Quiet Times

[Barbara Nolan]

ooc: takes place before Gotham's Darkest Corners /ic:

The Gotham Public Library was located squarely in New Gotham, surrounded by brightly lit streets and tall buildings. Barbara Gordon, recently back in her home town after two years enrolled in Metropolis University, pushed a metal cart piled with books into the YA section for filing.

A group of school kids were huddled around the computers chatting, and she had to tell them to keep it down. They were still young enough that the words of a 21 year old librarian still held some sway over them, and soon the quiet murmurs of the library were restored to normal levels.

Facing a shelf of books Barbara located the first hole and carefully pushed a slender volume between two large hardcovers. Walking on to find the next location, she pulled a well folded piece of paper out of her pocket and carefully opened it.

Anna Taylor 555-1293

Barbara looked around and then put it back in her sweater's pocket, feeling a little thrill as she remembered reading the name and number off her uncle's desk just that morning. Upside down, no less. Anna Taylor's story would be a great one for her blog, and she couldn't wait for her break so she could call the woman and try to set up an interview.

Distracted, she nearly ran into a library patron with her cart, but avoided the collision at the last minute. "So sorry," she said a little breathlessly. "Um, can I help you find something?"

[Carter Hall]

Though the librarian might have been distracted, Carter Hall was equally responsible for their near miss: wandering around with one's head buried in a book was seldom a good way of avoiding accidents. It took him a moment to register that anything had transpired at all; with a level of effort that seemed to match his age-addled features, he dragged his eyes reluctantly away from the page, and steered them towards Barbara.

"Hmm?" he enquired with a slightly oblivious frown, as his brain struggled to catch up with what was going on around him. Cogs began to groan into position, as clockwork realisation finally began to form in his mind. "Oh." He flipped the book closed with a flourish, and an audible thunk. "Help. Yes."

He offered her a strange smile - not creepy strange, but more the smile of someone who wasn't used to smiling very often. It wasn't forced: simply stiff and atrophied. "My name is Carter Hall," he explained, a quick cursory once-over picking up on the name badge that identified this young lady as 'Barbara'. Holding the book close, he wrapped his arms around it to let them fold across his chest. "I'm a Professor from Gotham University and, well -"

Another smile appeared, this one a little more nervous, and involuntary. "- I'm doing a little off-curriculum research, and our campus library is pretty woefully stocked when it comes to materials that aren't course related."

[Barbara Nolan]

Barbara instantly pegged Carter Hall as the absent minded professor type, realizing that he'd probably label her as a typical single and nerdy librarian. She pushed her black framed glasses up on her nose, catching that the book he was reading was on medieval heraldry. "Well, Professor Hall, I'm sure I can help you locate whatever it is you need. I'm sort of known for being able to find anything in here," and she gestured to the cart of go backs next to her.

"Something else on coats of arms, or...?" She smiled pleasantly, but her mind was already wandering back to what she'd ask Ms. Taylor and how exactly she was going to put the woman at ease after all she'd been through.

[Carter Hall]

"No, actually."

Carter fixed her with an enigmatic look. The Professor himself was long-lived in his own right, but inside his mind lurked the memories of countless other lives as well. Sometimes they were as open to him as the book in his arms had just been, ready for him to dive in and out and extract whatever knowledge he needed. Other times they were locked tightly shut, the only evidence of their existance coming from the the bleed-through fingerprints that apparently coloured every life that followed.

For much of his life, Carter had simply accepted his mental blocks, and learned to live with them. He resigned to the fact that it would take him a significant part of his life to realise who he truly was each time. He surrendered to the idea that he was eternally bound in a Romeo and Juliet reincarnation cycle, bound to forever be reborn to fall in love, and then watch that love die.

Romeo and Juliet, he mused, making a mental note of the thought. Sounds like that could be us, too.

