Trying something new:
Red Sky at Night
Part 1
One of the first things Kate had realized was that some of Gotham's problems were not the sort that a bat-vigilante could solve by punching. Fortunately, some of them were the sort that "Bruce Wayne's cousin, the new real-estate mogul" could take on.
Unfortunately, solving those problems frequently meant dealing with the sort of people she would usually either ignore or deck. Which was how she found herself stuck in a meeting room with one Kenneth Aldrich, a man who showed evidence of many extremely rich meals, but not much of caring about the people that money came from.
"Young lady, I do understand what you're saying, but I have to think about the consequences for my own property. Now these people-"
Kate interrupted, "It's 'Ms Kane', thank you. And by 'these people' you mean the tenants whose buildings haven't been bought up by your developers? The neighborhood is half the size it used to be, and it's lost most of its public facilities! They need something like this!"
Aldrich made a face. "Putting this...community center...on the edge of my development would just alarm the tenents of the new buildings! The chance of the undesirable elements gathering-"
"You might consider", Kate bit out, "that you're talking to a woman who's been considered an undesirable in multiple ways."
Aldrich scowled and reached for his briefcase. "Ms Kane, if you're going to make this personal, I don't think we can do business. He stood up.
Dammit! Kate gritted her teeth and tried to think of something to get him to sit down that wasn't outright begging or putting him in a headlock. She surged to her feet -
And there was a short nok-nok-nok at the window.
Kate swiveled around and was rather startled to see Supergirl floating casually outside the building. She smiled at Kate and waved, then gestured at the window in a vaguely "open up" manner.
"So...", Kate gave Aldrich a sidelong look. "Do those windows open?"
Aldrich sputtered. "Of course not, we're on the fourteenth floor!"
Kate looked back at the window, where Kara had obviously heard him. She made a face at the window, then suddenly grinned as her eyes started to glow.
Kate heard a yelp, and looked back just in time to grab Aldrich's shoulder as he tripped over his own feet trying to lunge for the door. "OK, settle down. She's not going to do anything dangerous while we're here."
"Not do - !", he broke off as a pop sounded from the window. Kate turned again to see Supergirl flip a perfect circle of glass out of the window, zip inside, and and fit the glass neatly back into the window. Aldrich started to sputter a protest, then broke off again as she switched the heat-vision back on and began fusing the window back together.
Kate eyed the hovering woman. This was a little more carefree than Supergirl usually acted, and something seemed off about her appearance as well. In a moment, she finished fusing the glass and turned round with a flourish. "And done!"
"Done!?" The lack of energy beams in the room seemed to bring Aldrich back to himself. "Who do you think is going to pay for that!"
"What?" Supergirl looked offended. "It's fine!" She knocked sharply on the window again. "I have lots of experience fusing stuff together."
There was a pause where Kate thought all three of them were waiting to see if the glass circle would pop loose but nothing happened. After a moment Supergirl gave them both a smug look, then landed on the carpet with a soft thud.
"Hey Kate!" She beamed sunnily. "You busy?"
Kate eyed her, ignoring Aldrich as he started sputtering again. "Little bit, yeah." She flapped a hand at the conference table where the contract she'd brought lay askew. "I'm trying to get this guy to help with some development for an underserved area, but he's being a mule."
"I beg your pardon-!"
Supergirl gave the contract a dubious look, then swiped it off the table and flipped through it at super-speed. She considered a moment, then gave Aldrich a sour look and held out the contract. "The only way you're going to lose money on this is if Gotham City is hit by a huge earthquake and cut off from the outside workd." She paused. "Which isn't impossible, but the odds of it happening before construction is complete is pretty low."
"Young lady, it's not just about the money being invested in the - !"
"Also," she ran on blithely, "I'm fairly sure my friends at Catco would love to run a story about a developer who had the chance to help a poor community, and passed it up for fear of - what was he saying when I flew up, Kate?"
"The undesireable element." Kate intoned dryly.
