Young Writers Society

"Of course not," he nonchalantly said. He brought her out of the room and down one of the hallways. He didn't really think about which way to go, or even where he was ultimately headed. It was all just an excuse to talk to her. "You work for Grandfather and serve my mom. If I say we're going somewhere, you're obligated to follow me - and the instructor is obligated to let us go."

So the kid was a kind of royalty here, then. Good to know.

"You're a good fighter," she commented, "I can't imagine you trained here to get that way." He would have had to be a much more dedicated fighter than everyone else in this..whatever it was. Kinda felt like a cult.

This kid appeared to be younger than most of the others, the fact that he was better than them in a fight would indicate him having some kind of outside training. He also knew moves most of the others didn't seem too. He fought in an awfully familiar style, Megara just couldn't place it.

"I learned from Mom's best assassins," Damian said, shrugging. There were also some self defense classes, street smarts and a few other bits of training thrown in over the years, but that was the main reason.

He glanced over at her. "What about you? It seems like you've had extra training, too."

She shrugged one shoulder, keeping her posture loose even as she felt the urge to tense up. "Rough childhood," she said simply, her tone inviting no more questions. She examined her surroundings as they walked, memorizing the place as though it was the site of a job. A familiar task to help lessen the unfamiliarity of it all.

A rough childhood had to be the biggest understatement he had ever heard. A rough childhood didn't let you beat trainee assassins with ease; you needed something more than that. You needed constant training to get skills like hers. Even if you took away the assassin part of it all, there still had to be some kind of physical training that prepared her for fights like this.

Damian really wished he had been paying attention to conversations about the Justice League.

He held out his hand to her.

"I'm Damian," he said. "Damian al Ghul. You probably already know the last name, seeing that you work for my family, but they usually just call me 'heir' or 'boy' around here."

Megara took the offered hand, "Most people call me Ninny," she said. An alias seemed appropriate, all things considered.

Damian. She'd heard that name before. The immense frustration she felt being unable to place it wasn't something to be described by words.

She focused, instead, on his actual words. 'Al Ghul' was an unusual last name, meaning something that could be roughly translated to 'demon'. Demon. Damian. Huh. If she believed the gods cared about the details, she might think this was a warning. A nice little sign telling her that there was danger here. To get out.

Of course, Runi was a demon, but Megara couldn't help thinking that the gods were all rather racist against the demi-mortal kinds.

The name didn't ring any bells, but the way she said it made Damian more than a little wary.

His hand fell back to his side.

"So what made you join the league?" he asked. He was already waiting to judge her response. He doubted she would pause or falter. She seemed too at ease for that. But he knew that her response would reveal something - if she was involved in the other side of the family business, then it had to be petty. Something that sounded even more like from the pages of a comic book than usual.

"The aforementioned rough childhood," she said with just enough pause to make it believable. So it was a league then. A league of fighters? Damian had mentioned assassins earlier, maybe that was it? It would make more sense for the assassins to be a branch of the league, though. Like she had been for Caedis, specifically The Count's branch of Caedis.

She didn't know how to feel about being in a place like that.

At the thought of feelings, she reached out for his. Suspicion was in the mix now, caution. That was never good.

All it meant was she had to perform well enough for him to drop his guard.

He couldn't help it - even though he had been trained for the past few years to not be as expressive, he raised an eyebrow in a show of disbelief. She was giving the same response. Even Tim was more revealing than that, and the current Robin was the most paranoid person that Damian knew outside of his mother and grandfather.

"It must have been pretty rough," he commented.

Megara shrugged, "That is how I described it," she deadpanned. She didn't want any more questions or comments about her backstory, and not just because she didn't have a set cover story.

She wasn't even sure she wanted to be talking to this kid. From a certain perspective, she had enough already. She didn't need to keep talking to him. Then again, there was still more to learn. Still more he could reveal to her about where she was and, if she was lucky, how she could get home.

Damian was getting frustrated.

He knew that she was hiding something. That, or she was just some cliche side character that he was never supposed to interact with. But the instructor had (probably) never shown up in the comics, going off of what Tim had told him. The instructor was more defined than Ninny was.

And what kind of name was Ninny? He was pretty sure that there was a thing about taking on more Arabic names once you joined the league, and Ninny didn't sound that Arabic. But maybe that was just a lucky kind of coincidence; it made everything feel more connected.

...Then again, she had even less dialogue topics than a Pokemon NPC.

"I've never heard of a rough childhood teaching someone how to be an assassin-"

There was a loud crashing noise from somewhere far away, but also close. He immediately stiffened. That sounded like an attack. But they were supposed to be stealthier than that - they had all been trained by the best vigilante this universe had to offer. There were more noises and more chaos. And then there was the instructor, rushing down the hallway and instructing Ninny to take Damian somewhere that nobody could find him.

"We can't lose him again!" the instructor sputtered out, completely ignoring that Damian was standing a few feet away and aware of the entire conversation. "The last time, Talia got rid of half of us - and you know how she gets rid of people."

Then the instructor was running back down the hallway, leaving Ninny and Damian alone.

It wasn't Batman.

Damian knew that.

And he knew it wasn't any of the Robins, either.

