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At least once per patrol, usually when the early hours of the morning are upon her and the smoggy sky has started to lighten in preparation for dawn, Steph likes to take a detour through the warehouse district to the edge of the river.
It’s not because there’s a lot of action over there. Well, there is, but it’s usually the kind of stuff Batman and Robin take care of—stuff where she’d be hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, no matter how good she’s been getting at her spin kicks. She doesn’t have the fancy gadgets or the big armored car, either, so it’s not like she could participate in the high speed chases that tend to cut through the streets out there closer to the Burnside Bridge. A mugger, she can handle—shipping crates full of drugs and basements swarming with goons?
Yeah. Not so much.
So, no. She doesn’t go out there looking for trouble like she would in the Diamond District or the Alley. She takes note of the things she sees, writes them all down in a crime log notebook hidden under her bed, but in all honesty, she just kind of likes watching the river flow after a long night spent fighting crime.
That’s why she’s here tonight. The water roars along too fast to become a true ice rink, but the way the white frost creeps down the embankment and across the slower-moving pools and eddies near the banks makes her feel… something. Something good, even. Her mom used to say a lot that even city kids need a little piece of nature every once in a while—some grass to play in or a tree to climb—so they don’t grow up to become one of the idiots in the ER she spends all night trying to stop from coding. She would laugh, and grimace, and tell Steph that a good tree is the only cure for the ones who tried to put a car bomb in their boss’s Lamborghini and accidentally took off one of their own limbs in the process.
It might be true. Or it might not. Steph is pretty much convinced that stupidity can’t be cured by a little greenery, but who knows, right? And it makes Steph feel a little calmer, sometimes, a little more at peace, when she has a chance to follow the gentle looping turns of the river.
Yeah, even when it’s below freezing. That’s what her wool coveralls, stuffed under her Spoiler costume, are for. Putting a little more pep in her step, Steph rubs her hands together and blows through them to keep her fingers warm. It’s a bitch of a night, tonight—but it’s Gotham, so of course it is. If it’s not rain it’s snow, right? Or at least a decent bit of slush.
She’s halfway to the bridge, beginning to think ahead to the cup of hot chocolate she can sneak if her mom is still out when she gets back, when she spots them. Him, she thinks, eyeing the over-large pants barely holding onto his hips and the thick, ratty boots clinging to his feet. It can be hard to tell, sometimes, but in the Alley you figure out the types pretty quick. It can make the difference between a nice outing and one where you have to wriggle out of a fight because some misogynist asshole figured you were one of them ‘stupid fuckin’ queers’.
This guy doesn’t really look like a toxic macho type, but again, it’s dark and she’s still kind of far away, so she wouldn’t bet her life on it. All she knows for sure is that 1) he’s walking (shambling, really) along the upper edge of the embankment, a little too far from the road to be properly on the sidewalk, and 2) he’s really not looking all that steady on his feet.
“Out drunk? At this hour?” she mutters to herself, squinting at him. It’s not really that strange, but he might also be homeless, because the bars closed a couple hours ago. She doesn’t think she’s seen him before, isn’t sure where he’s supposed to be holed up for the night, but he must have a destination in mind.
Hopefully it’s not the bridge. Or the river, for that matter. His shoes are barely on, for fuck’s sake. He looks about three seconds from tripping and taking a swan dive down the embankment—and that’s assuming he’s doing alright, you know, mentally.
…She’s really not in the mood to go swimming in the frigid water to fish out a pissed-off, possibly-suicidal drunk, thanks.
With this in mind, she clears her throat, starting to jog up the sidewalk. She comes around at an angle, trying not to startle him, making enough noise that he knows she’s coming. As soon as she can make out his features—and jeez, his eyes are unfocused—she breaks out a friendly smile and a wave.
“Hello, mister! You’re getting pretty close to the river, there!” she calls.
No response. Maybe he hasn’t noticed her yet? The water is pretty loud, after all. And up closer he really doesn’t look too good.
Her smile twitches as she reconsiders her original assessment. Maybe he’s not drunk—maybe he’s high? Might explain why his eyes look like that. Hm.
Clearing her throat loudly, Steph keeps going, slowing her jog to match his slow, shambling pace. “It would be a terrible night to slip and fall out here. Could I maybe walk you home?”
…Nothing but the white puff of his breath exiting on the freezing air. He’s not even looking her direction, eyes sitting glazed above chapped red cheeks and… wow, are those scars?
Steph bites her lip. What are the chances that this guy is just a misogynist who refuses to acknowledge that a woman is talking to him? Because it’s either that or this guy is tweaked off his ass.
Well, only one way to find out. “I’m gonna touch you now, sir. I just want to guide you away from the edge here, alright?”
