[Summer won't ever know (or maybe she can guess), but the morbid humor gets a bit of a wry smirk out of him.
Getting to the church takes a little bit considering he has to get off his boathouse the old fashion way by wading across the water on the raft. It's fine. He takes his time for once, trying to think of a hundred different things to say and how to phrase them. Just in case.
Like, in case Summer asks some off the wall shit or something.
She's probably already there by the time he shows up, depending on where she came from. Maybe they run into each other at the front around the same time. Small miracles.]
[She's sitting on the porch steps when he arrives, which is part because she's gotten pretty good at the whole "haul ass to Flavo" thing over the weeks she's spent here — it's a trip she's made often, for various reasons — and part because she'd had a head start, being already on the mainland when she'd signed off of the forum and started her trek.
The church steps are ostensibly church property, too, which presumably provides an unspoken answer to the previous question about burning witches.]
Hi.
[Always a good start.]
I'm kinda curious why you picked the church for a rendezvous. Not complaining, just wondering.
[Damian could have walked up to a burning, crispy corpse, but thank God (no pun intended) that darkest timeline didn't come to pass. Small blessings.]
It felt... appropriate. [His head tilts, and he glances up along the height of the building. Strange. It doesn't have any kind of denomination and, yet, it's very clearly a church. It feels like a church.] I'm not religious, if you're worried.
[Carefully, he begins to pick his way up the steps by her then keeps heading on inside.]
Not this particular one. I've been in a church before, though. I used to think that the reason they made services from eleven to noon was because that was when the sunlight came through the stained glass best. Made colors all over the floor.
[She shrugs a little, like she's shrugging the old memory off her shoulders and back into oblivious, then ungracefully gets to her feet to follow him.]
[Going in, it doesn't exactly seem like much of anyone has taken time up with the church. It's a little disheartening. Even if he's not religious, there's something distinctly sad about a place of faith being... empty, being somewhat dilapidated.
He stands in the foyer area just through the door and glances around from top to bottom. Their movement echoes--whoever had been here before took the time to make the church out of stone rather than wood.]
If we want the sunlight to make colors through the glass, we're going to have to do more work with the church to restore color.
[On the bright side, neither him nor Summer are erupting into flames. SO THAT'S GOOD.]
Tt. There's no denomination, but there might have been more to it than weddings.
[Please don't mar his pristine image of a place of worship with horseshit like feelings and eternal love.
On the other hand, it reminds him of two people in particular, nevermind the rest of Chroma that definitely need to be blessed and cleansed by someone while becoming a married couple.]
My father and his fiancee were planning to marry before we were brought here.
[His voice is quiet, though it still echoes somewhat. The pensive knot to his brows and the sour frown of usual times is back on his face.]
No, I mean — fairy tales. They always end with a wedding, right? They kiss, they get married, they live happily ever after. That's as much a staple as "Once Upon A Time" is. So of course there has to be a church, you have to have some place to put the wedding.
[Also the mention of Damian's dad and fiancee suddenly has this whole conversation spinning into the makings of a Colortown version of The Parent Trap, oh lord, someone stop this before it begins.]
I suppose it isn't an inaccurate assumption. [Slowly, he starts through the church, picking his way along carefully and slowly enough to inspect what's left.] They're both here. Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.
[He wonders if there's an official way for them to marry here instead. Going back home is something most of them are striving for, but getting there doesn't seem as if it'll be quick. They could be here for years.
Selina said she didn't need a piece of paper to call his father husband, but... It feels right. To give them what they had planned to do all along.]
Nevermind about that. I wanted you to tell me about this "fucko."
[He pauses. There's no lightning strikes. It's okay to say fucko in church.]
I bet there's enough people here to do a wedding. Get a cake together, set up some flowers. People here are decent, I bet they'd help out.
[But. Hmm. So that's it, then. They're not here for fairy tales, they're here for nightmares. Okay.
She looks around, finding a pew that seems relatively sturdy, and hops to perch on the back of it with her feet on the seat and her seat on the raised back.]
...It's kind of a long story. So if it seems like I'm avoiding the point, I'm not. I'm just trying to, y'know. Explain things in a way that all adds up by the time you hit the end of it.
