Mentor Management
My Name: Merry Reese
E-mail: ozdoofus@hotmail.com
LJ Name: mildredmilton
Recipient's Name: scheherezhad
Character: Mia Dearden, aka Speedy II (Green Arrow)
Warnings: Strong Language
Spoilers: None
Mentor Management
My Name: Merry Reese
E-mail: ozdoofus@hotmail.com
LJ Name: mildredmilton
Recipient's Name: scheherezhad
Character: Mia Dearden, aka Speedy II (Green Arrow)
Warnings: Strong Language
Spoilers: None
Mia knows she's being a brat. Thinking about it makes her even more of a
brat, so she's trying to ignore it. The trouble is, Bart is hard to ignore.
He's especially tough to ignore when he makes gigantic sad puppy eyes at
her, so she throws an arrow at him and he zooms out of the med-lab.
Actually, she realizes, he'd zoomed around the med-lab, put the arrow back
in her quiver, and then zoomed out of the medlab. Sometimes he makes her
want to yank that stupid floppy hair out by the roots, and cry, all at the
same time.
"The pain meds are kicking in. I'm fine." She says.
"Lie. Down." There's a big, metal hand on one of her shoulders. She looks
up. The thing about Cyborg is he only has half a face, so she can't tell
from his expression if he's pissed that she was mean to Bart or that she's
trying to get up, or that he just has to be the resident adult all the time
now. Probably all of them. "Superboy!" He just barely raises his voice.
He knows Superboy can hear him.
"Here." Superboy gives her a look that says he heard her bitching out Bart,
and he's going to take it out on her as soon as he won't feel guilty about
pounding on someone who's injured.
"Keep her in bed. I'm going out for a beer. I'll let Robin know I won't be
free to baby-sit for the rest of the night."
Cyborg doesn't look at her as he goes. Yup, he's pissed about all three.
Superboy brings a game-boy out of his back pocket, and settles in a chair,
not facing her. "Don't move." He says. "I can hear if you do."
She sighs and settles back on the bed. In Team Arrow territory, if anyone
hurt her, they'd catch hell from Ollie or Connor, one way or another. Bart
seems to be the pet on this team. She wonders if Raven's dreaming up a
nightmare for her right now.
At least she'd told them. At least she didn't have to worry about screaming
out 'I'm HIV positive! Careful of the blood!' in the middle of a room full
of supervillains. Full of a supervillain. Supervillen? It's hard to think
of pronouns for a guy who can make copies of himself. She usually hates to
think to think of supervillains in terms of their 'cape names,' because she
doesn't want to encourage them. Still, this guy or guys, for the sake of
her huge headache that isn't going to get better if she tries to figure out
the grammar for him/them, she'll just call go ahead and call Exponential.
Anyway, she'd told the Titans about testing positive, and telling the
police, and the people at the metahuman holding facility that they'd have to
test Exponential for HIV, because his clones or doubles or whatever had been
exposed to infected blood, and no one's sure if it can be transmitted via
self-proxy . . . well, it was only a little humiliating.
"I want Robin."
"He's in his room." When Superboy doesn't make a dirty joke, you know he's
mad.
"Could you just let him know? You'll be back in, like, a second." She
remembers the com. She's got the com back now. It's on her uninjured arm,
even. "Robin, could you come down here?"
"Five minutes." He makes it sound routine, even though she's never called
him before. Even when she should have.
She can tell Superboy is smirking by the slant of his shoulders, and when
the 'superhero' in the jeans, and a t-shirt thinks she's too dumb for the
business . . . . damn it. She likes these people. They got her out
from under a pile of Exponentials (Exponentia?) before her ribs gave out,
and they've always ordered her kind of pizza, and these really aren't the
people she's mad at. For better or for worse.
Robin comes in through the door the same way he does everything, in a way
that makes her think that she's watching TV with the mute button on because
it's so silent it's surreal. It makes Superboy seem especially noisy when
he gets up and slouches over to the door, never taking his eyes from the
gameboy.
"Could you tell Bart that I will teach him archery as soon as my arm heals
up?"
"He's probably forgotten already." Superboy says.
It feels wrong to get mad at Superboy for relaxing into a smile. It's not
his fault that he's such a sweetheart, and it's convenient for her. Fuck
it, she's faked harder things than a smile for worse people.
"If he has? Nevermind."
She can hear him snickering as he goes down the hall.
"None of us knew that Exponential could multiply himself." Robin says,
without any kind of preamble. Because he's like a Batman who gets why
you're upset and that . . . She isn't mad at these people. "We put you in
danger by sending you in to do the recon alone. That was our fault.
Letting that replication get your com away from you was. A mistake, yes.