"Yeah, I think we all know what he means by that." She gave Aldrich a bright, brittle smile and held out the contract. "Or..."
He gaped at her a moment, then at the contract. Sputtering, he snatched it out of her hand and stared at Kate.
Kate just shrugged.
Aldrich glared at both of them, then slapped it down on the table and yanked out his pen. "Fine." He signed with a jagged flourish and held it out to Kate. "But I expect it to be followed to the letter."
She gave him her best cheery smile. "All 100% above-board, I guarantee."
"It better be." He snatched up his briefcase again and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
After a moment, Kara raised her eyebrows at Kate, who promptly burst out laughing. After a second, she sputtered out, "Uh, thanks?" then dropped into a chair and grinned up at her. "You know, I really need to learn to do that on my own."
Kara gave her the puppy eyes. "But Kate! Poor children with no place to play!" She paused. "Actually, that really is awful when I say it out loud."
Kate snorted and took a breath. "OK, but seriously. Why are you here?"
"Well," Kara said, and leaned backwards to sit on the conference table. At this point, Kate suddenly realized what was bugging her about the other woman's appearance: Not only had she apparently ditched the unitard-style costume she'd worn recently and switched back the version with a miniskirt, she'd also ditched the leggings she wore with the old suit. As a result, Kara's bare legs were now crossed less than a foot from Kate's nose.
Kate stared at this for a moment, her mind trying to think several things at once, including
What the heck?
and
Huh, those are some really nice legs
and
I wonder if she's wearing-.
She mentally stomped on all the trains of thought at once and dragged her eyes upward, only to see a smirk on Kara's face that looked suspiciously like she knew what Kate had been thinking. "Um! I'm.....listening?"
The smirk deepened for a second, then Kara went on, "So when I went out to check the city before heading to work, I didn't find any trouble. What I did find was Lena in early at Luthorcorp, so I went inside and had a massive screaming breakup fight with her." She grinned like she'd just told the juicyest gossip ever.
I started my present-day "Grosse Pointe" fic.
Martin found Grosse Pointe weird and soulless on its best day, but it was just eerie holed up in his in-laws' house with no people on the streets. He was pretending to work(Marcella had turned out to have a real flair for investing, and had given him some great tips, but the unrest was threatening to affect everything.
He swore, but he wouldn't even be alive right now if he couldn't keep his cool. He wondered if it was the ghost of an old instinct that made him tense when a nondescript sedan turned around in the cul-de-sac and hoped he'd not succumbed to some suburban prejudice by tensing up while watching the black driver.
(He was pretty sure that downloading NextDoor had been a miscalculation, but he had enjoyed still feeling like he was in the mix.) he flicked channels on the television, watching briefly, but nothing really captured his attention for more than a moment.
Besides, Debi was pretty much the main breadwinner, both from her successful eighties-nostalgia podcast and because she sold a carefully-elided memoir of their relationship to a women's cable channel. She came out of the guest bedroom, laptop in hand, with that glow that he loved when she thought she did something great.
"Hey, babe," she said. " Did you call and check on Dad today? What bad luck for him to tear a ligament just when nobody can visit." She blew him a kiss.(Neither of them was sick, but somehow touching didn't seem appetizing. Still, when he "caught" her kiss, her heart still beat a little faster at his quick action.
"I'll take care of it."
"Do I want to know what that means?" Debi asked.
"Don't worry…I have my binoculars."
"Very reassuring, like a thing that's not."
Martin's laptop made a noise so he turned away from the movie he was half-heartedly watching. He didn't know why he tortured himself watching hired-killer movies..the inaccuracies got to him.
"Hi, Uncle Marty!" Marcella's energetic tween daughter Katrina said. (The uncle title was purely ceremonial, although at times Marcella had been like a nagging little sister…Marty was their private joke.)
