Saving Grace: a Batman fanfiction

Chapter 14

**Sorry for that hiatus on this story! Enjoy the updates! I really appreciate votes so I know if people are enjoying the chapters!

            “Thank Goodness, you’re up,” said Fatima, the deep worry lines in her face relaxing when she locked eyes with Grace. “Oh, Grace— I should never have sent you out, I’m so sorry!”
            “Oh, no,” protested Grace awkwardly, pausing once she felt a searing pain in her lip, realizing how much it hurt to talk. “It’s not your fault. Is Marianna—?”
“She’s okay,” replied Fatima, anxiously gripping the handle of her broom. “She made it back
before the Batman brought you back. You might have saved her life, Grace.” Grace just shrugged, burning with an unfamiliar feeling.
            She’d never saved anything before. Much less a life.
            She looked worse for it, too, with bruising under her eyes and on her forehead and left cheekbone, lip still swollen. Her whole body ached.
            “It was nothing,” she managed to say, fighting the habit of biting her lip. “Batman really brought me back, huh?”
            “He was incredible.” Fatima’s eyes were huge as she relayed the story. “When I heard the knocking on the door I was scared, I thought it was the thugs, I didn’t know what I would do if it was.” She paused and Grace wondered for the first time how much of a toll keeping a bunch of children alive in the Narrows by yourself was. “But then I looked out the window and saw the Batman, the Batman holding you in his arms. You looked dead, Grace. He said you have a concussion, he left you medicine.”
            “I’m not dead,” mumbled Grace, kind of hating the way Fatima’s eyes were widened in adoration. Adoration of her. A wave of bitterness swept through Grace because she’d fallen for this before, hadn’t she? She couldn’t fall for it again. It’s better to know that nobody cares for you, she thought, than to keep impaling yourself upon your own expectations. In this world you have to look out for yourself. It’s every man for himself. “I’m going to the library.”
            The library was about a block away and was small and run down. It was white once, a long time ago, but was now coated in years of dust and dirt. Grace went for the books, and when Mr. Ecker stopped by the group home. He was the actual owner of the home; the embezzling cheat, the cruel and hardened man Grace knew to keep away from. Though it was small, it had an impressive collection of used, worn books, and that’s all a library needs, isn’t it?
            Grace was dressed in pink sweatpants and an old, torn white zip-up sweater. She pulled her baby pink baseball cap down over her face when she entered the library because she didn’t want to attract attention to how bruised she looked as she bee-lined for the classics section.
            She was so focused on keeping her head down as she reached for Anna Karenina that she didn’t give a second glance to the man studying the books next to her, his baseball cap pulled similarly over his face.
            “Anna Karenina,” he mused softly, voice right in her ear.
            Grace screamed and dropped the book, tripping and falling on her butt in her haste to move away from the voice.
            It was just too similar to the thugs’ whispers, their breath on her neck. And the falling to the ground every time she was scared—God, she’d have to work on that. She squinted up to find Jason staring down at her, expression unreadable.
            She hadn’t seen Jason since the day she left his house. Hadn’t responded to his texts, either. He looked more or less the same; he was wearing the same brown battered leather jacket that he always wore. Still sprawled out on the ground, Grace suddenly realized how massive Jason was. He was even more muscular than Dick, even gaining on Bruce.
            Sometimes when you’re with other people, their strength gives you strength. Their boldness makes you more brazen. Their power empowers you. But that’s just sometimes.
            Jason felt too big today, not only physically but mentally. He represented a whole set of problems—a whole world, even—that Grace would be happy to forget about. (No, not forget about it. She didn’t mean that. She wasn’t sure what she meant.) This is what she meant; his imposing presence was making her flustered.
            He was making her feel small right now, in a bad way. Small and weak and ugly.

           Gazing up into his face, Grace could suddenly discern the expression that she’d thought was unreadable. A little anger. A little disbelief. And a little concern.

            “Grace,” he hissed, leaning down and wrapping a huge hand around her upper arm, pulling her to her feet. He sounded pissed off.

            “Good to see you too, Jason,” Grace spat back, imitating his irritated voice.

            “Oh, cut it out.”

            That was entirely unfair, Grace thought, as he pulled her out the back door of the library.

            “Hey, my book,” she protested indignantly, straining against his iron hold on her arm. Jason shot her a withering glare and she scowled but stopped resisting. She let him pull her to the rickety old picnic table behind the library and then push her down onto the bench. “This is really all quite rude of you, Jason,” she snapped, preening over her hair and trying to ignore him.

            “Grace,” he growled again, this time grabbing her chin and forcing her head up so that he could examine her bruises.

            Oh.

            That’s what this was all about.

            “Look—”

            “Where’d you get these?” He was angrier than Grace had thought. “Are they hurting you at the group home?”

            “What? No!” Grace pushed away from Jason, almost toppling over the bench. So her balance was a little off, she still wasn’t in optimal condition. She cleared her throat self consciously and avoided Jason’s angry stare.

            “How did it happen then?” He smashed a fist down onto the picnic table and something about the big banging sound just made Grace snap. (She snapped a lot when it came to the Wayne family, she was learning.)

            “OK, Jason, you need to chill out,” she said, raising her voice to a shout. “I don’t know what your problem is but—”

            “You saunter into the Narrows library alone looking like some beat-up girlfriend after ignoring my texts for fucking weeks and you expect me to just—”

            “I didn’t—I didn’t—I—It was an accident!” Grace stumbled over her words in her haste to get a word into Jason’s rant.

            “An accident?” She’d never seen him this mad, she realized. She knew that he was the one with the temper; that he was the one that was “wayward.” But she’d never witnessed him being like this before. “So you were being stupid, then? Is that what ‘an accident’ means? You go and get yourself hurt like—”

            “It was thugs, Jason,” said Grace, suddenly feeling tired. “I don’t know. I was looking for—there was a girl, a little girl, just four years old and I, I was the only person that could… go look for her. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. It was thugs. I couldn’t… I’m not…” She struggled to find the words she was looking for. (What words was she looking for, anyway? She’d lost even herself at this point.) “It was thugs.”

            Though mostly gone, traces of anger were still lingering in Jason’s expression. Not at her, Grace realized suddenly. For her.

            “You got attacked by thugs.” He crossed his thick arms over his chest and then sat down across from Grace at the little table, his knees hitting the underside of the wooden boards.

            “Yeah.”

            “How did you get out, then?” Jason’s voice had returned to being mostly unemotional, a sure sign that he was emotional, Grace was beginning to realize. And though she was mostly not mad at him, the disdain in his voice bothered her a little.

            “Batman.”

            “Fucking Batman,” Jason swore, and Grace giggled a little.

            “Oh, please, what do you have against the Batman?”