Athena
Modern Mythology #2
by maven
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: The characters of Birds of Prey are the property of Warner Bros. and DC Comics, all other characters are the property of DC Comics.
RATING: PG/PG13. Just two people talking. A few bad words.
CONTINUITY and SPOILERS: This is an Alternative Universe as it’s a blend of the Birds of Prey television show and a variety of DC comic books, particularity The Killing Joke and the Batman titles between 1983 and 1991. There will be spoilers for all 13 episodes of the series now that I’ve seen them all.
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: BG wrote this BoP story called Landslide with a short interaction between Commissioner Gordon and Helena. My imagination just ran with it. Warped and Nik suggested a sequel which translated to two series.
STORY SPECIFIC NOTES:
1) Imagine my surprise when it turns out that Gabby appeared in two episodes and was mentioned in (so far as I can remember) one other. So this Gabby is pretty much made up from whole cloth. Plaid, I think. Greens and browns and dull yellowy-gold. Nothing too garish, a hunting tartan rather than a piper's.
2) Timing. Right. Darned if I know. I'm going with the events of the final episode happened near the end of Dinah and Gabby's junior year (grade 11 for us Canucks) and that Policy and Procedure happened at lease six months after that. Modern Mythology, therefore, starts in the middle of their final (senior, grade 12, 12th grade, year 12, whatever) year. I think. Kind of hazy.
FEEDBACK, COMMENTS AND FLAMES: Email at maven369@sympatico.ca
It's always been hard to think of Ms Gordon as human. Not because of the chair. That would be stupid. It's the way she teaches English and knows about every book ever written. How the computer geeks come to her for advice and she can fill in for pretty much any teacher with ten minutes notice. How when Zeke the show-off threw a football and it went way wide she just sort of reached up, almost casually, snagged it and whipped it back so hard Zeke fumbled it. How when there's a fire alarm she gets herself and her class out of the building first and with no missing kids. How nothing seems to phase or depress or anger her.
Like how a high school English teacher is totally at home at the state of the art labs at the Thomas Wayne School of Medicine at Gotham University.
"Will it hurt?"
"No," she says with the exact same tone of voice as my dentist uses.
"How about when I pull these things off?" I ask, gesturing at the various electrode things she's taped and glued all over me.
"That's more of a stinging tug than actual pain. The actual process is painless although some find it disconcerting."
I have a cascade of third hand memories. A younger Helena and then Dinah in the Clock Tower as Barbara runs a machine similar to this.
"Why aren't we doing this in the Clock Tower?" I ask. I'm standing, dressed in my gym shorts and a tank top, on a small gym mat totally surrounded by about a gadzillion dollars worth of monitoring equipment.
"Dinah told you?"
"Not exactly," I say. "I haven't seen much of Dinah in the last week."
Ms Gordon looks uncomfortable. "Is this creating problems? Is she avoiding you?"
"No," I assure her. "It's term end. Stuff. She's just busy." I figure I'd better distract Ms Gordon. "I, uh, that's where you tested Dinah, isn't it?"
She looks confused and then nods. "You remember me testing Dinah," she says, putting little air quotes around the word remember. It's the wrong word but it's the closest one we've found yet. I nod confirmation before she turns back to whatever it is she's doing. "The equipment here is at least one generation better than what we had at the Tower. Plus, we had an… incident… and decided the machine space and power was better spent in additional Delphi and security modules than something rarely used."
"And you get to use the university stuff because you're a superhero?" Something doesn't add up because, hey, secret identity.
She smiles and looks up briefly. "Not exactly. You don't remember that part?" she asks.
"It's a black hole memory," I say. "Positive for you, negative for Helena and neutral for Dinah so I can't really get a grip on it. Plus, my Dad works for Wayne Industries so it's all connected and blurred with that."
"Interesting. Anyone else lurking in there or just us three?"
She asks this casually while fiddling with some knobby thing but I'm not fooled. She used the same tone of voice on Doug Barrett just before she asked for his bibliography and then busted him for lifting his essay from the web. What a moron, trying to pull that on Ms Gordon.
"Dinah's memories are strongest, then you two," I explain. "There's about a dozen other people who I know are there but I don't know them and they're really insubstantial."
She sighs. "I'm going to have to talk to Dinah, get an idea of how much she remembers from her encounters. You ready?"
I nod and close my eyes, waiting for the 'not hurt'. When it doesn't come I take a peek and gasp. I'm surrounded by a globe that I figure represents my brain. Little lightning storms ripple across the surface and I goof around, snapping my fingers and humming to see what'll crackle next. After a few minutes Ms Gordon clears her throat to get my attention.
"Well, I have good news and bad news," she says peeking over her glasses. "Or two good news, depending on your point of view."
"What's the definitely good news?"
"No brain damage."
"Oh," I say. That'd never been mentioned as a possibility.
"It was an extremely small possibility so I didn't even mention it."
"Okay. Next time I might have brain damage…"
She has the grace to look ashamed. "I should have told you that it was a possibility."
I shrug. Grownups want to protect you. "What's the other news? That's point of view dependant?"
"You're not a metahuman."
"Oh," I say. Ms Gordon had pretty much dismissed the possibility but I guess I'd had some faint hope that she was wrong.
"Gabby," she says, leaving her machinery and coming closer to me. "It sounds exciting and challenging but it's not. It's usually long stretches of tedium and frustration."
"Yeah, but…" I try to reason but she's on a roll, caught up in some memory that I only reach with a whisper touch.
"This isn't a game," she continues, circling me. "It's real. It's deadly. And it'll happen faster than you can imagine…"
I'm not sure what she was going to say because suddenly she's lying on her back a good two feet from her chair, an escrima rod against her throat while another pins her right hand to the floor.