[She shucks a hand through her hair.]
So. I was normal, once. Average kid. I was going to college. There wasn't anything particularly special about me, I guess. So my friends and I, we're walking home from class, when all of a sudden this — it was like this rip in reality just opened up and sucked us through. I'm oversimplifying it so that I can get to the actual point, but in a nutshell that's what happened. We get yanked through some aether or something, land in a strange world on the other side, and there's this guy waiting for us. Expecting us. And he says he's a wizard, and the world we've been brought to is in grave danger, and will we be the heroes the world needs, blah blah blah.
[She sighs.]
Some of the boys really bought into it. I mean, hook, line, and sinker. I didn't, because that was bullshit. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be there and he sure as hell wasn't going to send me home if I refused. But that was the trade-off, save the world and earn our way home.
[...]
Except that he didn't like me. I was always too skeptical, I didn't buy into his bullshit. So when the time finally came around to send us back, he found a loophole to...not send me. Mostly because I was useful, but I think in part because he knew how much I wanted to go home. He probably enjoyed it, making me see how close I'd gotten and then taking it away.
[She sighs.]
So he took me back to his stupid fucking wizard castle on this boondock island in the middle of nowhere. He said it was so that he could "train" me but really it's just. He fucks with me. Sets me up to fail at shit. He's always got eyes on me, no matter what. Sometimes I piss him off and he throws me into a mirror, traps me on the wrong side like it's fucking time-out. Sometimes I really piss him off and he throws me across dimensions again, but never home. And sooner or later he reaches back through and hauls me back — that's what I thought had happened when I first showed up here. I thought the old man was pissed and he'd dumped me off here.
[As quietly as possible without interrupting Summer, Damian comes to sit in a pew one down from her, facing. Being in the same pew her feet are on feels too... intimate, in a way, but he wants to be in one close enough, one he can look her in the face.
It's respectful, and yet, also a very nice method of seeing when people are being truthful and embellishing.]
So what was his M.O. from the beginning? If the dimensional tear which sucked you in gave you all powers... he hadn't been expecting you to show up with powers, had he? Or did he know it would happen?
Also... were you the first group he ever tried it with?
I don't think it really mattered if it did or not. I mean — he was smart enough that he could've played it either way, you know? We were part of his sleight of hand. Misdirect the eye over here so you're not paying attention to what's really happening over there.
[Neither one of them is sitting appropriately in these pews and it's a good thing that this isn't really church, or someone would be getting their knuckles rapped with a ruler.]
He wanted us to go find some thing, these six artifacts that when you brought them together, they could open up doors between worlds. There was this other guy, they called him the Dread King, who was trying to get all of them so that he could, I don't know, conquer every universe or something. Evil guy stuff. The idea was for us to get them before he did, and bring them back to the old man so that he could send us home, I guess. I was the only one who noticed that the old man didn't need any artifacts to send us home, because he'd already done it once to bring us there at all. The boys were okay with being willfully oblivious to it, maybe. They wanted an adventure more than they cared about seeing behind the curtain, I dunno.
[She shrugs again.]
I think the idea was, if Skul was watching us, he wouldn't be watching what Maerlyn was doing. We were buying the old man time to get ready for a showdown, I think.
[There's only a few things to really smash Damian's berserk button, among them: assholes fucking with kids. Despite not being able to exactly do anything, he's angry on Summer's behalf.
And it shows. Not on his face, worse, in his eyes. Cold hate. The hate saved for ultimate betrayals and things equally as heinous.]
Pathetic. [His eyes lower to the floor between the pews, both hands fisted on his thighs. In theory, it sounds easier than it would be--Damian knows, he gets it. But nothing is more frustrating to him than lacking options.] If you did whatever mattered so long as you survived...
Why didn't you just threaten to kill him until he sent you back home?
We were all scared and stupid. None of us knew what was happening, the old man barely explained anything. He left us to figure out our magic on our own. I think that's why he didn't get interested in me until later, when he started to figure out what I could do.