Nothing. Sighing and preparing to pull back fast, Steph reaches over to give the guy’s ragged coat sleeve a gentle tug.
The response is immediate. Without so much as looking at her, the guy yanks his arm away, his snail’s pace never faltering.
Yeah, alright. She’s leaning toward him being some kind of asshole. She still doesn’t want to see him take a spill in the fucking river, though, so after a muttered, “Well, I’m going home. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she backs off a few paces, crossing her arms over her chest to keep her fingers warm.
She doesn’t go home. Trust her, she wants to. She really, really wants to, actually. The tranquility of her night has been ruined, and she’s starting to crave that hot cocoa like nobody’s business. But there’s something about the guy being out here that just… it makes her nervous, okay?
I’ll just watch until he leaves the embankment, she decides. Then, stupidly, kinda wish Robin was here.
They don’t hang out a lot. Not as much as she hangs out with her school friends, anyway. She only ever sees him at night, after all, and that’s only when they happen to cross paths. But he’s… he’s funny. A little odd, but in a good way. He’s a good guy. She kind of thinks she might be (dare she say it) getting a teensy bit of a crush on him.
Not that anything will ever happen between them. They don’t even know each others’ real names. It’s just… nice to think about, sometimes. No harm in a little pipe dream every once in a while, right?
She could really use one right now, honestly. They’ve turned around a bend and the wind is picking up, curling icily across the rushing surface of the water and prickling like needles on her skin. She shivers despite her wool coveralls, kind of wishing she hadn’t picked this route so that she wouldn’t be stuck here watching some dick wander around just to make sure he doesn’t do something stupid. Ugh.
But he doesn’t do anything stupid. Not really. She follows for five minutes, ten, and though he stays right at the edge of the embankment he never steps over. She could almost be impressed by his shuffling footprints, honestly. How do they never quite land too far over? Maybe he’s more with it than he seems. It’s dangerous, sure, but maybe there’s nothing to worry about?
Until there is. And in the end, it’s not him that does it—it’s the assholes in the car who do it for him.
She hears them before she sees them, hooting and hollering and going at least twenty over the limit in a car not meant to handle sharp turns. The city is pretty good with salting the roads so there’s not really any serious ice, even out here, but the December slush pushed up against the curb is several inches deep, and she can tell even before the yelled, “OH SHIT!” that they didn’t realize how close to the river they were. Brakes slam, the car takes a turn too fast and starts to slide—Steph watches, her heart jammed up in her throat, as their wheels kick up a small tsunami of gray, the grimy slush spraying in a wide arc.
The car misses the guy on the embankment. One tire pops up over the curb for a split second before they manage to get their trajectory under control, skidding off down the street. But Steph isn’t watching them to make sure they don’t ram into a warehouse—no, she’s focused on the lone figure on the very edge of the world as he’s sprayed with slush.
He jerks as if on instinct, body twisting away from the road. The embankment is soaked, slippery—his foot comes down and it’s suddenly half off the edge, sliding even further downward under the unforgiving weight of gravity.
She can’t see his face from here, can’t see if his eyes widen or his mouth opens in shock. She definitely sees the moment his balance goes from ‘wobbly’ to ‘non-existent’, though. When he goes down—really, truly goes—she’s already fucking sprinting.
She hits the water a split second after he does. It’s less of a feeling of cold and more of a full-body jolt, her muscles seizing instantly from the icy temperatures. She fights through it, trying to remember everything she read about cold-water rescues when she first threw on her homemade Spoiler costume a couple months ago now. The water here isn’t very deep, but it’s moving fast, and if he gets caught up in the current before she can grab him they might both be fucked.
It’s pitch black down here. Her body is tossed this way and that. She fumbles, her cape pulling her one direction and her boots another. One moment her hand touches silt, another and she gets nothing but water. Water, water, more water—where is he?
She breaks the surface for a moment, sucking in a shockingly cold breath before she shoves herself under once more.
This time, she feels something jab into her side when she hits the riverbed, and with a surge of relief she yanks out her waterproof flashlight from its pouch. It’s still hard to keep upright, to see anything amid the rushing water, and she still can’t stop herself from nearly ramming into a giant log lodged into the bank, but after a few more seconds she has a stroke of luck—she sees a boot, kicking in the gloom.
Without a pause, she pushes off the log, hands grabbing wildly. Water, water—god, where is he? Her lungs scream, from the cold or the exertion or the lack of air, she doesn’t know. Water, water, water, silt, water—and then, finally, fabric.
She grabs hold of a leg in the darkness and does not let go.
