You'll trigger a landslide - ithoughtslashmeanthorror (2024)

Chapter 1: Easy

Chapter Text

January 7

The gang known as the Moth Men have struck again. This time, Joan Porter, wealthy Gotham socialite. In her sixties, single, female, many cats. The only thing that matches the rest of the Moth Men’s targets is her tax bracket. Rather than taking hostages, the Moth Men kidnap those in control of the bank accounts take them to an unknown location where they are held for an entire day in a room, described as a basem*nt, by themselves. They are then given an option by The Moth-Man – identity unknown: their life or an offshore payment, somewhere in the Cayman Islands.

Two have died so far [Lois Dupree, Charles Winston] with their bodies appearing in Burnside Bay. The others are rendered unconscious and returned to their homes within 36 hours. At this moment, Robin…

“Barbie!” Jim Gordon’s voice echoed down the apartment hallway.

Eleven-year-old Barbara shot up from her computer desk and twisted around to face the front door. It sounded like Jim was at the front door. She could hear keys turning and then clattering into the communal key bowl. What is he doing at home? Barbara swung wildly and looked around her room. It was an absolute mess and covered in a lot of things she was not supposed to have. Not to mention the living room, she thought, panicking even more.

Barbara darted across her room, picking up all the things she’d stolen from the GCPD evidence locker that had once belonged to Batman.

Stealing them had been a lot easier than it should have been if Barbara were being honest. It was no wonder crime ran rampant in Gotham if Barbara got in after watching a YouTube instructional on lock picking. She wanted to tell her father, but at the same time, it was nice to have that sort of accessibility.

“Barb, you home?”

No time to think of that. She had taken all her illegal objects and strewn them across her room. In her defence, Barbara had been at home by herself for a week. Her brother was at a school camp, and her dad was caught up in the Moth Men case and had been sleeping at the precinct because of the weird hours. Barbara had lost track of time.

She grabbed a milk crate that she had lying around and threw in her collection of batarangs, pepper spray, some of Robin’s shurikens, a costume and a grappling hook. “I’m just… in my room!” Barbara called out.

She leapt over her bed and slammed the box in the back of the cupboard, then desperately pulled at the rolling cupboard door to squash it all in. The wheel popped off its rails, the door warped with the weight of the things she’d thrown in there. Barbara put her back against it and popped it back in. The mirror warped where the box pressed against the door and bulged.

The handle to her door started to turn when Barbara spotted her computer.

The acid green text was still typing, and on her desk was the Batarang that Batman had given her with various wires sticking out of it. She pushed off her cupboard and took another running leap over her bed, crashing into her desk chair and pressed ‘escape’, switching out of the screen and blocking the immediate view of the batarang with her tissue box.

She spun back around in her desk chair and kicked her feet up onto the corner of the bed just as Jim Gordon stepped inside her room, looking around the place. His bristled moustache twitched. He’d heard her moving around, trying to hide things. Barbara schooled her features, years of lying to her detective father teaching her a thing or two. “Hey, Daddy,” she said.

His red greying hair was flopping against his head. As he shifted from foot to foot, trying to find what was wrong in the room, his trench coat shifted around his hip, so Barbara caught a glimpse of his badge and gun. “Hey,” Jim said, eyes still darting. His brow furrowed in suspicion. She knew he’d had enough time to inspect the living room – Barbara distinctly remembered leaving pizza boxes and all her books and comics around the place. She’d also left the king-sized duvet she’d stolen from her dad’s bed, plus all the pillows, to make a blanket fort in front of the television. On his face, she could see he was calculating something. “How are you?”

“I’m good, Dad. What about you? Did you catch the kidnapper yet?” Barbara said, keeping her face neutral.

He looked over her shoulder at the computer, then back to Barbara, wary. “No,” he said, still trying to decide what it was Barbara was hiding from him. His eyes darted over to her wardrobe, and she held her breath as they both stared at the warp. “Not yet.”

Barbara got up, her body all limbs and gangly movements, deciding a distraction was in order. She’d had a growth spurt recently and hadn’t gotten used to the longer dimensions of her body. She climbed over the bed for the third time and launched herself across to her dad. Jim caught her with ease, hugging her tight, but she could feel his gaze on her computer. “I’ve missed you!” she said.

“Hmm,” Jim replied, kissing her cheek. He hugged her for a minute then his shoulders dropped. “I see you’ve sprawled yourself out like butter again.” There was no annoyance in his voice. Jim didn’t mind when Barbara took over the living room. He wasn’t around enough to discipline her about it. He put her down and was still eyeing the room, eyes trying to spot the difference. “What have you been up to?”

Barbara scanned the room slowly, trying to find an excuse, then spotted a party invite on her bedside. She grabbed it and passed it to her dad. “Just trying on clothes to see what I can wear to Esther’s Bat Mitzvah. I’ve never been to a Mitzvah before, you know? It’s a first.”

Jim plucked the invite from her hands and looked at it but mostly eyed her computer. “And if I turn that screen on, that’s what I’m going to find? Bat Mitzvah dresses?”

Barbara’s blood ran cold, but once again, she knew how to lie to her dad, and she rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Daddy. Want to look?” Please don’t look, please don’t look.

Jim made another sceptical face. “You know, getting that phone call that you hacked the Gotham City National Bank last month wasn’t my favourite day, Barb.”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Well, they shouldn’t have made it so easy.”

“Barbara…”

“I’m not hacking a federal bank, Dad. And I only did that once because I couldn’t remember your password to pay the electrical bill.” She didn’t add that she had tried calling him half a dozen times that day, and it seemed a lot easier to hack the bank’s system than get in contact with him. They’d already had that argument when it happened, and it hadn’t gone well. “I’m just… doing girly things.”

It was sad how easy her dad became flustered when Barbara said, ‘girly things.’ He smiled painfully, his face caught somewhere between constipated and a stroke, and nodded his head. “I mean… yeah, sure. I guess. I mean, I know if you have any questions, we can… I don’t… I can ask cousin Holly…”

“I’m fine. I just didn’t know you were coming.” Her disappointed shoulder slump wasn’t all an act. Barbara did miss Jim when he spent long periods away from home. She understood, but... “You’ve been gone all week.”

Jim sighed. “I know. I’m sorry, Pumpkin. I lost track of time.”

Jim was on the back foot. Barbara wondered if it was weird that she knew how well to manipulate her dad for information was, but curiosity was burning at her. “Is it the Moth Men case?”

He made an uncomfortable sound. “Yeah. But don’t go telling people.”

“Joan Porter was kidnapped last night.”

Jim raised his eyebrow. “Did the news already release that?”

“Um… no. I’m on some sleuthing website and-”

“You know I don’t want you on those kinds of websites–”

“But I was just looking it up because….”

“Doesn’t matter what the reason is, Barbara. You’re too young–”

“James is coming home from camp tomorrow,” she said.

“Don’t change the topic. You can’t…”

“I was trying to find out whether or not I should ask Simon Pilfrey’s mom to drop James off!” she said, making her voice louder than Jim’s. He fell quiet. Barbara couldn’t see the shame on his face, but she did feel his mood shift. The room felt… Sadder.

“No. I’ll pick him up,” he said. “I’ll make the time.”

Barbara thought about how he’d said that about the grocery shopping too, but for the third week in a row, she’d had to take his card and go and make sure there was food in the pantry. She didn’t say that out loud, though. Barbara didn’t want to upset him.

He reached out and cupped Barbara’s cheek, softly smiling as he rubbed her soft, plump skin with the rough pad of his thumb. He leant down and kissed her forehead.

Warmth flooded Barbara and, before she could think, she launched forward and threw her arms around her dad’s waist, beneath his coat. He brought his hands beneath her arms and lifted her, letting her head fall on his shoulder. She wasn’t sure who was squeezing who tighter, but it hurt a little on her ribs in a way that spread warmth through her chest. “Oh, I missed you so much, Pumpkin.”

“I missed you too, Daddy,” she murmured, feeling a little childish. But she also felt warm and fuzzy. Barbara had missed her dad. Even though she went to school every day, she’d been home alone for a week and had been feeling the loneliness creep in.

She understood, of course. Jim Gordon was essential in Gotham. He was one of the few Sergeants in Gotham PD that wasn’t corrupt. He’d spent most of his detective career cleaning up police houses and worked tirelessly to keep the city safe.

But sometimes, Barbara felt like being a little selfish. Sometimes, it would be nice if she could keep her dad all to herself. She kissed Jim’s cheek and tried to quash her disappointment when he put her back down on the floor. “Can you come out and clean up the living room a bit? I have a pizza on the way for dinner for us. We can have a meal, and you can tell me about your week.”

“Okay. Do you want a coffee?” she asked.

He nodded. “That’d be nice, Barbie. I’m going to have a shower.” He squeezed her cheek one last time, then headed back to his room and most likely straight into the bathroom.

Barbara looked over her shoulder at her computer anxiously, then at her cupboard. She’d had plans that night. Important plans. Plans to finally use the things she’d been collecting for almost a month and use them.

But Dad’s home, she thought, and the endorphins from her hug with her dad flushed her system, so all she could think about was how much she was going to have fun chatting with him at dinner.

She went into her living room and looked around, realising how far she’d let it go. The apartment could do with a vacuum and dust, but Barbara figured she’d do it all later and started to work on the bigger stuff. She packed up the blanket fort, stacked her empty pizza boxes and drink bottles on top of the bin, and filled the dishwasher with more dishes from the week before deciding it was full enough to start the cycle. It was her job to keep the place clean, and she thought she handled it well enough, but sometimes, Barbara knew she got lazy. Her dad was out at all times of day and night, so it wasn’t like there was anyone around to complain if there was a dust bunny in the corner.

She had just turned on the coffee machine when the door buzzer rang, and Barbara collected the pizza from the delivery man. She took out two plates and set them down on the dining table, just as Jim walked out of his bedroom in a different shirt and pants and his usual trench coat thrown over his arm. Barbara saw how exhausted Jim looked. There were bags under his eyes, and his shoulders slumped as he walked over to the kitchen island and grabbed a hand full of napkins. He opened the pizza box to stack his paper covered hand in slices. “Hey Pumpkin, I gotta –”

“You’ve got to go?” she interrupted, unable to hide her disappointment. “But… you said…”

“I know, I’m sorry, but Joan Porter’s has been deposited back in her apartment,” he said, leaning down and pecking her on the forehead. “I promise, I’ll try and be home for breakfast.”

It was always like that. Jim was always leaving to go out and solve Gotham’s numerous crimes, and always promising to be back at some point. Those promises didn’t mean much. It’s too much for the GCPD to handle… It’s too much for Batman to handle, Barbara thought.

And as quick as he appeared, Jim Gordon was gone again.

Barbara ran her finger over the flat of her batarang – the one Batman had given to her in case of emergency – staring at the outfit she’d put together on her bed.

Biting her lip, she considered it and reconsidered it again and again. She rubbed the material between her fingers of her opaque black tights that would be worn beneath two yellow knee pads she got for her ninth birthday that still fit her knobbly eleven-year-old knees. They didn’t quite match her elbow pads, bought a year later when her original set had cracked. The yellow cape was fabric reused from her Princess Belle Halloween costume, and she’d taken a great deal of care to rip off the skirt and hand stitch a collar around it, so it covered her neck and ears. She had a few batarang’s she’d stolen a grappling hook and some yellow spray paint too. She used the paint to spray a bat symbol on a black t-shirt in a yellow tone that vaguely matched her old tennis skirt but looked nothing like her cape.

Did she miss something?

If she wanted to be safe – and she had to be safe – was there something else she needed?

She went into her cupboard and looked for a pair of shoes and figured her old yellow hiking boots would give her enough grip to scale the walls if she needed it.

Perfect, she thought, then went back over to her computer.

She plugged the batarang back in then, using the port she’d discovered while playing with it one day, and used the GPS signal to piggyback back into the Batcomputer – as she liked to call it.

Batman had been writing up his notes earlier in the evening when she’d been online, and she very silently had been watching him type. But now, no one was online. Hacking into The Batman’s network hadn’t been easy. It took her at least a week to figure out how to get in undetected, and it was only because she had the batarang that she could slip in and out, disguising her signal as The Batman’s very own technology. The only drawback was if anyone else was using the computer – Batman, Robin or the mystery A who sometimes spoke over the frequencies – she couldn’t use anything, or she’d be caught. It was only when no one else was on that she could deep dive. All she had ever done in the two years she’d been on the network was read case files on the various criminals of Gotham and sometimes tried to solve the case herself. Twice she’d added information to the files when she’d figured out a connection before Batman or Robin did. Barbara wasn’t even sure they had ever noticed.

January 7

The gang known as the Moth Men have struck again. This time, Joan Porter, wealthy Gotham socialite. In her sixties, single, female, many cats. The only thing that matches the rest of the Moth Men’s targets is her tax bracket. Rather than taking hostages, the Moth Men kidnap those in control of the bank accounts take them to an unknown location where they are held for an entire day in a room, described as a basem*nt, by themselves. They are then given an option by The Moth-Man – identity unknown: their life or an offshore payment, somewhere in the Cayman Islands.

Two have died so far [Lois Dupree, Charles Winston] with their bodies appearing in Burnside Bay. The others are rendered unconscious and returned to their homes within 36 hours. At this moment, Robin and Black Canary are placing cameras and trackers around the city to catch the subsequent kidnapping in progress. They are setting them up around the apartments of all suspected targets, major intersections and highways.

I don’t have time to read the rest of this. Dad already made me late, Barbara thought, flicking through to Batman’s map of Gotham. She could see a blinkered light, showing the Batmobile heading towards Robbinsville Park, and she knew that four of the potential next targets all had houses around there.

Well, that’s where I’m going. She shut down her computer, unplugged her batarang, and went to the window. The Batsignal was already up. I need to go now if I’m going to head out at all.

While putting on her makeup and gear – which took a lot longer than she realised – Barbara reminded herself again and again how to swing across the buildings. She had watched GCPD tapes of Batman and Robin, memorising how they used the grappling to swing in between buildings. Aim. Shoot. Pull the cable tight. Jump. Aim. Shoot. Pull the cable tight. Jump. It was her new mantra, clear and easy instructions.

She filled her eyes with black eyeshadow and pulled on a dollar-store plastic mask underneath her ponytail so her eyes could look blacked out. The last thing Barbara put on was her utility belt, which was made from a bunch fanny packs she’d stitched together. The pockets of said belt were filled with all the gadgets and equipment she thought she might need, both her own and stolen from the GCPD evidence locker.

She looked good. She felt good. Yeah, her gear might not have been as high quality as The Bat, but she made it herself, and she beamed in the mirror, fixing her mask one last time before she left.

She’d never felt so on edge about leaving her apartment before. First, she opened the door and peered out, her little masked face looking around the doorway, and when she knew the coast was clear, she locked up and darted across the hallway to the elevator.

The grappling was heavy on her hip, and she bounced from foot to foot, staring at the doors. Aim. Shoot. Pull the cable tight. Jump. Aim. Shoot. Pull the cable tight. Jump.

It wasn’t the jump that was worrying her.

Barbara wasn’t afraid of heights. She liked them. Ever since she’d been out with Batman, and he’d swung across the rooftops, she’d been obsessed. She went out onto the rooftop of her apartment most nights and just sat on the edge, wishing she could fly out there again. For Dick Grayson’s tenth birthday, they’d gone to a trapeze place, and Dick had taught her how to use her core to swing. It was simple. Easy.

The elevator doors opened, and Barbara froze at the sight of the elderly Mr and Mrs Yankovic from apartment 32, in their coats with their groceries. They sometimes looked after James for her when she had after-school activities. She stared at them, and they stared at her for what felt like forever. The doors started to close when Mr Yankovic lifted his cane and blocked the doors to stop them. “Are you coming in, Barbara?” he asked.

Barbara blushed a bright red and nodded, stepping inside awkwardly and punched the button to level 20, one before the roof and one after Mr and Mrs Yankovic. She bent her head forward, so her hair covered her burning features, and her stomach danced with nervous butterflies. As Mr and Mrs Yankovic got off on the ninth floor, Mrs Yankovic patted Barbara’s arm. “It’s a very nice costume, dear.”

Her features pinched. “It’s a suit,” she muttered after the doors closed. She noted that maybe she should cover her hair or something to make the disguise better and hit the rooftop exit again.

“Aim. Shoot. Pull the cable tight. Jump,” she whispered when she exited the elevator. “Easy.” The elevator was just a shortcut to the top floor, where she had to take the fire escape’s stairwell to the roof. Her footsteps echoed down the cement tunnel to the ground, and it briefly occurred to her how high up she was. It’s not hard, she added in her head, not wanting to seem crazy if anyone caught her talking to herself. Easy.

On the edge of the roof, Barbara adjusted the grappling’s strap around her wrist, tightening it as much as she could. She wasn’t afraid of the height, but she was precarious of it. That’s why she had studied the tapes so much.

I will be a hero, she thought, walking to the edge of the building. I can do this.

Scanning the city block, Barbara picked a gargoyle across the other side of the building and aimed her grappling gun. She fired, and the grapple shot across the street and missed the gargoyle altogether. It fell to the road beneath her, the rope still unwinding until it crashed into something. She surveyed for damage, but there were no cars that needed to swerve out of the way, but the hook did land on and broke the front window of a parked taxi, causing a few people to look up at her.

Oh crap, she thought, jumping away from the edge so no one could see her. She reminded herself to leave a sorry note on her way back.

She retracted the grapple. The cable zipped back into the gun quickly, the vibration coursing through her arm, and when the hoked snapped back into place, the anchor hit her fingers by accident, and she dropped the gun. “Damn it!” she cursed as the heavy weight of it swung from her wrist where it was still attached by the strap. “Stupid grapple…”

Okay, let’s try this again. Barbara aimed the grappling once again at the same gargoyle, just like she’d seen Robin do countless times. If Robin can do this, so can I. He’s not much bigger than me. It can’t be that hard.

Aim… shoot! This time, when the cable zipped across, it hooked around the gargoyle, spinning around it and grabbing on. Pull the cable tight. She pulled and felt it jam, grinning to herself as she walked out and stepped onto the edge.

The street, with all of its hustle and bustle, loomed beneath her. Barbara stared down but didn’t get a sense of dizzying vertigo. Instead, she felt calm. Deadly calm. She’d been swinging across rooftops before, with Batman of all people, when he’d taken a seven-year-old Barbara home. I can do this, she thought.Easy.

And yes, maybe she thought if she kept telling herself it was easy, it would get easier, but so far she’d had no trouble. So far, it working.

Her toes hung over the edge, and she took in a deep breath, checking once more that the cable was secure. Jump.

Barbara stepped off the edge.

She screamed, the immediate plummet sent her stomach up to her throat, and she lost her breath. Barbara didn’t swing at first. She dropped, and she looked up at the rope, panicking, but the rope then tightened, and Barbara swooped across the street, heading straight to the glass building across the road.

She was looking directly into her reflection in the fast-approaching office block when she realised she didn’t know how to stop and barely got to suck in a breath before her whole body hit the building. Pain exploded inside her so quickly she didn’t have time to register it entirely before it overwhelmed her. At the same time, the force made her lose grip on the grappling, and the strap tightened around her wrist, her whole-body weight focused around the joint.

The snap in her tiny wrist made Barbara scream childishly. Below her, she could hear shouts and gasps of panic, and she looked down to see them, then let out a second louder scream when she looked down and saw her feet dangling eighteen storeys off the ground. Barbara had no idea why she hadn’t been afraid of heights. They were horrifying and nauseating, and she was caught between crying, throwing up, and screaming some more.

No, no, no, no… Barbara looked down again and decided to scream louder because she was too overwhelmed to figure out how to cry, and vomiting did not seem like a good idea.

To make matters worse, tiny stones started to hit her head. She looked up, and the gargoyle that was holding the rope began to crumble under her weight, and her gloved hand was starting to slip through the wrist strap, the glove adding some give to it.

I’m going to die, she thought. I’m going to…

The rope gave, and she dropped down a storey, rope bouncing her and causing her arm to split unnaturally, and Barbara screamed louder, her voice drowned out by the city below. The hook had caught onto another part of the gargoyle, but the gargoyle was still threatening to fall. Not that either of those things mattered. Barbara was convinced her arm would detach from her body before the gargoyle gave way.

“Hang on!”

Barbara had been dangling wildly in a circle but saw a small colourful boy momentarily swinging through the buildings.

It was Robin, the Boy Wonder, and as she spun on the end of the cable, she caught glimpses of him grappling gracefully through the streets, spinning mid-air like an acrobat. He dislodged his grappling from one building to the next with a flick of his wrist and fluidly aimed and shot his grappling to the next building to catch him before he fell. When he got close by, he shot his hook took hold of the building’s roof above Barbara’s head. It secured in place, and Robin flipped mid-air before landing next to her, using the extra momentum to control his swing and plant his feet on either side of the window, evenly distributing the impact and ensuring the glass didn’t break. Only a tiny part of her brain was registering his tactics, the rest of it consumed with pain. But later, when she thought about it, she blushed in embarrassment because she had thought herself an expert. “I’ve got you, Miss!” Robin said, wrapping his arm around her waist.

He was small and lithe but strong, and Barbara could feel his hardened muscles as he grabbed her and carried her up, so she was no longer dangling. The lift took the pressure off her wrist, and her arm fell useless to her side. Barbara put her good arm around Robin’s neck, and he used his legs against the building wall to support her body, creating a seat for her on his lap. She gingerly managed to move her right arm with her shoulder onto her lap, pain flooding the broken limb, and she gasped and whimpered when the pain flared.

Robin looked at her and chuckled. “What are you wearing?” he asked.

Before Barbara could answer, he hoisted her in his arms and zipped up to the rooftop. Barbara had to climb over Robin to get up on the roof before he climbed up too, but by the time he was standing, she staggered, and her whole bruised body collapsed under her shaky legs. Tears welled up in her eyes without her express permission, and she shook all over, her dinner coming up her throat. “Hey, hey, hey,” Robin knelt in front of her. She leant over, and Robin barely had time to move before she threw up just next to herself. He moved behind her to pull back her hair and then drag her away from the mess, rubbing her back. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay. Here, take this.” Robin took off his cape to wrap around her. It was made from a leathery material, and the inside was lined with something softer and warmer. It wasn’t fleece or anything like that, but it was gentle on her skin like his hands were as he handled her. Barbara clutched it with her good hand to get it better wrapped around her frame. “Wait...”

Robin moved his hand to her face and pushed off her mask, and Barbara tipped her head aside, more tears streaming down her cheeks. She felt so embarrassed as her body went into shock. “Barbara Gordon? What were you doing?”

Barbara shook her head, rubbing her face and feeling very stupid. “Everything hurts,” she moaned. It did. The whole side of her body had crashed into the building. There was nothing but pain running up and down her left flank, and her right wrist was the one that was broken. Robin opened his mouth to say something but stopped, tipping his head to the side. He frowned and looked Barbara up and down.

“I will be there as soon as I can. I’ve come across... an accident. I think I need to come to the cave. Maybe... We’ll see. No, I’m handling it. Over.” He lifted his head up again, no longer talking to ghosts. “Can you stand up?”

Barbara tried but collapsed quickly in a mess of limbs. Robin tried smiling at her and reached out. “I’m going to carry you,” he said. Barbara nodded and lifted her good arm like a child, and Robin hooked it around his shoulder and lifted her with hands under her knees and behind her back. Barbara let her head fall on his shoulder and fell into blackness.

Chapter 2: Breakfast for Lunch

Chapter Text

Barbara gasped herself awake and jolted from the vivid nightmares of her legs dangling off the edge of a cliff and her arm being pulled from its socket.

I’m okay. It was a dream. I was asleep. She soothed herself and opened her eyes, unfamiliar with her surroundings.

Barbara wasn’t in bed or warm beneath her covers. She was… moving. Fast. All she could see was the pink-purple hues of sunrise, and for one sickening moment, she thought she was still dreaming as the familiar swoop of her gut warned her that she was mid-air.

She gasped again, vision blurring, and felt something around her tighten.

Arms.

There were arms around her.

Barbara struggled.

“Stop moving,” came a low gravelly voice in her ears.

She began to scream before she opened her eyes but cut off the shout when the familiar black cowl and white polyurethane eyes glared at her.

“Batman?” she gasped.

“We’re almost there.”

There was a bruise colouring the Batman’s jaw and a crack in his helmet, but he didn’t look any less intimidating. He looked more frightening because of it. They flew through the sky, and Batman held her tight against his armour, protecting her from the harsher elements.

It felt like a dream – more than it had when she was little. Only, she could feel how angry he was. It radiated and pulsed from him in thick incensed waves. Even that wasn’t as bad, though, as the guilt and vertigo twisting inside of her. The combination of the two – his anger and her internal whirling – was overwhelming, and she fell silent for the rest of the trip in fear she might throw up again.

The swoop-feeling disappeared from under her with a thump, and Batman came to a standstill. “I’m going to put you down now.”

She was put down slowly on her wobbly legs, and she held the vomit that threatened to come up down in her gut. Batman didn’t let go of her entirely at first, making sure she could stand before he stepped back. Even then, his left hand hovered, ready to catch her, while his right carried a bright yellow backpack. The last time Barbara had seen Batman up close, Barbara had been seven. Since then, she had thought she’d grown, but standing under the Dark Knight’s looming presence made her feel tiny again. “Hi,” she croaked out, feeling woozy.

Batman said nothing. His glare was intense. It hadn’t seemed so intense when she was little. Back then, she’d thought he seemed kind. Curious even. It was only then that Barbara realised she had extra weight on her wrist. She looked down and saw a cast on her hand, going up around her elbow and stopping in the middle of her upper arm. It was wrapped in yellow waterproof tape, and on the corner of her wrist was a stylised ‘R’ with a small note to ‘get well soon.’ “What…?”

“Torn, dislocated, fractured and broken,” Batman said, and he held out the backpack. “A full medical assessment, x-rays and some medication can be found in here, as well as your… outfit.”

