing through the window, save the day, then get the girl. You want to be Batman. God, you want it so much that sometimes it keeps you up at nights. But then you get older, and as you get older what matters to you, what's most important to you, changes. Slowly, but inexorably you begin to realize that being the hero, it sucks. People die when you play the hero. You're the one getting shot at, but it's always those standing next to you that seem to catch the bullets. Eventually you realize that Batman doesn't exist, or at least not the Batman you knew as a child. The Caped Crusader, he's an impossible ideal, a rabbit hole that leads to madness, or more likely crippling depression. And that's when you become conscious of the fact that you don't want to be the hero anymore. You'd just settle for being a good man. And isn't that enough?

Shouldn't it be?

*sigh*

Anyway, where was I.

I became the League’s go-to operative. The guy they called when they needed a scalpel rather than a mallet. Want someone to sneak into Khandaq and extract a VIP? You called Flamebird. Need a HIVE schools training programmes sabotaged? Call Flamebird. Want a rival agent seduced and brought over to the whitehats? You better believe you call Flamebird. (hey, I inherited the Grayson charm, alright. I can honeypot with the best of them.) Sure, I would still be there for those big-League operations when they run into one of those ‘all hands-on board’ situations, but that wasn’t where my strengths lay. I was a spy, for lack of a better term, and a damn good one at that.

Or at least I was, up until the day I died.

‘Whoa’, you must be saying to yourself, ‘What an incredible, and definitely not overplayed, twist’. Well thank you, I’m quite proud of it myself, but please stop interrupting, or I’ll never get this story finished.

During what was supposed to be a routine operation in China, picking up info left for us by one of the Leagues covert agents at a dead drop, I was ambushed by Deathstroke the Terminator and his granddaughter, Ravager. Now if you know Deathstroke then you know that guy doesn’t play around. If you end up in his sights, you're almost certainly going to die. I was lucky, and I mean jackpot-lottery-win-the-same-day-you-find-out-you're-secret-royalty-kind-of-luck, to make it away from that encounter in one piece. My luck ran out shortly afterwards though, when I missed my extraction. Things went from bad to worse when the Terminator picked up my trail, and so began a game of cat and mouse that seen me leading the most dangerous mercenary alive on a merry chase across Asia, Siberia, and finally Poland. I almost made it out too, but Ravager cornered me in Warshaw, and slowed me down long enough for Slade to catch up.

I fought them as hard as I could, but Deathstroke is good. Really good. Even in his prime, Batman wouldn’t face him unless he really had to, not alone, and definitely not without stacking the deck heavily in his favour beforehand. I, on the other hand, was alone, wounded, tired, and facing Deathstroke and Lady Deathstroke Junior together. I wasn’t getting out alive. That much was clear.

So, I faked my death.

I won’t bore you with the details – you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you – but I fooled Slade into thinking that he got the better of me. Unfortunately, I actually did get hurt pretty bad, and ended up out of commission for these last six months, six long months that I couldn’t even contact my parents, or any one else in the League to let them know I’m still alive. See, I now know something that the Legion wouldn’t want me to know. Something which means that I can’t use the old channels to contact my allies. Deathstroke didn’t find me by accident. Somebody leaked my whereabouts, and the only people that could have possible known where I was going to be are supposed to be the good guys. Which means the League has itself a mole.

A mole I intend on exterminating.

My name is James Grayson, and my story is just beginning.

_{[ ◈ ] N O T E S}

---

None at the moment.

_{[ ◈ ] S O U R C E}

---

N/A

Justice League: Shadow of the Gods (Always Open)

Flamebird

F L A M E B I R D

_{[ ◈ ] N A M E}

---

James Alfred Grayson

_{[ ◈ ] A L I A S E S}

---

Flamebird

_{[ ◈ ] A G E}

---

Mid twenties

_{[ ◈ ] B I R T H P L A C E}

---

Gotham City

_{[ ◈ ] A L L E G I A N C E}

---

Justice League

_{[ ◈ ] P O S I T I O N}

---

Commando/covert operative/soldier/spy

_{[ ◈ ] A P P E A R A N C E}

---

I’m not describing myself. Why? Because I'm not a douchebag, that's why. Just look at the photo up top. What? I can’t remember where it was taken, some Wayne Foundation charity gala probably. Those things are a dime a dozen. Ironically.

