Entitlement (M!A: sinceiwasnine owns goddessofarrows)
Ordinarily, Dick didn't sweat when he was wearing a suit. There was something about the environment, despite its likely below-70 Fahrenheit temperature that was making his skin burn with anxiety, so he squirmed a little against his white dress shirt inside his tailored suit jacket to catch a distinct bead of sweat that trailed down the small of his lean back, itching vaguely. Then he felt almost normal as he stepped outside the elevator--another secret elevator that did not have a permit on file with the city planning office. Another elevator that went into a deeper bowel of the earth than should ever have been allowed--down into a kind of privately funded hell. It was strange, how many things started that way.
This time, it was finishing something, though--finishing the first step. Getting Artemis back safe and sound and into his hotel room, rented under a phony name with a fake ID that placed him over the age of 18 by 18 months exactly, before they continued bringing down these worst of the worst in Gotham city--slave traffickers, dealing in flesh and against the will of women that Dick tried not to remember the actual figure on. It was too many. All that mattered was that they were going to put a stop to this. He just hated that they'd had to bring Artemis into it at all.
Only, the simple, awful, sexist fact of the matter was--they needed a girl. And they needed a girl of a certain body shape, a certain carnal appeal once you dressed them up and put them in a certain light, and in truth pretty much all the girls who were affiliated with the Team would have worked, but there were only two that lived in Gotham. Of those two, there was only one who was not Commissioner Gordon's daughter, and if she had turned up missing for any length of time at all, every single police unit in the city would have been mobilizing and crawling toward finding her--and only her. It wouldn't have worked.
That left Artemis. And despite Batman's resistance, the fact was, now that Artemis knew who Dick really was, finally, she was their best option. Better the daughter of a Shadow than the daughter of one of Gotham's only shining lights (no affiliation to the Light, mind you, Dick noted). She, like so many other girls from Gotham and illegally brought in from abroad, could disappear.
Only, Dick wasn't going to let that happen. That was his job here, his first and for the moment only job was to get from the elevator down the still golden-and-low-lit marbled hall to the even darker still set of rooms arranged in a circle--arena seating around a plexiglass and marble cage with two-way mirrors concealing the captive's view out into each of the surrounding booths. Captives who were girls with no hope, no one to save them, no way out except the highest bidder as they were (sometimes, he hoped not this time) drugged into delirium and placed on a pedestal where they were auctioned off like cattle.
His teeth were set so on edge that he could have bitten through them if only they hadn't kept holding up under the pressure.
He was single-minded, fingers hovering protectively over a pocket in his pants where he had a wallet secure, complete with all the paraphernalia associated with being a different, older person. Inside was also the technically, unofficially limitless credit card that was a lifeline. Not to mention the reams of several varieties of perfectly counterfeited currency hidden away in the penthouse hotel suite he had occupied for forty-eight hours--forty-eight hours during which he did not even begin to want to imagine the hell Artemis might have endured.
"Not much longer," he promised, and he muttered it aloud because he could have passed it off as his own anxious anticipation.
As it turned out, that was a mistake. He'd made a mistake somewhere. And during the next fifteen, then twenty minutes, his heart was racing and pounding behind his ears and he silently fought through and concealed the unconscious bodies three very well-trained thugs. Concealing them was imperative because if he blew their cover now, they were both in deadly danger. When the men came to, they probably wouldn't have admitted to having been beaten by one, lone society kid--even if they did know something they weren't supposed to know about it. Just in case, he detonated a little capsule that contained a chemical compound, given to him by Batman for this mission in particular, that was indicated to cause short-term amnesia.
And then he was straightening his suit, rushing as much as he dared because he couldn't run, after he'd hacked into the surveillance system and erased the footage of him fighting against much bigger guys than him. He'd lost a half an hour and by the time he entered the private booth--replete with its own minibar even though his false identity wasn't old enough to drink either--he watched in horror as she--Artemis--was guided off the pedestal and a digitized, unidentifiable voice piped into the room:
He didn't wait to hear the amount. He worked with his wrist watch computer the way he'd practiced and he entered an astronomically high bid that would outbid anything these people would pay for a girl like Artemis. He hated that he knew her price and he actually tasted bile on the back of his tongue, but then he knew, because of the stall in the announcement tone, that something was about to happen.
"I promise I'm coming to get you," he murmured. And then, in case someone was listening, he added, just as convincingly--to everyone but his conscience, "... baby."