Barbara took the backpack with her good hand, blushing sheepishly. She was wearing a brand-new pair of grey sweats, a hooded jacket and an oversized jumper that smelt like a familiar brand of laundry detergent. The night before was coming back too slowly. In the light of day, with Batman in front of her, it suddenly all seemed ridiculous. Had she really worn a pair of tights and jumped off a building? It all felt like someone else’s mistakes. “Thanks,” she said idly, her voice small as she shrivelled under the Bat’s gaze. She couldn’t handle his scrutiny and found herself staring at the backpack instead.

“I confiscated your other… materials.” Batman’s mask was static – a helmet made to protect his upper face and immovable. But even so, she could feel him frowning at her. “What you did last night was far beyond reckless. You would have died if Robin hadn’t happened to be patrolling. He could have been on any other street. It was only by coincidence that he was there to save you.”

The blush on Barbara’s face became brighter and brighter until it felt her face was searing under his judging gaze. “I…” she began, but really, what could she say? There was nothing to say. He was right. It was dangerous, and it was reckless. She tried jumping off a roof with no prior training.

“If you had died, what would your father have done? Could you really handle putting him and your brother through that grief? Haven’t they already lost enough? Not to mention, you would have died with my symbol on your chest. Do you know how that could’ve broken Gotham? What kind of burden that puts on me and the people I protect?”

Barbara deflated as she pictured her father, the way he had been in the days and months after Barbara Gordon Senior had left. How he sometimes spent nights sitting by the phone trying to contact her. Only Barbara’s death would have been so much worse. There would have been no one to call to beg for answers. Or maybe he would have called Batman, who’d had no idea Barbara had run off on her own and tried to join the fight. “I just want to help,” she whispered.

Batman tapped his chest. “This symbol is dangerous. Wearing it will make you a target. That doesn’t help anyone. Help by staying safe. Help by staying at home. For your brother, for your father… What would they do if they lost you?”

Stay at home, she thought grimly. Barbara started to remember what made her jump. The itch on her skin that told her to go. You can do it, that voice whispered. This is who you are. The had itch needed to be scratched. Barbara had been lying to herself all the night before. Everything hadn’t been okay. She had been petrified. But still, deep in her gut, she knew that it was the life she wanted. Still, she knew that she wanted to fly, even if it terrified her. “But–”

“No, Barbara,” Batman snapped. “No buts.”

“But–” she said a little louder like she did with her father.

“No!” he shouted, and she gasped, stepping back when Batman took two steps forward to loom over her. Batman wasn’t her father. She wasn’t his kid. He had no reason to listen to her, unlike Jim. “You are a child. You are not a hero. You will not be a hero. Not in my city. Not on my watch. Do you understand?” he bellowed.

Hot, bright tears sprung up in Barbara’s eyes, and Batman’s figure lost all shape and form as they blurred her vision. He huffed and ground his jaw together. She could tell he was forcing himself to calm, breathing evenly and letting his shoulders fall. “You can cry. You can yell. You can hate me,” he said, voice steadier. “I am keeping you safe.”

The tears spilt over, and she tipped her head forward to hide them. A hand came down on her good shoulder, and the rough gauntlet squeezed gently. “Will you be all right to get inside by yourself? Your keys are in your jacket pocket,” he added when she began to pat herself down.

“Yeah… I’ll be fine,” she croaked. She felt like her dreams were a bug being squashed beneath a giant’s foot, along with her throat from the cloying tears.

“Good. Go inside. Straight inside. I’ll know if you sneak out again, and so will your father. He left the precinct five minutes ago and will be arriving home soon.”

She wiped at her face urgently, pulling at her skin, and sniffed down more tears. As she looked herself over, she caught sight of her cast and lifted her arm, showing it to Batman. “What am I supposed to say about this?”

“Not my problem. Get some rest, Miss Gordon. Visit Doctor Leslie Thompkins tomorrow to check on the rest of your injuries. She’ll be expecting you.” Batman nodded for her to go inside, and Barbara held in more tears as she obeyed and turned her back on him. As she unlocked the fire escape door, she looked over her shoulder, and Batman’s fixed glare didn’t move. It was only as she closed the door that Barbara heard him take off, and she quickly reopened it to watch him flying off into the sunrise.

Batman and Robin, or Doctor Leslie Thompkins, had patched Barbara up well, considering. She gingerly had gone down the stairwell to the top floor and collapsed against the elevator doors when she was inside, the little bit of exertion costing her. The pain on the left side of her body and right arm and flank would most likely get to unbearable levels the longer she was awake.

She dragged herself into her apartment and barely got to her bedroom before she heard the front door open again as Jim Gordon returned from work. Barbara dropped the backpack on the ground and took off the jacket she’d been put in, letting it drop to the floor, then fell into bed and managed to get the covers over her when her dad opened the door to her bedroom.

Barbara’s eyes shut out of exhaustion, but it helped trick her dad into thinking she was asleep. She heard him close her bedroom door and fall into his bed when her world melted away. She was grateful that she was too tired to dream because the fleeting nightmare that morning had been terrifying, and she didn’t want to live through that again.

When Barbara woke up a second time at midday, she had a headache. It pressed against her skull, threatening to burst her brain. She hung over the side of her bed to get to the bag, remembering what Batman had said about medication and took two painkillers, as directed by the neatly written note tucked into the top of the bag, dry. She laid in bed for a bit longer, letting the painkillers kick in before she made her move. Then she headed over to her mirror, stripped down to her underwear and assessed the damage.

There were bruises spattered down from her neck to the thigh of her tiny body. Everywhere she impacted the wall, she was coloured in purple and navy, and she could see similar discolouration in her fingers on her right hand beneath the plaster. There was an exceptionally large bruise on her lower back that she remembered the pain vividly as she bounced off the glass. I should be dead, she thought.

It was a miracle that she wasn’t.

It ached to lift her arms, but she did it anyway because the bruise felt good in the strangest way. It almost needed to move so she could feel the relief. Barbara had always taken a peculiar comfort in pain because it meant she wasn’t numb. Numb, Barbara decided, was always worse. She stretched through the pain and grimaced and groaned as the tender muscles extended and loosened. She didn’t have a full range of motion in her right shoulder, but she pushed it to the edge, where her pain tolerance then relaxed.

There was a light knock at her door.

“Barbie? Pumpkin? You awake?” The soft, rough tone of Jim Gordon came through the door.

Barbara froze, then quickly scurried behind the door, leaning against it. “I’m waking up,” she called out. “I’m not dressed. What’s up?”

“We’ve um… got company. Work… Your brother just got dropped off. He’s making a mess in the kitchen… Do you think you could help him out with lunch?”

Barbara glanced down at her cast and back at the door. “Um… I can’t, Dad.”

“Please, Babs…? James is throwing a tantrum, and… And we can’t go to the precinct.”

The frustration she felt might have been worse than the pain. She knew what that meant. There were dirty cops in the precinct, and the good ones were sitting in her living-slash-kitchen-slash-dining room. It did ironically occur to her that she’d felt so lonely the night before when Jim left, and now she felt claustrophobic with the knowledge they had guests. Her space was being intruded upon. The living room that she’d had all to herself was going to be filled with the GCPD, her father and her brother, all of them uninvited visitors. They would need and want her to perform tasks and play host for a while—waters, teas, coffees, food. The duties were constantly thrust upon her because Jim was at home so little that he wasn’t even sure where the milk was in the fridge. Barbara was the expert in their home and how it functioned. It was her domain, but some days she resented the sole responsibility.

She tried to squash all of that down, pushing it aside with the pain that was drifting from her bones as the painkillers kicked in. She hung her head low, then looked at her figure, spattered red, purple, and blue, and the noticeable bright yellow clunky cast on her arm. “I’ll be there a minute. Can you turn the coffee on at least?” she asked.

“Heh. Sure. Thanks, Barb.”

She heard Jim back away from the door and pushed herself off the wall, muttering under her breath, “I was being serious.”

Barbara got dressed again, tugging on Jim’s old flannel that was too big for her and covered most of her cast and a pair of sweats. Then she fixed her mused hair to hide the rainbow of bruises on her neck and slipped her feet into a pair of wool-lined boots.

Her bedroom opened out into a hall, and she could already hear a cacophony of noises from the living room as she walked out, feet shuffling to hide her limp. The hall led up to the front door, and it opened quickly, Harvey Bullock ducking inside and shutting it like he was being chased.

“Hey, Harv.” Barbara had tried to call Harvey Bullock ‘Uncle’ exactly once in her life, and he glared at her and told her to stop making him feel old. He met her in the archway to the living room and gave her a half hug that pressed against the bruises in her body. She stifled her grunt and forced a smile on her face.

“Hey, Barbie-Doll. Oooh, you, okay? What happened to your hand?”

Barbara had flashed her cast momentarily, then yanked down her sleeve that hiked up as Harvey hugged her. “Nothing. It’s not bad. I just fell over.”

“Slip this into the coffee, will you?” He passed her over a flask, and Barbara smiled indulgently. “Good girl.” His whiskery beard scratched her forehead as he landed a kiss on it. Barbara saw her eight-year-old brother James first in the living room. He was sulking beside the kitchen bench, staring up at Jim as he begged for lunch to be made with his floppy blonde hair too long and hanging over his eyes. There were two uniform officers and four detectives, other than her father – a lieutenant, technically while Bullock was a Sergeant – in the room. Barbara recognised Harvey Bullock, Renee Montoya, and Sarah Essen, but the two uniformed police officers and the fourth detective, she didn’t.

Jim held a manila folder and talked to Renee urgently above James’ head, and as James began pulling on his shirt.

“… We’ve got to find out who those cameras belong to,” Jim said.

“How do we do that without logging into the network?” Montoya asked.

“Dad, I want food….” James whined.

Jim thought about it. “What if we logged into the system through one of the other forces? I’ve got some friends in the fire department, and their investigations team has access.”

“I’m hungry….” James said, tugging Jim’s arm. “Dad… dad…. Daa-aad…”

“Do we know anybody at the GCFD we can trust?” Montoya asked.

“Daaaaad…. DAD!”

“James!” Barbara snapped, stepping up to her brother and grabbing him from under his arm. Jim and Montoya both jumped as she appeared under their arms, and James saw his sister, and his eyes widened in panic. He tried to pull away from her, but Barbara had height on him and hauled him up, so his feet had to scramble. “Dad is busy. If you want food, come into the kitchen and help me make toast.”

“You make toast!” he complained, trying to pull away from her but only succeeding in causing her pain to flair. She gritted her teeth and hid her flinch.

Switching to older sister mode, she dropped James’ arm and bent down low next to whisper in his ear. “Behave, or I will hide your video games and send you to Mrs Yankovic after school where you can’t watch TV.”

He shut up, scared of having his privileges taken away. Barbara had the authority to do it. With their dad gone most of the time, it was usually down to Barbara to make sure he did his homework and chores, and if he didn’t do them, it was up to her to discipline him. Mostly she would lock his video games in their dad’s gun box, but sometimes she sent him to Mrs Yankovic, where he would get bored out of his mind.

“Make toast,” Barbara repeated, pushing him towards the pantry. “You know how to do it.”

The coffee machine was (thankfully) turned on and ready to go. She poured out mugs for the officers, making Harvey’s with a shot of whiskey the way he liked. Precariously, she stacked the cups on a tray and balanced that tray on the cast of her arm with her good hand, making sure it didn’t tip out. She went to Harvey first, pointing at his mug, and he slipped his hand into the pocket of her flannel to take out his flask and left her a five-dollar note in its place. Renee didn’t notice her as she took her mug, and neither did the uniform officers. They were discussing their theories on who the Moth Men were.

“They’re working for a central ringleader,” Montoya said. “We know this! Helena Markov told us that they took her to another man. A Moth Man.”

“Do you hear how dumb you sound?” Harvey demanded.

“Shut your face, Bullock. We live in a city with freaking Batman and a Humanoid Crocodile living in the sewers… It’s what she said!”

“How the hell do we know Markov even got snatched? No one reported her missing. She just burst into the police station saying she was one of the Moth Men’s victims, but there’s no evidence any money was taken!”

As Barbara approached her father and Sarah Essen, she noticed how close they were standing together. Sarah was seated on the couch’s armrest, and her father was leaning on the back of it. Their bodies were facing separate directions, but their arms were grazing each other, and Sarah’s head was almost coming over Jim’s shoulder. “Thanks, sweetie,” Sarah said, taking the coffee from Barbara with a pleasant nod.

Barbara bristled and almost reared back but stopped herself. There was only one person who called her sweetie.

Barbara Gordon Senior.

She looked over to her dad, who looked anywhere but at his daughter, though he had obviously heard what was said. She hoped that later when they were alone, he would tell Sarah not to call her that ever again but wasn’t convinced he would. “Markov is a criminal and is afraid showing us their accounts will give away their empire, but if she was spooked enough to come to us, we should treat it as a real kidnapping,” Sarah said.

Barbara got to the last detective just as Jim asked. “What did you see again, Jason?”

Barbara stopped in front of the… detective?

He wasn’t a detective. He couldn’t be a detective. He was a kid. Or at least an older teenager. She frowned at him as he took a mug of coffee with his head hung low, hid floppy brown hair hiding his horn-rimmed glasses. She noted his pants were trashed, rips and tears and big grease stains on the hip. He was making sure he didn’t lean on or touch any furniture as if he felt too dirty for the apartment. Barbara was walking back to the kitchen as he spoke. “I saw a bigger Moth Man, I guess? It was dark, and they were far away….”

“The kid’s got no idea!” Bullock shouted.

The kid – Jason – sighed. “He’s right. I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Jim said calmly. “Now go over it again.”

Barbara took out eggs, a frypan, and her step stool to see over the counter as Jason began to talk. “I was up in Crest Hill. I heard through some friends that Drake Manor is abandoned. There’s just a ghost that lives up in the attic or something, and they have a lot of stuff to take. So, I thought it would be a good place to crash for a while. I got kicked out of the homeless shelter.”

“What about your foster parents?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since I was fifteen. I’m seventeen, and they’re still collecting paychecks.”

“f*ck this city,” Renee muttered.

“Keep going, Bard.”

“Anyway, there’s a lot of walking you have to do to get around those big manor estates, and I was going up the hill when I saw the van swoop by me. It was big white, shady looking. And I figure Drake Manor’s not going anywhere, so I go and chase after the van. See what’s going on… You don’t see many vans in Crest Hill, you know? Not in the middle of the night, anyway.”

“The van’s got no plates. It was the first thing I noticed. Also, it had a dent in the back right door. It was out of my eye line for a while. Those estates are massive, and I had to get through some actual forest to get there, but when I did, I saw two of those Moth dudes running out of the Manor and shooting up the place before jumping into the back of the van and taking off. But yeah, one of them had a way crazier costume than the other one. He looked more important.”

“Kasinsky?” Jim called out, and one of the uniformed police officers stuck their head. “Can you take Mr Bard and try and draw this costume. Who knows what the hell might help us find this freak?”

Andi Kasinsky nodded and took Jason over to the sofas, taking a sketch pad off the dining table.

“Merkle, I need you to go over to the DMV and look for the van in the system.”

“Without plates?” Stanley asked.

“Yeah. Look for any white vans described as having a dent in the back. Or any car accidents with that damage. Make sure it doesn’t get back to the precinct what you’re doing.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Stanley left, Jim and Sarah moved from the couch area, tightening the circle of detectives, but by then, Barbara had finished the eggs and toast. She made James put out plates, cups, cutlery, and juice and was about to pick up the pan when Harvey cut her off. “Maybe I should get that, hey, Doll?”

Barbara nodded and backed up, grabbing the heat pad for under the pan instead. “Breakfast is served,” she called out as Harvey walked the eggs over to the table. She put the plate down with her left hand, keeping her right tight by her side, then watched as the detectives went and sat down around the table. Sarah served two plates for Jason and Andi before she sat on Jim’s right, and Barbara frowned at the smile he gave her.

“This looks great, Barb,” Jim said.

Barbara shrugged. “It’s just eggs and toast… For lunch.”

“Well, none of us got around to breakfast this morning,” Sarah said.

“Is this breakfast for lunch, brunch or a late breakfast?”

“Who cares, Bullock? All that matters are that Barbara’s eggs are the best in Gotham,” Montoya said, serving two for herself. “I really hope we take the assholes out of the GCPD, but it’s worth it to come here for your cooking, Miss Gordon.”

“I helped!” James spoke up. The excess energy that had caused him to be a brat had drained quickly once Barbara put him to work. “I made the toast.”

“Look, your sister makes the best eggs in Gotham, but your toast is hands down the best on the East Coast.” Harvey winked at Barbara as he patted James on the back, her little brother beaming.

Barbara blushed and let her hair tip forward to cover her face when she caught her dad’s proud gaze. Barbara knew she did a lot, but it was for her dad so that he could go to work without worrying. Guilt for her earlier anger at being woken up began to eat at her, and she momentarily pushed her food around her plate.

She made sure to keep her cast underneath the table and used her left arm to cut up her eggs with a fork. “So, this guy is just targeting rich folk in Gotham and holding them hostage until they pay up and killing them if they don’t,” Renee said, taking the conversation back to work. “What’s he doing with all the money?”

“The tech guys can’t find a trail,” Sarah answered. “He’s using offshore accounts that we can’t trace.”

Barbara found her head perking up. “Why don’t you just hack into the offshore banks?”

“Because that’s illegal,” James said.

“You work for the GCPD.” Barbara pointed at Renee. “She just said there are corrupt assholes in there. Probably in your unit. Why don’t you just bend the rules?”

“Language,” Jim said, his parental tone coming on. “And don’t point. We can’t just hack when we want to. Then we’d be no better than the corrupt… A-holes.”

“Or Batman,” Harvey said.

Barbara stiffened at the same time her father did. “Well, you know current department policy on him.”

“Hey, I’m the first one to call him a freak, but Loeb is dumb for decommissioning the Batsignal. What happens next time–” Harvey whistled, using one hand to frantically show what looked like a falling meteor with his fingers. “Aliens descend… Booosch… And blow sh*t up?” His hand imitated a little explosion on the table. “You think we can investigate that?”

“Bullock’s got a point,” Renee said. “Remember when the Atlanteans tried to take Gotham into the ocean? We need the signal.”

Jim and Barbara both looked at each other, but Jim looked over at Sarah right after, nerves on his face. Sarah let her red hair fall in front of her face, much like Barbara had just done. She looks guilty, she thought. “Well, I can’t do anything about it. Loeb has said Batman is persona non grata and shoot him or Robin sight. I don’t know what he did to Loeb to make that happen, but–”

“Detectives,” Anita said, coming over. “I got the sketch.” She held it out to Jim, who studied the drawing before nodding and handing it over to Sarah. She passed it to Renee, and Renee went to give it to Harvey, but it had to get over Barbara to do so. As it went across her place on the table, Barbara studied the so-called Moth-Man. Striped pants, thigh holsters with guns that looked like water pistols, a large set of petal-like wings, and a helmet with pincers and antenna. He had a floor-length duster coat, collar lined with fur. “Moths don’t have big pincers,” she said as it passed her.

Harvey took the page and studied it, narrowing his eyes. “How the hell do we know it’s not an alien?”

“The bank on the Cayman Islands indicates he’s probably just a dude in a Halloween costume,” Renee replied.

Harvey rolled his eyes. “Freaks. All of them.” He handed the picture back to Anita.

Jim took the picture last and studied it as Barbara cleared her throat and glanced at Montoya. “The um… Atlanteans that invaded? They weren’t Atlanteans.”

“What?” Montoya asked.

“She’s right. They were Black Manta’s army,” Bullock said, mouth filled with food. “Get this, they’re all humans, and they hate Atlanteans.”

“But they came out of the ocean?”

“I don’t know. They got some scuba gear or something to live underwater.”

“Why would they live underwater if they hate Atlanteans?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if they hate Atlanteans, why were they in Gotham?”

“I don’t know,” Bullock repeated, sounding absolutely flabbergasted. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for years. What the hell were they doing here?”

“Wayne Tech had a large microwave emitter that vaporiser large bodies of water,” Barbara said. “They planned on dropping it on Atlantis.”

Renee and Harvey both looked at her. “How do you know that?” Harvey asked.

Barbara had found out through the Batcomputer, not that she would say that. “I Googled ‘Why did Black Manta invade Gotham’?”

“Can you get that image out to the media, Anita?” Jim asked, interrupting the conversation. “Someone’s had to have seen him. We need information on who kidnapped Wayne.”

Wayne.

The name hit her like a ton of bricks. Barbara dropped her fork and lifted her head, staring at her father, and he looked at her, panic in his eyes as he realised his mistake. In her head, Barbara flew through every Wayne he potentially could have been talking about. She knew every single member of the Wayne family. She’d met them at Dick’s birthday dinner. Thomas Wayne had three siblings – Patricia, Vanderveer and Agatha – and one Uncle – Silas – survive him when he died, and none of them or their kids lived in Gotham City. The only one who did was Bruce.

He was the only Wayne they could be talking about.

“Bruce was kidnapped?” she asked. Her thoughts immediately flew to Dick Grayson. Sweet, kind, and gentle Dick Grayson was her best friend, and his adopted dad was kidnapped.

Jim looked stunned for a moment, but then a flash of understanding passed over his face. “Barb, calm down.”

“What happened, Dad? Where’s Dick? And Alfred?”

Jim hesitated and sighed. “We don’t know. No one can get in contact with any of them.”

Barbara made a pained noise in the back of her throat. A million terrible thoughts hit her at once:

Dick, chained and being tortured. Dick, a gag muffling his screams, watching Bruce or Alfred be tortured. Dick, forced to watch Bruce or Alfred die. Dick, dying.

The different scenarios spiralled out of control, and Barbara stood up sharply, knocking her chair back and swinging her cast covered arm up to push her hair off her face, revealing the flower bruises on her neck.

Jim gasped and stood up too. “What the hell? Barbara, what happened to you?” he shouted.

Barbara blinked and looked at her hand, almost as if she had forgotten the night before happened. The painkillers had well and truly set in, and she couldn’t even feel the bruises anymore. She turned on her heel, ignoring her father, walking to her bedroom. “Barbara!” he snapped, walking around his own chair to follow her. “When did you break your arm?” He was marching down the hallway after her, and she heard a scuffle and looked back to see Sarah Essen follow close behind.

In her room, Barbara picked up her painkillers and pocketed them and her phone from her bedside. Her world narrowed to the phone screen, dialling Dick’s number, which she knew off by heart, and pulling it up to her ear. She looked up to see Jim reach her room, standing in the doorway shocked. “What happened to you?” he demanded.

“What happened to Dick?” she countered, her voice trembling. She cupped the phone to her ear, listening to it ring.

Jim just stared at her in horror, unsure of what to say. They both waited and listened, and Barbara gasped as she heard Dick’s voice. “Hi,”

“Dick!” she shouted, and Jim held his hand out for the phone.

“You have reached me. You know who. You called this number….”

Deflating, she pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at him. “… The Moth-Man took him,” she said, the words heavy in her mouth as she accepted it. Dick was kidnapped. He was missing, and her brain was already moving on to the next obvious step.

He studied her cast and her face, then grimly nodded. “We’re doing everything we can to find him.”

Barbara shook her head. “No. This makes no sense. He never takes more than one person. Why take Bruce, Alfred, and Dick? Why break the pattern?”

“Barbara, what happened to you,” Jim said, anger bleeding back into his tone. “How were injured?”

Ignoring Jim still, Barbara’s brain ignited in a rush of adrenaline as she looked around her room, formulating a plan. She went and snatched her laptop and accessories from her desk and took the bag the Batman had given her, throwing in the electronics. “If I have to ask you one more time.” Jim raised his voice louder as he did. But Barbara already knew it was an empty threat.

“I tried to take the rubbish out. Fell down the fire escape. It hurt. I went to Leslie Thompkins clinic because it’s free and open,” Barbara said, her tone clipped as she swung her bag onto her back. “I’ve got to go.”

“G- Go? Go where? You’re not going anywhere, young lady!” He stepped in front of her, blocking her way.

“Can you just leave me alone?” she snapped.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Jim demanded.

Barbara threw her hands up into the air. “I don’t know, Dad. Because Moth Men were running around the city, and I thought you’d be too busy to answer? Because I didn’t think you’d be able to make it anyway. I don’t know why you care because you’re never here to notice me anyway!”

“I am—”

“I spend more time with Wayne’s at the Manor than I ever do here with you.”

“You don’t–”

“You don’t even look after James! I do! I get him out of your way, I help him with his homework, I make sure he brushes his teeth before he goes to bed… You can’t make me be an adult, then treat me like a kid!” She managed to get around him, using his shock to her advantage to push by.

There was stunned silence from the police officer onlookers, but she didn’t care. Her last obstacle before the door was Sarah Essen, and Barbara glared at her.

“Where are you going?” Jim demanded from behind her.

Barbara didn’t answer, trying to step around Sarah, but the older woman blocked her path. “I don’t think it’s a good idea you go, sweetie,” she said.

“You do not get to call me that. You are not my mother,” she snapped.

“Barbara Gordon!” Barbara froze. Her full name never meant anything good. She turned slowly on one leg and fixed her father with a glare. “You will not leave this house.”

“Why do you care now?” she demanded, the words leaving her mouth before she could stop them. Jim looked shocked. “You’re never here. That’s why Mom left. That’s why I always leave and why James always spends his nights at a friend’s place. You can’t tell me what to do if you’re never here. So, leave. I’ll take care of my brother and the apartment and my life, and you go screw Detective Essen, like always!”

Jim stood there, stunned as the silence hung in the air. Barbara huffed and took the opportunity to sidestep Sarah and go to the front door, where she slipped on her shoes.

I will find you, Dick, she thought to herself. No matter what.

And the door slammed shut behind her.

Chapter 3: Gotham History Museum

Chapter Text

Barbara felt listless, walking along the streets. She was going to the GCPD. She had a plan to find Dick, but she still felt empty. Barbara had never yelled at her father that way before. She had never yelled at anyone like that before. Jim had looked so stunned.

