Apokolips' Angels

[seriousfic]

So tumblr user thecapedraccoon wrote an AU of Scott and Barda as foster kids, and when I saw the pitch, I couldn't help writing a story go with it. Her post is here, but I cover a lot of the details in the story. Enjoy.

Barda didn’t wear the patch anymore, but she’d be damned if the Furies could make her take leather and jeans out of her wardrobe. Unzipping her motocross jacket, she saddled up to the bar and started a tab. Diana would yell at her, drinking away the memories instead of talking to a hippie for four hours about her feelings, but the liquor was cheaper and she vomited less.

All in all, it was looking like a great evening until someone sat down next to her. First rule of Barda: Wide berth. Especially if you were wearing a green sports coat over some red-yellow hipster shirt. Jeans too, Christ, he didn’t look half-bad in them, but she didn’t think she’d be able to ride anything with more horsepower than a scooter if she touched him.

“Excuse me,” he said, “do I know you from somewhere?”

Barda slapped the bar, drawing the drink-slinger. “Okay, I’ll give you points for actually trying to pick me up, but using that as your line? Not happening. I’ll buy you a drink and then you can be on your way.”

“I’m serious,” he said, leaning on the bar to examine her profile from a different angle. “I swear to God, I’ve seen you somewhere… oh, crap, Big Barda? From Oaksdale?”

She looked at him sharply. “Don’t call me big.”

“Right, sorry…”

“I’m six foot two, that’s as tall as Eric from True Blood. People don’t call him big.” She looked at him, blinking for a moment. The face looked familiar. The way he was nodding at her, like she was a puzzle he’d just solved. “Scott Free?”

“Yes!”

“I used to follow you around and wait for someone to bully you so I could beat them up.” The barkeep arrived with Scott’s drink. Barda took it. “You owe me one of these.”

“You paid for it,” Scott said, content with the bar peanuts anyway. “Where’ve you been?”

“You’re hitting on me, you go first. I never saw you after you moved away.”

“I’m not hitting—” Scott waved away the insinuation like it was cigarette smoke, which he was also waving away. “Didn’t you get my letters?”

“No. Not surprised you sent them. I’d say my foster-dad used them to roll jays, only I’m sure he was on heroin by then. You?”

“Oh, I’m a cliché. Foster puts out cigarettes on my arm. Got a new case worker named Himon, he got me out of the system and over to some friends of his who were looking to adopt, only my state didn’t allow gay adoption and theirs did. It took some finagling.”

“You were adopted by a gay couple and you’re still wearing that?” Barda sipped her drink coolly.

“They’re lucky. I was wearing this jacket when I got adopted and the shirt when I escaped from a burning building.”

“Wow. You tell that story to all the girls?”

Scott laughed. “You’re very set on me flirting with you. Sure that’s not just a bit presumptuous on your part?”

“Yeah, well, stop flirting with me and I’ll quit bringing it up.” Barda signaled the barkeep. “Look, you’ve got me out of the melancholy writer mood, which is how I love to drink, so why don’t we get out of here while I’m still good to drive? You want a ride or not?”

“I’m… could we talk more first? I can’t go straight from comparing childhood trauma to—”

“On my bike, dumbass.” Barda got up, tossing him her helmet. “Get the tab, would ya? Counts as your chauffeur fee.”

***

Barda’s motorcycle looked like it belonged in a Ghost Rider comic. When she started it up, it sounded like a GWAR concert and the exhaust smelled vaguely like an EPA lawsuit. Barda climbed on with one impressive stretch of her legs and then patted the saddle behind her. Scott got on, clutching the end of the seat. Barda grabbed his hands and jerked them around her waist.

“This doesn’t count as flirting,” Scott said.

“Not on your part,” Barda replied under the throttling engine.

***

They rode out to what Scott would’ve called a make-out spot, if he were still in high school. It was on a hill overlooking Valley City; lots of trees and not much noise, with the most civilization being the cars passing on the road below. The headlights shot up and fleetingly revealed their faces, but aside from that it was just moonlight and the glow of Barda’s brake lights. Barda had a bottle of vodka in her saddlebag.

“So you’re like a wine connoisseur without the wine?” he asked.

“Hey, we’re gonna reopen old wounds, we need anesthesia, right?”

“Sure.” When she passed the bottle to him, Scott accepted mostly because he didn’t want her drinking the whole thing by herself. “So where were we?”

“Scott Free has two daddies.”

“Right. Well, Michael is a football player and Ted is actually an Olympic athlete.”

“What sport?”

“Table tennis.”

Barda slapped her knee. “You could follow in his footsteps!” she laughed. “You’d be like the Dale Earnhardt Jr. of ping-pong.”

“Table tennis. There’s a difference,” Scott said, exaggeratedly looking down his nose at her.

Barda laughed more. “So what about Michael? Does he play real football or is he in the Puppy Bowl?”

“He’s actually won a Heisman Trophy.”