What does the Flamebird suit look like? Not much to tell, really. It’s a dark crimson body suit with a crimson domino mask and a giant gold phoenix emblazoned on the chest. Exciting, I know. Imagine a colour-swapped Nightwing costume, and you’ve just about got it.

_{[ ◈ ] A B I L I T I E S // S K I L L S // E Q U I P M E N T}

---

Wow, you really want me to list them all? Skills, and equipment? How much time have you got? Because if you’ve got anywhere to be in, oh I don’t know, the next week, you don’t have enough. And that’s not me being arrogant, or at least not intentionally.

See, you’ve got to bear in mind that I’m a bat-brat. Second generation, sure, but we all go to the same Bat-cave prep school. We’re the swiss army knives of vigilantes, what we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. The family's been doing this for a few decades now, and we've got the training regime down to a fine art. Ideal results, every time. Bonafide peak human/borderline super-people, or your money back. We’re taught martial arts, investigation skills, stealth techniques, advanced sciences, advanced driving, advanced catering - ok, that one was all Alfred, but still, surprisingly useful. Our unspoken motto is to prepare for everything, and brother, we take it seriously. If we didn’t what right would we have to stand alongside the Supermen and Wonder Women of our world? None, is the succinct answer.

So yeah, lets you and I save some time, and have you just assume that any skill that jumps to mind when you think ‘I bet a regular guy would need to know how to do this to just have a hope of hanging with the Legion of Doom when they start getting world conquer-y’, I know.

As for equipment, picture the best that money can buy. That’s the kind of stuff I carry. The best armour, the coolest gadgets, the sharpest weaponry. Again, not trying to sound arrogant, but I’m the freaking James Bond of superheroes, so you better believe I’ve got an exploding pen or two hidden up my sleeves. Along with several throwing knives, a grapple gun, smoke bombs, shark repellent ...

Seriously, we've got all the wonderful toys.

_{[ ◈ ] L I M I T A T I O N S // W E A K N E S S E S}

---

Bullets. Knives. Poisons. Gluten … look, is this necessary, because it feels pretty freaking morbid. I’m just a regular dude, most things kill me. Use your imagination, God damn.

_{[ ◈ ] B I O G R A P H Y}

---

Richard Grayson. Barbara Gordon. Better known to the world at large as Nightwing and Batgirl. You know the names, you know who they are. We all do. Well what you might not know is that Nightwing and Batgirl fell for one another – perhaps not all that surprising considering that when they first met they were just kids, and you know what happens when you couple a teenager’s raging hormones with intense, high octane situations like getting shot at and fighting colourful super criminals.

So followed a long and storied on-again, off-again romance. There were a few bumps in the road for the couple – including, but not limited to Dick getting involved with a smoking hot alien princess that resulted in a Tamarian/human hybrid love child – but the two bat-brats were fighters through and through, and they never fought harder than when they were fighting for one another.

Eventually they managed to force the pieces to fall in to place, which resulted in the kind of storybook wedding you can only read about in pulp fiction novels and comic books (Seriously, Poison Ivy transformed the bouquet into a flower golem and made it attack the wedding guests, while the Joker masqueraded as a catholic priest to marry the happy couple. I’ve seen the wedding videos. It was crazy.) Not half a year later the Grayson’s embarked upon what they would later describe as their greatest and most challenging adventure: Parenthood.

That’s where I come in … I just realised, I forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I? Well, no time like the present, I guess. James Alfred Grayson’s the name. James, not Jim. Let’s be very clear on that.

Anyway, as you might guess I didn’t quite have the typical childhood. My grandad was freaking Batman after all. Don’t get me wrong, I was a happy enough lil guy, and there’s nothing quite like getting a katana for Christmas from uncle Damian, but I was always very aware that mine wasn’t the standard experience. Mom and dad were always very up front with me with who they were, and while Mom slowed down the vigilantism - taking on a backseat role as the resident computer wizard for the bat-family and Justice League so as to have more time to spend with her little guy - they would both still disappear for weeks, sometimes months at a time with very little explanation, fighting off outer-dimensional incursions or cosmic tyrants.

Don’t even get me started on all the birthdays they missed because of Infinite Crises.

As I grew older I started to become aware that there were certain ‘expectations’ of me that didn’t seem to apply to my peers. For example, most pre-teens have to cut the lawn and take out the trash to earn their allowance. I had to learn the twenty-three most effective ways to disarm an armed assailant, and the best ways to escape from standard issue handcuffs … while underwater.