Barbara couldn’t blame him. She felt sick inside. How did I even get here, she thought to herself as she jumped on the train to her father’s work.

You can either let it not be okay, or you can do whatever it takes to make it okay. Or make it okay enough that you’re comfortable in it.

That was what Batman had told her the night her mother left. She had taken those words to heart, and as she watched Jim break down over her mother’s departure, Barbara had decided to do everything she could to make it okay for her family. So, she took over things in her house.

Slowly at first.

She learnt how to make dinner, so on the nights her dad came home late, there was something to eat that wasn’t just pizza. She learnt how to do the laundry by watching cleaning videos online, and then she started looking after her brother when Jim was out at night and had coffee ready for him in the morning so he wouldn’t go to work looking half-dead. Barbara was eleven and, even if it was ordering pizza, she made sure she and her brother ate three meals a day, had school lunch packed, the house was clean, and she reminded Jim when to pay bills and do grocery shopping and did those things for him when he forgot. And he always forgot.

And she had liked helping and doing those things, and at first, it was enough. For a long while, it was okay enough that she was comfortable with it.

But then, one day, it wasn’t enough, and she couldn’t remember exactly when that was, just that there was a point where Barbara didn’t feel like she was helping anymore. Instead, she felt trapped in organised chaos and felt too big and too small all simultaneously. Nothing was okay. Everything was wrong, and something like sadness but worse plagued her. Her friends had started to notice. Dick especially asked her if she was okay, more often than not. He always had a concerned pinch in his eyebrow when he did. So Barbara tried to be okay again, by keeping the house extra tidy, by being on top of her homework, by making everything easier on her dad to the point where she thought hacking the Gotham Federal Bank was a better idea than disturbing him. It all built up into a crescendo until three weeks earlier, at the Gotham History Museum when Barbara had almost died on a field trip of all places.

Dick Grayson stood next to Barbara, his usual wide grin on his face. Their class were lined up in pairs, waiting for instruction, but at that point in time, all she had been aware of was how his hand had dangled next to hers and how his knuckles kept grazing her fingers by their proximity. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Barbara could barely pay attention to what the teacher said because her heart was hammering so loudly in her ears. It was all she could think about when he bounded up to her and announced that they were going to be partners in front of all of their friends while they were still at school waiting for the excursion buses. “Come on. We haven’t done any projects together this year. I want to do this one with you.”

She stole a glance over at him. For his part, Dick didn’t seem to notice his effect on Barbara and was staring up at the ceiling with his mouth hung open. While he was, by far, the most handsome boy in their year group, with a smile that could light up the dark, he didn’t know or care about that. He was also overly tactile and grabbed Barbara’s hand for her attention, tugging on her entire arm as he pointed up above them. “Look at that!”

Barbara followed his gaze up to the ceiling and gasped when she saw it too. As the tour guide welcomed them to the museum and explained the rules, Dick and Barbara stared up at the domed ceiling where hundreds of different kinds of birds were carved into the stone. Cranes, eagles, hawks, doves, ducks, and even a penguin standing on the edge of a column, staring down at them. They were packed tightly together in a flock of continuous, harmonious flight and, in the centre, was a hovering owl, its eyes wide as it watched them. “Wow,” she murmured. “That’s really pretty.”

“It would have taken them forever to carve that,” he said. “It looks like one block of stone.”

She thought how strange it was that something had been hidden beneath the earth since probably the beginnings of the planet, nothing but rough rock, had been ground down and smoothed into something so beautiful.

Dick still didn’t let go of Barbara’s hand, fingers intertwined with hers. She got distracted again as she realised she could feel the webs between his finger pressed against hers and that for him to be gripping so tight without worry meant something she couldn’t quite place her finger on. He tugged her arm again, pulling her closer and tipped his head down to whisper in her ear. “Do you think you can find a robin up there?”

The conspiratorial whisper made her grin, and she lost some of her stunned shyness and looked up at him. “Fanboy, much?”

The mischievous glint in his eyes was alarmingly contagious. “Come on. He’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah…” she murmured, thinking of the R symbols she had sketched in her diary in her favourite purple marker. She blushed a little, grin widening. “I guess… Not as cool me, though, right?”

Dick beamed at her, eyes wide and honest. “No one could be as cool as you, Barbara.”

“Are you two paying attention?” A calm humour filled voice asked them. Barbara jumped and looked up as Dick beamed up at his adopted father, Bruce Wayne. “Come on. If I have to pay attention, then so do you.” He winked at the two of them, lightly bumping the back of Dick’s head.

“No one told you to come,” Dick pointed out, an equally cheeky grin.

“A part of my agreement to keep you in school, here was joining the volunteer squad.” Bruce wore a strained smile as he spoke, and Dick laughed. “I have to go to two of these a semester, so please make it painless.”

“Not my fault I keep getting so sick. I’m a frail boy, Bruce.” He said it like a joke, and Bruce’s smile became less strained and more earnest, but Barbara didn’t quite get the joke. Dick did take a lot of time off school. There was at least one day per week that he was missing. But he still got good grades, and the teachers all liked him.

“I hated these things when I was in school.”

“When was that? Two years ago?”

“Eleven.”

“You’re the oldest baby I know,” Dick teased. “I’m in the trenches here!”

“Mr Wayne!” One of the teachers called out. “You’re going to be with Mr Lycett!”

Bruce eyed Dick and Barbara. “Is that your class?”

“Nope,” Dick said, popping his ‘p’.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Pay attention and behave. I don’t want to pay for a new library wing so that you can graduate.” He ruffled Dick’s hair as much as he could before Dick lost patience and pulled his head away.

“You’re just jealous I have hair when you’re losing it!” Dick called out behind Bruce. Bruce turned around and glared at Dick, and Dick laughed harder. He leant over to Barbara and said, “That’s his, ‘you’re grounded’ face. But he won’t go through with it. He’s too soft.”

Bruce didn’t seem soft to Barbara. He didn’t seem strict either, but sometimes she thought he might be. Barbara couldn’t ever place his energy. He always seemed chaotic to her. When she saw him at galas with all of Gotham, he was the boy-ish life of the party, loud and raucous who got up to bad things in the press. Whenever he was over at her home because Jim had called him in for a private discussion (crime often crossed paths with Wayne Enterprises, and Bruce was always more than happy to help keep his family’s company above board), he was serious yet aloof, caring about the corruption but scratching his head as to where to start looking for it. Then finally, with Dick, he seemed like a great dad. He liked to tease him sometimes, but for the most part, Barbara saw him spend a lot of time with Dick, making sure his homework was done and sitting with him to help him with the things he couldn’t understand. He seemed too smart to be aloof, too gentle to be raucous, and too nice to be the man who accidentally got too drunk and ended up partying with a dictator in Biyalia who he said was a ‘cool guy, despite the war crime stuff.’ She sometimes couldn’t rationalise that those three people were the same man, but he was always good to her (when Barbara Senior left and the Kean family money went with her, it was Bruce who funded the scholarships to keep Barbara and James at Gotham Academy), and her dad had a lot of time and patience for Bruce, so she tried not to let the mystery surrounding Bruce Wayne drag her in.

Dick and Barbara went with their class in the opposite direction of Bruce’s. Their history teacher, Mr Eldridge, was trying to find all their clipboards when he realised he’d left them on the bus. “I’ll just be right back!” he said, disappearing just as a blonde-haired menace appeared in front of Dick and Barbara.

“Hey, Jane!” Barbara flinched as Ariel Crowne jumped in front of her and grinned, holding out her paper. She was why Barbara never forgot that people described Lucifer’s beauty as ‘angelic.’ “Finish this for me, will you?”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “My name’s not Jane, Ariel.”

Ariel grinned. “Sure, it is, Jane. Because you are Jane, the female colourless brain. Now, I need you to use that brain to do my work today.”

“I don’t think she’s going to do that,” Dick said, pushing Ariel’s hand away.

Ariel paused, looking at Dick as if noticing him there for the first time. Her eyes then went down to their hands, and she got a large, wicked grin on her face.

“Oh-em-gee! Barbara and Dick are holding hands!” Ariel Crowne screeched from in front of them. Her usual friendly idiots – Alexander Romanoff, Theresa DeMarco, and Seth Cole, all the children of Gotham socialites, noticed, and they were all staring straight at Barbara and Dick and began howling with laughter.

Barbara jumped up and released her fingers, but Dick didn’t, turning to Ariel with a frown as she began to coo. “Barbara lurves, Di-ick! Barbara loves Di-ick!” she shouted in a sing-song voice, the rest of their class erupting in giggles. Their guide - who was supposed to be watching them while Mr Eldridge was gone - had ducked off to grab them their information booklets, and the group of eleven and twelve-year-olds teetered with excitement and nerves as they were allowed out alone and in public without any supervision.

But Dick didn’t look bothered. He rarely did by the bullies. He just tended to look bored by them. “Really?” he asked. “How is that insulting? She’s my best friend. I love her too.”

Ariel faltered. She had not been expecting Dick to be unfazed by her taunts. For her part, Barbara was oddly also unfazed by Dick admitting he loved her. It was something he did all the time. It was a little embarrassing he snapped it across the room of her peers, but it didn’t bother her as much as the hand holding. “But if we were dating, wouldn’t it a bit cooler that Barbara had a boyfriend in the seventh grade while you stayed single and lonely?”

Barbara snorted, and Ariel flushed. “I do have a boyfriend!” she countered.

“Who?” Dick asked. “Is he imaginary?”

Ariel thought about it then beamed. “You know him. It’s Robin.”

Barbara’s jaw fell open at the thought. “No way,” Dick laughed. “You are not dating Robin.”

“Am too.”

“Prove it.”

Ariel rolled her eyes. “I can’t, you idiot. It would give away his secret identity and put me in danger.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “You’re not dating Robin, Ariel. Trust me.”

“How about you trust me, the girl who’s actually dating Robin?”

Dick scoffed. “Barbara’s dad flicks a switch, and Batman comes running. My dad has Batman on speed dial. Even if we pretended we believed you, both of us have access to Batman and Robin, and we can just ask him next time we see them whether or not he’s dating you, but I’m certain the answer is no.” Dick watched, a grin spreading over his face as Ariel became flustered. He squeezed Barbara’s hand and tugged her along when it looked like she was faltering. “Come on, Babs. Let’s go look at the gift shop while Ariel stews her poor lonely little life.”

Ariel’s face became red hot, and she balled her fists up on either side of her, and Barbara felt this massive swell of pride in her chest as Dick pulled her away. There was a chorus of oo’s around them, and it should have been over with. But Ariel Crowne did not enjoy being outwitted or outsmarted, and her radar homed in on Barbara again. “Well, at least both of my parents loved me enough to stick around….” Her gaze drifted to Dick. “And had enough money to pay off their debts.” She felt Dick’s hand tighten around hers. He didn’t lose his charming smile, but his eyes grew darker, and something glinted in them.

Mr Eldridge chose that moment to return with all their clipboards and passed them out. The children scattered, and Ariel pulled away, sticking her tongue out at them before she slid back in line. Dick and Barbara stood there momentarily, both of them hurt, but neither of them able to say it. Then their teacher handed them their clipboards, and they both unwound. Only then did Dick let go of Barbara’s hand to take off his bag and get a pen out. “Ignore her,” he said to Barbara, clearing his throat. “She’s just jealous.”

“She’s a bitch, that’s what she is,” Barbara murmured. Dick grinned at her and swung his bag back over his shoulder. Much to her surprise, he retook her hand before they set off with the class.

They went through the dinosaur exhibit, and Barbara felt over the moon again. With Ariel put a little in her place, Dick was spending all his efforts on spending time with her. They hadn’t been able to hang out as much as they normally did lately because of Dick’s various sick days, but he was clearly making up for it. He didn’t have to, but she couldn’t deny that it was nice. With his attention devoted fully on her, it felt like they were the only two in the museum. Maybe she had been harbouring a small crush on Dick since they met, and it was kind of nice. He knew a surprising amount about dinosaurs if she were being honest. He told her about all of it as they passed by giant prehistoric skeletons and they managed to finish their booklets before the teacher had run through half of the things.

“Now, before we head into the Ancient Egyptian Exhibition,” Mr Eldridge said. “Let’s all sit here for a minute to fill out anything you missed on your sheet.”

“I’m done with mine,” Dick said. “You?”

Barbara nodded, flipping through the pages in her worksheet. “Yep.”

Dick grinned. “Want to take a detour then?”

“Take a… where do you want to go?”

“China,” he said seriously.

Barbara’s mouth gaped for a second before spreading into a grin. She nodded, and Dick glanced over at the teacher and their fellow students before finding a gap in everyone’s concentration. “Come on.” He took her hand and dragged her away from their school, slipping into a crowd of tourists. They blended in, despite their uniforms, and when they were out of sight from the teachers, Dick pulled Barbara away again, and the two slipped inside the China exhibition.

She followed Dick, in awe of him and of the fact that he was her friend. He really wasn’t typical. Dick Grayson was one in a million – one in a billion. He was sweet and kind, and he didn’t have to be. Barbara’s cheeks flushed as a tiny part of her brain acknowledged just how handsome he was too. Dick held his hand around hers, and she let him drag her around.

He knew a lot about art and archaeology and could explain and expand on all the little cards. Barbara was so in awe of him and concentrating on what he was saying, she didn’t notice the screams straight away.

Dick, however, did. He frowned and looked over his shoulder, and Barbara did too, wondering what he’d seen. “Did you hear…?”

Another scream was followed by rapid gunfire, and Dick tensed up and looked at Barbara in mild alarm. “What was that?” she asked. They weren’t too far from the Egyptian Exhibition now, and Barbara heard screams that could belong to their classmates.

Dick shook his head and looked around. “I don’t know.” His eyes landed on the bathroom as other patrons around them froze in panic as the second round of gunshots went off, and there were more screams of terror. He pulled Barbara, dragged her to move and walked them over to a fire exit. “Everyone, I think we should all calmly exit the building,” Dick called out, pushing on the fire escape. Instantly, the alarm went off, and Dick pushed Barbara ahead of him and through the door. “Babs, take these people to the street, and call your Dad.”

He was stonily calm, his eyes devoid of the panic that all the other adults around them had. A few began to follow Dick’s instruction as frantic fervour picked up around the museum. “Where are you going?” Barbara demanded as the people started to pull Barbara away from Dick.

“I’m going to check on our friends,” he said. “I’ll find you when it’s over!”

“But—” The sea of people pulled her away in their tide as someone let off more gunshots, and the siren that started from Dick pushing on the fire escape turned from high pitched wails to deep horn bellows and the lights cut off.

Barbara lost him and was in the lead of a panicked throng of stampeding humans. She had no choice but to move down the stairs, and anxiety gripped her as she pulled out her phone and frantically looked for her dad’s number.

Unsurprisingly, the cement stairwell was a poor conductor for cell phone reception, and she couldn’t get through. There were bullets and gun sounds too, echoing down the stairs and as Barbara led the people forward, she decided that she would run around to the front of the museum and try to get back in to find Dick as soon as she could.

The exit was just ahead, and Barbara looked back again, checking everyone was okay before she flung open the door. “Come on–” she said, sidestepping to let the first person behind her out. He was older than her dad, with bifocals and wispy hair. His face was sweet but worn with age, and he wore denim jeans and a flannel shirt and clutched his wife’s hand as he exited the building.

Barbara only remembered him so well because if she hadn’t held the door open for him and his wife, and she had gone out first, it would have been her riddled with bullets.

The spray of gunfire from outside came so fast she hadn’t even spotted a man clad in black with a balaclava, standing in the back alley next to an SUV waiting for them until it was far too late. Or maybe he was waiting for his co-conspirators and was caught off guard by the people trying to escape. Barbara never really found out. All she knew was that her choice to hold the door open saved her life as the first few rows of people fell under the ratatatata of gunfire.

Flattened against the wall, behind a steel door, Barbara froze as the people who noticed their exit fill with bodies began to run back up the stairs. Barbara breathed heavily and watched them run, her knees knocking together. There wasn’t very much room on the stairs as it was, and the retreating mob trampled a few people who fell in shock as the gun went off. Barbara could see their hands waving through the railings, trying desperately to get up and breathe.

The gunfire momentarily ceased. The chaos was overwhelming, and Barbara felt faint. She thought she was going to pass out, her ears ringing with gunfire, when the gunman decided to step closer. She could see him in her peripheral as he reloaded his empty magazine. He stepped over the old man who was bleeding out – or dead, she didn’t know in that second – and Barbara realised that she was the closest person to the masked man. If she didn’t do something, more people were going to die.

I have to protect them, she thought.

Barbara exhaled the breath that caught in her throat and took another sharp intake of oxygen to fuel her adrenaline and what may have been a dumb idea. The man hadn’t spotted her against the wall yet, and as he clicked the magazine into his semi-automatic, she flew out of her hiding spot, throwing a punch at his jaw.

The man’s head flew back, and Barbara didn’t blink before she turned and landed a spin kick on his wrist, knocking the gun out of his hand. He staggered back over the dead bodies and stood in the doorway, and she jumped up and grabbed the exit sign above the door and landed another swinging kick in his chest. He staggered backwards, arms waving around his head as he tried to rebalance himself. The exit sign broke above her and Barbara dropped to the ground, managing to land okay, and she was about to go in on the man again when Batman fell from the sky, landing between Barbara and the gunman. He lifted the gunman back into the sky, and the man disappeared underneath his cape. Barbara looked up, and Batman dropped the man tied up to a cable connected to the rooftop and dangling from one leg.

Batman dropped down again and landed next to her. “There are more men down the alley. Press down hard, and throw them ahead of you. I need to go inside now.”

Stunned, Barbara felt something push in her hand and then Batman aimed his grapple back to the roof. Dick, her brain screamed, and she grabbed Batman’s arm and squeezed it. “My friend… Dick Grayson. He’s in there.”

Batman looked back at her and nodded once. “I’ll get him.” With that, he shot up to the roof.

Barbara had five black orbs with little buttons on top in her hand. She pocketed four of them and tried pressing the button with the one remaining. It was stiff. Two men were running towards her, and in the crowd behind her, the people were scared. The people were frightened, eyeing the dead bodies and the dangling man, plus the men running towards them.

Press down hard, she remembered.

Barbara knelt to the ground and smashed the button down on the cement. She felt it click under her hand, then stood and threw the orb at the men just like Batman said.

However, the orbs never made an impact as they went up into the air and floated momentarily before blasting a loud sound that knocked both the men back and against the brick wall. “Run!” Barbara commanded the people behind her.

The men were unconscious against the wall, and the crowd all made it out onto the street to safety. She got out onto the main road just as police cars pulled up, and Barbara ran towards them. “People… inside… dead… Call Jim Gordon!” she said through gasping breaths.

There was chaos again, and Barbara couldn’t remember the next few minutes. She never managed to get back inside, but Dick did come out later, alive and well, and they hugged each other as he apologised over and over for ‘almost getting her killed,’ but Barbara just held him back still in shock over everything that had happened. People were coming out covered in webbing of all things. She heard something about cocoons and didn’t quite understand it.

She’d replayed the events late into the night, long after her dad had checked on her for maybe the seventh time before he fell asleep on the couch watching the news.

“Linda, I hear you’re with a witness,” the news reporter said. “Could you please tell us what happened?”

The TV had changed to another face, and Barbara tuned out as the man recounted events and Batman’s voice from when she was a child rang out in her head. You can either let it not be okay, or you can do whatever it takes to make it okay. Or make it okay enough that you’re comfortable in it.

Barbara had been afraid when the gunfire went off. The bodies, the blood… it had all been frightening.

But the calm she felt when she attacked the man in the balaclava was electrifying. It had almost been like the world had slowed around her. She had known what to do, and her body moved on instinct – an instinct that, to her credit, she’d developed over six years of after school clubs in ballet, gym and judo. Apparently, her brown belt and multiple judo championship titles did help in real-life situations.

I want to be a hero, she had thought. I want to protect people. That’s how I can make this okay.

Barbara Gordon stood in front of Jim’s police precinct.

At some point throughout her aimless wandering, she’d walked to the precinct and stared up at the building.

She had wanted to be a hero. She wanted to be more to make it okay

Dick was missing, and it wasn’t okay.

The yellow bag on her shoulder was heavy. She swung it around her body, looking up at the GCPD sign as she shoved her hand into the bag and wrapped her hand around a batarang. She’d had a feeling it would be there, and she traced the familiar shape of it blindly and found the small button that she knew would call Batman.

Not yet, she thought.

Batman took all her things, but that didn’t matter. After all, she knew how to break into the GCPD evidence locker.

Chapter 4: Some Technicalities

Chapter Text

In and out.

It took Barbara a short amount of time and some smile flashing to her father’s co-workers to gain access into the GCPD, and even less time sneaking around to get into the GCPD evidence locker. Barbara stole several things including smoke pellets – confiscated from several second-tier goons – Robin’s retractable bo – slightly damaged, found at a crime scene – handcuffs – swiped from someone’s desk – and a universal car key - that was designed by a car thief who was serving five years downstate in Belle Reve, so he probably wouldn’t need it. When the universal car key had first shown up in evidence, Jim had told her that if it hadn’t been so illegal, the car key would have been pretty cool to have in case of emergency.

Now is an emergency, she thought as she exited the alley behind the station, dressed in her costume once again.

With her arm still in a cast, Barbara felt sillier than she had the previous night wearing the outfit she’d designed herself. Her t-shirt was splattered with paint at awkward angles and her skirt looked like it belonged to a schoolgirl. Her knobbly knees were tiny beneath the pleats and safety gear. She felt like she was in a low effort, cost-effective Halloween costume – I’m Lisa Simpson dressed up like Florida.With that terrible comparison stuck in her head, she wondered what delusion she’d been under the night before, and also how the hell heroes made their costumes at all.

That is not your biggest issue, she reminded herself, kneeling in the shadows as the aches in her body protested.

In the alley behind the police station, there was a parking lot filled with police vehicles. There was a guard at the front gate, and several dozen cars parked and lined up in a massive lot. At some point in her removal of evidence, Barbara had no idea where she needed to look for Dick or how she was going to get there. A police vehicle provided both transport and a police radio to scan the streets and track the Moth-Men.

But Barbara was eleven.

The most she had ever driven were go-karts.

And that one summer Dad’s cousin took me and James on mini dirt-bikes, she thought, as her eyes passed over a row of police bikes. Her eyes narrowed on them and she looked down at the fob, pressing a button that had a key pop out. It’s probably the same thing… right?

Barbara looked at the guard at the gate and the lack of cameras in the alley. Why do they make it so easy though? Barbara was admittedly disappointed in Gotham’s not-so-finest. She ducked under the booth where the guard couldn’t see her and crawled along the ground to where the bikes were. They were a lot bigger than the dirt bikes her Uncle Herman had set her down on, but she spotted a helmet with a police radio installed inside just sitting on the seat and, still crouched down, picked it up. She put it down on her head and turned it on, listening to the crackle and pop of static before… “Patrol, this is dispatch, have a robbery in progress in Gotham Park, can nearby officers respond, over?”

She let out a sigh of relief and stood up looking at the big bike. I have stolen my equipment and my symbol, and my best friend is still in danger. My Dad works here. I will bring it back… it’s almost like a rental… that I’m not paying for.

Barbara climbed onto the back of the bike, putting her feet in the… stirrups – she guessed? – and inserted the key. She felt the teeth catch where they should, held down the choke and turned the fob so that the engine roared beneath her. “Oh sh*t,” she breathed.

Despite knowing what the key could do, and twisting it herself, Barbara still hadn’t expected it to work. Fear flooded her because she had to drive the bike. Or ride it? Isn’t it drive, because it has an engine?

“Hello?” a voice called out.

Barbara looked in time to see the guard in the booth was getting out, looking around with one hand on his holster. He’d heard the bike! Why hadn’t she remembered about hearing? “Oh sh*t,” she repeated, as she realised she had no time to learn how to ride the thing. The guard was jogging her way, out of shape but still holding a gun and her frame was rattling from the engine. “Oh sh*t, oh sh*t, oh sh*t…” It was only the night before that she’d jumped off a building thinking she knew how to do it, and ended up falling. Barbara jumped off the bike, and it fell over, the engine running so loud it almost hurt her ears. “sh*t!”

She yanked out the key and scrambled back, helmet still on her head and ran behind some cop cars to hide.

“Hey!” the guard shouted out, but Barbara was certain he hadn’t seen her. “Who’s there?”

She could hear the guard walking around the lot, trying to find her. Barbara got up and bolted out of there.

“One ticket, please?” Barbara handed her coins to the bus driver who looked her up and down sceptically. She adjusted her ill-fitted costume and donned a weak smile. “I’m going to a hero and villain’s birthday party.” She held up the policeman’s helmet from under her arm. “I’m… Batcop.”

“Adorable,” he deadpanned as if he didn’t think any of it was adorable at all.

As she walked to the back of the bus, she reflected on her day so far. Jumping off a building, being yelled at by Batman, fighting with her dad, stealing from the GCPD lock up and catching a bus while smelling like a mix of toxic spray paint and sweat. How am I going to find Dick like this?

From the bag, she withdrew her laptop and connected it to a wireless internet dongle and the batarang. I need to find out where this Moth guy has taken Dick… or where he takes all his victims.

Batman’s surveillance.

She slipped into his system quickly and looked into the case file, finding the cameras he’d had Robin and the Black Canary set up easily. He said he set them up around the homes of suspected targets.

All the cameras were in a file attached to the original case. Barbara flicked through them. Like with everything else, Batman was meticulous with how he labelled, categorised and tagged the cameras by street name and who they were meant to be pointed at. She scrolled through a few, looking at the cameras pointed at windows, doors, garages and rooftops then typed in, ‘Wayne Manor’ in the surveillance feed search bar.

Her fingers froze over the keys.

Batman and Robin hadn’t just set up cameras outside 1007 Mountain Drive.

The entirety of Wayne Manor was covered in surveillance.

