"theres a lady who knows
all that glitters is gold . . ."
in which a wannabe hero leaves the safety of her own life to help a girl
with a very strange problem.
...
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"CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE A MURDERER."
DJ's stormy eyes rolled over in her head, tearing her misty and unfocused gaze from the morning news anchor reporting the Joker's death, and peered over with a glare at the source of the voice.
His dark eyes were staring in her direction from under the slouching skin of his wrinkled forehead, lids weighed down by heavy bags carrying the weight of ninety-five years of life. His lined face was devoid of emotion apart from a touch of light in his brown irises, the only part of her old friend that she could recognize from the eighteen year old she met back in 1945.
"Thanks." DJ said flatly, head rolling slightly to the side so she could glare out of the side of her eye. "I needed that."
"You're welcome. That's why you're stinking up my room with your teenage angst, isn't it? My great advice?" Benny clapped back, his voice a weak and faded stammer, but still laced with pieces of a Brooklyn accent behind every word.
"Yeah, Benny, that's what it is." DJ scoffed and turned back to stare off at the TV screen again, staring at the box above the anchorman's shoulder displaying Barbara's speech to the people of Gotham City.
In the past three months that DJ had spent in Benny's company, she had many of these moments where she forced herself to pretend to not notice the wheezing in her old friend's every breath, or the hacking cough every few minutes. Every time she looked at the old man, she forced herself to see the eighteen year old boy who gave her the jacket off his back in a freezing German autumn.
But she couldn't delude herself for too long. Age was coming for Benny. And age was not kind. It wasn't forgiving, or merciful, or understanding; it was stretching your days as far as they could go, hoping the memories and experiences made up for watching your body give up on you while the world gave more life, younger and fresher with everything laid out in front of them. Age came for everyone if nothing else beat it to the punch.
If there was any consolation to such knowledge, it was that at least her friend's almost century of life was jam-packed with all the best things you could have in life; even with so many hardships. So many stories she had already heard, whether it be helping her navigate through parts of her life where she would have been lost, or cheering her up when everything seemed hopeless, or educating her on parts of time she either hadn't seen, or had been glossed over in the history books.
He had been an incredible friend back in 1945 when DJ thought she was destined to live out the rest of her days in the decades before anyone she could trust had even been born, making sure she knew that she was safe and cared for despite the odds that she would be found. And he had been an incredible friend the last few months, helping her understand how taking life slow worked, and offering relationship advice with Jason, or even just listening to her daily rants about whatever had pissed her off.
She had tried to pay back all the help he had offered her - paying for a retirement home that gave actual care to the elderly, so unlike 90% of the homes in Gotham that simply took the relative's money while shoving aside the people in that depended on them. She made sure he spent the remainder of his life in as much comfort as possible, but there was nothing that she could buy for him that (in her mind) could ever make up for all that he had done for her.
