A Round of Drinks - 5

Chapter 5

Travis had expected it, but a part – a very small part – of him was still somewhat taken aback.

It was two days after he hired her that Catherine was absent from work. ‘Heroin, probably,’ he thought to himself. Right when withdrawal for it would hit her, like clockwork. He could be wrong, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. That was the norm with addicts that didn’t want to be addicts, but couldn’t get out of it. They’d try, they’d try really hard… and they’d fail, bloodying their metaphorical noses on the wall that was proper withdrawal.

‘Two days,’ he thought when Jason entered his bar and shook his head at Travis’ questioning eyebrow. ‘She lasted two days, in the first week.’ It was very… discouraging, to realize that. It was also very sad, he supposed. She had seemed serious and responsible when she was there, when they worked and even when they didn’t. She seemed a little self-conscious but that was no surprise, really, when she was constantly showing the signs of her condition.

She had seemed fine enough though even then, but sometimes it was like that. Especially since she’d kind of needed him to have a good opinion of her. In hindsight, Travis should have definitely known better, but… Well, it’d been a while since he’d had to deal with that kind of thing. Maybe he’d lost a little of the mark Gotham left on everyone.

Not all of it though, never all of it.

“Everything fine?” he asked when Jason took a seat. There were only a few people at the bar, but they’d start coming in soon enough. For the moment, he had time and Jason was a kid, so he wanted to try and help him at least a little. Especially because he certainly didn’t look fine. Jason never looked quite happy, but he looked particularly frowny at that moment and he’d barely spoken.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the kid mumbled while Travis prepared him something to drink, keeping an eye on the tables. “So, can we just… not?” Jason asked, sounding quite upset, almost angry. He knew the kid wasn’t angry at him though, so it was no issue, really.

“Sure,” Travis agreed easily, something that seemed to catch the boy off guard, if the blink and slightly widened eyes were anything to go by. “Here you go,” he added, passing him a mug of hot chocolate. He was getting good at preparing that quickly, if he did say so himself.

“I’m not a kid,” Jason complained, as he always did when Travis prepared him that drink. He’d rather have juice than that, it seemed. Somehow, juice was a more respectable drink, in the kid’s mind. Not that Travis cared, giving the boy a shrug before getting a soda himself and sitting on the other side of the counter from Jason.

“Hot chocolate always helped me feel better when I was your age,” he commented, scanning the bar and taking a gulp from his own drink. “If you need anything, I can try to help,” he said then, turning back to Jason for a moment. The boy had taken his mug, but he was just holding it between his hands, glaring at it like it was the cause of all his problems.

“You don’t know anything anyway,” Jason grumbled then.

“I don’t know what it’s like to have a parent that's addicted,” he acknowledged with a nod, very aware of the way the boy seemed to tense up. “But I know what it's like to want help but not know who to turn to.”

“Yeah?” Jason asked, derision and disbelief in his voice. “You have a whole place of your own, to live and to work. You are fine,” he said, almost accusingly.

“True enough,” Travis replied with another nod. “But that’s all I have right now. This place, it’s all I have. I have friends I haven’t talked to in years and no family. I have nowhere and nothing if this place doesn’t work. I had nothing for quite a while before I got this place too,” he explained, making sure that nobody was within earshot as he spoke. “I’m just lucky this place seems to be doing well,” he added with a shrug.

“If you say so,” Jason mumbled before bringing the mug to his lips. He might complain a whole lot, but he always did end up drinking the hot chocolate anyway. It was the reason why Travis kept making it. If he’d have completely refused, then he’d have looked for alternatives.

“So… you want to get some sandwiches and go back?” he asked, drawing a surprised look from the boy once more. “You can spend the day with your mother if she’s having a hard time, you know?” he commented, although it was probably the opposite. He didn’t want to assume though, but-

“She doesn’t want me around when she’s… you know?” ‘High,’ Travis finished for him as Jason shrugged. That was understandable, even respectable, sort of. Although, leaving a kid alone in Gotham wasn’t all that much better than having them around a high parent. He didn’t know what kind of high person Catherine was though, and that was kind of important.

