❝ But Sicilians don't go to therapy and figure that out.

[crossbearing]

Date & Time: August! (maybe some September later idk)
Location: every location
Characters: Helena, Renee, Barbara, Dinah, Jaime, Steph and I swear to God she will go be Helena at non-DC people, too. (closed-ish, let me know if you'd like to do something with her and I can toss a prompt in here!)
Summary: Helena Doing Things At Different Times.
Warnings: Comics, let's be real. Possible rage, angst, violence and then even more feelings or reference to any of these things.

( HAHA no the starters are in the comments, I just wanted to do cut text for fun. Feel free to go with prose or action spam and I'll match it! )

Comments

14th → Renee Montoya

[crossbearing]

( It probably wasn't really good form to go and mostly ignore someone who is apparently your friend from the future after you've held a crossbow at them and threatened to shoot them. In fact, the crossbow thing all on its own wasn't really the best way to go about making friends, but that had never been her forte.

And ignoring Renee was the only thing she could work out how to do in the wake of finding out what happened to Vic. It was sort of inevitable, it felt like. Someone else might have had a more mature, logical approach, one that was less raw. Helena had always been too much of one thing or another, though. That was the way it worked.

She couldn't keep going that way forever. It wasn't Renee's fault, so she'd gotten in touch with her and offered to show her the new place she's been sorting out. It's an old building, not perfect, but it's worth it to skip on paying rent. That just means they need to sort out some repairs, but then it's theirs and they won't be beholden to anyone. It's not so much a single place as a row of Victorian townhouses - three, altogether - that have managed to survive bombings that have taken out parts of the properties that were on either side. Helena's sitting on the stairs of the middle house, a set of keys hanging from her fingers as she sips a (lacklustre) "coffee." Never mind that it's a house of vigilantes and keys are probably pointless: she still tracked down a locksmith. )

19th → Barbara Gordon

[crossbearing]

( Let's be honest, it wasn't just Renee she was avoiding. Helena's healthy response to emotional problems is to isolate herself, not talk about them. Half the time she doesn't know if Barbara is her employer, an equal, an adversary or a friend. That third option is slipping lower and lower down the list in terms of how regularly they hit that element in one another, but when it happens, it's bad.

Still. It's probably better that she goes and hangs out with her favorite criminal(sabotaging) mastermind. (Never tell Barbara that.)

She's unannounced as she knocks at Barbara's door and hopes she answers. (See, because Helena respects privacy enough to not just unlock the door and walk in. No, she's probably not going to let that go for a while.)

After a few seconds, she knocks again. )

Barbara!

( Okay. So she's not very patient. )

12th????? idk man → Stephanie Brown

[crossbearing]

( The greatest curse is inaction. To simply stand there and let events unfold around you, with the hanging doubt that you should have done anything, something. It was the dread that had clung to her for so long: that she was helpless, frozen. That she could have done something, even if her family were still shot maybe she could have saved her mother, and there was the fear that even if she had the presence of mind, if she hadn't been frozen, that all her actions would have meant nothing.

People still died.

Grief is too painful, it's too debilitating and she's can't let herself feel it, not in the way that she encourages her students to, that she thinks other people should. Grief will freeze her, again. Her rage is a flashfire, it sweeps through everything. These men, they were breaking into a business closed for the night. That probably doesn't merit the severity of the beating they're taking. She isn't just breaking up a drug deal turning south with blades drawn, she's set to leave them so they will be struggling to move if she has her way. It's an alternation of letting them get some hits in, letting them think they have a chance, and then reminding them of all the ways that thinking they could hold her back was a terrible mistake.

Two men try to converge on her with knives - one of them takes a kick to the throat before she throws him into a wall, her capes wrapped around the others face, suffocating him. )

22nd → Jaime Reyes

[crossbearing]

( IT'S FREAKING MOVE IN DAY, YEAH

"Place" would admittedly , traditionally, probably refer to just one house. What Helena's found is a collection of three Victorian townhouses, with the houses that had been on either side of that trio too bomb damaged to really be inhabitable. This has been her main project the last two weeks in particular. (For most people this would be excessive, even with the collection of people she wants living there, but this is the woman who bought an entire apartment complex and lives there alone so she can have her personal space.) Beating thugs and fixing up whatever she can manage herself has been her principle way of dealing with the news about Vic, in between cursing herself for not having the right to be as sad as she way, as hurt.

Between them, there's plenty of room for themselves, for any new arrivals that might turn up, for making it a real safehouse. This is Helena's castle, and it's where she's keeping the people she wants to protect and who are risking themselves to protect Exsilium. It is theirs, and no one else's, no rent to be paid, no considerations made. She's inside, trying to finish fixing up the electricity before everyone moves in. Being a vigilante is basically just code for being qualified in a bunch of really strange things, though usually when she's playing with electrics it is for much more nefarious purposes and she's definitely not an expert.

She told Jaime to come meet her and start moving his stuff in, if he wanted, and there's a key under a pile of bricks outside that she told him about so he could make it in, now that the windows on the lower floors are all boarded up. )

Jaime, is that you? Can you test that light, for me?

25th → Dinah Lance

[crossbearing]

( So maybe she is stupidly relieved to have Dinah here. The full extent of that relief was lost with finding out about Vic, and Helena certainly has been doing her very best to keep herself isolated in bursts, between necessity or loneliness pushing her to grab onto someone.

With the move in to the place just about complete, actually avoiding Barbara and Dinah (and Jaime and Renee) is not so easy as it might have been before. The place still needs a hell of a lot of work, there are parts you wouldn't really call inhabitable, but they have what they need and it's sort of a nice, distracting project.

Today, Helena has given up fixing stairs and reinforcing panels, building access ramps for Barbara. Instead, she has agreed to something of a girl's catch up day with Dinah.

And maybe she also has been missing the excuse to be a bit frivolous, as she frowns at a "lipstick display" (no) and waits for Dinah to appear. )

29th → Oliver "what the fuck is going on" Queen

[crossbearing]

( Oh, you know, just a typical Thursday night. Kicking back with a nice glass of wine and so on, you know?

Except, no. Because that isn't what you do when you're a vigilante. You get the occasional night off, maybe, but Helena doesn't like doing that too often. Not in Gotham, and not here, where anarchy is the name of the game. It reminds her too much of No Man's Land, sometimes, and that takes her far beyond being uneasy.

She's been tracking this drug ring for a few days, waiting for the right time. Just keeping an eye on things, really, and she has no idea how long she's been waiting on this rooftop, but you stop paying attention to stuff like that eventually, because there are countless other things you need to be focused on.

Right now, she's focused on the fact that an arrow pinned her guy to a wall the same time as her crossbow bolt pinned his other side, so he's pretty much stuck, lips curled back in a snarl. This was her bust.

Before she goes in the direction the arrow came from, though, she's dropping down to knock out one of the idiots trying to make a run for it. )