Normally, his death followed swiftly after that of his love; usually by reckless action rather than deliberate attempt. But in this life something had delayed that process: having raised Dinah, Carter was now far older than he had ever been before, and the advanced years were making him introspective. So, he had taken it upon himself to build a map: a timeline of his regenerations through history, so that come the next life he would need only the slightest flash of memory to lead him to a place where all his questions could be answered at once.

He realised that he had fallen silent for perhaps a moment too long; fighting the urge to appologise, he answered Barbara's query. "I'm looking for any reference materials you have on the old West: particulary on outlaws, vigilantes, and, well -" He trailed off, that slightly nervous smile back again. "- cowboys, I suppose."

[Barbara Nolan]

Barbara narrowed her eyes slightly as she thought, her mind finally fully devoted to the problem at hand. "History of the Old West..."

She leaned a bit on her book cart, and then started pushing it. "This way, I think there is something that could help you upstairs." The professor followed her as she left her cart at the wide staircase and started up it. "There is actually a wild west section in History, but its pretty small and easy to miss." Barbara threaded her way through shelves and past little clutches of tables and chairs, some holding people quietly reading or taking notes.

"Yep, here it is." She crouched down and gestured at a bottom shelf. "Unauthorized History of Cowboying," Barbara cocked her head to the side to read the spines more easily, "The American West, Wild Bill's Show and Rodeos..." She trailed her fingers along the top of the books, and then extricated a narrow book. "Here, Posses and Vigilantism in the Old West by G. Stanger. There might be something else here that will be helpful as well."

Barbara rocked back on her heels, "Like I said, its a small section and hard to find."

[Carter Hall]

For once, Carter had actually left the house without his battered old fedora. He'd had a rare session of actual lecturing that morning, so was dressed like a marginally respectable person, with a shirt and a tie and a jacket - one with leather elbow patches, no less. Even so, he still reached up involuntarily to tilt it back on his head, to clear space for his eyebrows to make an impressed climb upwards.

Trying to disguise the accidental movement, he scrubbed his hand over his shaven jaw. Momentarily he mused over the irony that books about outlaws were so illusive, and considered making a joke towards that end; ultimately he thought better of it, having been informed numerous times by Dinah that his attempts at humour seldom went well.

"Thank you," he said with a gracious smile, taking the book that she offered. Part of him doubted that he'd find anything of benefit to his research in such a readily available publication; but then the objective of the exercise was to jog his memory, rather than to relearn facts that were already buried somewhere in his mind. If nothing else, there was a chance it would point him in the right direction; a first step.

He pushed his thoughts of cognative reconciliation aside for a moment, and focussed on the young lady who had so willingly rendered assistance. "Do you just happen to have the entire library catalogue memorised, or is there a little divination and soothsaying at work here?"

[Barbara Nolan]

Her eyes sparkled as she got up to her feet. "Well, I don't usually share my secrets, but I made a deal with the devil. Now I can find whatever I want, whenever I want." Barbara winked, and added, "I just do a lot of filing, and my memory is pretty good. I knew where the western history section was, and got pretty lucky."

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, "Some people say they'd rather be lucky than good!"

[Carter Hall]

"Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold," Carter mused, the old proverb tumbling unbidden from a back corner of his mind.

A frown formed on the professor's brow, hesitance preventing him from expressing a thought that lingered on the tip of his tongue. The task he had set himself was not insurmountable - he hoped - but it would be long, and complex, and the obstacle of finding the materials he needed would only worsen that. Loathed as he was to ask for help, logic insisted that Barbara's aid could prove invaluable.

But how did he ask? He couldn't simply explain that he was a reincarnated Egyptian pharoah, trying to find out about his past lives: talk like that was wound to land him firmly in a padded cell at Arkham. He could no doubt concieve a convincing lie; but to enlist her aid with such a falsehood felt wrong, somehow.

