shatterverse | (no subject)

It's fairly early in the morning when Mel, Sokka and Steph crest the final hill and find themselves looking down from the Heights towards Gotham City. Mel is keeping the girls happy in the back; Steph's driving. She doesn't ask before slowing gradually to a stop, eyes on the vista before them.

Gotham. Smoky, dark, twisted, gothic. It almost looks organic, lumpy and misshapen as it is, every building sprouting gargoyles and added wings, twisted into fantastic shapes.

It's so familiar it makes Steph's heart lurch; she hasn't been home for almost a year. She knows the skyline inside out, knows exactly how it feels to leap from the casino to the street below and swing up exactly in time to land on the train, knows where the instabilities in the gargoyles are and just how hard to throw a grapple to get from one end to the other of Ninth in under two minutes. It's filthy and ugly and disease-ridden and smoky and it's home.

Except ...

... this isn't the home she left.

It's with a sigh of pure relief that she realises, slowly, that this is Gotham before the quake, missing the light-filled spires of Luthor's redesign, all the old buildings still standing tall. This is Gotham before she had the baby, before the No Mans' Land.

This isn't her world.

The grin she turns to Sokka is enormous and full of relief.

"It's not mine. I won't find th— her here. Oh, thank fuck for that."

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"We're managing."

"Good to know," Mel says, bouncing both girls lightly. "We'll head back when we've got what we need from Gotham."

Steph returns her attention to the road, since Marie's apparently quite comfortable and now would be a bad time to hit a pothole.

Or a body. Like the one sprawled across the road in front of them. (She can tell it's a body and not a person who's napping in the road, because of how people's legs usually both join on to their bodies.)

"Hang on!" she yelps, doing her best to swerve gently and trusting to Mel's reflexes to grab the girls.

Mel has very good reflexes indeed. So babies are grabbed while Mom peers out at the body.

"Worth investigating?"

Steph looks like she might be sick, but she conquers it, leaning over to look at the ... mess.

"... I don't ... think there's anything we can do for her," she says, grimly. "And I don't want to hang around long enough for us to get hurt. Socks?"

She'd ask Marie's opinion, only that comes after Sokka and Mel's. Sorry, Marie.

Sokka doesn't look much better on the sick scale, making a face out the window himself before sitting up to try and see more of the road ahead.

"A lack of legs and that much blood doesn't usually need more investigating than a glance," he says, but it's not entirely decisive. He's fairly certain the person was dead, but he isn't exactly a leader.

"Then we drive on."

Mel is a leader type, sadly.

"Though I'd like to know what it was."

"Aside from human?" Sokka asks, glancing back at her with raised brows.

Steph swallows, sitting back and putting the car into motion again, getting them away from -- whoever it was.

She's very tight-lipped -- from nausea, and from leaving someone behind, dead or not. From not stopping to help.

The babies -- and Mel and Sokka, and maybe even Marie -- are more important; that's all.

"Whatever was -- eating her. We can go -- inspect the toothmarks -- later."

Normally, Marie would be able to see quite a lot more than anyone else in the car.

At the moment, however, she's sitting in a moving vehicle and most of what she can see is suggesting to her that she doesn't actually want to look any closer.

So whatever insight the material sight is giving her into the half-eaten corpse, she's just going to keep her mouth shut and wait for things to get interesting in a less... gruesome way.

(She might be waiting a while for that one.)

Mel uses a look to tell Sokka she meant what killed her, and goes back to fussing over Loo.

"Keep going."