Barbara had spent a lot of days and nights at the manor and had played hide and seek with Dick for hours and she recognised the paintings in the east wing and the door leading up to Bruce’s office in the west wing. She gaped as she checked all the surveillance feeds, tapping through them and looking for life.

The hallways were barren.

No one was there, but there was police tape in the living room where the usual flowers that sat in the foyer were smashed and left there. Why does he have inside the house so well covered?

She’d heard rumours over the years that the Batman was on Bruce Wayne’s payroll. But Bruce criticised the Bat as much as he praised him in public. But maybe, in private, they had a different deal. She could kind of see one of the many personalities of Bruce Wayne being friends with the Bat, especially if he knew the version of Batman she’d known as a kid - the kind, gentle one who carried seven-year-olds home for cocoa. This could help…

Barbara rewound the camera until almost eleven p.m. the night before and shifted on the bus seat so she could hold the laptop up closer to her eye level as she judge where to drop her cursor on the video timeline. She dropped the timeline and got there too early in the day. It was just after school it looked like, and Dick was walking into the house with his backpack over his shoulder.

He was talking to someone. A woman. Well, a teenager. Barbara had never seen her before. She was tall and blonde and leggy. Her hair was tied up in a high ponytail and Dick walked her towards the west wing. She waved her hand around as she discussed something with Dick, and he tipped his head back and laughed.

Barbara ignored the twinge of jealousy in her chest. What did it matter if some girl was making Dick laugh? She wasn’t the one who hacked into Batman’s computer and used his crazy stalker equipment to find him, was she? Dick and the girl walked into Bruce’s study together, and she couldn’t find a camera to follow them inside. She waited to see if they came out. What could they be doing together in Bruce’s study for hours? She watched and scrolled through the time-lapse, but the next time she saw anything the time stamp on the camera said 1:32 am and Dick had his head stuck out of the room, hair looking frazzled and he was out of his uniform and in a tracksuit and t-shirt.

He looked startled and was looking around like he had heard something in another part of the house. Barbara flipped over to the front foyer camera and saw there were splinters on the ground and the front door had been broken through. She rewound the clock again to 1:20 am, and everything was where it belonged. At 1:23 am, the front door flung open though, the splinters shattering the ground and two figures, one larger than the other walked in.

Barbara watched as two of the Moth-men stormed inside and walked around the table in the front entrance. One of the men was clearly The Moth Man, his coat duster swirling around him. He held a gun in his hand bigger than his assistant and was calling orders that she couldn’t hear on camera. They split up. She followed the Moth Man as he stalked through the Manor, up the stairs and towards Bruce’s bedroom. He must have known where it was because it was the first room he searched, entering it as Barbara saw the second small moth-stooge coming up from the other side of the stairs to cut off the second entrance and…

Nothing.

The Moth Man entered the room and left with no one but the goon, then got him to follow him.

They went down the hall and would have stormed past Alfred’s bedroom at some point but even then, no one came out and nothing was disturbed. They began heading towards the west wing, where Dick’s bedroom was, but they had to bypass Bruce’s study first.

Barbara flicked back to that camera and saw Dick with his head out the door, watching and waiting. He shut it again quickly when the Moth Man got closer, and her breath caught in her throat.Run, she thought, but she knew he wouldn’t.

The door flung open, into the Moth Man’s face.

The Moth Man fell backwards, landing on the other guy as the door hit him. From the angle, Barbara couldn’t see much other than the fact Moth Man was clearly unconscious and his goon was scrambling to get out from underneath his boss. The door opened slower andDick came casually strolling around the corner and halted as if he’d just noticed the man on the ground. He smirked and casually turned on his foot to look at the goons. “Run,” she whispered to Dick, hoping that by saying her thoughts out loud he would listen.

But instead, Dick waved at the one goon still standing, grinning from ear to ear.

Barbara gasped as the moth goon lunged forward and tried to grab Dick, but he cartwheeled backwards, landed on his feet and began to run. There was a game of cat and mouse around the Manor as Dick was chased from room to room. Barbara followed Dick through the cameras as he ran down the thinner, winding servant's corridors to the kitchens, then back up to the foyer and straight around back to the study where the Moth Man was just waking up.

Don’t go that way, she thought.

But he did.

The goon was too slow for Dick and had been lagging behind, but Dick jumped over the Moth Man as he tried sitting up, then turned around to taunt him. The Moth Man pulled his gun out and pointed it at Dick, who tried to jump back again, but the Moth Man fired his weapon and a large net flew out and wrapped itself around him. Dick scrambled, stepping backwards covered in netting, but it got caught around his legs and seemed sticky enough that it trapped him to the ground. The Moth Man clutched the back of his head, taking a moment to breathe as the goon finally caught up to them, out of breath as he stopped next to Moth Man and braced his hands on his knees as he gasped.

The Moth Man looked up at him and looked like he was yelling something behind his mask. The goon looked apologetic, then went over to Dick and lifted him up, throwing his struggling body over his shoulder. The Moth Man stood, and got up, still telling off his goon. Dick bucked and kicked and screamed, but neither of the men who captured him looked like they were paying him any mind.

When they got back to the foyer, Dick was tried to land a kick in the Moth Man’s head when the goon accidentally got too close to his boss, but the villain dodged it and Dick’s foot landed on the table, flipping it on its side and breaking the vase of flowers that had been on it.

The goons left with Dick.

They roughly threw him into the back of the van with no plates and slammed the doors shut.

The van rattled.

Dick must have been throwing his slight form against the side of the van as hard as he could, but that was it.

Dick was gone. Kidnapped. Stolen.

Her heart thudded in her chest and Barbara couldn’t help the moisture that was gathering in her eyes.

No, he’s not. I can find him.

Barbara managed to follow the out of the Manor and then down Mountain Drive towards the city. Her heart ached but her mind was whirring as she pulled up bridge cameras, and the rest of Batman’s surveillance in Gotham to watch as the van made its way through Crest Hill and out of Gotham Estates towards Burnside.

She tracked it through the cameras, watching the van get caught in traffic, everyone around unaware that Barbara Gordon’s best friend was inside, until it turned onto 35^th street.

Barbara searched the Batcomputer for 35^th street, but couldn’t find it. She frowned and tried looking for any angle, but it seemed, that wasn’t a street the Batman or his proteges had set up. It was as she was looking through cameras around 35^th street and couldn’t see the van leaving 35^th street. She double-checked and was about to pull up a map of Burnside when her computer screen went black.

“What the…?” She clicked on her trackpad and tried to move her mouse around, then looked at the power button which was still clearly shown as ‘on’. She clicked again and jumped when the normal acid green text of the Batcomputer lit up in front of her.

Go home, Miss Gordon. I will meet you on the rooftop. We need to talk.

Barbara blinked, then looked up at the inbuilt camera on her computer. He saw me, she thought and quickly shut the laptop lid. The laptop felt like it was a bomb and she dropped it on the seat next to her, staring at it as an ice-cold feeling of dread pooled in the pit of her stomach. Batman saw her watching his computers. He wanted to meet with her.

She looked down at the batarang in her hand attached to her laptop, then quickly disconnected it. He’ll confiscate this. He’ll tell my Dad.

I have to find Dick first. Before anything happens to him.

Barbara had picked the bus line she did because it matched up with most of the major train lines on the island. She popped the battery out of her computer so that there was no way Batman could track her, then got off at the next stop that was connected to a train station.

Barbara was going to Burnside.

Chapter 5: Night of the Moth-Men

Chapter Text

Burnside was big.

It was a tiny city within itself, and the main problem that Barbara faced was it only had three train stations, and not one of them was near or even remotely close to 35^th Street. She got off at the nearest one she could think of and then considered the bus again when she realised that she didn’t really know the bus schedules. And because she was avoiding Batman’s detection, Barbara had also turned off her phone, so there would be no way for him to track her and couldn’t look them up.

Which was why she was staring at a brightly coloured Vespa in the middle of a side street.

It was cute. It reminded her of the Lizzie Mcguire Movie Vespa, except in purple, and she didn’t hate that comparison for herself, unlike the Lisa Simpson one. Lizzie McGuire pretended to be a popstar and got away with it. If she got away with it and her parents didn’t ground her, maybe she could get away with stealing it without Batman or her dad killing her.

The Vespa was small and looked a lot easier to sit on and handle than a motorbike. She twisted the universal car keys in her hand. I can always bring it back, she thought. But she also knew that many insurers covered superhero and villain damages and thefts.

Though, Barbara wasn’t sure which one she’d be in that case.

I just hope whoever owns this has good insurance.

She had a little more time than she’d had at the police station to get used to the Vespa. She put the police helmet on her head then slipped onto the seat. Her backpack and utility belt had all her gear, so there was no need to use the small storage compartment under the seat. Unlike the motorbike, the Vespa was easier to sit on for her short frame. There was nothing to straddle, and she didn’t have to stretch her body out to get her feet in the stirrups.

Okay, it’s just like an electric bicycle.

The street she’d found the Vespa on was reasonably quiet, holding a few small art galleries, so there was a long stretch of road for her to practice on. She took off. She only yelped once and straightened out the handles that wobbled under her hand from the force of taking off. She looked behind her and saw the street was still empty, then tested turning. Leaning to the side, Barbara almost skidded off the bike and stuck her foot out on the pavement to catch herself. The Vespa went out beneath her, and she cursed but managed to catch it without letting it hit the ground.

She’d leant too hard. Her injured body ached and protested as she lifted the heavy thing, and Barbara sighed and pulled the Vespa up to the side of the road again. The painkillers were wearing off, and she calculated only a few hours since her last dose. She took another two, hoping they didn’t put her to sleep, then tried again on the Vespa.

The second time she tried turning, she didn’t lean as much and managed a perfect U-turn - if she didn’t count the fact she’d done it on an empty street without looking over her shoulder. It was like riding a very powerful bicycle that she didn’t have to pedal, she decided. With that, Barbara looked at the street numbers around her and went up Simone Avenue towards 35^th.

She wasn’t great at riding a scooter, but images of Dick Grayson, bound and gagged in the back seat of the van filled Barbara’s head. If Batman’s timeline were right, Dick would still be isolated. There were another eight hours before he was offered the choice to transfer money to the Moth-Man’s bank or…

Don’t think about it.

But then, that was all Barbara could see. Bruce and Alfred dressed in black, standing next to the Wayne Family graves as a small casket was lowered into the ground. Maybe it was her painkillers, but the thought was frightening her less and less and began to motivate her. Focusing on the image, Barbara was determined to ride faster through Gotham and prevent it. Nothing was going to happen to Dick Grayson. Not while she had breath in her body. The brake was behind her broken right hand, smarted every time she tried to squeeze it, but she got used to the pain and used that to fuel her.

By the time she made it to35^th Street, all Barbara was running on was the fumes from her desperate need to protect her friend, the pain sliding from her body, and the painkillers leeching it out.

The street went for twelve blocks, and she rode down, listening to the police scanner in her ear, which she’d tuned into Burnside’s frequencies. Wherever he’s keeping them, it has to be somewhere where no one will hear screams. So the blocks where police activity was already searching, responding to domestics and a corner store robbery, weren’t targets.

She narrowed her search down to about five blocks that seemed pretty quiet considering the neighbours. She was in Burnside’s Latin district, which was, when Barbara last checked, run by the 8-Ballers. From the many nights she spent reading the Batcomputer files for fun, Barbara knew that the 8-Ballers ran guns and drugs up for Colombian cartels. They had a terse relationship with the Triads, who ran the gun trade across the bay on the islands of Gotham City, but for the most part, they stuck to their district in Little Bogotá.

She saw plenty of 8-Ballers eyeing her as she drove up and down the blocks. They’d noticed her - how could they not, with her giant yellow cape and bright purple Vespa - and observed her from a distance. The 8-Ballers didn’t like capes from what she’d read.

One trio of men, in particular, made her wary, and they were hanging out on the turn off to the highway. They stood around on an empty lot, where food trucks parked at night, creating a small festival for the city. Barbara got antsy when one time she drove by, one of the 8-Ballers took their phone out and took a photo of her. She bit her lip, searching the blocks again for something out of place. But Barbara hadn’t spent enough time in the Latin District to know what to look for. On her fifth lap, she eyed the 8-Baller trio, and Barbara quickly decided to drive off the road and onto the sidewalk towards them. They stared as she rode across the lot. Her mind was flickering through all the scenarios she needed to avoid. Guns can’t get involved, she thought to herself. Barbara had no idea how to defend against them if one was pointed straight at her, so she was determined to keep them out of it.

The scooter skidded to a stop, and Barbara almost stumbled off, not quite used to the motion yet. Terrible first impression, she thought, but she sucked in a breath to inflate her lungs and make her look more confident and stepped closer. “Hey, um…” She took her helmet off, resting it on the side of her hip so she could look at the three men, covered in tattoos of crosses and gun signs, in the eye. “I don’t have a lot of time, but… Can I ask you a favour?”

The three men glanced at each other, and the one who Barbara assumed was their leader, with a shaved head, a black bandana and teardrop tattoos cascading down his cheek, looked Barbara up and down. His eyes first went to the bat symbol on her chest, then rested on the police helmet under her arm. “And who are you, little girl? Batcop?”

Barbara then understood how unfunny the joke had been when she said it to the bus driver and groaned internally. She hadn’t decided who she was. She wasn’t sure what to name herself, or even if she could? Batman got given his name by the Gotham Gazette, same as Superman, so it never seemed important to her. As the 8-Ballers snickered at their joke, Barbara cleared her throat and shrugged. “It doesn’t matter who I am. I just need to know if you’ve seen a white van drive up and down here lately? Or any men dressed weirdly?” Again, the man looked her up and down as if to ask if she were really asking. She fidgeted with the hem of her skirt, pulling it down over her knees. “Yeah, look, I get the irony, but I’m looking for men dressed like moths, and I’m kind of in a hurry.”

“Uhuh.” The man didn’t sound helpful or like he intended to be helpful. “Move along, little girl.”

Barbara was unintimidated. Barbara Junior had been raised by Barbara Senior, a blonde, white, wealthy heiress, and Gotham socialite. There was no doubt in Barbara’s mind that her mother had been the Queen Bee and most ruthless Popular Head Cheerleader Gotham Academy had ever seen. She would have probably given Ariel a run for her money on bitchiness, and the Kean’s weren’t from any of the Founding families. There were still framed photos up in the halls of Gotham Academy as Prom Queen in her Freshman year. It sometimes gave Barbara a complex – and Barbara desperately avoided walking past the third-floor corridor in the Athletics wing for a reason – but she was also the woman she was raised by. Barbara had watched Barbara Senior sweep through the Galas of Gotham City with her ex-military grunt of a husband, who barely knew what cufflinks were before he met her, and reduce grown men to tears who tried to insinuate Jim didn’t belong at her side.

“Men are easy to manipulate. Just dangle something they want in front of them, and they’re yours,” Barbara Senior had told her daughter once as she applied her lipstick. Barbara had been sitting on the bed, watching her mother get ready for some charity dinner. “But never offer up yourself, honey. Don’t ever let them think they can afford you because - and trust me with this - you are out of their league.”

“I am?” Barbara had asked, not sure what Barbara Senior meant, and also unsure if it was true.

Barbara Senior turned in her seat and faced her, a frown between her perfect brows. “Barbara Gordon, you are smart and beautiful and talented beyond belief. Men will beg on their knees to make you happy.”

The police helmet was heavy in her hand — an idea formed in her mind. Barbara typically avoided anything that made her anything like Barbara Eileen, but she let her mother’s words wrap around her. Make them beg, she thought.

She dipped into that side of her heritage and drew herself to full height, and let a gracious smile fall on her lips that would have made Ariel Crowne cower. “You know I have something you want,” she said, pretending she was so much more confident than she was. She dangled the bait out in front of them and lifted the helmet in one hand, then threw it into her other hand like she was playing with a ball. “This helmet has police scanners,” she said, tipping her head to the side. Her long hair flowed down her side, shiny and pretty, just like she’d seen her mother do once when the mayor had been rude to her father. “Scanners that could come in handy when you need to, I don’t know…? Commit a crime where you don’t want police showing up?” She smiled lazily, and when one of the men looked curious, she winked at him, making the guy in charge look over his shoulder at his boy with a glare.

After a second, Baldy - as she decided to call him - looked back at Barbara and scoffed. “I’ve got scanners, little girl. I can listen to any channel I want.”

“Not the encrypted ones,” she sang, raising her eyebrow, spinning the helmet around between her fingers. “The scanners you have access to only really report the comings and goings of the emergency scanners. The normal stuff civilians dial 911 for. This helmet here...” She held it out in front of her, and when Baldy reached out for it, she threw it behind her back, catching it and bringing it around her body like it was a basketball. “You can listen on the lines they use when they don’t want you to know they’re coming. Lines that they use in long term investigations. It’s pretty nifty if you have any stash houses you’re afraid of having raided. Like the one, three streets over on Dozier Parade?”

“How do you-?”

“Just be thankful that my friend, The Batman, has bigger issues than you right now,” she interrupted him, batting her lashes with a smile and trying to look as innocent as possible.

The man eyed the helmet and took a step forward. “And what’s stopping me from just taking this scanner?”

Barbara’s stomach momentarily flipped with fear, but she hoped it didn’t show on her face as she maintained her smile. She could see a gun in the waistband of his jeans. If he withdrew it, she was in trouble. But his friends didn’t seem to have any weapons. She didn’t let her smile leave her face. “As I said, I’m friends with Batman, and he already has evidence on you. Do you really want the Bat in your business trying to figure out why his favourite apprentice was hurt?”

“I’ve never seen you with the Bat,” he sneered.

Barbara pulled out one of the spare batarangs from her bag and threw it in one solid motion. She’d been practising doing that for so many years with her own batarang that it was almost second nature, and the blade embedded itself in the brick wall behind one of the other 8-Ballers heads. “Check the quality. That is one of his. Batman keeps me well hidden and extra stocked. We just have an emergency right now, and I am in a bit of a hurry. So, if you want to risk the Dark Knight dismantling your little clubhouse to keep a couple of whackos dressed up as moths safe, go ahead. It’s not my livelihood you’re threatening. Or you could peacefully take this police helmet with an encrypted scanner in-built and tell me what I need to know. But please, make your decision quickly because I don’t have a lot of time.”

Baldy looked at his friend, who was staring at the batarang in awe. He rolled his eyes. “Whatever, little girl. I don’t need this sh*t. I ain’t ever seen Moth-men,” he said, and Barbara could tell he wasn’t lying. He grinned at her disappointment. As she took a step back, he took a step forward, and her hackles rose as she twisted into a position she launch an attack from more easily. “But that van from the news? The one that keeps showing up at these crime scenes. They all go into the parking garage in the new building down a few blocks. La Bonita. That weird billionaire owns it. The one who buys all the stupid art.”

“Stupid art?”

“The stupid art. Y’know. Like the black dot in the middle of the white canvas. Or when someone tapes a toothbrush to a wall, and it sells for millions? That kinda sh*t. I see him bringing it in and out all the time in the same dumb van.”

“What’s his name?”

Baldy raised his eyebrow. “Little girl, you’re not good at this interrogation sh*t. I’m just being nice because I don’t feel like asking my friends here to wash little girl brains off the sidewalk. Now, are you gonna give me that there police helmet nicely, or am I gonna have to shove you a little?”

Barbara’s cheeks flushed, and maybe, she wasn’t as convincing as she thought she was, and maybe she got played too. She glanced at the helmet and then back up at the man. Realistically she knew she couldn’t give this man the scanner. It was too dangerous, and her dad would be the one in danger if she did. But she had promised. Slowly, Barbara approached him again, holding the helmet out in front of her. Her fingers tingled. He assessed her and reached out to take it with his hand on the same side as his gun.

That, she decided, was his mistake.

He grabbed the helmet from where the neck went in, and Barbara held it from the open visor. The man tried to tug it away, but Barbara tightened her grip. He was surprised and eyed her, and Barbara smiled. “Is that your only gun?” she asked, trying to keep the tremble from her voice.

He stared at her.

Barbara stared back.

They both moved at the same time. Baldy went to reach for his gun with his free hand across his body because he was still holding the helmet. Barbara tugged the helmet down simultaneously, dragging his arm with the motion and hooked her leg around his arm for extra leverage to give her strength. She used the momentum to break his hold, and while he stumbled downward, she brought her knee up to his face, breaking his nose. Barbara felt the crack beneath her knee, and he swung back, clutching his face. He fell to his knees, and Barbara punched him in the jaw and kicked him in the chest, so he fell back on his back, and while he was sprawled on the ground, she kicked him in between his legs so he couldn’t get up, and took his gun.

Oh my God, she thought, adrenaline pounding in her ears, holding the piece. She looked up at Baldy’s friends, who were thinking the same thing as she was, and as she twisted the gun in her hand, they both put their hands up above their heads. Barbara had her brown belt in judo - her mother had signed Barbara up for ballet when she was small, and at the end of all of her classes, while she sat and waited for one of her parents to pick her up, she always ended up watching the boys use the same room for their judo practice. Eventually, Barbara convinced her parents to pick her up later and let her learn judo too. She’d won her third competition only a few months before and fought the guy with the gun outside the Gotham History Museum but knocking down Baldy felt different.

“Holy sh*t, Batcop,” one of the guys said, glaring at the gun at her hand. “You want to stop swinging that thing around for a sec?”

Barbara did. Her dad had shown her his gun a few times and taught her how to pull one apart. “As long as I’m a cop, we’ll have a gun in this house, and I don’t want you to do anything dangerous or get too curious. So I’m gonna take the mystery out of it,” he’d said, and Barbara pulled the gun apart and threw the different parts in opposite corners of the lot. At the museum, she had been surprised, and in judo matches, she’d always had the rules of the competition, but this fight she had been prepared for the moment she arrived to talk to the 8-Ballers, just in case, and she had won.

She was staring at Baldy, clutching his manhood with one hand and nose with the other. He looked up at her, absolutely stunned. “The f*ck?!” he shouted.

“Sorry, I was bluffing,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and walking back to the Vespa. “I was never going to give you the helmet. But thank you for that information. You might have helped save someone’s life.”

The other two guys started towards Barbara since she was sans gun, but she pulled out Robin’s retractable bo staff, and it opened to full length. “No, I don’t want to hurt anyone. Plus, it’s a time-sensitive issue, so… Thanks for your help!” She jumped back onto the Vespa and put the helmet back on her head. “Bye!” she called out, turning on the engine.

The three men all stared at her, as shocked as Barbara felt. She tried offering a smile in lew of an apology, but none of them seemed to appreciate it. Dropping the smile, Barbara backed up the Vespa, and turned around, flying out of the lot, still in a bit of shock.

Just like the 8-Baller said, the La Bonita was a few blocks down.

It was a nice apartment building. A nice apartment building. The kind of building she expected to see in an HBO series about high flying New Yorkers. The Latino community in Burnside weren’t exactly the slums of South Gotham. Still, terrace apartments along the water were the height of luxury in the area, and even they didn’t have highrise penthouse apartments overlooking the Gotham Islands. La Bonita looked like it belonged in the Diamond District, or at least somewhere where there were buildings taller than five storeys. She didn’t go up to Burnside enough to know enough about the architecture, but this place looked out of place amongst the bodegas and gothic apartments, and the fact the Moth-Men would go in there made even less sense.

Her eyes wandered up to the rooftop. Barbara’s gut told her whoever was behind everything was up in the Penthouse. There was no other reason to be in an apartment building that lavish. She highly doubted the kidnappers owned a third-floor apartment. Maybe kidnapping Gotham’s 1% is how they pay their rent? Or how they afforded to build this in the first place. This must have happened somewhere before. In another city, maybe? Barbara filed that information away for later.

It doesn’t matter how they got this building. How do I get into the garage?

Barbara looked up and down the building for a discreet entry point, then saw a couple walking in through the front doors of the apartment raised her eyebrow. I can’t just go through there… can I?

Barbara parked illegally in the front and stared at the doors. It really seems stupid to just walk through the front door... but could I?

She couldn’t feasibly see why not, as it dawned on her that she really hadn’t thought of her plan after finding where Dick was being kept. Was she going to stake out the building? Could she get through security? Could she even fight her way through? Was that even something she could do if there were multiple people?

Not that she’d had a plan when she decided to dress up like a hero at all past swing to the next building’ the night before. Or a plan after ‘slam the front door as you leave the house’ that afternoon, either. Barbara swallowed as it dawned on her she never had planned any of her next steps. It had always just been about sating the constantly fluttering feeling in her gut that saidI have to do this very specific thing now, and all her plans - saving Dick, becoming a hero, making things okay - had developed from that. But the problem with her plan to make everything okay was once it wasokay, what would she do then?Is okay even enough? It doesn’t seem like enough. Is this even the right time to be thinking about all of this? What am I doing?!

Oh my God, I beat up a criminal. On purpose,for a stupid plan, I hadn’t thought through!?

“... All Units, be aware, there have been reports of Batman in Burnside. I repeat, Batman has been spotted in Burnside....”

Barbara startled at the sound of the police radio in her ear, forgetting that she’d been wearing the helmet. She blinked and looked up, expecting to see the familiar black shadow in the late afternoon sky. But there was nothing there. “Units in the area are giving chase to the Batman. Please be aware that there are orders to shoot Batman and any of his accomplices - Robin, the Black Canary, Catwoman, or any other masks - on sight. Over.”

“...Loeb has said Batman is persona non grata...”

Jim’s annoyed huffed voice from lunch came back to her, and she looked down at her chest and the poorly drawn symbol and felt her mask on her face. I have to get off the street. Get inside. Find Dick. Get out. Beat up anyone who gets in your way. Her mind formulated the following parts of her plan without her saying so. I think I’m not terrible at this... Okay, I’m not great at long term planning, but I have figured out planning on the fly. I hacked into the batcomputer, found Dick, and now I’m here. I can do this.

Barbara calmed herself and moved, taking off the helmet and shaking her hair out. She knew she wasn’t a hero - that much was obvious - but the police wouldn’t really care one way or another, so long as she kept pretending to be one, and she headed inside the building. Keep going, she told herself, tamping down the fear.