"I am... studying masked vigilantes throughout history," he explained; a half-truth. "While Gotham certainly seems to have a monopoly on the type of late, Batman is far from the first man in history to hide his identity in order to fight crime." He offered a small smile. "I found a few references to an individual that went by the alias 'Nighthawk', but have no idea of where I can source more information. Perhaps a little of your luck can help me?"

[Barbara Nolan]

"Well," Barbara said, "For something that specific I'll have to forgo luck and see if searching the database with one of our reference computers will help." She gestured for the older man to follow her and led the way out of the shelves and to one of the cleared areas that had been populated with dark wooden desks and comfortable chairs. By a structural support pillar there was a small podium set up with keyboard and outdated monitor, with plenty of scraps of paper and tiny pencils nearby.

Barbara flitted through the menus and entered NIGHTHAWK in the prompt. Usually something so broad would bring up too many options, or maybe nothing at all. They could refine their search terms whichever the result was.

She pressed ENTER, and stepped a little to the side so Professor Carter could get a good look once the ancient system finished crunching the numbers and came up with some ideas. "So, what do you know about this Nighthawk character? I only ask," she added, "because we may have to search for more information in a sideways manner. Entering something of a description and seeing if we can get to the right answer."

[Carter Hall]

Carter stared intently as the computer screen worked away at whatever kind of technological magic Barbara had commanded it to perform. He cocked his head to the side slightly, wondering if there was a channel on Dinah's tele-gizmo that would let him do something similar back home. Or perhaps he'd have to borrow her toplab, and climb on the infraweb?

Her question caught him entirely off guard, mainly because he was paying absolutely no attention to anything but the whizzing images on the screen in front of him. It took a moment for his brain to shift back into an appropriate gear, and furnish him with an answer. "I believe his real name was Hannibal... Hawkes? A mechanic of some description; though he went to great lengths to keep his vigilante and secret identities distinct." He smiled at the thought of that. "It isn't just the Batman who doesn't want the world knowing if he has a mild mannered alter ego."

Scrubbing a hand at his jaw again, Carter tilted his head to the right and wondered how orientating the computer contraption sideways would possibly help. But then, there were those lillipads and myphones that the youngsters had nowadays that did all kinds of silly things when you turned them certain ways, so anything was presumably possible.

[Barbara Nolan]

"Well if this doesn't work we can..." She paused as the screen popped up with NO RESULTS. "We'll try Hannibal... Hawkes..." Barbara typed as she spoke, and pressed enter again.

"You might want to try looking on an ancestry website, like Ancestry.com. Usually there's a small fee for the use of their records, but its amazing what you can turn up these days. If there's a record of this Hannibal Hawke in a census, or of his family, then you'll probably be able to find it through them." Barbara shrugged a bit, trying to be helpful, but it was slightly obvious that Professor Hall wasn't very comfortable with computers.

[Carter Hall]

Carter always got confused when it came to dotcoms and capcoms and telecoms and all those strange and frustratingly similar technical terms. It all sounded like rhetorical nonsense and hokum to him, but apparently it made sense to the techno wizards and the hacksters, and fair play to them. Barbara was no doubt right that he could theoretically find what he wanted out there in cyberspace; but it was the practical aspect of him finding it that generated most problems.

Of course, he could ask Dinah for help; together with her reporters' instincts, they'd have compiled what they needed in no time. She took after her father in that respect - it wouldn't surprise him if he walked into her room to find her wall peppered with articles and photographs, all connected together with lines and string like something right out of a television drama. But he couldn't bring himself to do it: he couldn't burden her with the truth, nor could he face the prospect of decieving her.

"I'll try that," he assured; and he ment it. Alas, success was far from assured. He paused for a beat, offering a hint of a smile. "Again, thank you."

[Barbara Nolan]

"You're welcome," Barbara said, and then the screen blipped up with its search results. "Here we go, something to look at now."

She showed him the mouse and how to scroll down, and then stepped aside to let him look through what had come up. The first result was a children's book about a hawk named Hannibal being released back into the wild, which was greeted with a snort by the professor. Underneath that were some old news articles in the microfiche about the trial of a woman named Matilda Roderick. There were several articles from different old newspapers, spread out over a four month period.