Those extra-curricular activities seemed to get more and more comprehensive until one day, without really realising that it had happened, I was wearing a cape and mask, a yellow ‘R’ on my chest, and spending a lot more time brooding on rooftops than is probably healthy for a sixteen-year-old. Hey, I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, most kids would have killed to be in my pixie boots, but it’s a lot to put on a kid, the weight of the world on their scrawny shoulders, when they should still be chasing girls and squeezing pimples.

All that said, I think I turned out alright. I mean, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if I was the first member of the bat-family to wind up in therapy, but all things considered, I think I’m doing fine. (In case you’re wondering, I am, of course, joking. Us cape and cowl types aren’t allowed to visit shrinks. It makes us seem too human. Nobody want’s their superhero to be, y’know, a flawed human being. It kills the power fantasy. Besides, the shrink always turns out to be some Hugo Strange-style super-villain, and just uses the opportunity to try and brainwash us into becoming their own personal attack dog. Every. Freaking. Time.)

Eventually I upgraded from the chainmail speedos to tights and an alter-ego of my very own, one that wasn’t just a hand me down from dear old dad. And with that Firebird was born. I picked an inauspicious time to graduate to my big boy pants though, as the very next month the Legion made their big play for world domination. I was still a Titan back then – a real one, I mean, not one of those kids they churn through the Academies nowadays – and spent the first two days fighting alongside my team. Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Vulkan, Damage, Spitfire, Bloom, Blue Paladin. Nightstar – my half-sister – had recently left the team to join the Justice League proper, which had left yours truly in charge. Something about being a part of the Bat-family always seems to automatically propel you into a leadership position whenever the super-teams get together, regardless of whether you’ve earned the spot or not.

We … We lost a lot of good people. Too many, seems like now.

I struggle to remember all the details now. I look back, and all I get are fragments. Sharp, jagged, shards of memory. I go back to them now and then, and if I’m not careful they cut me. Funny that, don’t you think? You’d imagine memories like that would get less painful with time, that if you handle them enough you’d eventually start to round-over all those sharp corners. Never works like that though. If anything, I’ve just sharpened them, honed the edges until they’re razor.

…

Look, I’m going to move on, ok? Ok.

When things started to settle down I could have really used a vacation from the superhero biz. I mean, I deserved one, right? I’d just been fighting on the frontlines of World War Three, only instead of jackbooted teenagers with pip-pip machineguns I was fighting power-ring wielding Yellow Lanterns and dudes who could lift buses over their head while blowing lighting out their noses. Stressful doesn’t even begin to cover it. Well, the battle might have been over, but the war was just beginning, so unfortunately for Ol’ James here any and all time off had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. There was just too much to do, and not enough time to do it in.

Not enough people to do it, either, as it turned out. All that fighting had left the League’s ranks with more holes to fill than a good Swiss cheese, so I suddenly found myself thrust into the big Leagues. For a while I went wherever I was needed (which felt like everywhere at the time). Like I mentioned earlier being a part of the Bat-family, even as junior a part as me, lends you an authority that people automatically respect, and seeing as gramps was getting a touch long in the tooth to be personally handling every Legion related disturbance that cropped up, it came down to the rest of us young’uns to handle the day to day shenanigans, so he and the other big-heads could deal with the major stuff.

It all suited me fine really. I’ve since come to terms with the fact that I’m not comfortable making the big decisions. Having so many people dependent on you, on the choices you make, that’s just too much responsibility for me. Batman has to be in charge, Nightwing was born to fly, but me, James Grayson, I prefer having my boots on the ground. I guess I get that from the Grandpa Jim. Sure, he’s mayor of Gotham city now, but I think in his heart he’ll always be a beat-cop, a regular guy who does what he knows in his heart is right. It might surprise you to know that in my darkest moments I ask myself “what would Jim do” long before I start wondering how Batman would handle the situation.

See, that's the thing no one tells you growing up in this family. When you're a kid, you want to be the hero. You want to wear the cape and punch the badguys, to swing through the window, save the day, then get the girl. You want to be Batman. God, you want it so much that sometimes it keeps you up at nights. But then you get older, and as you get older what matters to you, what's most important to you, changes. Slowly, but inexorably you begin to realize that being the hero, it sucks. People die when you play the hero. You're the one getting shot at, but it's always those standing next to you that seem to catch the bullets. Eventually you realize that Batman doesn't exist, or at least not the Batman you knew as a child. The Caped Crusader, he's an impossible ideal, a rabbit hole that leads to madness, or more likely crippling depression. And that's when you become conscious of the fact that you don't want to be the hero anymore. You'd just settle for being a good man. And isn't that enough?