“Got it,” he replied, wondering what else to say beyond that or if he even should say something else beyond that. “You’re always welcome here, even if you’re not gonna work, just to be clear,” he told the boy, getting a pause and a stiff nod while Jason stared at the mug in his hands. “If you need anything else, just say the word, yeah?”

And with that, he turned to leave. Jason didn’t seem to know what to respond with then and Travis didn’t want to put any pressure on the kid. He’d keep an eye on him while working at the bar though. If he seemed particularly off, he might warrant another chat. As it was, Travis knew that sometimes talking wasn’t easy, nor was it comfortable or even good. Sometimes, one just needed to be alone without being lonely.

Hopefully, the bar could give Jason that, as it had once done for Travis.

‘A lifetime ago, that,’ he thought with a mild smile.

[}-o-{]

“Feeling better?” Travis asked, passing the last plate to Jason. The bar was closed and they’d just been tidying things up afterwards. The chairs were up, the floor was clean and now everything was washed too. Things were done already, apparently, a good day all around, really, if Travis did say so himself.

“Yeah,” the boy mumbled, taking way longer than necessary to dry the plate. “Thanks for letting me stay here,” he added. He turned his head to the side as if trying to look at Travis, but not really managing, stopping halfway through the motion. “You didn’t have to.” True, he didn’t. Jason had spent like half the time there doing nothing, but he wasn’t about to demand he work all the time. He helped when things got busy and he helped when it was closing time too. That was good enough for him.

“Don’t worry about it. Help closing more than makes up for that,” Travis replied with a grin. After that, he moved to the register and got Jason’s pay for the day from it. He’d gotten his meal, sure, but he’d worked more than enough for some extra. “You wanna bring something for your mom?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at the kid while counting the bills.

“I… yeah, could I?” Jason said, looking a little caught off guard. Which was reasonable, since they’d just finished tidying everything up. He’d have to make a mess if he wanted to prepare something. That is, if he hadn’t thought about that in advance.

Since he had, he opened the fridge and pulled a tupperware container.

“I’ll need that back, yeah?” he commented with a smile as he passed the thing to Jason, who stared at it like he was trying to make sure it was real and not an illusion. “I whipped this together before when I had a moment. Thought I’d offer it for your mom and eat it myself if you didn’t want it,” he explained, pushing it firmly up to Jason.

“What about you though?” the boy asked, his tough guy act on the floor as he looked up with slightly widened eyes.

“I’ll get take out from a Thai place around the corner. I’ve been meaning to try it out,” Travis reassured with a wave of his hand. To be honest, he wanted the kid to take him up on his offer. Take out had always been a weakness of his all his life, but even more so those days. After spending a whole day preparing drinks and food, he didn’t feel like cooking more after the day was over. “It wasn’t here when I moved out and I’ve been curious,” he continued, smiling when Jason’s hands wrapped around the container.

“Ok… thanks,” he mumbled.

Maybe the day had been more rough on him than Travis had initially thought, because he’d been really subdued through it all. Hell, he looked downright shy at that moment, and Jason wasn’t like that, least of all for very long. It made Travis worry and want to do something dumb. Something like…

“Want me to walk you home? It’s late,” he asked, leaning on the counter. So far, he’d tried to keep his nose out of Jason’s business, but with his mother working for him and him knowing Catherine was high and… And he was growing attached to the little shit, Travis would admit, if only to himself.  Ultimately though, the decision was on Jason. He might be a kid and all, but as far as anyone was concerned, it was just as dangerous to allow Travis to go out at night with him and show him where he lived as it was to go out alone.

Gotham was fun like that.

“It’s fine,” Jason said, getting some of his usual personality back as he frowned, looked away and shuffled a little, clutching the tupperware container in his hands. “I usually run everywhere. It’s safer that way,” he explained and Travis nodded. That was a valid strategy. People were less likely to target you if you looked like you were more trouble than you were worth, and a running rat definitely was too much trouble for most. And that was without considering the chances of the rat having nothing worth taking.