In her mind, breaking into the hideout of criminals should have meant using smoke bombs and distractions, finding a hallway filled with burning lasers and tripwires and a slew of plot devices that hours of watching James Bond and Mission Impossible films had prepared her for.

In reality, Barbara entered a foyer that looked like it had a concierge during the week and slipped behind the desk to find a computer with the police helmet safely under her arm. She turned it on and found it was password-protected, so she slipped her laptop out of her backpack and connected them. She hadn’t tried turning her computer on since the Batman hacked her back, but if he was out in Burnside being chased by police, he wasn’t sitting in front of his computer tracking her. In two minutes, she was through the password in the system and had copied herself a swipe card to enter and exit all the levels in the apartment building. Before logging out again, she looked through the building lists owners and found the Penthouse suite in the manifests. Cameron van Cleer.

Barbara closed her eyes and went into her head. She’d heard that name before. She tried to remember where. Cameron van Cleer? Cameron van…

She could see a reporter. A woman, blonde with a tall hair poof, blue eyes. “Thanks, Ryan. This is Linda Lake, reporting from Gotham History Museum, and I’m with Cameron van Cleer…”

Barbara’s eyes popped open, an imprint of a man left on her retina and a ringing in her ear. The man, Cameron van Cleer was in his early thirties with maybe a little too much hair gel. His dark eyes shone like obsidians as he looked at the camera. He’d was the man interviewed at the Gotham History Museum. He’d been there that day, and so had Moth Man. There had been webbing all over quite a few of the victims that day, and she hadn’t understood why until then. Baldy had said that ‘stupid art’ came in and out of the Penthouse. Stupid art to historical art wasn’t that far of a stretch - in antiquities, broken vases could sell for millions if they had a story.

Barbara closed her eyes again and switched her mind back to the interview, trying to remember as much of it as she could. “Mr van Cleer, what did you see?”

“Well, it was downright frightening, Ms Lake. The shooters didn’t care if you were a man, woman, or child. Just whether you were affluent or not.”

“Really?”

“Yes, of course. I was a hostage. If it weren’t for the Batman-”

“The Batman? He was out during the day?”

“He was! I was just as surprised as you were.”

Barbara blinked and came back to the present. Cameron van Cleer was there? Also, now that she thought about it, Batman out during the day was a big deal. What was he even doing there?

Now, she thought. Where do I go first? Penthouse or garage…? She decided garage first because that was most likely where the victims were. All of them described waking up in a basem*nt, and she was there to save Dick, not take in the Moth Men. The next thing she knew, she was punching the elevator’s down to the parking garage. A map on the computer of the garage told her which garage spaces the penthouse suite owned, and she went down to sub-basem*nt 7 to find it.

Just before she got into the lift, Barbara double-checked the foyer to see if someone was waiting behind the pot plant in the hall to jump her. Walking right in seemed too easy to be true. Maybe he thinks he’s too smart for anyone to figure out he lives here? The lift arrived, and she stepped inside, punching the button for the B7 parking level. If her hunch was right, she was just going to walk into this guy’s garage and… what? Find Dick and leave? Could it be that easy?

Barbara thought of everything that could go wrong and wondered what she had to do once she got to the garage. Should she call the police? Dick could be injured… What if I have to drag him out of there? Her stomach flipped with anxiety. What if I’m wrong about the Penthouse and van Cleer? She was just hoping that her guess about the Penthouse was going right when the elevator doors opened, revealing a basem*nt of storage units made from chain-link fences and two goons with their Moth masks off and just their costumes from the neck down on. “Oh, hi,” she said, holding Robin’s staff in a defensive position. “Um… what would you say if I told you I was lost?”

The men both took a moment to take in the badly sprayed bat symbol on her chest before the panic erupted over their faces. “Get her!” the one on the right shouted.

As the guy on the right started towards her, Barbara threw the police helmet at the left goon and took a smoke pellet from her pocket. She threw it on the ground in front of her. It worked for half a second. The Moth-Men couldn’t see her, but also she couldn’t see them, and they were blocking her only exit. I don’t think I thought this through, she thought, as she sucked up a giant breath of the smoke.

Oh no.

The effect was immediate.

The smoke irritated the back of her throat. Barbara began to hack and cough as she pushed forward to get out of the elevator. She needed to walk into an area with more oxygen. Her eyes watered from the smoke as well, and she shut them against the stinging. The two goons were having the same trouble as her. She stumbled blindly out of the elevator and into one of them. The man tried to catch her as he staggered blindly, coughing up a lung.

She ducked under his arm and swung the staff out, whacking him like a pinata at a birthday. She heard a yelp, then sent a kick into what she assumed was the man’s backside, only for her boot to connect to something much… softer.

The second shout from the guy sounded more like a dying animal, and she heard him stagger back towards the elevators. Forcing her eyes open, she saw the goon on the floor hunched over, cupping his manhood, and the shadow of one of the goons through the elevator door. Barbara sprung forward and took the swipe card out of her pocket. Blindly and still coughing, she leant against the doorway, scanned the card, and pounded level 6 – eight levels above the garage and nine levels below the Penthouse, so he had no time to run and get recruits – and slammed ‘doors shut’ button.

Back against the shut elevator doors, Barbara slipped down to the ground, trying to catch her breath. She had inhaled far too much smoke, and lucky for her, so had the other guy. She sat on the ground, and he bent low with his hands on his knees to try to catch his breath. “You… wouldn’t be inter… interested… if we called a… truce?” she asked, hacking through her words.

The guy – who had dropped the police helmet at some point – peered at her through his squinted eyelashes and staggered towards Barbara. He struggled to draw breath, but he was still ready to attack. “I’ll take that… as a no….” She groaned as she fell into a crawl and shuffled away from the smoke, pushing herself up to her feet when she reached clear fresh air – or as clear and fresh as it got in a sub-basem*nt.

She sucked in some hasty breaths, holding up Robin’s staff and pointing it towards the goon. Directly across from her were storage cages, and her mind formulated a new plan. The goon went to pull his gun out, but Barbara spun the staff around and snapped the bo across his knuckles before he could. He charged towards her, and she swung the bo like a baseball bat, bringing it to rest in his soft stomach. He groaned and doubled over, and Barbara brought the staff down on his back. He fell flat, and before he could try and get up, Barbara pulled his gun out of his belt and dragged him across the cement. She retrieved the handcuffs from her fanny pack, hooked them to one of his hands, and then attached the other half to one of the chain-link fences.

“Okay,” she breathed, still coughing. “That was easier than… expected.” She cleared her throat and huffed and nudged the Moth-Man with her foot. “Where’s Dick Grayson?”

“You’re a little girl,” he coughed.

She kicked him harder in the ribs. “Yeah. I am. Where. Is. Dick. Grayson?” She punctuated every word with another kick in the ribs. She was small, but her tiny feet hurt, judging by the grunts he was making.

“f*ck it. Not getting paid enough for this sh*t. Bay 32. Around the corner,” he gasped.

Barbara smiled. “Thank you!” She leant down, grabbed his gun that had been discarded, and held it out, pinched between two fingers. “I’ll just… take this.” She checked the safety was on, then broke the gun apart and slipped the magazine and barrel it into some of her many pockets. Before she left, however, she saw a set of car keys on the goon’s belt. “Oh, this too! Thanks again.”

Leaving the Moth-man where he was, Barbara collected the police helmet and put it on her head with the visor flipped up, as her broken arm was aching from carrying it, and she wanted to keep her other arm free in case she needed to fight.

Barbara walked past the storage units until she found the garages. Each one was numbered, and she was close to 32. She kept jogging down, aware that the second goon was most likely running back down the fire escape stairwell to get back to her, or maybe even to tell their boss. I don’t have a lot of time.

The roller door opened, and Barbara beamed when she spotted the van was right where the moth-man said it was. She quickly flew forward and opened the backdoors, and a small person was sitting cross-legged inside. “Dick?” she whispered.

A hand went up in front of the boy’s face, and he blinked sheepishly. Dick Grayson peered through the cracks of his fingers, and his face fell when his eyes landed on her. “Barbara?” he asked.

Barbara blushed bright red as she climbed the rest of the way into the truck and got in close to Dick. The mask – and now helmet – really weren’t hiding her identity at all. His hands were bound in front of him, but otherwise, he looked unharmed. Her heart pounded in her chest with excitement. “Hey,” she said, grabbing his arms. All of the anxiety she’d been feeling melted like butter as she saw him. He was there, and he was alive. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“No! Crap. Babs, this…. What are you wearing?” he exclaimed, and Barbara momentarily paused as she experienced an intense wave of déjà vu. Don’t get distracted, she reminded herself and continued to unwind the tape around his wrists. “Did... Did Batman recruit you?” he asked conspiratorially.

“Um... yes? Sort of... no” Barbara smiled awkwardly. “It’s a very long story. See, last night I sort of-”

Barbara was cut off by two-gun shots going off, and she yelped as one grazed her arm. Dick swore and, with strength that she’d never seen in him, snapped his duct tape bound arms with a yank across his body. She gasped, and Dick dove past her and pulled the back door of the van shut. They were immediately enveloped in darkness, and she couldn’t see her friend anymore, just feel him moving around. “You don’t know how to drive a van by chance, do you?” he asked, sounding more annoyed than someone who was in the process of being rescued.

She didn’t understand why Dick sounded so angry when he spoke, but she also didn’t care. They needed to get out of there first. “Why would I know how to drive a van? I barely know how to drive a Vespa!” she exclaimed.

But Dick ignored her and climbed toward the van’s side door. “Stay here and lock the door behind me,” he snapped. He kept himself as flat as he could along the side of the van, not stepping outside but leaning over to open the front door. Then, Dick slipped out of the back and into the front seat, pressing against the side of the vehicle so the gun wouldn’t see him. In a matter of seconds, the van had started, and Dick banged on the wall between the front seats and the back and shouted, “I told you to lock the door!”

She bolted forward and shut the side door as Dick reversed the car. Apparently, the white van was bulletproof and very capable of running people over. At least, that’s what she assumed happened when the van drove over something with a giant thud sound.

The sound of tyres screeching as Dick spun the van around echoed up and down the garage. Barbara rattled around in the back. Dick’s driving could be described as erratic at best, but then he cursed loudly and slammed the breaks. The van spun around and came to a stop, and Barbara’s body smashed against the wall. She gasped, the van silent other than the ringing in her ears when the loudest crunch Barbara had ever heard deafened her.

The van flipped.

She couldn’t even scream as the van flew in the air, and her body moved like a pair of jeans in the tumble dryer. She spun out of control, the van going one way and her body the other. Her bag on her shoulders felt light as it flew up towards the sky and her head, knees, torso, arm smacked on the walls as she landed on them.

She lost track of the rolls, but when the van landed on its side, she came down to the ground with a crunch and the visor on her helmet was shattered. The plaster on her arm was cracked in places. Her head was bleeding. She was finding it hard to breathe from her left side. Everything was aching.

Barbara could be stubborn and proud. She could get mad, but she also knew when things were getting out of hand, and an eleven-year-old kidnap victim crashing a van in an underground parking garage seemed like the moment to ask for help.

Painfully, she removed her helmet, gasping at the effort it took. She slid her backpack off her shoulders, crying out in pain as it stretched her back muscles against the bruises. Whatever painkillers she’d had, were worn off, and she sucked in quick sharp breaths to stave off the pain a little longer as she plunged her hand into her backpack and felt around for Batman’s batarang. Her hand was sliced open as she tried to grab it, and she hissed, dragging it back.

“Careful with the edges,” she heard Batman’s voice say in her head. Maybe she had a concussion because it oddly felt like he was right there. “There’s a button on it. If you need me again, just press that button.” The button was in the middle of the Bat symbol, and Barbara reached into her bag more carefully and found the batarang a second time, then fumbled for the button.

She pressed it.

Barbara had never pressed the button in her life before and was unsure of what to expect. She blinked in the dark, pulling the batarang in front of her face and...

It was just a red flashing light.

“Seriously?” she muttered.

The light flashed, and Barbara sighed, hiding the batarang in her waistband before getting up gingerly, highly aware her body was radiating pain. “Dick!” she called out. “Dick!”

But there was no response. She adjusted her mask on her face and tried to orientate herself in the dark. She was pretty sure the van was on its side because under her feet, she could feel a glass panel below her feet. She wavered, her legs not giving her enough strength and sucked in a sharp breath as her side smarted. Before she could move, Barbara heard a crack above her and looked into the blackness to find the source of the noise. “He’s gone!” a voice shouted. “I don’t know where he went!”

Dick, she thought, relief flooding her. He would go get help. She knew him.

“Open the van!” The voice was distorted by something electrical. Before she could wonder, the back doors of the van flew open horizontally, and silhouetted in the doorway was a Moth-man with one of his hands cuffed and the other aiming a gun at her. “She’s alive, boss!”

The silhouette changed. The Moth-Man goon was thrown out of the way, and Barbara pulled another batarang from her fanny pack and aimed it high. All she could see was the shape of him. His shoulders were large, and his cape dragged behind him. She could see the shadows of guns on his thighs, and the bit of light that bounced off the side of his head revealed a green face-covering helmet. “Tie her up,” he said. “I’ll take her with me downtown. You two find the Wayne boy! He can’t have gotten far.”

Barbara was about to open her mouth to object when a smoke pellet hit the ground in front of her, and the fine mist it distributed put her straight to sleep.

Chapter 6: Warehouse and Cave

Chapter Text

“Ouch,” Barbara moaned as she woke up.

Her voice was small and her movements stiff, not just because she was too injured - although, she was that. But also because she was tied up in a chair, the ropes too tight around her sensitive skin. She opened her eyes and looked around.

The Moth-Men had relocated her to a warehouse somewhere. There were crates – artifacts it looked like – and boxes of miscellaneous things from around the world, including the stupid art that Baldy talked about and historical artifacts more in line with items that had been targetted in the museum. She saw mirrors and paintings and bags of packing peanuts. Some of the boxes had labels, and the closest one she could read said: ‘departure from Chicago’. Moth-Man seemed to have his fingers in many different pies, and she was in his base of operations.

The warehouse had very high windows. There were at least three floors, and she was below ground, surrounded by the balconies of the other two levels and straight up to the glass ceiling with the moon shining through. The next floor up, she could see the garage doors built for trucks to come in and out, and the front doors to the warehouse. Barbara tried to find a path from where she was to the doors. On her right, a staircase up to that level led straight to the front door, but it was heavily guarded. She counted six Moth-Men in her immediate line of sight, standing on different balconies and watching her closely.

Her equipment was gone. They’d even taken off her cape, but she could still feel the blade of the batarang at her waistband. She looked around to her left and couldn’t see Dick anywhere. She remembered before she’d gone unconscious the voices talking about how he’d escaped. Good. Get out of here.

She was happy that Dick was safe. It meant she could concentrate on getting herself out without worrying about him. Except…

Barbara had done judo. She had done gymnastics. She had studied fighting, being sneaky, and all the other things she figured she needed to be a good crime fighter.

She hadn’t studied the art of escape, though.

From what she could see, her legs were bound to the chair with rope, and she could feel her arms duct-taped tied in a similar position behind her back. If I could grab my batarang, I could cut myself out of here.

It was kind of hard to breathe too. If she inhaled too deeply, her chest ached. Her arm and her head were throbbing too, and she felt tiny pinpricks of pain over her face.

“Ah, you’re awake,” said the same electronic voice from earlier. Barbara lifted her head and, out from the maze of boxes she was hidden in, a man stepped forward. He was the one from earlier. The green mask he wore was more elaborate than his goons. It had pincers, antennae, and red eyes. The pincers were some sort of oxygen mask, and she thought back to the sleeping mist she’d been drugged with earlier. She probably hadn’t needed it. Barbara didn’t feel very capable of staying awake. “Morning, Miss Bats. I mean, evening, but semantics. How was your rest?”

Barbara cleared her throat. “I don’t know. Accommodation could have been better.” She grinned and tipped her head to the side, holding off a shiver that wanted to tear through her. “Would you mind if I stretched? I just got a kink in my shoulder….”

“Unfortunately, I can’t let you do that. You know we had to take Antonio to the hospital. His right testicl* is twice the size it should be.”

“Might I suggest a life other than crime then?” The man’s broad shoulders came from the large fur cowl he wore over his cape, which wasn’t exactly a cape but an oversized, sweeping floor-length duster. “So… is your power being super-rich so you can build yourself fancy cocoon weapons? Or were you bitten by a radioactive moth and can shoot people with your butt?”

The Moth Man didn’t flinch. He didn’t even jump. The red in his mask flashed as he studied her, and she could almost hear a smile in his voice. “Super-rich.” He pulled a gun out of his pocket, aimed it at Barbara and shot it. She barely had time to scream when a pellet hit her in the chest, and she went flying back in her chair surrounded by a cocoon of sticky webbed fluid that quickly began to harden. “How’d you know about the gun?”

“I watched the footage of you kidnapping Dick Grayson... also, the Gotham History Museum,” she said, trying to calm her breathing. She’d been frightened by the gun. For a second, she thought it had been the end of her. Stay calm. Be in control. Don’t let him think he can afford to kill you. “You were there. I mean, the Moth-Man wasn’t there, but Cameron van Cleer was.”

“The Moth-Man. Is that what they’re calling me?” He didn’t deny or refute the claim he was van Cleer. He also didn’t own up to it either. Instead, Moth-Man – or whoever he was – laughed. “Guess I need to work on my PR. My muscle are Moth-Men. I am, Killer Moth.” He paused, waiting, and Barbara wasn’t sure if it was for dramatic effect or not until he waited a little bit longer.

“Okay, sure. Is that supposed to mean something to me?” she asked, tipping her head to the side.

Killer Moth grinned, his red eyes flashing brightly in his helmet. “I’m your worst nightmare.”

Barbara just kept staring at him, unmoved and unphased. “Really? Cause you kinda look like a bad Halloween alien costume with a cape. I mean, are they really supposed to be Moth Wings? At least Batman’s cape kind looks like Bat wings? I can send some photos of some really cute moths if you want.”

“Are you going to lecture me about costumes?” he asked, glaring at her clothes.

Barbara snorted. “I’m eleven. This is an attempt by an eleven-year-old. What’s your excuse?” Killer Moth was annoyed. She could tell. He was sitting there and exchanging barbs with her. Barbara wondered if she could keep annoying him into doing something stupid. “Face it. You’re a Batman wannabe.”

“Pfft, Batman?” he snapped. “And who are you? Another one of his sidekicks? You look like a little girl in a mask.”

“I am a little girl in a mask,” she deadpanned, then she straightened up, smiling smugly. “And actually, Batman has never trained me. He doesn’t even know I exist. This little girl, with a broken arm and on her first day on the job, beat up your goons and freed your kidnap victim all by herself.”

Oh sh*t.

As soon as the words left her mouth, Barbara knew she shouldn’t have said them.

Killer Moth’s eyes narrowed, and his smile grew. “So, what you’re telling me when I hang your corpse from the Gotham Belfry, no one will even know who you are?”

Her eyes widened in horror, and she pushed back in her chair as Killer Moth withdrew his real gun and pointed it at her. She gasped to scream as the sound of breaking glass rang out overhead. Her scream turned into a yelp as glass shattered down on her, and she tipped her head down to shield her eyes.

Batman and Robin swung in, and Batman landed on top of Killer Moth, knocking his gun out of his hand, and the two of them broke out in a fight of kicks and punches. Robin landed next to Barbara, ran over to her, and sprayed the rock-hard cocoon with something that immediately dissolved the shell. “Thank you,” she gasped.

Robin barely acknowledged her. He cut open the duct tape, binding her arms together, and she managed to pull her hand apart. “You are crazy,” he said finally. “What are you doing even here?”

“Saving the day,” she grunted as she opened and shut her fingers to get the blood flowing again. Everything hurt and throbbed. Her chest was aching, and she wanted to collapse, but she was alive and didn’t feel she was going to die yet. Satisfied, she took out the batarang from her waistband and went to her right leg to hack at the rope as Robin knelt and attacked the ones on her left leg. “What does it look like?”

Robin glared at her, then moved to help her with the right leg – she was struggling because of the cast half-broken. “We had it under control,” he said.

“Really? I saved Dick Grayson. What did you two do?”

“You didn’t… Ugh, you’re so annoying sometimes!”

When she was undone, he held his hand out to her, but Barbara pushed it aside and stood up on her own, wincing at the bruises. “I’m fine.” She slapped his hand away when he tried to steady her. “Let’s help Batman.”

But Robin pushed her back to sit on the chair. “You stay here. I’m helping Batman. No – don’t argue. I saw what you did in the garage, it was impressive, but Batman and I have trained together. It’s different. You could get one of us hurt. Stay here,” he repeated firmly.

Barbara narrowed her eyes but did as instructed. “There are men upstairs!” she said, and they were running down to join the fray.

“We’ll handle it. Just stay here!” Robin replied, then threw himself into the fight, ducking under one of Batman’s blows to deliver his own to one of the five Moth-Men who had descended around them. He was holding off the goons as Batman threw punches at Killer Moth.

She knew that, in dancing and fighting, it was easier to work with a partner you knew, but she didn’t like it. Her hackles rose, and, as Barbara watched the fight, she couldn’t help but feel like a damsel in distress. She wavered on her feet, feeling sick and grabbed her side when it screamed at her to sit down, but she was determined to stand, and it paid off as one of the Moth-Men from upstairs flew over the banister and ran to her instead of Batman or Robin. He must have assumed she was easy pickings, but Barbara was determined not to be, and when he raised his fist to backhand her, she dodged the blow and kicked him in the shins before jumping over him, picking up the rope that had been around her legs and using it to choke him. He choked, and Barbara pressed her entire weight down on him to cut off his breathing, but then a batarang flew past her and hit him in the head, rendering him unconscious.

“We don’t kill!” Batman shouted before ducking another blow from Killer Moth.

“I wasn’t trying to kill him!” she objected. The momentary lapse in concentration as she glared at Batman left her open to an attack from behind. She gasped as a Moth-man grabbed her by her hair and yanked backwards. Barbara leant back into the grip, trying to lessen the pain raging in her scalp. “Let me go!”

The Moth-Man lifted her instead, and he squeezed her a little too tight. Barbara gasped as her ribcage burnt inside of her, but the height he lifted her gave her perfect leverage to kick her leg backward and slam her foot in the spot between his groin and stomach. He gasped, winded and dropped her. Barbara collapsed to the ground, her arms spread out underneath her. She was so tired and inso much pain, but she couldn’t stop.

Only a few meters in front of her was Killer Moth’s fallen cocoon gun. Her eyes landed on the cocoon gun. It doesn’t even make sense. Moths don’t spin cocoons, caterpillars do, but that didn’t matter. She dragged herself across the cement floor of the warehouse, body scraping as she went. The Moth-man behind her was getting up as she reached within for extra strength to stretch out and grasp the edge of the gun. She felt a hand come down on her ankle, and Barbara flipped onto her back with a pained cry and shot the gun. It hit the Moth-man straight in the chest, and he staggered backwards, trapped in its sticky mess. Then he fell to the ground, and the webbing hardened, making it impossible for him to move.

She gasped and went limp on the ground momentarily, trying to catch her breath. The excitement and pride washed over her and made the pain bearable enough that she could stand again. She staggered and looked over to Batman and Robin, who were intensely fighting amongst the majority of the Moth-men and Killer Moth himself, and she saw one of the goons get too close to Robin. She lifted her arm, aimed the gun, and shot another pellet at the goon without thinking. The netting expanded and wrapped around the Moth-man and trapped him. Robin was startled when he noticed and looked over to Barbara, shooting her a glare halfway caught between anger and gratitude. Barbara beamed back at him. I can get used to this.

She aimed the gun, again and again, trapping a second, third and fourth, Moth-Man before any of them could get near Robin or Batman. At one point, she shot one of the men Robin had been about to attack, and he spun around and looked at her and glared. “Get out of here!” he told her, then went back to help Batman fight Killer Moth, the only one left. All the rest of the goons seemed to be done or wrapped up tight in a cocoon, courtesy of Robin and Barbara.

Robin landed a spinning kick on Killer Moth between Batman’s punches, which van Cleer had not expected. He staggered backwards into Batman’s next blow, and Robin went low and tripped him. Killer Moth landed on his side and pulled out a grapple from his waistband, aiming it up high and shooting to drag himself up to the next level in one quick movement. Batman followed, and then Robin, the three of them neck and neck and neck. They landed on the next level, and Barbara staggered over to the stairs, climbing them as the fighting grew more ferocious. Everything was happening in double time, and Killer Moth could hold his own against Batman and Robin.

Barbara held her ribs as she got to the top of the stairs - the ground floor. She sat down, unable to keep on her legs anymore. She leant back on the metal railing and aimed the cocoon gun at Killer Moth but failed to find a clean shot. Killer Moth spread his wings open and jumped off the edge of the railing, and Barbara groaned and shifted on the stairs again. She was running out of energy and huffed in annoyance. Batman and Killer Moth were gliding through the air, Robin bouncing in and out of her crossfire, landing swinging kicks where he could, as Killer Moth landed punches and kicks back. But while Batman and Robin were holding back as not to kill the Killer, Killer Moth wasn’t frightened to use deadly force. They can’t keep this up forever, she thought as she watched the aerial dance.

They were all too close together. She tried aiming just at Killer Moth, but suddenly Robin would appear in her vision, and when she adjusted again, Batman was there. Dad could make this shot, she thought to herself. Her father had begrudgingly taken Barbara to the gun range. He had taught her how to hold and shoot a gun because, in his mind, she needed to know, she needed to know how to dismantle one. “This is a weapon, Barbara. You need to remember that. Guns aren’t made for games. Guns are made to kill people.”

The excitement she’d had at being able to shoot a gun had died in her chest a little. It was such a hefty weight. The cocoon wouldn’t kill anyone but one false move, and she could hurt Batman and Robin. She could be the reason why Killer Moth escaped and took another victim. What would Batman do?