Shouldn't it be?

*sigh*

Anyway, where was I.

I became the League’s go-to operative. The guy they called when they needed a scalpel rather than a mallet. Want someone to sneak into Khandaq and extract a VIP? You called Flamebird. Need a HIVE schools training programmes sabotaged? Call Flamebird. Want a rival agent seduced and brought over to the whitehats? You better believe you call Flamebird. (hey, I inherited the Grayson charm, alright. I can honeypot with the best of them.) Sure, I would still be there for those big-League operations when they run into one of those ‘all hands-on board’ situations, but that wasn’t where my strengths lay. I was a spy, for lack of a better term, and a damn good one at that.

Or at least I was, up until the day I died.

‘Whoa’, you must be saying to yourself, ‘What an incredible, and definitely not overplayed, twist’. Well thank you, I’m quite proud of it myself, but please stop interrupting, or I’ll never get this story finished.

During what was supposed to be a routine operation in China, picking up info left for us by one of the Leagues covert agents at a dead drop, I was ambushed by Deathstroke the Terminator and his granddaughter, Ravager. Now if you know Deathstroke then you know that guy doesn’t play around. If you end up in his sights, you're almost certainly going to die. I was lucky, and I mean jackpot-lottery-win-the-same-day-you-find-out-you're-secret-royalty-kind-of-luck, to make it away from that encounter in one piece. My luck ran out shortly afterwards though, when I missed my extraction. Things went from bad to worse when the Terminator picked up my trail, and so began a game of cat and mouse that seen me leading the most dangerous mercenary alive on a merry chase across Asia, Siberia, and finally Poland. I almost made it out too, but Ravager cornered me in Warshaw, and slowed me down long enough for Slade to catch up.

I fought them as hard as I could, but Deathstroke is good. Really good. Even in his prime, Batman wouldn’t face him unless he really had to, not alone, and definitely not without stacking the deck heavily in his favour beforehand. I, on the other hand, was alone, wounded, tired, and facing Deathstroke and Lady Deathstroke Junior together. I wasn’t getting out alive. That much was clear.

So, I faked my death.

I won’t bore you with the details – you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you – but I fooled Slade into thinking that he got the better of me. Unfortunately, I actually did get hurt pretty bad, and ended up out of commission for these last six months, six long months that I couldn’t even contact my parents, or any one else in the League to let them know I’m still alive. See, I now know something that the Legion wouldn’t want me to know. Something which means that I can’t use the old channels to contact my allies. Deathstroke didn’t find me by accident. Somebody leaked my whereabouts, and the only people that could have possible known where I was going to be are supposed to be the good guys. Which means the League has itself a mole.

A mole I intend on exterminating.

My name is James Grayson, and my story is just beginning.

_{[ ◈ ] N O T E S}[hr ]

None at the moment.

_{[ ◈ ] S O U R C E}[hr ]

N/A

Justice League: Shadow of the Gods

@Polyphemus Great to see you back on the guild dude.

Tales of the Crimson Legion - Galaxy at War

Tentatively interested.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

@Lord Wraith You should use it as your new siggy. Easily a superior interpretation of Dick Grayson.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

_{Star City, Sherwood Florist, Near dawn}

---

---

The night was all but over when Dinah finally made it back to the florist. It had seemed like a good idea at first, operating out of the faux medieval-style tower that had once functioned as both her mother’s shop and the family home. Mom had left it to her and Sarah in the will, and with lil’ sis at college, and the shop long closed, there was never anyone about to clock the unsociable hours Dinah had been keeping. It had been convenient, having a place to bed down that she didn’t have to pay for. Rent prices in Star - even after the earthquake hit - were prohibitive, and her being a jobless millennial didn’t exactly endear her towards mortgage officers or prospective roommates.

All that said the real reason Sherwood had initially been such an attractive base of operations was the fact that it was placed firmly in the Orchid Bay. Distance from the Glades had seemed like a good thing. It would give her some space think, to breath. Somewhere all the problems facing Star’s most downtrodden neighbourhood would seem smaller, less immediate. God, what an idiot she’d been. She realised now that it didn’t matter where she went, didn’t matter how many miles she covered, a part of her would always be down in the Glades, sunken in the filth and the grime and the hopelessness. Its corruption had stained her bone deep.