[It's still so surreal, to tell this to people and see them get angry, genuinely angry, about it. Part of it is the isolation talking, probably. Part of it is the resignation to the fact that none of the boys ever really wanted to believe her suspicions about Maerlyn, not until it was long past too late.]
But lately? He knows I'm not strong enough to kill him. And even if I ever get close enough to try...I'm only going to get one shot, you know? Plus I don't know if I'd really trust him to send me home, anyway. He knows I want it too much. He'd find a way to fuck it over for me somehow.
[Both brows draw together, and, after a moment, he glances up.]
You're talking like you're going back there, like it's still happening. [Nothing ever said they weren't going back--hell, this whole time, he's been trying to help others get them back where they needed to go, back home.
But after talking to Elizabeth, after seeing Elizabeth's world... It doesn't feel right, sending people back where they came from when the place they came from is shit.] Just because some of us are trying to get back to our worlds...
...doesn't mean you have to go back to your own. You're free now, right? He hasn't even found you here. He might not be able to find you again.
[A false start; she's got to take a minute to sort of regroup and come back around to what's on the tip of her tongue here.]
I guess by now my family must think I'm dead. When you told me about your brothers, you know? I was thinking about mine. I don't know if the guys would've told my family what happened. Hell, maybe he sent them back without their memories of Nevermorrow, I don't fucking know. I don't know anything. I never wanted any of this shit but here I am, phenomenal cosmic powers and all I actually wanted was to finish college.
[She sighs.]
I hope you're right. Maybe he can't find me, and I can get away. Even if I never make it back home for real, anything's better than being under his thumb.
I meant--the world you were at before, the world he kept you prisoner. You don't have to return to that one. We might find a way to send you home.
["Fuck that guy." - Damian Wayne probably]
We'll get you back. Wherever you want to go. There will be a way. We'll find it. [As useless as it feels in terms of them finding a way, Damian sounds... determined. Maybe stubbornly so.
It isn't only about him going home anymore, as bad as he hates it. It isn't about getting Bruce home, Selina, Clark, and Jon. Everyone else, too. The people who weren't anything to him since he didn't know them well.
Now they were friends, and they deserved to go to the place they called home, wherever that may be.]
That's where my portal opened up to, back when I fell into your cave and everything. Mine went back to the island.
[But she's quiet, because there's something that's been nagging at her for a long time, something she'd thought once and carefully buried but never quite forgot about.]
You know, he said he wanted me because my magic was like his. So if he could control me, he could use me as like, a subcontractor. More magic, bigger spells.
...I've always kind of wondered if that means I could learn the same spell that he used, someday. If we're the same, I mean, and he can pull people across worlds. I wonder if that means I could, too.
[Okay, so... this is definitely the kind of optimism he likes to hear. None of that hollow, goody and hopeful shit. Something more manageable, something with hard work attached to it.
It gets the barest bits of a smile to tug the corners of his lips up.] Probably. If you magic is similar to his own, then you can do whatever he can do with practice and fine tuning.
You should try.
Elizabeth was convinced she wasn't able to open her tears here, and then I made her try. They aren't stable... but she can open them, something she couldn't do before.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[Score one for twisted humor.]
Sure, I can meet you there.
action
Getting to the church takes a little bit considering he has to get off his boathouse the old fashion way by wading across the water on the raft. It's fine. He takes his time for once, trying to think of a hundred different things to say and how to phrase them. Just in case.
Like, in case Summer asks some off the wall shit or something.
She's probably already there by the time he shows up, depending on where she came from. Maybe they run into each other at the front around the same time. Small miracles.]
no subject
The church steps are ostensibly church property, too, which presumably provides an unspoken answer to the previous question about burning witches.]
Hi.
[Always a good start.]
I'm kinda curious why you picked the church for a rendezvous. Not complaining, just wondering.
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It felt... appropriate. [His head tilts, and he glances up along the height of the building. Strange. It doesn't have any kind of denomination and, yet, it's very clearly a church. It feels like a church.] I'm not religious, if you're worried.
[Carefully, he begins to pick his way up the steps by her then keeps heading on inside.]
Have you ever been inside?
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[She shrugs a little, like she's shrugging the old memory off her shoulders and back into oblivious, then ungracefully gets to her feet to follow him.]