I have a cascade of third hand memories. A young, red headed child practicing and practicing on a pad like this, turning somersaults and cartwheels, training on ropes, pulling on some homemade costume and riding some slick motorcycle through the streets, a younger Ms Gordon lying sprawled and boneless and helpless, more training - this time physio with alternating waves of pain and frustration and, finally, sparring with Dinah and Helena from the chair, the clash of sticks and yelps as they make contact with flesh.
"Shit! I'm sorry!" I leap back in horror at what I've done; dropping the sticks and back-pedalling so fast I nearly trip.
"No. That was entirely my fault for trying to be cute and demonstrate how sudden and unexpectedly the situation can get dangerous. It's certainly poetic justice for underestimating you like that," Ms Gordon says, sitting up slowly and rubbing her right wrist slowly. She seems more academically interested than pissed off that I just threw her from her chair, stole her sticks and nearly broke her neck. "Silat?"
"Yeah."
"I see. We use some of their techniques but I've rarely seen such a pure style in action. Although you started the routine with one of Dinah's opening moves. Obviously the memories include what is normally termed muscle memory. I take it that Dinah hasn't been teaching you self defence?"
"No. Dad was assigned to the Jakarta facility for a couple of years when I was a kid. They wanted me to learn something of the culture and keep me occupied."
"So they chose Silat?"
"Yeah, I don't think they realized it was so, um, vicious. But they..." I shrug. "It was a bad time."
"I don't know that much about you, do I?" Ms Gordon says softly. "Any other surprises?"
"I row double sculls and fence foil and epee from when Dad was assigned to London and mom had a teaching gig at Cambridge. Another attempt at culture and boy avoiding activities. Not that boys turned out to be much of a problem," I say, grinning. "We just moved back to New Gotham for my freshmen year."
"So you're not from Massachusetts?"
"Not exactly," I say, busying myself with righting her chair and rolling it to her. I try to act non-chanlant as she muscles herself into the chair. "I just sort of added the 'new' to England when people asked. High school is bad enough without sticking out. Maybe that's..."
"What?" she prompts when I fall silent.
"Maybe that's what I like about Dinah. She's not afraid to stick out," I say but a wave of memories sweep me as I remember myself as child-Dinah trying to fit in, be normal, not attract attention. The memories ripple across my gut and the brain hologram ripples with little lighting storms. Ms Gordon wheels herself over to the monitors.
"Interesting," she says, attention turning from me to her control panel. "It's a shame I don't have a baseline to compare these readings to the ones prior to your exposure to Dinah's memories. Do they always manifest the same way?"
I shrug. "No. Sometimes, a strong one is like a migraine or stomach cramp. Sometimes I'll just realize I know something like when you asked that question in class. I hadn't seen the movie but Helena had."
She laughs. "Helena was assigned the novel and watched the movie instead," she says. "And you haven't discussed this with Dinah?"
"No. She's been really busy."
Ms Gordon sighs. "If they're that violent it would be good to know more. Any idea of what triggers them at least?"
"No. A name or a sound. Hell... I mean, heck, you would not believe the memories vanilla candles..." I trailed off, realizing just exactly where those particular ones came from. "Then again, maybe you would. Anyway," I continue desperately, "no idea."
"Joker."
The pain drives me to my knees. The sound of green and the sharp taste of terror and the smell of mad laughter. A tunnel where shadows turn into people and the knowledge that as long as my two companions are with me that nothing can go wrong and then I'm alone with a ringing phone and a ringing doorbell and a ringing echo of a gunshot and everything goes terribly, terribly wrong.
"Fascinating."
"What, Spock?" I manage, not caring that I'm being rude to a teacher. I'm not at all sorry anymore that I knocked her from her chair earlier and am half tempted to do it again.
"It's almost as if there are latent neural paths. Memories that spontaneously link when triggered. If we could run a few more..."
"No!"
She looks startled, almost as if she'd forgotten her guinea pig could talk.
"It's not like watching a movie. It's like being there and, frankly, they're usually bad and that last one was awful so could we not run anymore on purpose?"
"Gabby?"
"Is it like that for her?"
"I don't think so. I've never seen any evidence of flashbacks. You could ask Dinah."
"She's avoiding me," I snap, giving up the lie. "And I don't think I can ask in the three seconds before she thinks of an excuse to run off." I sit down, allowing myself to fall back onto mat and stare at the ceiling. Little diode things stick into me and I don't care. I can hear the sound of rubber on foam as Ms Gordon comes over.
"I thought you two talked?"
"That morning, yeah. And I thought we were good. I mean, still friends and that was fine. I'd take just friends. But then Monday at school it all fell apart."
"Maybe she just needs a bit of time to get use to it?"
"Maybe," I mumble. "But I've given her a week of space and it feels like a vacuum."
"Then maybe you should try talking to her."
"You mean I should make the next move?"
"Well, you could wait," she says with a slight smile. "But I've recently discovered that that's pretty much a waste of time."
"Carpe deim?"
"More like occasionally life sucks but mostly it rocks. So avoid the sucky parts."
"That sounds like Helena. Except I'd expect some innuendo on the word 'suck'."
She blushes a bright red.
"I'll come over Friday night. If that's okay?"
"That's very okay. I'll have Dinah take early sweep so she'll be home for the evening."
"Matchmaking, Ms. Gordon?"
"Helping you avoid the sucky parts. At least the bad sucking."
I'm too traumatized at the mental image the last sentence invokes that my brain can barely answer beyond a whispered 'thank you". Definitely inhuman.
"Cambridge, huh," she says with a slight smile. "So you can explain The Boat Race and cricket?"
"Boat Race, sure. Cricket, not a chance. It's a mystery to me."
She smiles. "Give it a shot. I love a good mystery."
END
Next: Aphrodite.
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