Batman would be out of the way.

“Batman, Robin!” Barbara shouted. Batman lifted his head momentarily and spotted Barbara, then quickly grabbed Robin, yanking him backwards. They fell out of the sky, and Killer Moth glided, not expecting it. When they were clear, Barbara found her target quickly and shot the cocoon into the air. The webbing ejected, landing over him, and Killer Moth’s wings crumpled up under the sticky material. He began to fall to the ground, and Batman swept down and caught him with his grapple, changing Killer Moth’s trajectory. He landed in some packing peanuts, the bag exploding around him, and the packing peanuts fused with the webbing just as the sticky blanket hardened and trapped him.

There was silence, occasionally punctuated by the grunts and complaints of Killer Moth, trapped in a device of his own making. Barbara’s eyes widened, and she let her arm fall before her jaw opened. I did it. I trapped Killer Moth. I stopped him with Batman and Robin. She looked at the dynamic duo who were staring up at her. Robin looked stunned, while Batman’s face held no emotion. “Did I just... do that?” she asked, unsurely. Batman’s stoic features hardened, and he looked at Killer Moth.

Shedid do that. Her face split open into the most enormous grin she could muster while her face felt like a giant bruise, and she whooped for joy, punching her good hand through the air with a laugh of surprised relief. The rush of endorphins and adrenaline running through her system was something she’d never experienced before. Not in any judo tournament, not in any school award ceremony, not at any kind of sporting event she could think of. “I can’t believe it! We… we did it!”

She looked down at Batman and Robin. They had landed on either side of Killer Moth and were glaring up at her from the basem*nt floor. Her happiness died out, her shoulders deflating. “I mean… we did, right?” she asked, shrinking back.

Batman’s mask shielded most of his face, but she saw his lip twitch into something. “Robin, make sure Killer Moth doesn’t suffocate and alert the GCPD. You,” he said, turning his attention to Barbara. “Might want to go sit in the car until we’re done.”

“But–”

“Unless you want to explain this to your father?” he asked, face blank. Her hand went up to touch her mask, but Batman already had an answer. “Your cast, visible eyes, slipping mask, and civilian clothes might be dead giveaways. I know who you are, and any officer of the law will too.”

Barbara gaped and then shut her mouth again. She couldn’t let her dad see her. The cold hollow feeling of doing something wrong began to build up inside of her. “Um… okay. I’ll just…” she drifted off. Barbara looked around the warehouse. She had no idea where to go. Where was the car? She stumbled as she stood up and took a step forward. The adrenaline had all disappeared, and she felt like a stupid, clumsy, embarrassed kid again. She hadn’t felt like all of those things at once for a very long time.

Batman let out a long sigh. “Robin, take her to the car.”

He opened his mouth to object but saw Batman’s face and shut it quickly, thinking better of it. “Yeah. Sure. Come on, Barbara.” Robin jogged up the stairs to her and offered out his hand. Barbara stared at it, then took it, and Robin pulled her in close to his chest.

Just as Robin pulled his grappling out, aiming it at the ceiling, the front doors to the warehouse flung open. Barbara and Robin both startled, and Barbara lifted the cocoon gun in her hands, pointing it at the new arrivals just as she heard, “Freeze! This is the GCPD! Everyone get down on the ground now!”

Barbara started to lift her arms above her head, training from Jim kicking in when one of the police officers storming towards her saw her gun. “...the orders are to shoot Batman and any of his accomplices - Robin, the Black Canary, Catwoman, or any other masks - on sight...”

The officer didn’t say anything. He didn’t warn her. The officer just shot at her, and Barbara gasped, hearing the bang and closed her eyes, burying her face in Robin’s neck, ready to be hit when two arms came around the both of them and lifted Barbara and Robin into the sky. Barbara dropped the gun, and Batman flew them up to the ceiling, smashing through the windows and landing on the roof.

It was freezing. She felt rain crackle in the air, and the heavens split open, drizzling as Barbara looked back and forth at Batman and Robin desperately. “Get out of here!” Batman yelled before diving back into the warehouse.

Robin grabbed Barbara’s hand and pulled her along to the edge of the building. “Hold on!” he shouted, and he dragged her into his side and leapt off the building. Barbara yelped, holding Robin as tight as she could, considering as he shot off his grappling and used it to slow their descent to the ground. They ran down the side alley of the warehouse, both of them listening to the fight inside. “Why are the police shooting at us?” he asked out loud.

“Don’t you know? Loeb’s basically put a hit out on you with the GCPD. Shoot on sight, Batman and any of his allies,” she gasped, her lungs aching.Her head was spinning, and she felt like she would throw up, but Robin didn’t slow, even as they arrived at the Batmobile, hidden in the ally.

“Wait here,” Robin said, directing her firmly. Barbara opened her mouth to object, and he grabbed her mask and ripped it off her face. “Half the GCPD know you. Just stay here.” He crumpled her mask up and dropped it to the ground, and Barbara had never felt so much like a little kid before.

Robin flew off again, and she watched him sprint away across the roof. She could hear the fight between Batman and Robin and the GCPD. She looked around and shivered as the rain beat down on her harder. There was nothing she could do. If anyone from the GCPD recognised her, they were done for. She waited impatiently until finally, all the noise stopped. She heard shouts and frowned, recognising her dad’s authoritative grunts. She clutched her side, her legs giving out and leant back against the batmobile, eyes drooping. She looked down and lifted her shirt, seeing the bruises on her chest were a deep red colour, then quickly pulled her shirt back down as she heard noises from above.

She looked up, and Robin was back, falling beside her. “What happened?” she asked.

“Your dad. He’s on our side. Whoever we didn’t knock out seems to be on our side too, so Batman is okay on his own for the minute. Sorry, I left you. I panicked. Let’s get you inside,” he said it all bluntly, anger reverberating in his tone. Barbara gasped as he helped her up, even though he was gentle. Robin was glaring at her as if the GCPD arriving was her fault. It surprised Barbara that he was so mad at all. He was supposed to be quite nice and chatty. She’d heard from her dad and had seen him in news reports. Usually, it was hard to shut the Boy Wonder up from his excited chatter, but the boy in front of her was just filled with glares.

Barbara wrapped her arms around her chest then hissed as she put too much pressure on her ribs.

Robin noticed and did a double-take. He scratched his ear and grumbled before taking off his cape. “Here,” he said. “It’s thermal.”

“I’m f-fine,” she said, but she was shivering hard and trying to stop her teeth from chattering.

“You’re hurt. You might go into delayed shock,” he pointed out. “Just keep yourself warm.”

He didn’t leave her with an option, throwing the warm cape around her. Her insides still felt cavernous. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Sleet began to fall around them, and Barbara tried to open the batmobile door, but it was locked. “The car door has biosecurity. You won’t be able to open it if your biometrics aren’t on the system.” He leant over and opened it for her. She turned around to face Robin. They were almost nose to nose, the rain pouring between them. She was trapped between him and the car, and he wasn’t threatening her, but he was blocking her from leaving.

“How mad is Batman?” she asked.

Robin’s lip twitched. “You sort of ruined our operation tonight,” he said. “But you did find The Moth Man. So, I don’t know. Fifty-fifty chance he’ll forgive you? But, I don’t recommend doing it again.”

“Killer Moth,” she murmured.

Robin co*cked his head curiously, then understanding dawned on his features. “Killer Moth,” he echoed back wistfully. “Radioactive moth bite?”

“Batman enthusiast who chose bugs instead of mammals... I’m guessing. He’s a rich guy named Cameron van Cleer. Works a lot in antiquities and stupid art.”

“Stupid art?”

“It’s... a long story.”

“Seems like you have a few.” Robin nodded for her to get into the car, and Barbara wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “I don’t want you getting sick on top of all sorts of injured, so I’ll turn on the heater so you can get dry.” Barbara sighed and slipped into the backseat. Robin bent over and stuck his wet head inside, pressing something in the centre console that started up the seat warmers, and a giant gust of heat hit her in the face. “Don’t press any buttons. Just sit and wait for Batman and your dad to finish their yelling match.”

“Yelling match?” she asked.

“Batman didn’t appreciate the lack of warning that there was a hit out on him,” Robin sighed. He looked Barbara up and down. “Neither do I.”

“Oh... Okay,” she murmured.

Instead of leaving, Robin hung off the car door, just staring at her. “It’s not a game, you know.”

“Huh?”

“This thing we do. It’s not… People die, Barbara. People get hurt. It’s not always fun.”

“Who said I was doing this for fun?” she asked, her voice tinged with anger.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this. I’m just saying it’s not a game. It’s serious.”

“I did this because my best friend was kidnapped,” she snapped, glaring at him. Robin slipped backward, hiding his face more in the shadows. “And I couldn’t just sit back and watch someone I love get killed!” Then she remembered Dick and shook her head. “God, did Dick get out? They said he escaped but–”

“He’s safe.” Robin had the same white coverings over his eyes that Batman did, and they shone in the darkness as he reached down and took her hand. Barbara was stunned as his fingers intertwined with hers, and he squeezed. “He was worried about you. Petrified. If something had happened to you… he would have always blamed himself.”

“Nothing bad…” Robin’s lips cut off Barbara. It only lasted a few seconds. He ducked down into the car and chastely pecked her then pulled back and shut the door. She just stayed seated, staring at Robin’s back as he retreated into the warehouse again.

Barbara had never been kissed before.

Robin had kissed her.

What?

More police arrived on the scene, and Barbara watched her father walk to his car to pick something up before heading back inside. The uniformed officers started to spread out and collect evidence from around the place while the detectives paced and patrolled, looking for things out of place to catalogue.

If only dad could see me now, she thought glumly. Jim wouldn’t be proud of her or even happy with what she’d done that night. On the contrary, he’d be horrified that his little girl had done anything so stupid. However, even though she could see how horrible her idea of running out and playing hero was, she had no regrets. She thought of Dick and how he’d been captive in the dark for hours. But he was scared for you.

Robin’s words sounded genuine enough. But that kiss… She touched her lips, frowning. Why had Robin kissed her?

Her head started to spin as a headache formed behind her eyes, and she wasn’t sure if it was the excruciating pain that was beginning to build up inside of her body or the flush she felt when she thought of how brief his lips had been on hers. She’d always had a crush on Robin, but it was the same way she’d had a crush on any celebrity. Barbara had never deluded herself into thinking she could end up with him. Her head spun again, and she rested her forehead on the cool glass.

Maybe sleep it off, she thought, letting her eyes shut with Robin’s warm cape still wrapped around her.

It felt as if she’d just closed her eyes when two swooshes made her sit upright again, and she saw Batman and Robin had landed on either side of the car. The doors opened, and they got inside, Robin shaking out the rain from his hair. Both were soaking wet in their suits, and Robin moved and adjusted the heat levels in the car. “Well, that’s going to be hard to explain,” Robin said.

Batman didn’t answer. She couldn’t see his eyes under his mask, so she was completely unsure whether he was staring at her through the rear-view mirror or not, but it felt as if his eyes were on her. He stretched back and handed her her backpack and the police helmet. “Here,” he said.

“Thanks.” Barbara took her things, hands trembling probably from the pain. “For… rescuing me too.”

“Hmm.” Batman started the car and reversed the vehicle. “Did you call Leslie?”

Barbara was confused. “Who’s–?”

“I’m talking to Robin,” he said, voice cold but authoritative, and even though she mostly dried up from the rain, she felt the iciness of it drip down her back.

“Ah, yeah. She’s on her way,” Robin answered awkwardly.

“Good.”

The rest of the car ride was silent. Barbara was far too scared to ask anyone where they were going, and no one in the car seemed to want to tell her. All she knew was they were driving out to Bristol County. It was just passed Gotham Estates, and it mainly was woods. She’d been on a drive through there once with her parents. They’d like to do stuff like that when she was a kid. Long Sunday afternoon drives through the countryside.

She recognised one of the paths they were on. It led down to the plunge pool at the bottom of Bristol Falls. Gotham wasn’t notoriously known for its tourism, so the fact they had a waterfall in their woods was also quite hush, hush. Barbara sat up in her seat as Batman drove them deeper and deeper into the woods towards the falls.

He took a sharp turn just at the water, going off the track and driving around the lake but also, Barbara realised there was a new track. Not obvious. There were no apparent signs that there was another road, but also, there was nothing there to stop a car from driving over the dirt. Barbara wondered if she should be afraid of Batman for the first time in her life. Where was he taking her? Where were they going? Why were they driving towards the rock cliffs next to the waterfall?

“Batman?” she whispered as they sped up to the rockface. Neither Robin nor Batman seemed bothered by it. “Batman…?!” she said, louder and more urgently.

“Just put your seatbelt on,” Robin said, looking over his shoulder. “It’ll all be over in a minute.”

“Robin,” Batman scolded as he hit the accelerator, going faster towards the wall, and Barbara screeched, falling back into her seat. She was clambering for the seat belt when she caught Batman’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. This time she knew he was looking at her because he had stopped glowering and was trying to be reassuring. “He’s teasing you. We’re fine. Watch.”

Batman hit a switch on the car’s ceiling, and the rockface disintegrated in front of her eyes. No, not disintegrated. The rockface split open, and rocks rumbled and tumbled as the cliffside opened enough to let through the Batmobile. The car dove into the depths of the cliff, and the road beneath them changed from dirt to rock.

There was no crash, no fall, no nothing, and Barbara spun around in her seat the minute they crossed the mountains gates and watched as they closed by up behind her. “You… You… You have a cave?” she shouted, filled with terror and excitement. “The Batcave is real? It’s not just on the computer…? Are your servers down here?”

Batman still wasn’t budging on his cone of silence when it came to answering her questions, and they drove deeper and deeper into the cave system, then popped out into a wide-open cavern.

The Batcave.

Her eyes drank it all in. Barbara had been following Batman with her dad forever. She recognised the robotic T-Rex from Murray Hart’s Dinosaur Island theme park. The Giant Penny from the first grand larceny he stopped by Joseph Coyne, aka the Penny Pincher. Joker’s giant card, left at an assortment of crimes, seemed to have duplicates amongst his collection.

They drove the car onto a platform, and Batman got out of the car followed by Robin. Neither of them waited for Barbara, but she supposed she was expected to get out too. She did, staggering as she did so because of the amount of pain she was in. She realised she hadn’t catalogued all her injuries from being tossed around in the van earlier, but that didn’t matter at that point.

She was in the Batcave.

The platform she was on was like a grill, hanging in mid-air on a series of steel suspension ropes. She took another step forward, and her body was in so much pain she fell to a knee. Robin quickly came to her side, but she was staring at the series of computer servers, the gym mats, and the laboratory. “This is amazing,” she breathed out as Robin looked her over.

“Where does it hurt?” Robin asked.

Everywhere. The painkillers had officially worn off, and everything ached and screamed at Barbara to lay down. But she was too stunned to do anything but gawk and spin slowly, taking it all in. Or maybe that was just the shock Robin had been talking about earlier. The cave - the Batcave, had gym equipment - weights, treadmill, bicycle - and of course it did. Where else were heroes going to train? There was a table, eight chairs, up in a corner. She imagined the kinds of heroes that would gather there. Batman, Superman, Flash,Wonder Woman...

She thought for the second time ifmy dad could see me now as her vision began to grow black around the edges. “Batman, she’s shaking,” Robin’s voice came from somewhere beyond her field of vision, but she could feel his hands on her shoulders.

“Move,” Batman commanded, and Robin did. Then Barbara was up in Batman’s arms, still staring at everything around her. It was like she was in a church or a monument. She felt this holy reverence for everything around her.

“I think I love it here,” she murmured.

“What’s Leslie’s ETA?” Batman asked.

“A told me he went upstairs to collect her.”

“Go check. Make sure he doesn’t come down here...” Barbara locked eyes with Batman above her, and his jaw was set in a line of concern as he trailed his eyes down her, assessing her. “Yet.”

“A,” Barbara said, her voice growing fainter in her ears. She tipped her head to the side, staring at the Batmobile. “He’s your helper. He’s on the computers sometimes.”

“Yes, he does. Barbara, I need you to open your eyes,” Batman said, his voice gravelly in her ears. “You’ve hit your head, and it looks like you have a severe concussion.”

“Have I?”

“Yes.”

Barbara hummed back, and Batman’s hands - not his gauntlets - were stripping her of her cape and boots.

“How do you know who A is?” he asked, clicking a finger next to her ear.

Barbara’s eyes flew open, and she was staring right into Batman’s eyes. His inky white eyes. He must have updated the mixture he used in his masks because she could no longer make out his irises like when she was a kid. “Um…” she answered slowly, licking her lips. “I… hacked…” she slurred. She was losing her train of thought very quickly all of a sudden. The last zip of adrenaline as they drove into the rockface had taken a lot of out her. “… the batarang.”

“That’s impressive. Tell me how you did it.”

“Re… reversed the… tracking system… You have GPS in the… ‘rang... That’s how you found me, right?”

“Yes. That is how I found you.”

“Thought so. See, I’m smart.”

She saw his face again, and he was smiling softly at her. “You are impressive. There are only a handful of people who are capable of hacking my security.”

Barbara nodded her head. “I know. When I opened the door inside, I made sure only I had the key. I set up a secondary security system… just for me. But I don’t have my own servers, so I piggybacked off yours.” She was in a medical area of the cave, but Barbara tipped her head back, her eyes searching for something. “Where are your servers?”

Batman held her chin in his hand and tipped her head to the right. He moved out of the way, and Barbara saw a door on the far end of the cave. “Just through there.”

She beamed up at him. “I don’t know how you never noticed… I control half of them.”

Something changed in Batman’s expression. “I have noticed my data storage deplete. I thought I was having issues with my systems and was looking to have them upgraded.”

Barbara hummed. “You should... probably do that anyway. I didn’t want anyone else to exploit...” Barbara felt her eyes slipping shut, and Batman cupped her cheek with his large hand, covered in latex now, rubbing her cheek.

“Look at me,” he commanded.

Obeying, she opened her eyes and tried to track what she was saying. “Didn’t want anyone else to exploit the system the way I did. I wasn’t... trying to... be bad. I just wanted to see.”

There was a grunt and whirring, and Batman and Barbara could hear an elevator descending the cavern. Batman looked over his shoulder and let out a small sigh. “Doctor Thompkins is coming. She can treat you and make sure you’re okay.”

“I think I need a new cast,” she mentioned, lifting her aching arm.

“She can do that too.”

Barbara sighed, and her blinking slowed as she tried to fight off sleep again. “Batman?” she mumbled. “I know it was probably... dumb, but… I’m glad I saved Dick Grayson. If anything happened to him… I don’t think I’d be okay.”

Batman stared at her, some sort of emotion pinching his face, but none that Barbara could place. His hand went to her hair and wiped some off her face. “We’ll talk about it later. What you did… I understand. But it can’t happen again.”

“But–”

“We will talk later,” he said again, then moved back as a greying woman appeared in Barbara’s vision.

“You know, there are easier ways to get a follow-up appointment, Miss Gordon.” Barbara assumed this woman was Doctor Leslie Thompkins, the one who had patched her up the night before too.

“This seemed easier,” she said, grinning. Her vision began to fade again. “I don’t think… I can stay…” With that, she fainted.

Chapter 7: The let down

Chapter Text

For the second time in as many days, Barbara woke up with arms wrapped around her. Only instead of the gut swooping she had the day before from being carried to her rooftop, she could hear the gentle hum of an elevator. She opened her eyes and saw Batman’s cowl, although his face was weary, and stubble was poking out from his chin.

Barbara hummed and cleared her throat, and The Batman moved his head to look at her. “You’re awake,” he said. Barbara groaned and let her eyes fall shut again against the harsh elevator light. Seeming to understand, Batman moved his cape around her head, hiding her from the light that burnt her sensitive eyes. “We’re almost in your apartment. Leslie told me to drive you straight to the door. You can’t be jostled.”

“My chest hurts,” she complained.

“It should. You broke a rib. It punctured your lung. It was a miracle you managed to keep breathing as long as you did. We had to perform surgery on you.”

Barbara’s eyebrows shot up to her head. “Surgery?”

Batman nodded. “You should be okay. Doctor Leslie is expecting you in three days. There is some damage. The police helmet you’d been wearing when the car rolled kept you safe from most of the impact. You still have a concussion, but it was better than we thought. You should heal up well, so long as you keep icing and heating your injuries. You’re lucky.” They got out on her level, and Batman withdrew his cape from over her eyes and to her door. He let himself in with her keys, just like the last time.

“No hot cocoa?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“No. Not tonight. I’m afraid the milk might be a bad mix with all the painkillers you’re on,” he answered, taking her straight to her room.

“I still haven’t figured out how you did that,” she murmured as he put her down on her bed, over her blankets. It was then Barbara noticed that she was wearing pyjamas, but not her own. They were grey and blue. She picked up her arm covered in a brand-new cast and inspected it as Batman pulled her blankets down and covered her up. Robin hadn’t written on it.

“That was A,” he said.

“A broke into my house and made us cocoa?”

“Yes. He’s my assistant, but no one knows about him, not even your father, so don’t go around telling anyone.”

“A is a hell of an assistant.”

Batman smiled a genuine smile. “He is.”

Barbara pointed up at his mouth. “I made you laugh.”

Batman didn’t acknowledge her. “I’m going to get you some water,” he said instead. “You might have a dry mouth.”

Barbara did, so she was quite grateful. She stared up at the ceiling and yawned, stretching and testing the limits of her body. It all hurt so much more. Even the stretching didn’t give her comfort. She groaned and shrivelled up into herself. Trying again, she tried to find all the pulls and pinches that would annoy her. By the time Batman came back, Barbara knew where every bruise, break and fracture in her body was located and the ways to move to avoid them. She winced as he slipped set a pair of pills on the bedside. “Is heroing always this painful?”

“Yes,” he said bluntly and put her jug and glass beside the pills.

Barbara hadn’t expected such a direct answer. She squished her face up. “It’s going to be hard to hide from my dad. But I’ll manage it somehow.”

Batman shook his head. “No, you won’t. You will not be going out again.”

The silence as they stared at each other rang in her ears. She swore she could hear a high pitched screech in it as her brain short-circuited. Her body was frozen, and she shook her head. “Wait… what?” She racked her brain, trying to think of whether or not she’d missed something. She knew Batman and Robin weren’t happy with her, but at the same time… “But I found Dick. I figured out Killer Moth was Cameron van Cleer.”

Batman looked mildly surprised with the later information but was shaking his head. “We were following Richard Grayson. We knew where he was. Black Canary was watching him, and I was tracking him. We were waiting to see where the second location the Moth Man took his victims was because we knew he kept the device he used to wire money. We needed to find that to have him arrested to get the appropriate legal documents to return the money, and he destroyed it the minute he saw you. What you did means we don’t know where the money came from or how it ended up there.”

It took a moment for Barbara to follow what he was saying. “You let Dick get kidnapped… as a trap?”

“No, Richard was kidnapped. We found him and were keeping him safe from a distance.”

“He was alone!”

“Barbara, that’s not the point. You can’t go out and play hero on your own.”

“I’m not playing hero,” she sneered, sitting up. Her body protested, and her head spun, but she was furious at what Batman was saying. “I saved Dick.”

“He was fine.”

“I didn’t know that!” she snapped and pointed at him. “And it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m not playing at anything. I want to be a hero. Like you. Like Robin.”

“You’re not like us. You don’t have the training or the equipment or the skill–”

Barbara laughed. “Excuse me. I broke into the GCPD evidence locker. Twice. And I could’ve stolen a motorbike if I knew how to ride one, but I couldn’t, so I stole a Vespa instead.”

“You’re the daughter of a GCPD detective.”

“I know that this wasn’t Cameron van Cleer’s first go at this,” she said. Batman frowned, and she felt a jolt of success. “That building he had Dick in. It’s new. It doesn’t belong in Burnside. He must have built it with the money he was making from stealing art.”

“Wait? Stealing art?”

“He was the one at the Gotham History Museum. He takes artefacts and modern art. Stuff that looks like it has no value but is really very expensive,” she rambled, her mind running a million miles an hour. “He had a massive collection in that came in from Chicago. His bank probably travels through there, and if I looked up the shipping manifests, I’m sure I could find it.”

The stunned expression on Batman’s face would have been funny if Barbara wasn’t so overwhelmed. She wanted to be a hero. She needed to be a hero. And suddenly, she knew she also needed Batman’s help. Without him, she wouldn’t last long. “Train me,” she begged. She got up out of bed, wincing as she did, and Batman snapped out of his stupor and moved to stop her. He managed to grab her before she stood and knelt in front of her as she clapped her hands together to plead with him. “Please. I will do whatever you say. I just want to be like you. I want to help people and do good things and jump from buildings without being scared.”

“You don’t know what you’re-”

“I tricked a gang banger with a gun into giving me information, then stole his gun from him,” she blurted out. “I did that. By myself! If you could train me-”

“You did what?” Batman sounded angry. “When?”

“Today!” She looked at the clock on her bedside that was ticking a little past three in the morning. “Yesterday,” she amended. “I also hacked into your computers using nothing but a batarang and my second-hand laptop… actually, where is my laptop?”

“Confiscated. Along with your outfit and all the stolen batarangs.” Batman stood up and crossed his arms over his chest. “Miss Gordon, what I said yesterday morning still stands. What you did was beyond reckless, and you could have died. You almost did. You do not have the training required–”

“Then train me!” she repeated, feeling frustrated at having to repeat herself.

“No,” Batman said, voice hollow. “I don’t need a partner.”

“You have Robin! Why can’t I–”

“Robin’s situation isn’t the same. Robin is my… son.” He hesitated as he said it as if still testing the word in his mouth. “Your father is my friend. I couldn’t–”

Maybe it was the painkillers, or perhaps the exhaustion from her day, but Barbara burst into tears. “It felt so good,” she cried, wiping her eyes as they began to fall. “I was scared out of my mind half the time, but… But I wasn’t… It was like being alive. I didn’t know I could do those things. I can do it. I could be a great hero. I always thought I could, but now I know it, and I didn’t know how good that would feel. I want to feel that all the time!”