All she’d done was ensure that her nightly commute was a lengthy bitch.

She let herself into the tower, thinking that all she wanted to do now was grab a cold beer, take a hot shower, then hit the sack. Her legs were sore from tramping up and down deserted alleyways all night, while her throat ached like someone had drawn a cheese grater along the inside of her neck. Slowly. And repeatedly. An unwelcome side effect of using her Cry earlier that night, and just one more reason for her to keep its use to a minimum.

The tower’s ground floor had once served as Sherwood Florist’s shop floor, and signs of that ‘lofty’ purpose still lingered, even now, almost five years since a flower had been anywhere near the place. Shelving units were plants of all kinds had once sat proudly still dotted the floors, now covered by off-yellow dust sheets, ironically blanket in thick layers of dust. A circular cashier’s desk was placed in the middle of the floor, a bank of four ancient till machines placed at the four compass points hovered like old forgotten relics, seemingly waiting for a gentle touch to coax them back to life. The shop, once one of the busiest florists in the city, had become a mausoleum, her still refuge from the city.

Or at least it was supposed to be, and yet she could clearly remember shutting the basement door before heading out earlier that night, and yet now it was hanging wide open.

Dinah’s mind began to race while her heart picked up the tempo. Nobody was supposed to be here but her. Sarah wouldn’t have come back – she hadn’t liked being in this room when it had been fresh and vibrant, and those days were in the distant past now – and there wasn’t a reason for anyone else to have come … unless, of course, they were here for her.

She hadn’t made the dent in Star City’s crime problem that should would have liked, had hardly done anything more than rough up a few Vertigo dealers and break a couple legbreaker’s legs. Could that have been enough to blip up on someone’s radar? She didn’t think so. Then again, what did she know about organised crime? Maybe this was just the way the criminals did business. Meet any infraction or insult with total retribution.

Dry mouthed and sweaty palmed, she made her way down the basement stairs, flicking the light switch as she passed. If there was somebody down here, they seemed to like the dark. Dinah didn’t mind it herself, it wasn’t like she was scared or anything, but it would be stupid to go stumbling into shadows that might be hiding trained killers. Or that’s what she told herself, anyway.

What was once a storeroom had become the Dinah’s vigilante sanctum. Ok, it wasn’t all that impressive to look at – yet – but she was starting to get quite attached to her chamber of secrets. The walls were covered with maps of Star City, pictures of known drug dealers and gangsters, a few posters from her mom’s punk days, even a flier from one of Ted’s later fights against some up and coming amateur called; Battlin’ Jack Murdock.

A huge wooden desk dominated one quarter of the circular space. It was one of the few pieces of furniture already down here when she first started using the space a few weeks back, but she couldn’t remember her parents ever owning it. Her busted laptop sat there, unlikely to get used anytime soon. Dinah wasn’t all that computer-literate, as Sarah would put it. She preferred dinosaur copies, hard files, that kind of thing. In keeping with that there were boxes of her dad’s case files dumped around the room, forming haphazard towers and patchy walls. Quentin would squirm at his daughter’s devil-may-care attitude towards filing, though she had never seen the problem with organised chaos. She always managed to find what she was looking for eventually. Standing in that basement now, with any number of killers potentially skulking in amongst the hiding places those files afforded, she suddenly realised the wisdom of dad’s system.

She took a couple of steps into the room, eyes open and suspicious, ears straining for any tell-tale sound. The rasp of a blade being drawn, the cock of a gun, hell, even the clenching of a fist would be nice. Somehow the silence seemed so much worse, so much more dangerous, than any of the above. It was a blank white page on which she could illustrate her own horror, and right now they were a lot less welcome than reality.

“I should warn you,” she said aloud, her voice remarkably steady. The way she was feeling, jittery and fearful, excited and anxious all at once, she never would have put money on sounding ‘steady’. “I’ve had a long night and wasn’t in the best of moods before all this. If you come out now, I’ll con –”

She never got the chance to finish the sentence before the guy made his move. Call it paranoia. Call it dumb luck. Call it a sixth sense. Call it whatever you damn well please, but he struck, and somehow Dinah was ready for it. Before she realised what she was doing she dropped into a crouch, balanced delicately upon the balls of her feet, feeling rather than seeing the fist that tore through the air where her head had moments ago vacated.