That was a long time ago, though.
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He stands in the foyer area just through the door and glances around from top to bottom. Their movement echoes--whoever had been here before took the time to make the church out of stone rather than wood.]
If we want the sunlight to make colors through the glass, we're going to have to do more work with the church to restore color.
[On the bright side, neither him nor Summer are erupting into flames. SO THAT'S GOOD.]
no subject
[She glances around, too, taking stock of the vaulted ceilings, the stone, the dusty barrenness of it all.]
...It's probably here for a wedding, you know. I'd be willing to bet there were never services in here or anything. Just weddings.
no subject
[Please don't mar his pristine image of a place of worship with horseshit like feelings and eternal love.
On the other hand, it reminds him of two people in particular, nevermind the rest of Chroma that definitely need to be blessed and cleansed by someone while becoming a married couple.]
My father and his fiancee were planning to marry before we were brought here.
[His voice is quiet, though it still echoes somewhat. The pensive knot to his brows and the sour frown of usual times is back on his face.]
no subject
[Also the mention of Damian's dad and fiancee suddenly has this whole conversation spinning into the makings of a Colortown version of The Parent Trap, oh lord, someone stop this before it begins.]
Are they both here? Your dad and his fiancee?
no subject
I suppose it isn't an inaccurate assumption. [Slowly, he starts through the church, picking his way along carefully and slowly enough to inspect what's left.] They're both here. Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.
[He wonders if there's an official way for them to marry here instead. Going back home is something most of them are striving for, but getting there doesn't seem as if it'll be quick. They could be here for years.
Selina said she didn't need a piece of paper to call his father husband, but... It feels right. To give them what they had planned to do all along.]
Nevermind about that. I wanted you to tell me about this "fucko."
[He pauses. There's no lightning strikes. It's okay to say fucko in church.]
no subject
[But. Hmm. So that's it, then. They're not here for fairy tales, they're here for nightmares. Okay.
She looks around, finding a pew that seems relatively sturdy, and hops to perch on the back of it with her feet on the seat and her seat on the raised back.]
...It's kind of a long story. So if it seems like I'm avoiding the point, I'm not. I'm just trying to, y'know. Explain things in a way that all adds up by the time you hit the end of it.
[She shucks a hand through her hair.]
So. I was normal, once. Average kid. I was going to college. There wasn't anything particularly special about me, I guess. So my friends and I, we're walking home from class, when all of a sudden this — it was like this rip in reality just opened up and sucked us through. I'm oversimplifying it so that I can get to the actual point, but in a nutshell that's what happened. We get yanked through some aether or something, land in a strange world on the other side, and there's this guy waiting for us. Expecting us. And he says he's a wizard, and the world we've been brought to is in grave danger, and will we be the heroes the world needs, blah blah blah.
[She sighs.]
Some of the boys really bought into it. I mean, hook, line, and sinker. I didn't, because that was bullshit. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be there and he sure as hell wasn't going to send me home if I refused. But that was the trade-off, save the world and earn our way home.
[...]
Except that he didn't like me. I was always too skeptical, I didn't buy into his bullshit. So when the time finally came around to send us back, he found a loophole to...not send me. Mostly because I was useful, but I think in part because he knew how much I wanted to go home. He probably enjoyed it, making me see how close I'd gotten and then taking it away.
[She sighs.]
So he took me back to his stupid fucking wizard castle on this boondock island in the middle of nowhere. He said it was so that he could "train" me but really it's just. He fucks with me. Sets me up to fail at shit. He's always got eyes on me, no matter what. Sometimes I piss him off and he throws me into a mirror, traps me on the wrong side like it's fucking time-out. Sometimes I really piss him off and he throws me across dimensions again, but never home. And sooner or later he reaches back through and hauls me back — that's what I thought had happened when I first showed up here. I thought the old man was pissed and he'd dumped me off here.
no subject
It's respectful, and yet, also a very nice method of seeing when people are being truthful and embellishing.]
So what was his M.O. from the beginning? If the dimensional tear which sucked you in gave you all powers... he hadn't been expecting you to show up with powers, had he? Or did he know it would happen?