Batman stopped, not moving as Barbara drew her hands up to her face and cried into them. She sobbed, and Batman huffed, staring at her with a pained expression. Barbara was scared. She wanted to feel that good again. She wanted to fly on her own, without being frightened, and Batman had cut down her hope of ever having any of it.

He moved and sat next to her, and Barbara didn’t stop crying, and he didn’t comfort her. He was patiently waiting for her tears to run out. When her tears started to pain her, her head throbbing, Barbara tipped her head against his arm. “My head hurts,” she groaned between the tears. “Everything hurts.” Batman hushed her and took off his gauntlets. Finally, he gave in and lifted his arm and wrapped it around her. Barbara shifted closer and wrapped her arms around his neck, and Batman let her bury her face under his jaw. The armour at his neck was softer than the rest of his cowl, so he could turn his head, but the leather and kevlar were still cool to the touch, and that coldness felt good against her forehead. She sighed, the tears subsiding, and Batman rubbed his hand between her shoulder blades, helping the pain ease too. Finally, her tears refused to spill. She felt calmer, but the pain was still there, beating in time with her pulse.

Clearing his throat, Batman’s voice rumbled in her ear as he spoke. “You are good,” he said. “A natural. I’m not saying I couldn’t train you. But, I can’t let you. It’s too dangerous. If anything happened to you, your father would never trust me again, and our trust in one another is what keeps this city on its feet. Tonight… he was supposed to shoot me on sight. But he didn’t because he knows I’m not the bad guy. If I took you in and something worse happened to you than what already happened to you tonight, I’d lose that trust forever. I know you’re old enough to understand that.”

Barbara hiccupped, wiping her eyes and lifting her head to look at him. He looked disappointed and… sad. She wiped her eyes and sniffed, and looked at the symbol on his chest. It made her chest hurt as she remembered the pure joy she’d felt as she’d painted it on her t-shirt. “When my mom left, you told me I can either let it not be okay or do whatever it takes to make it okay. Or make it okay enough that you’re comfortable in it. That was exactly what you said. I remember it, word for word. I would whisper it to myself every night. I was home alone, waiting for my dad and looking after my brother. I chanted it when I was making birthday wishes.

“I did what you said, Batman, but I couldn’t make it okay. I tried. It was okay enough for a while, but then it wasn’t, and then okay enough kept getting too far away. It was harder and harder to make it okay enough. I wanted to be something more than lonely because that’s what I am. I’m always lonely and… and I don’t know what to do anymore.” She looked up at him, desperate to make him understand. “When I was out tracking Dick and following the signs and the clues… when I was fighting the goons. I didn’t feel bad anymore. It felt right. This feels right. Being a hero makes me feel good, and I know it’s dangerous, and I know my dad would flip, but… Please, train me.” Her eyes spilt over with tears again and the Batman barely flinched. She wiped her cheeks as anger built inside of her, amplified by the silence. “Say something!” she yelled, her small voice tearing.

But he didn’t say a word.

Batman leant across to the bedside table and picked up the pills and the glass of water. He passed the water to her first, and then after Barbara took a shaky sip, he deposited two pills into her hands. Batman watched her take the pills, and it took a moment, but she began to feel sleepy. The drugs were stronger than anything she’d had before. Her head spun.

Her eyes felt heavy and sunk low as her head tipped down onto Batman’s chest. “I don’t like being alone.”

The arms around her were moving, taking off gauntlets. “You’re not alone, Barbara.” The rough gravel in his voice disappeared, and he sounded more human. More familiar. She couldn’t place it, but… she knew whoever it was keeping her safe, as a hand pressed into her hair. “You need sleep. Close your eyes. I won’t go until sun….”

Barbara didn’t even hear him finish the sentence before the darkness took her.

The next day was the worst.

Barbara’s entire body felt like a giant bruise. Every muscle burnt with overexertion. Every twitch pained her.

Her alarm went off for school, but she didn’t go. She heard James come home from the Yankovic’s - she assumed - early in the morning. When he knocked on her door, asking for breakfast and she didn’t go to help him. She didn’t even get up to check he went to school.

There was no trace of Batman in her room except for a batarang that looked quite different to the one she used to have, and she guessed it wouldn’t have any ports she could hack in it. She shoved it under her pillow, fingering the sharp blade after she drifted off to more pain meds.

At some point in the day, her father had come home and checked on her. Surprisingly he didn’t ask her why she wasn’t at school. Instead, he kissed her cheek while she was semi-awake and cupped her face in his palm. “We’ll talk when you get up,” he murmured. “We’ll figure it all out. I promise, Pumpkin.”

At around four she woke up when the doorbell rang. She was home alone again. She had no idea where James was, and she thought she should look for him but also couldn’t bring herself to move. She figured she was home alone or her dad would have answered it, but she hadn’t ordered a pizza, so she tried to ignore it. But the buzzer kept going off in two-minute intervals, not letting her go back to sleep. It was only when her phone started ringing non-stop in tandem, that she finally lifted her head from the pillow.

“What?” she moaned as she answered her phone.

“Let me in!” Dick’s annoyed voice shout through the speaker.

She groaned. “Okay, okay.” Barbara got up and shuffled to the buzzer. She opened the downstairs door and unlocked the front door before hobbling over to the couch and dropping into the cushions. Dick let himself in, locking the door behind him. He jumped onto the couch seat next to her, somehow managing to bounce without jostling her at all.

“You’re an idiot,” he told her as he dragged her in close for a hug. Barbara went with it, leaning her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes. “But thank you for trying to rescue me. I’m sorry I left you there. I flew out of the van and couldn’t get to the backdoors. I went straight up the front foyer and called Bruce, who called Batman and….”

“As long as you’re okay,” she said, squeezing Dick back as hard as she could without feeling the bruises. “I was so scared when I saw they’d taken you. What the hell were you doing? It looked like you were taunting them on the video.”

“Video?”

Barbara flushed. “Yeah, video… I… hacked Batman’s computers. Did you know he has the entire Manor wired with cameras?”

Dick’s eyes widened in surprise. “Um… I… no… he… I mean, we have cameras,” he said, voice shaky. “He must have hacked into them. I doubt Bruce let him install cameras in the Manor?”’

“Why didn’t you hide?” she asked. She couldn’t move, her body too tired, so instead of watching his face, she stared at the world rise and fall in time with his chest. He was wearing his Gotham Academy varsity jacket. He was on the school’s gymnastics team with her, and he would have been team captain if he showed up to school more, but he was never there. But he’s always here for me.

Hand carding through Barbara’s hair, Dick sighed. “I don’t know why I didn’t hide. But, I’m fine. Really. It wasn’t too bad. I mostly just got bored in the dark, staring at nothingness. I think I napped for most of it.”

“I hacked into Batman’s computer system, stole equipment from the GCPD, bartered with some guys I’m pretty sure were drug dealers, hacked my way into the parking garage with an elevator key, fought off the hired help, got kidnapped and shot Killer Moth with his own cocoon gun,” Barbara listed off, pretending to sound bored.

Dick scoffed. “Sounds like a slow afternoon.”

She laughed with him, but the exertion hurt her, and she groaned, and Dick’s laughter died down to sympathetic chuckles as he rubbed her arm. “Sorry, I won’t make you laugh.” He pressed his lips against her cheek, keeping an arm around her. The spot where his mouth touched burnt with the heat from his mouth. She held down a shudder as Dick pulled away. “Thank you for rescuing me. Please don’t do it again, but… I get it. I would have done the same for you if it had been you.”

“It’s because we’re good friends,” she mumbled, eyes getting heavy.

“Huh?” Dick asked.

“We’re… good friends. As in we’regood to each other. We take care of each other, and we’re good people. We deserve to be good and safe.” It may not have made complete sense to Dick, but it sounded like the right thing to say in Barbara’s painkiller addled mind. “Batman won’t train me,” she complained, as her eyes got heavy and shut. “I asked. He said that I’m good, but my dad would be mad.”

His fingers in her hair were massaging her skull and felt so good. It was all she was aware of in the seconds before he spoke. “Good,” he said.

Barbara opened her eyes and looked up at him. “But… But that’s what I want. I want to… be a hero.”

“Barbara, it’s too dangerous,” Dick whispered. She frowned. Her eyes were scratchy. She rubbed at them to keep herself awake. “I was so scared, Barbara. I thought… I thought of all the bad stuff that could happen to you because of me and… Please, don’t do anything like that ever again. I don’t know what I’d do if anything bad ever happened to you.”

His big blue eyes were begging her, just like she’d begged Batman. Something tugged in her chest, almost painfully. “I can’t promise that,” she murmured, her eyes glazing with tears. He lifted his hand and brushed one from her cheek.

Dick was studying her, so she studied him back. He was so different from all of their friends. Dick had callouses on his hands - from trapeze and gym and growing up in a circus. He had muscles under the baby fat he carried around his chin and cheeks. “I know you haven’t been acting like yourself lately,” Dick whispered. “Is it… about your mom?”

Barbara swallowed thickly and looked at the wall above their couch. There was a wall of photographs of her and her brother growing up. They hadn’t updated it since her mother left. None of their apartment had been, and Barbara Senior had liked to decorate. Time wore the leather couch and the dining table in a way she would never have let happen. Crystals were missing in the chandelier from when James had played handball in the dining area, and Barbara knew the entire thing would have been replaced by something more expensive if Barbara Senior had been around. But because Jim never tried redecorating or changing anything, Barbara Senior was still present on the wall of photos, which meant Barbara Junior had spent many nights staring at that photo, wondering what if… “Do you ever wake up and remember your parents are gone?” Barbara asked. Dick flinched, and Barbara heard her own voice in her ear and how bad she sounded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have….”

“No, it’s fine, I just didn’t expect….” Dick trailed off, a frown on his face as he thought. “I mean… yes, and no. I think about them every day, but sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing it. Like when I get a good grade, and think how proud my mom would have been, or when I land a trick my dad used to do, I try to remember how he would have taught me to do it and I can imagine him showing me. In that second, it doesn’t always click that they’re gone, just that they’re not there in that second. But yeah, sometimes it hits me that… they’re dead, and it knocks me back a bit.”

Barbara stared at the photograph and frowned. “I think sometimes I wake up and have to choose to be happy instead of actually being happy, and I think that makes me unhappy. I don’t want to choose to be happy. I just want to be happy.”

Dick reached out his hand and wiped at her cheek. Barbara blinked, not realising a stray tear had slipped out of the corner of her eye. “I choose to be happy every day, too,” he said.

She frowned and raised her eyebrow. “How do you do that?”

Dick shrugged. “Sometimes I wake up, and my parents, my aunt, and my cousin… they’re dead all over again. It’s like yesterday was the day they died, and I have to go through all the stages of grief from the beginning,” he said, voice wavering. “I have to mourn them again, and I have to do it quickly so I can stand up and breathe normally. It either gets harder or easier every time, but it never really goes away. I have to choose to accept it and be happy with the things I got out of them dying. Bruce, Alfred… you. I get to have the best days of my life without them, and it sucks sometimes, but sometimes it just… is. Absolutely nothing in this world can make that pain completely disappear. So I have to be okay with that, or I’ll lose my mind.”

“…you can do whatever it takes to make it okay…”

“But what if… what if you get the chance to be more than okay?” Barbara asked. “What if me being a hero makes me feel better than okay?”

The pained expression on Dick’s face was what got her. He looked so conflicted, and Barbara couldn’t figure out why. “Let me help you find a way to feel better that isn’t going to get you killed,” Dick said, his words fast and desperate. “Please, Babs. If anything happened to you… I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

Her fingers were under her chin, laid across his chest. Through her skin and the thin t-shirt he wore, she could feel the soft thump-thump of his heartbeat beneath her fingers. For the first time since the incident at Gotham History Museum, Barbara felt like herself again in his arms. The strangest part about it was that Dick had never held her like that before. It made her feel warm all over. Not like when Batman or her Dad had held her, when she felt safe. Dick’s hug made her feel… something she couldn’t put her finger on. Dick made her feel good in a way she couldn’t put into words, and he was asking her to stay out of the hero business, and for some strange reason, she felt compelled to listen to him, as well as the burning need to defy him.

“Robin kissed me,” she said, out of the blue, surprising herself. She wasn’t sure even why it came to mind, but something was tugging at her that made her desperate to tell him.

The hand that was rubbing soothing circles on her arm faltered. Dick took a moment then continued the slow movement. “Really?”

“Hmm,” she murmured, eyes darting down to Dick’s mouth and back up to his eyes. “I don’t know why… It was… a bit weird, now that I think about it.”

“You don’t like him?” Dick asked, his voice filled with nerves. He was staring at her lips too. She knew he was. Her breath caught in her throat when she noticed.

“It’s sort of strange, isn’t it? Considering he was dating Ariel,” she smirked a little, swallowing because even the joke couldn’t dampen the slow realisation thatDick was staring at her lips.

Dick snorted, his expression still nervous. “She’s going to be pissed her boyfriend cheated. You should definitely ask him out and get him to show up at school.”

Barbara’s heart fluttered, and Dick’s heart skipped beneath her fingers. Thud-dum-thud… She felt too tired to move, but she shifted anyway, straightening her spine painfully to get more reach. “I don’t think so. He’s nice, but I think there’s someone else I like more.”

“Yeah…?” he said slowly. His eyes darted up and down between her mouth and her eyes, and her face and her hands sliding up onto his shoulder. Thud-Thud … thud-thud… thud-dum-thud… “Who?”

Barbara blinked slowly through the pain in her body that Dick had been easing with small little shoulder rubs and fingers in her scalp and the hundreds of ways his presence just made her feel better. His eyes wavered with uncertainty. He leant forward and waited, closing half the gap to her lips and Barbara closed it, pressing her mouth to his. Neither of them moved. She kept her lips still against his, until she pulled back, puckering them and an unstuck noise coming from the small smack of her lips. They stared at each other, Dick’s breaths rapid in his chest.

She blinked once, looking into his blue eyes. Twice… Dick’s eyes had light flecks of blue in the middle. The outsides were rimmed in navy. It was like his eyes were the dawn sky, the sun rising from the centre. Her eyes blinked three times in a row, each time opening slower. Behind her eyes, she could see endless blue skies. Her head fell against his chest, and she felt him let go of all the breath in his lungs as his chin came to rest on the top of her head. She could feel the width of his smile on her scalp, and her lip quirked up too.

Dick shuddered, letting out a quiet nervous peel of chuckles. Barbara’s heart soared in her chest at the feeling and snuggled in closer. It was short but sweet, and Dick pulled back with a soft expression. “Sweet dreams, Babs,” he murmured.

Barbara hummed, burying herself deeper into Dick’s side. “Can we watch Sorcerer’s Stone and have a sleepover?” she mumbled.

He lowered them both down on the couch. Barbara was squashed against his side, but he maneuvered her around gently as if he knew exactly where her cuts and bruises were. “Sure. Anything you want… Where’s the DVD?”

But Barbara fell asleep before she could answer.

A faint blue glow came from the DVD menu as Dick and Barbara were shaken awake by Jim Gordon. “Hey, kids. Time for bed. Dick, you can take James’ bed.” Barbara startled and looked around her, noticing the pillow fort she’d woken up infor the first time. Dick had moved everything in her living room while she was asleep, so the couches were pushed together like a bed, and they were in a nest of soft blankets and pillows. He also must have put Sorcerer’s stone on because she could hear the faint lilt of the Harry Potter theme. Dick had also propped her up with various ice and heat bags, which were discarded on the ground, and she vaguely remembered a strict instruction given to her by Batman and was glad Dick had helped her out. The last thing Barbara became aware of was that Dick had been wrapped around her, holding her like a kid holding onto a toy.

She was slightly embarrassed about it all when Jim woke them up. But Dick helped Barbara stand with barely a blush and then went to James’s bedroom just as Jim asked with a small nod of acknowledgement to Barbara. “I’ll make breakfast,” he offered.

“Don’t you have school in the morning?”

“I was kidnapped, sir. Bruce said I could have the week off so long as I’m here or at home.”

Jim nodded once, kindly and curtly and ruffled Dick’s hair. “Thanks, kid. Glad to have you back.”

“I had my own personal hero looking out for me, I think,” he said, winking at Barbara. He went into James’s room while Jim helped shuffle Barbra and some of her blankets back into her bedroom.

“Where is James?” Barbara asked as Jim helped tuck her in.

He pulled the blankets from outside over her and sat beside her on the mattress as she bunkered in. “With your grandparents. I realised you weren’t feeling well yesterday and asked them to pick him up from school and take him for the week. I figured you could use some time off from handling James.”

Barbara smiled. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, Pumpkin,” Jim said with a long sigh.

“That’s my line. I yelled at you, Dad. I shouldn’t have. I was just….” She was trying to get the words out to explain how she had been feeling the day before when she snapped. Because a part of her had felt relief when she let out all her pent up aggression, but she still said some mean things.

“Under a lot of pressure?” Jim answered for her. There was a beat, and Barbara hadn’t expected that answer. “You were out of line with some things, but some of them, I deserved. Or at least, I deserved to hear them.”

In her memories, she could hear herself yelling at her dad over Sarah Essen, and she flushed and was mortified by it. “I’ll apologise to Detective Essen,” she said.

Jim shook his head. “You don’t need to do that. I already have. I handled it all wrong. I… I should have told you about her. But at night when I’m not here… It’s not because I’ve gone to her place. I’m working on a case, or I’m chasing someone down. I’m never not here when you’re here alone because I’ve gone out on a date, Barb. But, I have gone out on dates. I won’t pretend like I haven’t. And I am dating Sarah. I just didn’t think you had to know about it.”

Barbara’s stomach flipped as she thought about her next question. She wanted to know, and she knew that there wasn’t ever going to be an opportunity like this to ask again. “Daddy… you’ve known Sarah for a really long time,” she whispered. Jim frowned and looked down at the bed, his own blush rising in his cheeks. “Is she…? Was she…? Is that why Mommy left?”

Jim didn’t say anything for a long time. Barbara’s eyes stung with tears as she waited for his answer. She didn’t want to say anything in case he decided not to tell her, and she really had to know the answer. When Barbara was eight – the year after her mother left – Barbara figured out that something was going on between Sarah and her father. Since then, she’d constantly wondered about what involvement their relationship had in her mother’s decision to leave, but she’d never pursued that thought before, and now it was glaringly obvious Jim had wondered too.

“I…” he began and cut himself off. He cleared his throat and shook his head. “I’m not going to lie to you. I think you’re too smart for it, so here it goes. As far as I knew, your mother couldn’t have known. It wasn’t… Sarah and I weren’t doing anything wrong back then, but we weren’t doing the right thing either.”

“I don’t get it,” Barbara whispered.

Jim shrugged. “It’s not always black and white, the wrong and the right. Sarah and I had feelings for one another. I still loved your mom, but she was mad at me all the time for the same things you’re mad at me for.” He looked even more disheartened by that, reaching out and running a hand through her hair. “Sarah and I… I’m only telling you this because I hope you’re old enough to understand… We both had feelings for each other, and we weren’t hiding it from each other. We had many… moments. We went to dinners together, and we said they were for work, but we rarely talked about work while we were there. We acted on our feelings one time, and it was just… a minute. I regretted it immediately, because your mother… I never knew it was possible to care about two people so deeply like that at the same time, but I did. I had to choose, and I chose your mom. After that, Sarah and I stopped interacting at work andI tried to do better at home, but your mother still left. I don’t know if she found out, but Sarah and I only started our relationship a year after she left.”

Barbara knew her dad had trusted her with that information, but it still felt wrong for her to know. It was strange how she hadn’t seen or heard from Barbara Senior in four years, but still, she felt defensive of her. Barbara knew that Sarah wasn’t even thirty yet, and it felt a bit gross having it confirmed for her that he was pursuing a woman twenty-two years his junior. But Jim did look really sorry, and she believed him when he said that he chose Barbara Senior. “Do you love her? Sarah, I mean?”

“I don’t always know,” Jim confessed, his voice rough. “I think so. But we’re different in a lot of ways. Like, I like cigars and whiskey on a Friday night, and she wants to take me to bars to dance. Even when I was her age, I didn’t like bars and dancing.”

Barbara frowned down at her hands. “Did… did Mom like bars and dancing?” she asked.

There was more hesitation in his voice, and Jim sighed. “Yeah. But… different kinds of bars. A different kind of dancing… the kind I didn’t mind.”

Tears sprung up in her eyes, and she knew exactly what her dad was talking about. There were nights when she was really young that her parents still went out to nightclubs, coming back smelling like smoke and whiskey, and her grandmother would scold them and say they were going to kill themselves. Jim would chuckle, helping Barbara Senior out of his trench coat that she’d put around her slinky black dress to stay warm in the cold Gotham winter. “It’s fine, Ma,” Jim would say. “Barbie and I just had some fun.”

Barbara looked away from her dad for the moment, toying with the sheets on the bed. She started to pick apart all the ways Sarah and Barbara Senior were different. Sarah had red hair, and Barbara had blonde, and Sarah was young, and Barbara was only a few years younger than Jim. She wondered what made one better than the other and if it was just the fact that even after Jim had pushed her away, she was the one to stick around. “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

Am I? she wondered. “I guess… I am? But also… no. Maybe that’s why Mom left, but none of that was my fault. Why can’t she just call me for my birthday? Or even Christmas? That part’s not your fault, and that’s the part I’m mad at more.”

If her dad was having an affair, and that’s what made Barbara Senior leave, she still didn’t understand why that meant she had to leave Gotham and never call her again. Jim leant in close to her ear and kissed her forehead, pushing her hair off her face. “You’re my little girl, you know that? You’ll always be my baby, and nothing will ever change how much I love you or how much you mean to me, Pumpkin.” He looked at her cast and then back up at her. “And If you are ever hurt again, you call me straight away.”

Barbara thought of her broken rib and the bruising up and down the side of her body. She didn’t want to lie to her father, but she also knew he would lose it if he found out, and she was too tired to deal with all the questions. “Okay, Daddy,” she murmured, tipping her head down.

“How does it feel?” he asked, eyeing the cast.

Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “Hurts a bit.” She felt like she couldn’t drawer breath in from the broken ribs, but she pushed it down and overcame to try and project a sweet innocent, ordinary girl.

Jim sighed and rubbed his face. “When’s your follow up?”

“Wednesday.”

“Okay. I’ll come with you.”

Barbara blushed. She figured Leslie would keep her lie, but at the same time, she also didn’t believe her dad. “What if something comes up?” she asked.

Jim’s hand went through her hair, and he rubbed her cheek with the pad of her thumb. In his eyes was a warm glow as he stared at her. “I’ll get Harvey to take care of it. On Wednesday, I’m all yours, Pumpkin. I promise, and I’ll try not to break any more promises to you or James. I won’t be very good at it, but I’ll try, okay?”

Barbara’s lip twitched, and she tapped on her dad’s leg. “Can you sleep here?” she asked.

Jim smiled and looked down at her single bed. “It’s going to be a tight fit.”

“That’s okay. I’m pretty small.”

“You kind of are,” Jim murmured, and he kicked off his shoes and took off his jacket, then squished into Barbara’s tiny bed. She laid down half on top of him and sunk into his warm embrace. “I love you, pumpkin.”

“I love you too, Daddy.”

Chapter 8: 10:48

Chapter Text

Barbara’s healing took forever.

Or at least, it felt like forever.

Barbara saw Doctor Leslie Thompkins every two weeks for the rest of winter and most of spring. Her dad went with her to every appointment, and, gratefully, Doctor Thompkins never told Jim what exactly Barbara had been doing the night(s) she got injured. Barbara felt kind of bad because the first night she went there, Jim told off Thompkins for just putting a cast on her and sending Barbara home, and Leslie glared over his shoulder at Barbara while she took the blame. She looked at the rest of Barbara’s injuries while Jim waited outside for her to change into a gown. Leslie was nice, but she was also scary, and Barbara had to promise to help her out around the clinic once her arm was healed to make up for her having a GCPD officer looking too closely at her practice.

Remember to buy her a Christmas present, she had thought at that moment.

When it came to Jim and his promises, he did get a little better coming home at night for the most part. It meant sometimes he was sitting in his room, on the phone or staring at crime scene photos, but he tried to make dinner at least once a week. On the nights he couldn’t be there, he tried very hard to make sure someone was over to help watch James and some nights, he managed to get Mrs Yankovic or to come over and sit with them for a few hours.

It was great for a while. But Barbara was getting to the point where she was sick of eating Mrs Yankovic’s leftover banitsa for breakfast every morning.

And Barbara loved banitsa.

It still gets lonely, she thought, and she thought of Barbara Senior, sitting on the couch, staring at the clock with a perfectly still expression. She was dressed, ready to go out to a ball. It had been some sort of dress-up ball too because her mother was dressed in white gossamer and silk, with glitter and sparkles all over her. Her eyes lashes had white feathers on the end, and her lips were shiny and painted pearlescent, and she had placed rhinestones on her skin.

That night stuck out to Barbara sometimes because Barbara Senior had called a babysitter to watch Barbara and James, and the babysitter had looked after them while she sat there, staring at the clock. The babysitter had been so awkward because of it, and she had sat with Barbara and James in their (at the time) shared room to play a board game.

When the babysitter had to go home, and Jim still wasn’t home at close to one in the morning, Barbara Senior had paid for the girl’s taxi then sat on the couch with Barbara laying on her side, not even taking her heels off. “Your dad is trying,” Barbara Senior had muttered, completely unprompted, still staring at the clock. “I know he is. But he swore on his life he’d be here tonight. That he’d make… just this one.”

She sighed and looked down at Barbara, lifting her chin up to look at her. “You listen to me. If anyone breaks your heart this many times – if he makes you miss out on a ball, while you look so good that the heavens would weep – I will break them. Do you understand? No one gets to make you feel this terrible, Barbara. They will have to go through me to do it.”

Barbara hadn’t understood then. But she had reached across her mother's waist, head nestling in on the soft silk and gossamer because she knew her mother needed comforting, though she wasn’t sure why. “You look beautiful, Mommy.”