Instinct honed through endless hours of training and sparring kicked in, her body acting without conscious direction, doing what it needed to do to keep her in the fight, to make sure she was still standing at the end of it. She stepped back tight into her assailant, real tight, so close she fancied she could feel his breath on the back of her neck, one arm grabbing onto the wrist of his extended arm, while the other simultaneously snaked up and over the back of his head. He realised too late what was happening, and before he could stop her she was throwing him over her shoulder. He flew for a heartbeat, before crashing into a stack of her dad’s case files. Papers exploded outwards like doves in a John Woo movie.

She followed in quick, eager to end this before it had a real chance to begin. In the moment she used to close the distance she studied her foe. He was big, she realised that even as he lay on his back. Maybe 6’ 4”, with viciously wide shoulders and hands the size of tennis rackets. He was dressed all in black, a balaclava covering his face, an almost stereotypical bad-guy goon. Inspection over, she continued with the fight.

A quick step forward eased into a spin, that moved effortlessly into a pirouette, that ended in a flawless hook kick. She’d been complimented on her long legs plenty in the past, but it was only moments like this that she was truly thankful for them. The hook kick was a tricky manoeuvre to pull off, powerful as a locomotive if it landed, but difficult to connect with, and a damn mess if it missed. She was confident though, with the bad guy on his ass, that she wasn’t going to miss.

Then again, she’d been wrong before.

The assailant was fast. Faster than she wanted him to be. In one flowing move he sprang to his knees, got a guard up – a philly shell, she noted – and rolled the kick of his shoulder. Suddenly she was the one off-balance, and he punished her for it, a straight jab, right in the gut. He shouldn’t have gotten much power from it, not from a crouch, but to Dinah it still felt like getting kicked by a mule. She had to back off, get some space, otherwise this was going to end badly.

She conceded a few feet, but he was quick to follow her. Damn, but she hated being the one on the defensive. She threw a couple jabs, but he threw up a high guard and knocked them aside with contemptuous ease. Those forearms of his were knotted with muscle as thick and unyielding as old, weathered oak, and it was easy to imagine her hits were costing her more than they cost him.

He knew what he was doing, that much was clear. A real pro. Whoever had paid for him was really getting their money’s worth. Suddenly she realised she couldn’t wait for him. If she kept backing up he would just walk her down, and if it went to a straight slug fest she didn’t like her chances. She didn’t wait for him though, surging forwards herself. Give no quarter, take no prisoners. So what if he could fight, so could she.

And she had to bet that she could do it better.

A vicious exchange of blows followed, punches and strikes raining almost too fast for the eye to follow. Dinah dodged what she could, blocked what she couldn’t, using her palms and forearms to guide aside the hits she didn’t want landing. She managed a few counter-punches of her own, but if her opponent felt them he didn’t let on.

Somewhere along the way she felt a smile tugging at her lips. Yeah, that’s right, an honest to goodness smile. God, but this was living. When was the last time she’d had a chance to let loose like this?

Of course, like all good things it couldn’t last, and this time was no exception. For Dinah it came to a screeching halt when she recognised that right jab the masked man kept throwing, aiming to keep her on the defensive, to let his size and reach do all the hard work for him. She’d seen that jab a million times growing up. Heard a man she thought of as a father extol its virtues time and time again. All of a sudden, she decided that this had gone on for long enough. She wanted answers, and she wanted them now.

She stepped in quick, feinting in a low body blow. The assailant hunched in tight, not so much dropping his guard – he was way too experienced to fall for a weakass trick like that – but lowering it just enough to leave the opening she wanted. Viper quick her hand nipped forwards, clutching a handful of her opponent’s black mask and yanking it clear.

She leapt back, leaving the old boxer blinking in the bright, harsh light. Her arms folded tight across her chest, but her wide stance and splayed legs signified that she wasn’t done fighting yet. Not by a long shot.

“What the hell are you playing at Ted!?”

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

@ErsatzEmperor Mostly we keep them for situations like this.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

@Sep For all of one post so far, but yeah.

CLOSED - Ultimate One Universe: Season One

@Sep's becoming polis? Of all the stupid, ridiculous things that's happened in Scotland these last few years, this is the one that's making me seriously consider emigrating.

As an aside Dinah wont be joining the Silver Surfer slugfest. It's to early in her developmental stage for her to jump in something of that magnitude yet.