Also... were you the first group he ever tried it with?
no subject
[Neither one of them is sitting appropriately in these pews and it's a good thing that this isn't really church, or someone would be getting their knuckles rapped with a ruler.]
He wanted us to go find some thing, these six artifacts that when you brought them together, they could open up doors between worlds. There was this other guy, they called him the Dread King, who was trying to get all of them so that he could, I don't know, conquer every universe or something. Evil guy stuff. The idea was for us to get them before he did, and bring them back to the old man so that he could send us home, I guess. I was the only one who noticed that the old man didn't need any artifacts to send us home, because he'd already done it once to bring us there at all. The boys were okay with being willfully oblivious to it, maybe. They wanted an adventure more than they cared about seeing behind the curtain, I dunno.
[She shrugs again.]
I think the idea was, if Skul was watching us, he wouldn't be watching what Maerlyn was doing. We were buying the old man time to get ready for a showdown, I think.
no subject
And it shows. Not on his face, worse, in his eyes. Cold hate. The hate saved for ultimate betrayals and things equally as heinous.]
Pathetic. [His eyes lower to the floor between the pews, both hands fisted on his thighs. In theory, it sounds easier than it would be--Damian knows, he gets it. But nothing is more frustrating to him than lacking options.] If you did whatever mattered so long as you survived...
Why didn't you just threaten to kill him until he sent you back home?
no subject
[It's still so surreal, to tell this to people and see them get angry, genuinely angry, about it. Part of it is the isolation talking, probably. Part of it is the resignation to the fact that none of the boys ever really wanted to believe her suspicions about Maerlyn, not until it was long past too late.]
But lately? He knows I'm not strong enough to kill him. And even if I ever get close enough to try...I'm only going to get one shot, you know? Plus I don't know if I'd really trust him to send me home, anyway. He knows I want it too much. He'd find a way to fuck it over for me somehow.
no subject
You're talking like you're going back there, like it's still happening. [Nothing ever said they weren't going back--hell, this whole time, he's been trying to help others get them back where they needed to go, back home.
But after talking to Elizabeth, after seeing Elizabeth's world... It doesn't feel right, sending people back where they came from when the place they came from is shit.] Just because some of us are trying to get back to our worlds...
...doesn't mean you have to go back to your own. You're free now, right? He hasn't even found you here. He might not be able to find you again.
no subject
[A false start; she's got to take a minute to sort of regroup and come back around to what's on the tip of her tongue here.]
I guess by now my family must think I'm dead. When you told me about your brothers, you know? I was thinking about mine. I don't know if the guys would've told my family what happened. Hell, maybe he sent them back without their memories of Nevermorrow, I don't fucking know. I don't know anything. I never wanted any of this shit but here I am, phenomenal cosmic powers and all I actually wanted was to finish college.
[She sighs.]
I hope you're right. Maybe he can't find me, and I can get away. Even if I never make it back home for real, anything's better than being under his thumb.
no subject
["Fuck that guy." - Damian Wayne probably]
We'll get you back. Wherever you want to go. There will be a way. We'll find it. [As useless as it feels in terms of them finding a way, Damian sounds... determined. Maybe stubbornly so.
It isn't only about him going home anymore, as bad as he hates it. It isn't about getting Bruce home, Selina, Clark, and Jon. Everyone else, too. The people who weren't anything to him since he didn't know them well.
Now they were friends, and they deserved to go to the place they called home, wherever that may be.]
no subject
[But she's quiet, because there's something that's been nagging at her for a long time, something she'd thought once and carefully buried but never quite forgot about.]
You know, he said he wanted me because my magic was like his. So if he could control me, he could use me as like, a subcontractor. More magic, bigger spells.
...I've always kind of wondered if that means I could learn the same spell that he used, someday. If we're the same, I mean, and he can pull people across worlds. I wonder if that means I could, too.
no subject
It gets the barest bits of a smile to tug the corners of his lips up.] Probably. If you magic is similar to his own, then you can do whatever he can do with practice and fine tuning.
You should try.
Elizabeth was convinced she wasn't able to open her tears here, and then I made her try. They aren't stable... but she can open them, something she couldn't do before.