plotted starter as birthday gift for @crimenight!
It was a common assumption among most that Vân was unaccustomed to violence. She did not take offense to this. People had good reasons to assume so when gazing at her, whose outward physical attributes would suggest more of a sedentary lifestyle than one dominated by physical labor. Her arms were slender-looking, almost “noodle-like”, and it did not help that she often wore tight long-sleeve suits to work (on which her cats’ shedding fur stuck stubbornly, despite her lint remover’s best effort), shielding any visible muscle from sight. To fleeting glances, she looked as if she was raised in some sort of ivory tower, and had never attempted to lift anything heavier than her house cats throughout her more than four decades of living. The protruding collarbones had also been cause for many’s concern - most especially the well-meaning elders of Chinatown’s family restaurants, who had made her food and collected her money enough times that they had become somewhat comfortable with telling off the city’s district attorney. Often accompanied by a disapproving wrinkled frown from someone’s grandmother, variations of “你太瘦了!” or “sao lại để người gầy như hạc thế kia!” (you’re as thin as a rake!) had rang across restaurants with a volume loud enough for customers to turn their heads, while she only let the remark bounce off with an embarrassed smile, trying to hide her face behind the transparent cup of ice tea as she took a sip. Though she did have problems with putting on weight, such was a topic for another time. The facts at hand were that, most believed she was unsuited to handle violent situations. Gotham was a violent city. The math was simple.
Except, she wasn’t. The ivory tower she was raised in wasn’t ivory, nor was it a tower - it was mustard yellow, and it was a fortress. A rectangle Soviet-style collective housing unit built in the 1960s that almost fifty families huddled in together, with extremely poor soundproofing. A strange place where everybody knew everybody, where everybody saw everything, heard everything, yet they saw nothing, and heard nothing at the same time. The unit had often been filled with differing noises - newborns crying from upstairs, children’s thundering footsteps running up and down the stairs, earsplitting gasps of women around her mom’s age standing in the shared hallway (whenever a scandalous gossip was revealed - sometimes it was about her), the high-pit whistling of Vietnamese tobacco from men sitting in the community yard. Noises had been a never-ending presence.
So when dead silence befell the entire unit right after her mom threw a drinking glass to the floor and shattered it into shards, of course she had noticed. It was an oppressive kind of quiet, the kind which whispered into her ears to tell her that everyone had heard the fracture, and despite it, despite the neighbors' wall-penetrating ears listening from every other side, she was alone in the world to face the fury before her. The scene had always played out the same way: her dad would observe everything playing out from the seat in the corner with a scrunched sympathized look - she had never figured out to whom that sympathy had been directed to, whether it had been her or her mother; after the fury, her parents’ bedroom door would slam close, and she would remain to clean up the glass (it had been her fault, after all); and, in the following morning, when she got out of the door to walk to school, she would feel the weight of heavy stares from other apartments’ residents. Though, when she turned around, all heads had quickly turned back to their buzzing radios. The massage was clear. They, too, had taken her parents’ side.
Therefore, she knew of violence. Rarely at the giving end, but she knew of violence. She understood it - or more precisely, she understood them. There were many kinds of violence, with many faces. Some blows were delivered with a roar, some stalked silently beneath the surface of daily life. She had lived with them since her birth - which, also, was the byproduct of one. And now, she had decided that she had had enough of them.
“ @crimenight, that’s enough. ” The repeated and constant pounding of fists colliding with flesh muffled her admonition from the doorway, its brutality showing no signs of ceasing. The bat’s rage had distorted his hearing, for his head had yet to turn around to acknowledge her presence, as he had always done. Instead, his focus was dangerously pinned on a limp figure that was being nailed to the floor with an iron grip on the neck. Punches rained down - they kept coming, and coming. Spatters of red blood painted the imprints of their shadows on the tiled floor. Nearby, there was a tossed hunting rifle - undoubtedly of the unconscious silhouette. A frown creased on her forehead as she left her standing position to walk closer. Her shoes stomped uncharacteristically on the floor, every step resounding with the purpose to distract. Her voice grew firmer as she stopped a few steps behind him. “ Batman. ”
Nothing changed. It was futile, and past experiences had taught her to know better to initiate unexpected physical contact with an agitated man - let alone a six-foot-two man in the heavyweight class, even if it was her oldest friend. Her lips thinned into a straight line, her teeth gritted silently in frustration while her narrowed eyes searched around swiftly for a solution. If he was not listening, then she could not use words. Touching him was not an option, unless she wanted to put herself at the mercy of his self-restraint (as much as she trusted him, it was not something she had much faith in at this moment). Somehow, without words, without touch, she must make her presence impossible to dismiss.
A bang blasted out the whole world, and everything halted.
“ Did that get your attention? ” A handgun in her right hand. A bullet lodged in the steel bookshelves.