“Ok, give me that then, or it’ll be a mess by the time you get home,” he told Jason, smirking when the kid sheepishly passed the container back. Some pieces of bread and napkins later, he made sure that the food wouldn’t be too ruined by the running. “There you go. Stay safe out there, little guy.”

“Been doing that my whole life, old man,” Jason threw back, all moody, like he always did when he called him “little guy”. He was predictable like that, and it made it kind of fun.

“All three months of it,” Travis replied and if looks could kill, Jason’s wouldn’t have, but it definitely would have left a few bruises or burns. He was no Superman though, so too bad for him. “Go along, buddy,” he said, rolling his eyes and walking up to the bar’s door to at least check the immediate street and make sure there wasn’t like, a gathering of crackheads right outside. “See you around.”

“See you,” Jason said, all serious as he nodded, like he was someone actually mature and going to war or something. It would have been kind of funny, if it weren’t so serious to go anywhere in Gotham… at any time of the day, really.

Which was why Travis stood at the door, watching the boy run off until he couldn’t see him anymore. That was the night he’d stayed the longest, at least while leaving alone and not with his mother. He was suddenly wondering if it was better for him to leave with Catherine rather than on his own. Sadly, it wasn’t like Travis could do a lot to help them out in any case.

That was just the reality of living in Gotham.

He didn’t have to like it though, but not liking it wouldn’t do much for any of them.

[}-o-{]

He knew Jason would be trouble, he really did.

Travis just hadn’t realized how much.

Because the more he interacted with him, the more the kid was influencing his life, either willingly or not. Some of them were smaller things, like making him learn to make stuff more suitable for children, even if he had a bar. Another was keeping a closer eye on how things went about outside of his little piece of Gotham, more than just what he needed to in order to keep his place stocked.

Other things were much more blatant, like how he’d hired someone to work at his bar much earlier than he would have normally done so. Or the fact that said employee was someone he wouldn’t have actually considered under normal circumstances. Nothing against Catherine, but… addicts didn’t have a reputation for making great employees. Not to say he wouldn’t have hired her without Jason being involved, but the scales would have certainly been leaning less in her favor.

And the latest – but probably not the last, he’d wearily admit – thing that the kid had turned upside down on Travis was making him think about what he had… what he could have. Because he hadn’t lied when he said he had nothing. His father had been his only family and he hadn’t had him for way longer than the man had been dead. He had had friends, sure, but that was long in the past, before he’d left Gotham behind him for years. Angelo was there, but for as close to the man as he could feel, he’d been more a friend of his father’s than Travis’, like a few others.

As for those that had been Travis’ friends…

Half of them, he didn’t even want to talk to, didn’t want to consider them friends anymore. The other half, he was… unsure about, really. Even if that hadn’t been the case, he wouldn’t even have known where to begin looking for them. It’d been so long and Gotham was so different.

‘Funny how that works,’ Travis thought, in the silence of the bar with a glass of soda in front of him. ‘It never felt like Gotham changed until I wasn’t around to keep up anymore,’ he mused, half-closed eyes gazing into the fizzy drink as if he could find answers in between bubbles and colored liquid. ‘Where could any of them even be?’

‘Dead,’ a very unhelpful corner of his mind supplied, which was… fair. They could very well be dead, maybe they’d just been at the wrong place at the wrong time when a crime happened or maybe they’d run into one of the psychos that roamed the place like walking natural disasters. Lots of stories like that in Gotham, after all, so Travis wouldn’t be too surprised. ‘It would still suck,’ he thought wryly as he took a gulp of his drink.

Instead of sweet, it tasted incredibly bitter as it washed over his tongue.

‘What if they aren’t dead though,’ he thought, closing his eyes and imagining how their lives could have gone. Even if they weren’t dead, Gotham had other ways to screw you over. None of his friends had been particularly wealthy, far as he knew, but you could always have less, things could always be worse.