Damian could have taken a gamble. He could have gone running towards the source of the noise, and desperately hoped it was someone here to rescue him. But he couldn't take that risk right now, and part of him didn't want to see anything bad happen to Ninny. She was interesting, and he kind of like hanging out with her.

So he grabbed onto her wrist, gave a surprisingly sharp and strong tug for a just barely nine year old, and went running down the hallway towards a secret exit only the al Ghuls knew about.

The safest place to be was away from the league, and he knew hiding outside in the cold was the last place someone expect Ninny or him to be hiding.

The exit was only a few feet away from where they were standing. So when he opened the door and pulled her out, there wasn't really any time for her to resist. And there was even less time for Damian to realize how unsteady the snow on the mountainside was after all of the chaos somewhere-near-but-not-here was going through.

The moment Damian dragged Ninny out onto the snow, they both went tumbling down the mountainside.

Damian desperately tried to regain his balance, but the snow was hard to grab onto. And he felt so cold in his current outfit - he was shivering as he tried to grab onto the occasional rock jutting out of the mountainside. Tears started welling up in his eyes, memories dancing back through his mind. Of a burning, scorching heat dancing across all of his limbs. It wasn't hot now, but it felt like it could be. Everything hurt, and he was sobbing by the time that he finally reached a small rock just big enough to catch Ninny and him.

He didn't want to die.

He tried to stop the sobbing, but the tears just kept coming - making his already cold, flushed cheeks feel even more frozen before. Everything had happened so quickly that he barely had the time to understand what he had experienced. Damian just knew that things had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that his plan to hide had worked too well.

No one would ever find them on that rock.

Maybe Mom or Grandfather might have, but both were far, far away. By the time they got back, Ninny and Damian would human popsiciles.

And Damian seriously doubted he would get another second chance.

Megara wasn't quite in the mindset to resist being dragged around by someone who was clearly an important person - albeit a small one - here, especially when she had a cover to keep. A cover she didn't even know much about.

She did, however, have a few qualms about being out in the cold. At all.

The moment they stopped tumbling, she pulled her knees into her chest, hoping to preserve some of the heat she had left. She glared at Damian.

She knew she didn't have much time. She'd read up on the chillier areas of the northern lands, and she'd done at least some of the training before it was decided that Briar was better suited to make an example of whichever lord or lady their father had been having qualms with at the time. After all, Megara would make it hurt, Briar would make it flashy. There was something about a corpse found in pieces, clearly cut with care, in the kitchen of his own castle laid out with offending documents that implicated whoever their father was planning to frame.

It all felt like a lifetime ago. It had been. Megara had died since then.

She didn't feel like talking just now, though. For both the reason of her lungs, which burned with the cold and would only get worse if she tried to talk, and because Damian was the reason both of them were out here in the first place.

It had been slightly amusing, in a morbid kind of way, when he'd begun to comment on how a 'rough childhood' was a rather odd explanation for her status as an assassin. Of course, since she wouldn't be telling him anything more about that, it would just have to stay that way. Odd and unexplained.

She huffed hot air into her cupped hands. What kind of assassin-league-thing base was in a place like this? It felt like poor planning of the highest order. Putting a base for a bunch of fighters who used a very reflex-based style in a place where the temperature would slow their reflexes. It made sure that they were individually almost at their weakest if or when their own base was attacked. All the attackers would have to do is open a window to gain a slight edge, so long as their fighting style didn't rely on speed.

She shook her head, knowing she was just distracting herself from the problem. The cold. She should be trying to solve it.

She cast one more glare at Damian before asking, her voice shaky from the cold, "You wouldn't happen to know a way back inside?"

At the sound of Ninny's voice, he forced himself to bite back another sob. He needed to focus, even if he was pretty sure they were done for.

"No," he whispered. His voice was shaky, too; that only made him feel even more terrified than before. "There's-There's doors, but they're all too far away. I-I don't think we can reach them before we...we..."

The sob he had been trying to hold back finally slipped out.

She softened, "Then we don't use the doors." She paused for a moment, debating her next move. They would have to keep warm until then. Gods, she wished she hadn't stashed her supplies. The blanket and matches, specifically, would be really nice right now.

She glanced over at Damian. They would have to stay warm until they could come up with another plan. If she was from here she knew she'd have one. A place to go, just in case. Maybe some supplies stashed somewhere or a rope or chain hidden beneath the snow to help climb back up. She didn't suppose anyone here was paranoid enough to plan or prepare for something like this, though.

Gods, she really hated the cold.

At least it'd be an interesting story to tell Eddie when she got home.

She held out a hand in the small gap between them, "Come here. We'll be warmer if we huddle together."

It was very hard not to think about how many times she and Briar had been forced to do just that in the small gap of time when it was in consideration that they go together to the north. She still wondered what the mer who were hired to create their training rooms thought a wealthy family of nobles needed with a frozen tundra of a room.

He hesitated for a moment.

Then he scooted over to her side, leaning up against her as he tried to ignore how cold it was. Her warmth felt nice. It also felt surprisingly safe - the only person who had ever given him comfort like that was miles upon miles away in Gotham right now.

"Thank you," he whispered.