It’s a miracle that she manages to claw her way up to his chest, grabbing hold of him around his middle and locking her hands tight. He’s struggling, but she can’t tell how weak it might be, the water tossing them around too much. She kicks and kicks and when her feet hit the riverbed once more she pushes, dragging him toward the surface.
They break free just a few dozen meters upstream from the bridge, the shape of it a massive, towering straight-edge carved into the sky. Coughing, Steph kicks as hard as she can, struggling to keep both their heads above water and also move them toward the bank.
It takes a few seconds too long, but soon she can almost brace her feet against the silty riverbed, half-swimming and half-dragging the guy as she fights to break free of the current. Another tug, another, another—and then there’s a spot where a large rock creates a small pool right on the edge of the river, and the tug lessens. Gasping, she swims them into the pool, where she can throw herself backward onto the bank, the guy sprawled across her chest, and kick her way up onto solid ground.
They made it. In a pile of shivering limbs and her tangled cape, yeah, but fuck, she thought they were goners for a second there. She lets herself cough and gasp, twisting them both onto their sides to help get any water out of her savee’s lungs.
He’s not moving now. Unconscious, she’d guess. She shakily lets go of his chest—which, she’s relieved to see, is at least moving, if not much—and fumbles for her utility belt.
The pocket she needs is empty. Compulsively, she opens and closes her stiff fingers, trying to remember when she let go of her flashlight.
She doesn’t know. That means she must have lost it in the river somewhere.
Fuck. She lost her flashlight. She had to save up for a month for that.
No time to get upset. She’s on her own with an unconscious civilian—no back-up, no nothing, and she might be wearing wool but even with that her teeth are chattering. Who knows how her new companion is doing—hypothermia and water inhalation are no fucking joke.
She swallows, the taste of river water on the back of her tongue. Then, limbs like cement, she pushes herself onto her feet to start hauling the guy up the embankment to safety.
…The guy who she swore wasn’t that much bigger than her when he was standing. He had maybe an inch on her height-wise, and probably not a lot weight-wise under his ragged coat. Now that he’s dead weight, however? Yeah, now he feels like he’s a million fucking pounds.
She grits her teeth, forcing one foot back, then the other, dragging the limp body backwards up the slope one step at a time. She has a weirdly good view of his face, now, barely six inches away from it as the sky lightens, and he’s… fuck, he’s young. Maybe a few years older than her, if that. His face is bloodless, his lips purplish from the cold, his breath jagged in his chest. She presses her lips together and tries to shake him, to wake him up, but his eyes remain closed.
Fuck. Can she make it to Leslie’s? How far was she before she went in? They passed the bridge by at least a few meters—how much distance would that add? Her phone is probably zapped, fuck. If only she’d splurged for the waterproof case—
“Spoiler?”
Robin! Too breathless to call out, Steph twists her head toward him, nearly tripping on her cape when it gets caught up under her feet. Thankfully he must get the memo, because he starts to gracefully slide down a steeper part of the embankment, coming back up under the kid’s feet.
“Wow,” he says, and he’s grinning, an eyebrow raised at Steph. “You saved him on your own?”
“Some of us—don’t have—gadgets,” Steph snarls, her soaked bangs hanging down into her eyes. She’s trying to toss them to the side so she can see when she hears Robin gasp.
“What?” Steph demands, slowing nearly to a halt. Robin is still down there, underneath them, and she waits impatiently for him to get a move on. He’s not looking at her anymore, though—his mask’s lenses are locked on the face of the boy in her arms, his lips parted like he was shocked right out of his train of thought.
The moment lasts just a second, before Robin jerks, leaning down to grab hold of the guy’s legs, taking some of his weight. All Steph needs is that second, however, for something in Robin’s expression to click.
“You know him?” she asks, starting to move once more, feet digging for purchase in the frozen mud.
Robin laughs, a sound on the edge of hysterical. “Do I ever,” he says. He grimaces, pushing them faster, before his mouth twists. He opens it, closes it, opens it again, and says nothing else.
It’s an expression she knows well. He’s always so filled with thoughts and plans, contingencies upon contingencies upon contingencies, that sometimes they war with each other on their way out of his mouth.
Steph generally likes to take a direct approach when that happens. She’s fourteen, all right? She doesn’t have time to dick around if she wants to achieve something in life. So as they crest the edge of the embankment, finally hauling the kid’s limp body up into the warehouse district, she takes a moment to breathe in deep before she says, “Well? Who is he?”
Robin leans over the kid, yanking a warming blanket from a pouch at his belt. He tucks it around the kid, pressing in all the little edges so they won’t blow in the breeze. Then, finally, in a voice hushed with reverence, he says, “This is… it’s Jason Todd.”