30 Days of Demonfire

Symbiosi (part two)

The Firewall's kind of crowded today. I was hoping to work on my eyebeams a little more—lately I've been feeling them almost ready to use, but I still haven't been able to actually use them—but it'll have to wait.

Helena, Damian's fourteen year old half-sister, and Nell, who's Damian's age, are using the practice program right now.

They're pretty good. Their combined time when they finish is way faster than mine and Damian's were, but I guess that's what happens when you work together rather than compete.

"Hi, Mar'i!" Helena greets me when they finish and realize I'm there. "You gonna practice, too?"

"Yep," I answer, and I shoot a starbolt at her feet playfully. When she was younger, Helena used to pretend to shoot starbolts and she'd ask me to take her flying. Now that she's older, she doesn't do those kinds of things anymore, but she's still a little jealous of my powers, I think. It's sort of nice.

"Classes starting soon?" Nell asks, and I nod. Nell goes to school in New York City. She still does the superhero thing when she's there with the JSA, but she wanted to get out of Gotham. I can't really blame her. Nell knows what she wants to do with her life, and it's not vigilantism. I give her a lot of credit for that. I'm just going to school because I should. Because I want the possibility of a future. But I'll probably end up getting a degree in something I'm good at, like language, and then I'll keep doing this. Maybe I'll do criminal justice and become a cop like my dad, even though he's already told me he doesn't want me doing that.

"Yeah. Next week," I tell her, and we talk about it for a while. Nell's classes are pretty different than mine, since she's going for engineering and I'm still undecided.

When I tell her that I'm trying to work on unlocking a power that I should have figured out how to use a long time ago, she nods like she understands even though she can't and she and Helena leave.

I change into my Nightstar suit and I put my pendant on top of my folded clothes on the bench. I guess I didn't really need to change, but I'm half-procrastinating. I really don't know what I'm doing with my stupid powers. My plan is to train until I can feel the eyebeam energy behind my eyes and then tap into it, but I don't think the power comes from training. It seems to come randomly.

It's hard, working with emotions. You don't realize how many you feel at once. There's different kinds of the same emotion—there's happy after you've been sad, or happy because something exciting happened, or happy for someone else. In Tamaranean, these all have their own words So when I try to focus on what I'm feeling when I get that rush of power, it all stops abruptly because I'm focusing too hard and I can't pinpoint what it was. Sometimes I even feel things without knowing that I'm feeling them.

I go a few rounds but nothing's working. All that happens is that I feel exhausted and my average time has gone down by a lot. Frustrated, I sprawl out on the cool floor and cover my stupid eyes that won't light a starbolt with my hands.

"Grayson?" I hear from the doorway. "Why are you laying on the floor?"

I roll onto my stomach and lean on my elbows so that I can look up at Damian. "Because I suck."

"At least you finally realize it," he says with a shrug.

I hate him. "Asshole," I growl.

He ignores that. "What is it that you are failing to achieve?"

I really don't feel like sitting here and explaining the complications of abilities powered by emotions to Damian Wayne, the boy who, come to think of it, I've never seen smile. "I can't figure out how to get lasers to come out of my eyes," I say summarily.

"That's nothing to be upset over," he says, and he tilts his head at me. "Neither have I."

I stare at him for a few seconds and I push myself into a sitting position. "Was that a fucking joke?" Damian makes stupid quips all the time. But this is one of the only times I can remember him making a joke in a light-hearted way, and maybe the purpose of this one was to make me feel better.

"I suppose," he says with a shrug.

"Well it wasn't funny."

He ignores that, too, and he crosses over to the locker room to change. He emerges in his Robin suit, sans mask, and I sigh. "I was kind of hoping for a little privacy."

"Too bad," he says. "Please sulk elsewhere or get up and continue working."

I stand and cross my arms huffily. "Look, I was in the middle of training and you can't walk in here like you own the place—"

"Firewall, initiate trial one, field one, participants Robin and Nightstar," Damian interrupts me.

The floor pixelates and I glare at him indignantly as the whirr of revving machinery starts.

"I can and I will because I do, in fact, own the place," he adds.

Annoying, arrogant, spoiled— He throws a batarang right at me so I have to duck, but it sinks into a practice droid that was moving behind me and he raises his eyebrows and a corner of his mouth quirks up and he looks so smug.

I take my eskrima sticks from either side of my belt and I charge starbolts in my hands, shrouding them in crackling pink energy. I shoot a starbolt out of the left one and I swing the right one at a robot. The last time we did this, we went in different directions and we were trying to prove a stupid point that I can't remember right now. Now we're covering each other and fighting back to back and it's so much faster. It's probably just because I'm distracted, but my bad mood vanishes a little more with every robot that gets hit by a starbolt-eskrima stick or a batarang or a sword.

And that's when I realize that I like hanging out with Damian, which is a disturbing thought. Ii guess it was bound to happen. He lives across the hall from me. We're in the Teen titans together. We've grown on each other.

He turns and yanks on my wrist so I stumble into him and his arm circles around me, The flat of his sword turned out, and he blocks one of the shots from the practice droids that was about to hit me. His arm drops and he steps away as he throws a batarang, and to prove that I'm not totally useless I shoot a starbolt and they both hit at the same time. Pink sparks dance over the metal skin of the droid, and oil drips out of a hole the batarang made.

"Tt." He glances at me quickly, and I can tell that his expression is filled with annoyance like it usually is but there's also what might be confusion or something that's softer than that. "Pay attention."

"I… sorry," I mumble, and I take a shot at a droid coming up behind Robin. "I was… thinking."

"I understand that it's a rare occasion," Damian says dryly, "but until you learn to do two things at once, try to contain yourself."

Glaring at Damian, I charge a starbolt in my hand and I throw my arm up in a punch as a droid approaches me from behind. There are two left now, and we round on them violently. I finish mine with a kick, but Damian prefers to go for a dramatic swing of his sword.

Our time shows on the main screen, and we've improved vastly over last time. As a duo, our time is fourth, after mine when I'm with my dad, Cass and Steph's, and Tim and Steph's, in that order.

We're both panting and I float as I shake my wrists out. Damian looks up at me approvingly, and I think there's almost a smile on his face.

Unfortunately for him, heat builds behind my eyes and I can't help the twin beams that shoot out of my eyes as my vision hazes over with crackling pink. Don't take this the wrong way, but that felt really good. Like when you've had to sneeze and you finally do it, or like scratching an itch. When my vision comes back into focus, Damian's holding his sword diagonally across his body, looking so unhappy with me.

I shrug and say, "Oops, I guess."

"'Oops?'" he echoes venomously.

I laugh, and he bristles like an angry cat, but I can't help it and I have to land and lean on the wall for support. When I finally calm down he's looking at me like I'm a time bomb. He's holding his sword in a loose grip but he's glaring at me so intently and I raise my eyebrows for him to say something.

An annoyed, "Tt," is all he has to offer, and for some reason that makes me burst into a new laughing fit.