There was an obvious answer to his problem, so obvious… And yet he couldn’t take it. ‘I won’t… I can’t. If I go to them… ’ Travis thought, trailing off even in his mind. But he knew what could happen, so very well. He’d left, and he’d done so for a reason. He couldn’t be the one to go there, or everything, the tenuous balance of his life, could crumble like the house of cards he knew it to be.

No, that was not an option.

His finger tapped on the counter and he gazed upon the empty bar. It’d be time to open soon and he was a mess. Good thing there wouldn’t be a lot of movement around the place for a bit even after opening. Most that could happen was a few clients and Jason wanting to work when – or if – he dropped by with his mother, but even then it’d be light.

He tapped louder, an idea popping up in his head and making him grimace.

Yet, despite how much he didn’t like it, despite how much he tried to push it down. Because… What else did he have, really? What did he have other than half-baked theories and ideas? ‘It won’t help. Never does,’ Travis told himself, like he had about a million times.

Even then, he still found himself walking up to the apartment, opening the storage door, pulling out the shoebox and shuffling the cards. Every little step felt like he was walking into a trap, again. The cards never had answers; they never told him anything. Their meanings were vague, he knew. He’d looked it up, asked questions, learned like he never had in school. All he’d figured was that it was useless, because each card could mean anything and everything. They could be positive as much as negative. They could be interpreted in any way one wished to.

It was why they were so good for conning people.

‘And here I am,’ Travis thought, bitterly amused. ‘Conning myself, I guess.’ The cards were laid before him all the same, however. All three of them, like always, waited for him to turn them, to reveal them and try to figure out their meaning, as if they even had one.

So he did.

The Tower. The Moon. Strength.

‘No The Hanged Man, no Death, no The Devil. Not even Judgement. Only The Tower,’ Travis thought with a self-deprecating half-smile. ‘Downright cheerful, I have to say.’ Still he had no answers, but as always, the cards didn’t fail to inspire emotions all the same. Strangely, Travis felt something other than despondency at the sight of them though.

Like they had few times in his life, the cards gave him hope.

[}-o-{]

Hope was dangerous though, Travis knew.

Hope made men ruin their lives and women fall apart. Hope made one do crazy things for a chance of things going well. Hope fueled gamblers as they lost everything. Hope encouraged criminals, making them think they never would get caught. Hope drove those that could settle but insisted on more.

And like everyone, Travis felt deceived by hope all the same.

He wasn’t supposed to be taking days off on good days. Not so soon, not barely a month and some change into his new life. Yet, he’d made sure Catherine and Jason wouldn’t drop by. He’d stuck a sign to the door and he’d left the bar closed as he walked out that Saturday.

All because he hoped.

No wonder Travis had been called Fool for most of his life.

‘And I’m just getting started,’ he thought self-deprecatingly as he walked through the streets of Gotham. In itself, a questionable decision, especially by himself, but he wasn’t too scared. There might be different people around, different buildings, different stores, different everything, but at its core, Gotham remained the same, he’d learned in the time since he’d been back.

The streets were dangerous, yes, but they were only truly dangerous if you didn’t know what you were doing. If you knew, if you walked through certain spots, at certain times, in certain ways, you’d probably be fine. About 75-25 chances, which was a lot more than some random person from out of Gotham would have, really. People ready to mug you for all of a few coins were everywhere, but those were also cowards, the lowest of the low. They wouldn’t jump just anyone.

They were like predators, looking for the sick, the old, the easy, the weak. Or maybe it was more accurate to call them scavengers, opportunists. They waited for someone they could take safely, someone that wouldn’t fight back and would roll over at the flash of a knife or the possibility of a gun. Those were the ones muggers looked for.

‘Same as always,’ Travis thought, walking past a guy that was definitely waiting for a victim. He kept his back straight, calmly side-eyeing him for a brief moment as he passed him by. He didn’t turn, but he paid more attention to what he was hearing, looking for steps, or the ruffling of clothes, or any other sign. No such thing happened, because he looked like too much trouble. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’

So, he walked, a bit aimlessly, but never straying into the streets that nobody in their right minds would approach, or God forbid the alleys. He kept his eyes on ahead, even as he scanned every corner he could see. He looked at the people, checking for familiar faces. He listened to their conversations in passing, an ear out for voices he might recognize. He walked past old hang out spots, parks, stores. Some looked the same as he remembered them, some looked absolutely nothing like they’d once been.