“That’s kinda cool.”

A car sped by below them. When the headlights shone through the trees, Scott could see a brief look of… longing on Barda’s face. She took a slug from the bottle and wiped it off her face.

“You still into bondage?” Barda asked, sitting down against a fallen tree.

Scott leaned down next to her. “Escapology. And yes. In fact, I’ve made a little of a living at it. It’s a new media thing. People design death-traps, I go to them and defy death, then we put it online.”

Barda suddenly looked at him like he’d revealed a plan to go over Niagara Falls in a canoe. “What, do you have a year to live? Is it cancer?”

“It’s a living.”

Barda passed him the bottle. “Cigarette burns.”
 

“What?”

“Drink,” Barda said, stridently enough that Scott didn’t expect anymore out of her until he took a shot. “Let me guess, you’re trying to get back at one of your parents for using you as an ashtray? Or your original parents for abandoning you?”

Scott’s lip twitched, but he’d had enough practice at getting slurs thrown his way. Growing up with two dads will do that for you. “That your story?”

“Shit no. I loved my foster parents. Used to do street races to get them drug money.” She fake-pouted. “I guess I just needed a hug.” Another drink. “Then I crashed. There was this other racer, Auralie—pretty cool girl. She hit my bike and…” Barda wheeled her fingers around before they froze that way, claws. “Anyway, when you’re in the hospital with your leg in three pieces, people get the funny idea that maybe you don’t have a ‘safe family environment’. So, new case worker, Diana, who actually gives three-quarters of a shit about me. Sets me up with a job at this mechanic friend of hers, Io, and some community college courses out in the real world, where it turns out not everyone has dope fiends for parents and it is in fact frowned upon to race motorcycles for cash. Then I meet another burn-out from my old gang when she brings her hog in for a tune-up. Kay’s making pretty good money at motocross, so I look into that. Turns out I’m pretty good at it and this time I can keep the money. So here I am. Happily ever after.”

“Happily ever after just finished the bottle,” Scott observed.

“Yeah…” Barda tossed it aside. “Looks like we’re camping out here. Unless you have a motorcycle license.”

“Saving it for my mid-life crisis.”

Barda grinned. “Speaking of which, your happily ever after seems to have a lot of suicide attempts.”

“I never go into anything without an escape plan.”

“And now you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere with a drunken biker slut. Nice plan.”

“To be fair, you didn’t tell me you were a biker slut until just now. I had assumed you were a motorcycle enthusiast,” Scott said primly. He got up, cracking his neck. “You have a tent in there?” he asked, looking at the saddlebag.

“I have an army blanket, one of those little bottles of alcohol you get on airplanes, and a tire iron.”

Scott opened the saddlebag. Yup, there was a tire iron. It reminded Scott of that cardboard tube Barda had used to run around with, all sorts of crazy stuff crayoned on the sides. “Your Mega-Rod?”

“Oh God, don’t remind me.” Barda pulled her knees up and buried her face in them. “How can you remember this stuff?”

“Only things worth remembering from those days.” Scott pulled out the army blanket and returned to drape it over Barda.

“Oh no, you take it. I’ll keep warm, I’m wearing like three cows.”

“I’m wearing new-age thermal underwear,” Scott said. “You never know when you might get trapped in a meat locker.”

Barda yawned. “What makes it new age?”

“When my dad isn’t winning Olympic gold at the ping-pong table—”

“Table tennis table.”

“He’s an inventor. I have, like, a scarf that can double as a flotation device.”

Barda patted the ground next to her. Scott sat down, a bit wary, and she threw the blanket over them both.

Scott leaned back against the log, a bit nervous to say anything. He didn’t want to ruin this. Almost immediately, he was wondering what ‘this’ was.

Barda looked down at their shoes poking out from under the blanket. “Scott, you’re wearing green high-tops. Why?”

“They’re lucky,” Scott said. “I saw you again in them.”

Barda shook her head. “Just admit you’re hitting on me or it’ll be creepy.”

“Fine, I admit that I did have a crush on you—”

Barda kissed him. It was, Scott thought dimly, rather like she was revving up a motorcycle. Just a few deft moves of her lips and he felt this heat settle in his chest and somehow throw his arms over to her, cupping her face, feeling her weather-beaten skin and a smudge of grease on her cheek, under his fingertips, and when she pulled away it was like being plunged into cold water.

“Had?” she asked, as girlishly as his childhood best friend, and she rested her head on his shoulder to go to sleep.

Scott put his hands behind his head and tried to catch some shuteye as well. It wasn’t easy. He kept thinking of what Ted and Michael would say when he introduced them to her.

Comments

[wuxiadaddy.livejournal.com]

"Barda’s motorcycle looked like it belonged in a Ghost Rider comic. When she started it up, it sounded like a GWAR concert and the exhaust smelled vaguely like an EPA lawsuit."

Great line. Like Geek Chandler.

You'll get your movie someday.