Apparently Hannibal Hawkes had been killed by this Matilda person. Barbara leaned forward despite herself, still careful not to crowd Professor Hall as he continued through the results.

There was a black and white picture, also from the microfilm archives, captioned THE ROUGH BUNCH - notorious vigilante JONAH HEX, photographed with suspected accomplices BARTHOLEMEW LASH, LAZARUS LANE, HANNIBAL HAWKES, KATHERINE MANSER, and JIM PAYTON.

"Anything helpful?" she asked him hopefully.

[Carter Hall]

Matilda. The name struck a chord in his mind; nothing specific, but there was definately some fragment of memory in there. He briefly pondered how the name had always unsettled him - how he'd never been able to bring himself to root for Roald Dahl's protagonist; how The Piper at the Gates of Dawn had always been his least favourite Pink Floyd album. He fought back a shudder at the very thought, and was glad when her name disappeared off the top of the screen as he scrolled.

He came to a halt at the photograph. You could tell by the quality that it was old - created with technology that had been developed a century and a half before, and then replicated time and time again. It had become grainy, and faded into more of a yellow than a white; still, there was no mistaking the faces that appeared before him. "That's him," he said instantly. It was like finding yourself in a photograph from childhood - you could almost, but not quite recognise your old face, having transformed so much in the years since. Except unlike a photo from childhood, Carter had traversed more than puberty to become the man he was now.

He continued to stare, not needing to read the caption to discern who was who. Kate was unmistakable: whether a side effect of the reincarnation spell or of simple love, he couldn't forget the face of his Juliet. He didn't need to ask Barbara how she'd been killed - he could feel in his bones that her fate had been the same as his. There was Jim, too: poor, misguided Jim, who'd have followed him to the ends of the earth and back if he asked. And then, sporting the same hideously scarred scowl that he always carried, was Jonah Hex.

He frowned, momentarily. "Can you -" He searched his memory for a phrase that Dinah often used. "- 'cross-reference' the names from that caption against books in the library? I may be able to find some information about this Hannibal Hawkes via the other members of the Rough Bunch."

[Barbara Nolan]

"Sure," she nodded agreeably, taking over the station and copy/pasting the names from the caption into a new AND/OR search, including the gang's name along with the members. "I think I've read about Jonah Hex before - something in a novel. Historical novel," Barbara added, "So fiction of course."

With so many threads to search through the computer seemed to freeze up for a long minute, and then the results began popping up. She filtered them by most relevant, and stepped aside again so the professor could look at them.

[Carter Hall]

It was more than Carter could have hoped for. Admittedly, it wasn't much; but he'd arrived with such low expectations that they were easily bested. His eyes skimmed across the illuminated display, skimming brief passages of text that supposedly summed up the contents of the various books and tomes it recommended.

A few were clearly fiction as Barbara had alluded; one even seemed to be related to a strange cartoon of Japanese origin, where two of the villains were named Lazarus and Lane. He fought the urge to smile, wondering how El Diablo would feel about his identity being userped in such a way.

He committed the others to memory, a shred of disappointment sparking in his chest that so many of them weren't currently stocked at Gotham's library. But at least it gave him a starting point - he'd be able to hunt them out from other sources, no doubt. What had seemed like an impossible task at first had suddenly become an attainable goal; all thanks to one young lady.

He turned towards Barbara, and flashed her a sincere smile. "Your assistance has been invaluable," he admitted truthfully. "Thank you, Miss -"

He hesitated, a slight hint of a frown forming on his face. "I'm sorry; I'm afraid I didn't catch all of your name."

[Barbara Nolan]

"Gordon," she supplied, "Barbara Gordon. I'm glad I could help."

She was already thinking about the cart of books that needed re-shelving, but waited in case the professor needed something else.