"How are you holding up, Peanut?" The visual on the screen moved around and Martin could see that she was wearing a gi as if she were still going to her suspended karate lesson and that her feet were bare and a few of her toes were painted pink He was grateful for her overflow of energy because even that little sign of womanhood from someone he'd known since she was a curly-haired toddler made him uncomfortably aware of the passage of time.
"kind of going crazy without my classes!" Still, Katrina found a way to flash a dimpled smile amidst her nervous energy.
"maybe when you're older we'll talk about kickboxing…when I was young it was the sport of the future. Katrina moved again and Martin's screen filled with their ocean view…unexpectedly, hard-coreMartin Blank felt himself getting a lump in his throat. Here, in the flat Midwest of his birth, he longed for ocean breezes and the scene of his reinvention. He married Debi on the beach as she insisted, and it took years for her father to forgive.
More "Grosse Pointe"
Martin Blank stood outside for a moment after retrieving Debi's "Free Press"(In keeping with her retro podcast, his wife preferred a folding paper that left ink on her hands, though they shared reading The Nation on Martin's tablet.)
He retrieved the paper and pretended he wanted a breath of spring air, but the truth was he was girding his loins to face Debi's father, whom, he already knew from much briefer bouts, made an awful patient. That same car drove through the cul-de-sac and made the hair Martin's neck rise…this time, he got a look at the driver, whose familiar profile and snow-on-the-roof hairstyle kind of reminded him of Obama.(
He had criticized Obama in the past, as well as working for years outside the law, but he felt fairly confident that the former President would not come out in a luxury car to settle the score personally. Wasn't he?) He stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, wondering if the seldom- remitting whiteness of the suburbs made his intuition misfire, squashing Deb's paper…. Suddenly, he heard the zip of a power window going down and a voice calling "Martin? It's been a long time."
"That it has," Martin bluffed." Since Prague, right?" There was another more vivid memory scratching at Martin's consciousness, but he could not retrieve it. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath as he'd learned in therapy, and remembered Debi's parents' hallway as a crime scene. Suddenly, the man in the car didn't look like the 44th President anymore, as he watched Martin impassively. "I thought you were dead,"
"I came close enough," he shuddered. He reached in his pocket and, for an instant, Martin was disappointed that the life that flashed before his eyes looked like the picture in the wrong end of a telescope. Instead of the Glock or Sig Sauer Martin might have expected, the black man pulled out a chip.
" Before we get down to why I've come here, is it wrong to say I'm kinda geeked that you remember me from Prague."
"If people don't," Martin advised. "I wouldn't take it personally…it was kind of a wild scene when we were there. You know?"
"Yeah, I'm hip. I always liked that you never cared what folks think."
Martin stepped out further onto the empty street. He wasn't the type to still seek forbidden thrills, but the space felt nice. He scanned the front page of the newspaper before the black man spoke again. "This is hard to say,"
"You could just shoot me an e-mail," Martin offered kindly. He tore of f a bit of the newspaper's margins and wrote an alternate account on it.
"That wasn't pathology…that was business. Though I won't lie and say there's no overlap. Also, if you ever met my father-in-law…." Martin couldn't bring himself to finish the joke.
"No..I should say it in person." The other assassin touched the plastic chip in his pocket."I owe you an amends. I should never have tried to kill you or your now father-in-law."
"A voice that was a blast in from the past cut through the silence. "I heard you were back."Paul Sperwicki thundered, seemingly unable to keep social distance in mind as he hugged Martin almost violently. "At the risk of blasphemy…thank God."
Paul dusted himself off and handed the black man his card. "Paul Sperwicki, realtor. My card. We have some lovely lofts available."
Martin laughed. "You still have cards?"
"Yes…I'm fifty and I don't mess with what works…I still have cards. But my Instagram is listed on them, fuck you very much."
"Sounds super hip, man.I wouldn't want everyone to see my picture, though. Old Habits die hard."
"Not my picture," Sperwicki corrected. "My properties' pictures.
"Is this gentleman bothering you?"Paul asked.
"Which one of us are you talking to?"
"Much like Jack Benny, I'm still thinking."