The only thing Travis found, as he walked and walked, was the feeling that he was out of place. Not something new, but something that definitely hit harder at that moment. He knew nobody in those streets. He didn’t recognize them anymore. He could have walked past an old friend and he wouldn’t have realized. Or maybe none of them were around anymore, which would have been even worse.

‘They can’t all be gone, right?’ he wondered to himself, stopping at a corner and pondering what to do, what he was doing. Did he really expect to just… stumble upon an old friend just like that? East End wasn’t what he’d call small and after years and years, they could be anywhere at all, if they even could be found. ‘What option do I have though?’ he thought.

There were options, yes, but most of them were terrible choices, for himself, for his purposes, or for both.

‘It’s what I get for disappearing off the face of the Earth, I guess,’ Travis mused idly, expression falling somewhere between disappointment and just plain sadness. Maybe he missed his old friends more than he realized. Even those that were terrible. ‘Things were easier back then,’ he thought, although he didn’t know if that was because he was dumber or because of… other reasons.

Eventually, he started walking again.

There were some spots he could still check. Hiding places, those where they’d run to when they got in trouble. There weren’t a lot of safe places in Gotham, if any at all, but they’d found some that gave them the feeling of being safe. That had been huge, back in the day. With all the messes going on with the mafias and the gangs, and general psychos… With more than one of them not wanting to go back home, himself included at times… They’d needed places to just… be, exist, without Gotham itself looming over them.

So, he checked them. Old abandoned buildings – three of them had been rebuilt, one of those had been abandoned again –, almost literal holes in the walls, between buildings and such, a church…

“Fool?” a voice called and he froze where he stood. That voice, it sounded familiar, and at the same time not. The nickname was enough though, enough for him to turn around. “It’s you, right?” the woman said, eyes wide. He didn’t look at her eyes though, not at first. The first thing he noticed was, instead, the coppery hair. Then he saw the blue eyes, and that was enough. Not a lot of redheads that knew his nickname and would recognize him at a glance, he was pretty sure.

“Matchstick?” he asked, not daring to let the smile get ahead of him… that is, until he saw her lose the battle before he did. A second later, there were arms wrapped around him, squeezing with all her strength… little as there was of it.

“I missed you, Travis,” she said then, her voice muffled against his chest and his clothes. Just like that, he found himself at a loss for words, because there was a lot to unpack in those four words alone. Like the fact that there was no anger in her voice, or how she’d called him Travis instead of Fool, or how the very first thing she said was that she missed him instead of… any number of other things, things that had haunted him since he’d first started considering reaching out to some of his old friends.

Eventually though, he found his voice again.

“I missed you too, Holly.”

 [} Chapter End {]

Hey guys! How’s it going?

Honestly, it’s interesting to just… introduce Travis and Gotham – my Gotham, I guess, since I doubt it’s very accurate or faithful to any rendition of the place – in chapters like this. I feel like I could do twenty of these and not run out of things to point out or say… but I won’t do that, don’t worry guys.

Maybe just ten.

With that said, I feel happy with this chapter, even though not a lot happened. I’m sure there’s probably about ten things wrong with it, like the fact that – again – not a lot happened, or maybe I did something wrong with the character or their interactions. However, personally, I’m happy with it. So, I’m gonna take the slight win and go with it, if you don’t mind.

Also, I hope you guys enjoyed the chapter.

Discord Link: discord .gg/UTDransjJZ

Random Question: Probably should have asked this earlier but… Are you a DC comics reader or do you just know the fandom through movies or series? Personally, I hadn’t read a single comic until I started this project. I’ve checked a few of them since, trying to fact-check the wiki about a few things or expand on what it says. I had considered it before, admittedly, but it’s very intimidating and confusing to get started when there’s like twenty different timelines and so on.

See you.