"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" Marcel Marceau

Dear Charlie --

This is going to be my second letter in a row, questioning the wisdom of bumper sticker slogans, but I'm sure about this one, either. I was a cop, remember. Murder police. I saw a damn lot of people at the most moving moments of their lives, learning they'd never see a loved one again; or learning they'd never see the outside of a prison cell again. Moving moments go both ways.

And sure, I guess, some of them were what we'd call speechless -- quiet, or sullen, or nonverbal, which isn't really the same thing. But just as often, I noticed over the years, people would start to talk. They'd say any damn thing that came into their mind. Not the right words, of course, not the ones to say what they meant. But still. Words.

There's a reason they started making cops tell perps they have the right to remain silent. And they do. They also have the right to open their mouths and say the most random, inappropriate, disconnected stuff, which in hardly any case is actually going to help their case. But no cop ever told a collar he had the right to do that; people figure that one out all on their own.

And look at you and me. Up until the bitter end, we never stopped running our mouths at each other. Those days when you were in the hospital bed, losing your mind to the cancer -- if anything, it seemed like you had more to say. You probably don't remember this -- I hope you don't remember this -- but you were singing songs. You were saying things that were disconnected, talking to people who weren't there. You weren't missing your words; you just didn't have the right ones for the right time. No one ever does.

-Renee

tags: tm_response

*ooc -- I hit on the idea of writing Renee's prompts in the form of letters to her dead friend Charlie (aka Vic Sage, the original Question who passed the Question mask and identity on to her.)

Dear Charlie,

( Spoilers through the end of Gotham Central )

tags: tm_response

*private* (based on comics-canon events of Gotham Central and 52

Charles Victor Sage was the last person on Earth who should have been able to seduce me.

For starters -- to state the obvious -- Charlie was the wrong gender. It's been a decade since I dated a man for any reason other than to make my parents happy and plead off at the end of the night because I was a good Dominican girl. I knew I was a lesbian from pretty early on, and I haven't even been able to hide it since the day one of my other male admirers outed me as publicly as he could. Thanks, Two-Face, I owe you one; though now I've said it sarcastically, I wonder if maybe I do.

In any case, I wasn't exactly a stranger to men coming on to me. Even if I don't count Harvey Dent on the grounds of his pretty serious psychosis. Count every guy who used to see me and Daria out together and just assumed we had been waiting all our lives for his particular brand of man-loving. All the crude remarks from men I arrested. All joking flirtation I ran into from other cops that weren't always such jokes, which we all knew was only a joke if you wanted to take it that way.

But Charlie Sage -- he walked right into my bedroom and into my life and before you could say, "Holy boundary-crossing, Batman," I was following him to the other side of the world.

It helped that he didn't want sex. It took me a while to figure that out. I blame my mother for drilling "Boys only pick on you because they like you." I assumed Charlie was being a pain in my ass because he thought he could sleep with me. When I got to know him better, I realized Charlie was a pain in the ass of everybody he ever met, because he never figured out another way to be.

So why do I say that this man I never kissed -- who I never would have kissed -- who never tried to kiss me -- why do I say it was a seduction?

I put this mask on every night, I slide it over my skin, it becomes my skin. I slip into the shadows, I float through the streets. I used to be a cop. Now I'm an urban legend. It's too bad Charlie isn't alive anymore, to see what he turned me into.

Oh, who do I think I'm kidding? Charlie knew all along.

tags: tm_response

(Based on canon, The Crime Bible #3)

"There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it."

Kate won't understand why Renee has to leave.

She stands over Renee, holding the book.

"Why is it so damn important to you?" Kate demands, and Renee answers "I'm trying to save you."

Kate stares down at her and even through the mask -- through both their masks -- Renee can see her anger, her hurt. Her contempt, maybe, although maybe Renee is wrong about that. Maybe that steely arrogance is just Kate.

She throws the book at Renee's feet, and speaks in a brittle voice. "Maybe you should have asked what I want."

Then she spreads her cape, and leaps off the roof. Renee stands up and looks after her, but she's already invisible. Renee wonders if Batman's girlfriends go through this.

Kate doesn't understand the reasons. When Renee says, "I'm doing this for you," Kate probably hears "I love you" (Kate would hear "I love you" from people who never meant it; Kate is spoiled when it comes to love, but at least she doesn't miss the truth of it, that Renee does love her.

That isn't the point. That isn't, as Kate herself said, the question. Renee has lost too many partners already. She's not ready to invite the possibility for more loss into her life. She knows what she has to do. There's no point in inventing new sorrows.

tags: tm_response

Private entry

When Daria left, she said it was because it was because I was a control freak.

I told her that was interesting. That was interesting, I said, (or I tried to say; I was just drunk enough to think of something clever, just too drunk to be coherent about it) considering that I didn't have a job, and when I did have a job, I'd spent most of it watching my partners get killed, and being stalked by supervillains. It didn't seem to me – I tried to say – that former Detective Renee Montoya had control over much of anything.

"You're a control freak, and," she said, and added, like a magistrate reading off a list of charges, "you try to inject humor into inappropriate situations."

Daria left, the way she should have left, a long time before. I'd given her every reason to leave. I wanted her to stay, but I knew I didn't deserve her to, and besides – there's nothing a control freak hates more than being left. I couldn't even ask my lover to stay, without proving her point. Looking back, that's probably what she wanted me to do. But she left me, the way I should have been left. The way I had been waiting for her to leave since I started staying out too late, drinking too much and going to bed with whoever was convenient, and making sure that Dee discovered the evidence.

As she walked out the door, I found myself thinking, control is just another word for freedom and – the words of a song that I'd always thought were nonsense suddenly drifting through my mind -- Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

That was me, a year ago – Renee Montoya, detective, lieutenant, and commissioner of my own private precinct that contained absolutely nothing. I thought I had it all figured out.

A year can change everything.

OOC: Link to intro post.

tags: tm_response