But tripping that last one into the museums display case to set off the
alarm was an effective recovery. Blinding the primary with the glue arrow
was an intelligent move. You did well."
Robin pauses.
"You are not the weak link."
She stares at the ceiling. "That's not what's bothering me."
"You. I. Oh. I anticipated . . . . I didn't mean my speech to indicate
that . . . . Your set of skills is unique. And valuable." She stops
staring at the ceiling so she can see Robin turn red. "I would never send
Bart in to do a reconnaissance mission, for example."
"Fine!" Bart says, from behind him, and then there's a woosh and Bart's
gone again, a clattering quiver of arrows propping open one of the doors.
"Oh man, Rob. Just when I got him happy again. You know what? You two
versus me, in the training room next weekend. Bring ice-packs." Superboy
runs a hand through his hair, and heads off in what, Mia guesses, would be
the direction Bart took.
Robin's kind of purple now, but he can still focus on what he's trying to
say.
"I remembered my concerns about my contribution, as a non-meta, to Young
Justice and the Titans. I didn't mean anything."
She smiles a little. One way to get rid of a bad mood is to transfer it,
and it's working. "Okay, that's not all that was bothering me."
"I won't hazard another guess."
"Have you ever had any close calls? Fuck, don't answer that. I know you
have. I've heard about a few of them."
His face closes down.
"And?"
"What were you thinking about?"
"Mostly ways to get out of the situation."
"What else did you think about?"
"When I'm facing death, I don't often get that much time to think."
"Well, what about those times when you do?"
One of the good things about having seen the absolute worst of human nature,
is that she doesn't get that intimidated when a little guy in a cape narrows
his eyes at her, even if he was trained by Batman.
"See, the med-lab is white, and your costume is black, yellow, green and
red, and your face is still a little bit pink. So you don't blend in with
the walls, Robin."
He ducks his head. No he doesn't. He looks at the open door. And
batarangs the quiver of arrows out of the way so it slams. A lot of people
here can still hear him, but she guesses it's the principle of the thing.
"My . . . . I think of the people I care about. And Batman, I think about
how I've let him down. I think about the people I didn't save."
"Thought so." Is it bad that she makes that sound like an accusation? The
way Robin looks at her means that yes, it is. "Hero thoughts."
"I take it that those weren't your thoughts."
"I was pissed."
"Not surprising. And often quite useful. Sometimes being angry at the
perpetrator can - well I'm sure you know about adrenaline."
"I was pissed at Ollie."
"Oh."
"I was pissed because I didn't want to join the Titans. No I wanted to
join the Titans, but he was the one who kidnapped me and dumped me here.
And because I wanted to work on hand-fighting with Connor and he was all,
'One thing at a time.' I was pissed because he keeps lecturing on getting
overconfident, and hamstringing my training until I can freaking make and
bow and arrow out of bamboo and a rock. Half the time he's pushing me, and
the rest . . . ."
"I don't think there's a rule-book for final thoughts, Speedy."
She looks at him, and he's doing that thing where he's tightening his mouth
and thinking it's a smile.
"You pick this to joke about? This?"
"Perhaps I'll just be quiet again."
"Yeah. You do that." She settles back for some serious ceiling-staring.
"He gave me everything. If he hadn't been there . . . . I'd be dead, or the
sort of person you'd have to pick off for mugging little old ladies and girl
scouts."
"You're allowed to make jokes?"
"Yes. He gave me everything, except Speedy. I had to work for that. I
had to. I had to fucking force him to train me. And then I go down being
so damn mad at him I can't even think."
"You're not down yet, Mia. You're alive."
Robin's looking at her like she's missing something really important.
"Yeah, so next time I'll work on going down all 'I regret that I only have
one life to give for a bunch of people in silly outfits.'"
"You need to work on not, um, going down." Robin looks at the door for a
second. "Hmmmmm. Either Superboy's not listening, or he realizes this is a
solemn moment. Back on the subject; you can exert some control over your
training. There are many reasons to make sure you're trained by a variety
of different people. Some of them are emotional as well as physical."
"There aren't that many people who can train me in Star City."
"Paris has a few dojos you could consider."
"Ollie won't let me go to Paris."
"'Let' isn't the word you should focus on."
"You're shitting me. Ollie would kill me. Or fire me."
"I'm reasonably sure he wouldn't. A limited rebellion can sometimes be very
useful."
"No. Thanks. I'd rather just go home and have Ollie bite my head off for
getting hurt."
"Or I could tell Batman that you are best served by being trained only by
Green Arrow, he would pass along the message, and by the end of the week
Oliver would import a dozen teachers."
"See, there are two horrifying things about that. One: you're manipulating
Batman. Two: Batman and Ollie would talk to each other."
"I suppose."
"So Paris, huh?"
"Mmm."