“You’re more beautiful, sweetie. Infinitely more beautiful than I will ever be.”

Later Barbara found out that it was the night Two-Face became Two-Face, and the entire city was running rampant trying to find the ex-DA. But that never justified not calling her. But then again, Barbara Senior had broken Barbara’s heart a million times, and she hadn’t been there to protect her from any of it.

Barbara felt guilty.

Her dad was trying, and she was acting ungrateful. Or shefelt ungrateful. So, she tried too. She put on her best efforts to spend time with James and Mrs Yankovic. Her leg got restless all the time, directing her pent-up frustration into a moving body part. There was a clawing in her chest. A desperate dam that needed to break inside of her.Push it down, she thought.Hold it in.

One evening, as the feeling of overwhelmed, began to claw at her throat again, Barbara found herself staring at the photos of her mother still up in the living room.I blame you, she thought. Obviously she had faulty genetics. There was no other explanation.What did you do to feel better?

“Goodnight, Mama.”

“Goodnight, sweetie.”

Barbara blinked, panic gripping her.

I’m not running away, she thought shaking out her head. That’s… such a stupid idea.

But, it did remind her what her mother has also been good at.

Barbara got up off the couch and went to her own room, leaving Mrs Yankovic watching her Bulgarian drama while James finished his homework at the dining table. Batman hadn’t returned her laptop or equipment. A new laptop had appeared on her desk one morning after everything had happened. Like Batman, she didn’t question the magic with which it appeared but accepted it. It was brand new with restrictions on it so that she couldn’t download hacking programs. She had tried to break through it and get around the security, but Batman seemed to learn his lesson and Barbara-proofed his software. It was super-fast and was so new it had still had the plastic on it, but without her usual programs she wouldn’t be able to hack Gotham National with it any time soon - even though it had speeds built for hacking.

Instead, she logged in and started browsing the internet for furniture.

Barbara was pretty good with money and making it stretch, so she worked out a budget and took screenshots to work it all out. It was a good distraction, and the overwhelmed feeling melted away as she planned and organised, lists and vision boards online taking up corners of her mind, making her think less of all the things she would rather be doing. It was a good distraction, and she remembered Barbara Senior spending hours in front of a wall of paint samples, flicking through them, touching the textures.

“Do you like mint or spring green?” she’d asked her daughter.

At four, Barbara could see the colours were different, but also couldn’t understand how they were. One of them just looked like the shadow of the other. She could never figure out why it mattered so much before.

But Barbara sighed, Barbara was sitting at her computer, studying different shades of navy, and reading articles about the differences between warm and cool shades on mental health.

The following day at breakfast, when Jim was back, and they were eating mekitsas and jam, Barbara floated the idea by him. “If you give me five-hundred dollars, I can redecorate this whole place.”

(Or maybe the floating was more like a gavel on a sound block)

“What’s wrong with the place?” Jim asked.

Barbara frowned, and even James was looking at her, confused. “We have photos of mom up. You have a girlfriend who isn’t mom. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“You have a girlfriend?” James asked.

Jim bristled and glared at Barbara, but Barbara shrugged it off. “Five hundred dollars and I’ll change everything by myself.”

“We don’t need to change the living room.”

“Is your girlfriend pretty?”

“James!”

“Dad, please,” Barbara begged. She pointed at the chandelier. “Lights are missing in there. The couch will get a hole in it next time one of us sits on the edge. Mom’s photos are everywhere. Our fridge door is stuck and-”

“Four hundred, and I have to approve everything first.”

“I will give you fifty dollars back if you have no say.”

“No bright colours?”

“Does forest green count as bright?”

“If I have to squint at it, it’s too bright.”

“Neutral scheme it is.”

“Three-fifty then.”

“Deal.” Barbara beamed. She could have done it with three.

James was looking back and forth between them, confused. “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

Jim looked at James, hesitating and huffed. “It’s Sarah. Detective Essen.”

“Oh,” James said, frowning at his plate. “She is pretty.”

Barbara snorted as Jim blushed into his plate, shaking his head.

The following weekend, Barbara invited Dick over to help her paint their walls from white to grey, and he brought one of his friends, Wally. At fourteen, he was a little older than them, but that didn’t seem to bother him or Dick at all. “He’s from Central City,” Dick explained as he introduced them. “I met him while I was still travelling around with the circus, and he came out to visit.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said to Wally. His vivid orange hair stood on ends, as he assessed her with bright sparkling green eyes. He had a spattering of freckles across his nose too that were quite cute. “Sorry, I’m making you work.”

Wally was a bit hyperactive, bouncing on the balls of his feet, but he was more than happy to help and meet her. “No way, this is awesome. No one ever lets me do this stuff. I just moved in with my aunt and uncle, and they’re super cool, but I’m a bit clumsy, so no one really trusts me with stuff like this. Not that I’m going to screw up your apartment or anything, I can be careful I just really have to try. And I totally will try because I don’t want you getting upset with Dick because then he’ll get upset with me, and I will never hear the end of it. Not like I hear the end of it now anyway. He talks about you all the time.”

“Dude, shut up,” Dick hissed.

A sheepish expression crossed his face, and Wally grinned wider as he saw Barbara shifting with embarrassment. “I’m sure Babs can’t shut up about you either,” Wally teased, winking at Barbara, and leaving Dick and Barbara both blushing red. It wasn’t as if anything had happened between her and Dick since that night, she sort of confessed her feelings for him. He wasn’t pulling away from her, but he wasn’t running to her either. Barbara hadn’t run to him either, in his defence. Their relationship didn’t change, except that maybe when they held hands, they were both aware of it a lot more. It was almost as if something was holding him back, and she wasn’t sure what it was.

She handed Wally and Dick paint rollers she’d borrowed from her grandparent's garage, and they got to work. Around lunch, Wally, Dick and Barbara (mostly Dick and Wally seeing as Barbara still had her cast on) managed to get her couches into their mostly empty storage unit below the apartments. After posting pictures online, she had found a buyer for them and some of their other furniture, which gave her extra money to buy the new fridge that was coming at the end of the day. Despite Wally trying to embarrass them, redecorating the apartment did help her clear her head.

She found herself feeling useful again, which wasn’t happy or okay, but was good enough.

Both the boys stayed at her place in sleeping bags on the floor of her bedroom, and the next morning the new couches came. Her mom had liked the gold-lined art deco thing, but Barbara had gotten rid of all of that. The chandelier was replaced (by an electrician) with just a plain drop light, and the leather couches were replaced with a large plush dark grey one with an L-shaped corner. She managed to get dark green and blue cushions, and - after watching many youtube videos and nervously shouting at Dick and Wally, who kept rushing on ahead - they painted the shimmery material in the same shades of green and blue to match. The gold was replaced with wood, which reminded Barbara more of her dad, and the last thing she had to was put all the photos back on the wall, her mother’s original black frames working just fine with the new look.

She was putting them all back when she noticed her mom was still in the photographs. Wally was taking a break and (carefully) eating on their new couch - Barbara wasn’t sure if he ever stopped eating if she were being honest - watching TV, and Dick stood behind her as she worked at the new wooden dining table to replace all the photos.

“Are you feeling better?” Dick asked her softly. It struck her that Dick knew why she was renovating her apartment. His hand was on her shoulder, and she leant into it.

As he did, Barbara revealed one of the photos in the frame she was taking out. It was one of her and her mom when she was five. Barbara Senior was holding her hand as they posed in front of the opening of some art gallery. She remembered going to a lot of those kinds of events with her mother. Galas and ceremonies. Barbara Senior was a part of the Gotham elite, and she was raising Barbara to be the same.

She used to decorate the apartment all the time.

Barbara understood all of it. It was a momentary distraction. Something to focus her energy on to make the discomfort go away. Her heart racketed in her chest as she looked around the apartment that she’d managed to redo in one weekend and her insides tore with regret for not dragging it out longer.

She picked up the photo she chose to replace her mother with one of her, Dick and James, at Amusem*nt Mile, standing in front of a cart of balloons. She slipped it into the frame. “Yes. I’m fine,” she replied, then flipped the photograph over to show it off to Dick. She tried to remain as neutral as she could, hiding her internal panic. “Next time Wally’s in town, maybe we can go do something fun like this?” she beamed at him.

Dick smiled at her, but he didn’t look like he believed her, which was fine. She didn’t need him to. She just had to pretend hard enough that he’d leave it alone. And he did. He squeezed her shoulder and sat next to her, silently leaning his head on her shoulder to offer some support.

Barbara appreciated it. She appreciated a lot of what Dick did for her, and after he helped her hang all the photos back up on the wall, Barbara leant over and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.” Dick blushed, while Wally grinned wide, Dick shooting him a look to shut up before he could open his mouth.

Her dad and brother returned from work and their grandparents' place shortly after Wally and Dick left.

(Wally had given her a giant hug with an open invitation to come to Central City whenever she wanted, which Barbara thought was nice of him considering she’d put him to work as soon as he’d walk in the door)

However, her dad had brought Sarah Essen home too, and the detective stood with Jim's arm around her, looking around at all the hard work Barbara had done with a nervous smile. Barbara deflated at the sight of her. She hadn’t seen her since that morning she’d erupted at her. While she could accept that her dad felt bad about whatever had happened between Sarah and himself when he was still with Barbara Senior, and he had promised they weren’t dating when they were working, it still ground on Barbara a little to see them together. “The place looks great, Pumpkin,” Jim said, looking around. He held up a bag of Chinese food, and Barbara’s mind flashed back to whenever Barbara Senior finished redecorating. Jim would walk through the door with Chinese and a big smile and say, “The place looks great, honey.”

She blinked, rubbing her forehead because now Jim had his arm around Sarah, who was nodding with him. “You did a great job, sweetie,” Sarah said. “I hope you don’t mind me joining you for dinner tonight. Your dad brought James past the precinct, and he invited me along.”

Barbara cringed at the word sweetie but forced a smile on her face. She thought of the shock on Sarah’s face when Barbara had shouted at her, and maybe it wasn’t the politest thing, but she had hoped the message had got through. Apparently not. “Yeah, it’s fine,” she said, swallowing down her displeasure. “I’ll get some plates.”

And all the crash came down on her quicker than she thought it would.

A few weeks passed, and Sarah Essen joining the Gordon's for dinner became a regular thing. At least once a week, she would be at the dinner table, and Barbara would sit there awkwardly, trying to think of anything but Sarah sitting in the place her mother once did. Her skin was itchy again. She couldn’t justify redecorating the living room one more time, so she shifted the furniture around in her room and redid her bookshelves until even that became boring.

Some nights when Sarah was over, Barbara was plagued with a strange memory of her mother. It was the only time she ever recalled Sarah and Barbara Senior interacting.

It had been at the Policeman’s Ball.

Barbara was quite certain Jim had never gone again since her mother left, but before she did, he hadn’t missed a single one. Barbara Senior had dressed to the nines, putting all the other police officers' wives and husbands to shame. When Jim had introduced Sarah to his wife and children, Barbara Senior had looked Sarah up and down, her head falling to the side, then held her hand out as if she was waiting for Sarah to kiss it.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet the woman my husband spends too much time with.”

Sarah’s eyes had been filled with panic, and she glanced at Jim and then back to Barbara Senior, taking her hand awkwardly to try and shake it. “Sorry, about that.”

“Hmm,” Barbara Senior had said, removing her hand. “I’m going to go say hi to Harvey. Come on, sweetie.” She had tugged Barbara along with her, and that was the end of that.

She knew, Barbara thought to herself. Mom knew about Sarah.

But Barbara wasn’t trying to start an argument about it. She smiled stiffly when Sarah was around and Jim nodded encouragingly, and everything sucked.

Just when she thought she was about to lose her mind, Jim had to stay at the precinct overnight, and couldn’t find someone to look after James. Barbara had said it was fine for her to look after him, but he insisted it wasn’t and Barbara deserved to be a kid, and instead dropped her younger brother off at their grandparent’s place, and Barbara got the apartment to herself. No Jim, no James, no Mrs Yankovic, no Sarah. It had been the first time since the night she jumped off the building that it had happened, and at first, she thought she’d love it. She took a long bath and stood in the kitchen in a large t-shirt and her underwear, and even set up a pillow high up on the hallway, and tried practising her jump kick.

But then she hated it.

The house quickly became too quiet, and she turned up the music on the television and tried playing music, but it didn’t help. Barbara hated her own silence. She felt something in her chest, building up like a scream but she couldn’t justify it. She wanted to talk to someone, but even in her own head she couldn’t make the right responses.

Not wanting to be completely alone, she tried calling Dick on his phone, but it went into voicemail. She then tried calling the Manor, and Alfred picked up. “Wayne residence.”

“Hey, Alfred. Is um… Dick there? It’s Barbara.”

“Ah, Miss Gordon. Unfortunately, Mr Grayson has gone to stay in Metropolis with the Kents’ this week. I do believe he left his phone at home.”

“He’s had another argument with Bruce again, hasn’t he?” she sighed, her voice tinged with sadness.

“You are correct, I’m afraid. They’re both brooding. However, Master Dick always comes back with a more level head once he returns from the Kent household.”

“Okay, I’ll try him in the morning,” she said. “Thanks, Alfred.”

“You are very welcome, Miss Gordon.”

She went into the fridge, took out leftover pizza slices, and then climbed in front of the television, hoping some sound would distract her.

“Breaking news,” said Iris West - Wally’s aunt in a strange coincidence - was on the television as the trashy reality TV show she’d been watching was cut off. Barbara leant towards the TV. Iris West primarily reported in Central City, but according to the lower third, the report came from Hatton Corners, down in Virginia in the middle of a hurricane. Do hurricanes usually happen in March?

Isn’t there a global conference in Washington this week? Hatton Corners wasn’t that far from Washington from what she could tell, and hurricane winds were whipping around the mid-western reporter. “A supervillain, calling himself Mister Twister with the power of tornados, is currently ripping up the town of Hatton Corners. The highways in and out have all been ripped out by hurricanes and tsunamis. While we are not certain why Mister Twister has targeted Hatton Corners, there seem to be some young heroes here trying to hold him back.” She was shouting into the microphone, and the camera angle changed as she spoke.

Barbara sat up in her seat as she watched Robin get launched up high by Wonder Girl – who normally operated out of New York. He flew in an arch and landed on top of Mister Twister, punching him in the face twice before falling back down to the earth. He was caught mid-air by Central City’s Kid Flash, who used his speed to hurl himself up into the air, high enough to intercede Robin’s trajectory. Robin shouted something, and a boy about the size of Robin jumped up in the air, carried on a jet of water and wrapped a water bubble around Mister Twister’s head. At the same time, Speedy – Green Arrow’s new sidekick in Star City – shot an exploding arrow at his chest. Wonder Girl caught Mister Twister by his leg and dragged him down to the ground, slamming him into the cement.

Robin was on Kid Flash’s back, and Kid Flash shimmered too fast to be picked up by the camera, and a series of explosions went off around Mister Twister’s body as he was putting Robin down. Wonder Girl flew through the middle of the others and bent a steel pipe like a ribbon around his arms, and Speedy shot him with electrical wiring that zapped brightly. With the flash – Barbara guessed it was something that nulled a metas abilities – all the winds and rains around them stopped, and finally, the water kid pulled his water bubble off Mister Twister then and stretched them out into long streams of water, which he froze to create a cage.

The five underage heroes were gasping and looking around them, exhausted yet still ready for a fight. It took a few moments for them to realise the fighting had stopped, and they looked at each other, with some look mixed between horror, shock and excitement.

I want to be them, she thought, jealousy burning through her. Wonder Girl flew across the quiet battleground and swept Robin up in an embrace just as Kid Flash swung the water kid around with excitement, and Speedy laughed at all of them with an infectious glee on his face. She watched Robin and Wonder Girl hug and wondered if she’d been there what she would have done. Would he have kissed me again? Would I have kissed back?

But she thought of Dick and his knuckles knocking on the back of hers and how sometimes she would catch him staring, it would make her body feel like jelly, and she felt guilty for even thinking about it. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she turned off the television, unable to watch anymore. It was somehow spirit-crushing and heartbreaking at the same time, and rather than try and think about it too much longer, she turned all the lights off in the apartment and went to sleep early.

Barbara went to school the next day, spent time with her friends, and studied hard, but it all felt… empty. Life felt empty. Food tasted dry, her clothes didn’t fit her, and everything just made her tired. What is wrong with me? she wondered, waving to her friends as they headed off to their science class.

Dick returned to school the following week, and he asked her if she’d seen the Titans – as the five kids were calling themselves – on the news. It was like he was talking to her from underwater. Barbara had to ask him twice to repeat himself.

“The Ti-tans,” he said slowly, the cheer in his voice fading. They were in the library. They were supposed to study, but Barbara had been staring at the same sentence in her textbook for what felt days but was probably twenty minutes. “Are you okay?” he’d asked her, then panic lit up his features. He looked at her cast, and then studied her face. “Are you still in pain?”

Barbara shook her head. “No,” she replied, getting up with her books in her hands. “I’m going to tell the office and go home. I’m tired.”

Dick deflated and stood up too. “Let me walk you?” He held his hand out to offer to carry her books, and Barbara hesitated but nodded her head. He took her books in one arm and took her hand in his other. She squeezed it and leaned heavily against his side. The feeling of not being okay was back, and this time it hurt. This time she knew how to feel good. Small tears pricked her eyes, and when they were outside the nurse's office, Dick noticed. “Babs?” Voice tinged with desperation, Dick lifted his hand up and touched her face. “You’re not just tired, are you?”

Barbara shook her head, wiping her eyes on the back of her arm. “I’m fine. I just need sleep,” she lied.

Dick nodded, then took her into the nurse's office, helping Barbara lie to get home. He sat with her in sickbay, and she leaned against his chest, letting him hide her from the rest of the world. The nurse had dimmed the lights because Barbara had told them she had a migraine. Jim couldn’t pick Barbara up, and the nurse came in to explain. “Your dad is in a meeting with the mayor. He said to apologise, but Sarah Essen will be picking you.” She passed on the message and left, and Barbara felt ice prick her in her stomach.

Groaning, Barbara wished she hadn’t lied and just stuck it out in the library. “Can you come with me?” Barbara asked, looking at Dick desperately.

He smiled sympathetically. “I promised Bruce I’d go to school and pay attention for ten days in a row, and he’ll un-ground me.”

“You’re grounded?”

“Why do you think I went to Metropolis?”

She groaned, and he rubbed her back. “I can come after school,” he said. “If I tell him it’s for you, he’ll be okay with me coming over.”

“It’s fine,” she mumbled. “I’m just going to sleep anyway.”

Dick frowned. “Barbara, I’m really worried about you.” She could see it in his eyes. There was fear in his big blue eyes, and he grasped her arm. “I don’t know why you’ve been really upset, or why you think being a...” he lowered his voice down to a whisper. “A hero will fix it, but you're scaring me.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s like you said. I just have to choose to be happy, right?”

Nodding reluctantly, Dick leant in close and swallowed. “Can I kiss you again?”

Barbara bit her lip, eyes glancing at his lips. “Why?” she whispered. She wanted to know. He hadn’t kissed her again since that night on her couch, and neither of them had said anything about it.

“You just look really sad, and I want to see if it helps,” he said.

She considered it, willing to try anything and nodded. “Okay.”

Dick leant in close, pressing his lips to hers, and Barbara sighed, tipping her head to the side so her nose was out of the way, and he had room to move. They made out. It was different to the peck he gave her last time, made of tiny little kisses. Sometimes he stopped to look at her, to see if she was okay, and a few times, Barbara leant in to stop him from looking too closely. In the dim light of the sickbay, it did feel nice. Dick felt nice, and safe and warm.

She wasn’t sure what was on his lips, but her brain stopped worrying and she gripped Dick’s shoulders as if they her from floating off into nothingness.

“It’s okay, Barbara,” he mumbled between their lips at some point. “It’s all going to be okay.” She closed her eyes and kissed him again, moving in closer and her arms sliding around his neck until her elbows were where her hands had been. She was trying to ignore his words because they lurched terror in her chest. I don’t want to be just okay, her mind screamed, but she silenced that voice down to pathetic whimpers when she moved her lips to press small kisses to Dick’s cheek, and he gasped into her neck and sent butterflies spinning around her stomach. She didn’t want to think about ‘okay’ anymore but instead wanted to concentrate on how heavy Dick’s palms felt over her school jacket and how they grounded her.

“Miss Gordon! Mr Grayson! This is the sickbay, not a hook-up spot!” The shriek of the school nurse plus the light being flicked on suddenly tore them apart, and they both blushed as Barbara looked up to see Sarah Essen standing behind the school nurse with the papers to sign her out in her hand. She also looked embarrassed, and Barbara groaned internally as she stood up with her bag, head tipped down.

“Sorry, Nurse Davies,” Barbara said immediately, getting up and fixing her jacket. She left the sickbay, not looking back at Dick or even able to speak, and walked straight by Sarah. She left the office and went outside, and after a minute, Sarah joined her. They walked out of the building together in silence, and Barbara let Sarah go ahead, seeing as she had no idea which car was hers. She walked over to a Honda Accord, and Barbara followed her and got into the car, crossing her arms over her chest, and looking out the window.

Sarah seemed to respect her silence for all of five minutes, and as they drove out of the parking lot, she turned down the radio and asked, “Are you okay?”

“No,” Barbara deadpanned. “If I was okay, I wouldn’t be going home.”

“Walked into that one,” she said, trying to keep her voice light.

Barbara flinched. Her patience was thin. She just wanted to stay quiet. “I guess that was awkward,” Sarah said, laughing a little.

“Was it more or less awkward than when my mom found out you were having sex with my dad?” The words were out of Barbara’s mouth before she had the chance to stop them. They were at a red light, thankfully, or Barbara was certain Sarah would have crashed the car. She looked at Barbara, stunned and Barbara matched her gaze, red rising in her cheeks, but unable to take the words back or bring herself to apologise.

“How did you know about that?” Sarah breathed. “I’ve never… your father doesn’t even…”

Barbara huffed, annoyed that she’d been right about the Policeman’s Ball. “You just told me,” Barbara muttered, leaning back on the window. It was too bright and cheery of a day. Barbara wished that it was cold and rainy, like she felt but spring had sprung, and Gotham was seeing good weather for a change. Barbara really wished it wasn’t.

The lights turned green, and it took until someone honked their horn for Sarah to take off again. The silence stretched out. “I’ve seen your dad interrogate a thousand people, but he could not have pulled that one-off.” The fact that pride bubbled in her chest from Sarah Essen’s words hurt her. “You’re never going to like me, are you?” Sarah asked.

Barbara’s lip twinged. She sucked in a deep breath and twisted her gaze back to Sarah. “Look, my brother and my dad both like you, and I’m going to have to be okay with that, but you don’t have to try with me. Because you’re right. I’m probably never going to like you, but maybe I could respect you a little bit more if you didn’t keep trying to be my friend.”

Sarah frowned. “I don’t know why we can’t be friends. Your dad and I both know, what we did was wrong, but–”

“How old’s your dad?” Barbara asked, turning to face Sarah.

“What?”

“How old is your dad?” she asked, slower, her voice tinged with annoyance.

Sarah blushed red, already getting where it was going. “It’s fine, Barbara. We don’t have to talk about it.”

But Barbara wanted to know now. She unwound her arms and frowned. “No, you want to know why we can’t be friends. How old is Mr Essen?”

Sarah swallowed and sighed. “Doctor Essen is sixty-one.”

“Only ten years older than my dad. Cool. Now how would you feel if your dad cheated on your mom with a thirty-nine-year-old, and then when your mom abandoned you, possibly because of it, he started dating her secretly? And every time you see her, she calls you sweetie like she’s your mom, and she tries to be your friend like she isn’t the one your dad spends most of his time with while you’re stuck at home, cooking, cleaning, looking after your brother and you’re forced to be polite with her because your dad is the only one who stayed?”

Sarah stared dead straight ahead, hands tight on the steering wheel. “I get it. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Barbara said, anger tinging her voice. “I don’t think you do. Because the age difference between you and me is less than you and my dad, and I have a huge problem with the fact you and dad hooked up before my mom left. But somehow, I feel more sorry for you than mad at you because my dad is a good police officer, but he's not the best guy at relationships, and the only person who's going to lose here is you. But the bottom line is, Sarah, I don’t want to get along with you. I don’t want to like you, and I don’t like you, and that’s how I deal with it. I don’t need a friend, and I don’t need a mom. I’ve done okay without one this far, so... You know?” She shrugged her shoulders and looked back out the window. “Leave me alone and we’ll be fine, okay?”

Sarah sighed and leant back against her seat. “Okay,” she said, her voice stiff.

They sat in silence, and Barbara watched Gotham City go by, guilt twisting up in her gut. She didn't like being mean. She wasn't naturally mean. But Sarah made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and made her want to fight. She couldn't bring herself to like her, no matter what she tried.

But still...

It's not her fault Dad cheated on Mom. She didn't force him.

Barbara closed her eyes and sighed. “You make him happy. I’m glad you make him happy.”

Sarah took a moment to respond. "He makes me happy too."

Barbara huffed. "Well, I'm sorry, but I'll just have to be the step-daughter from hell." She looked over at Sarah and saw a smile curling on the corner of her lips. It was small, and it wasn't overly confident, but it was accepting.

"I'll try not to be too annoying."

"Impossible," Barbara muttered. She shifted in the seat again, looking back out the window. “And stop calling me, sweetie.”

The silence turned more comfortable as the two agreed to some sort of truce. Sarah turned the radio back up, and she dropped Barbara off in front of her apartment building in comfortable silence.

Barbara’s mind kept flashing to Robin and the Titans all throughout the night, and it was all she could dream about. The next day she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, so she got James ready and sent him to school by himself. Jim called her halfway through the day after a phone call from her teachers alerted him that she wasn’t at school, and Barbara told him she still felt sick from the day before. The night he came home without James, who was off at his friend’s place for a sleepover and carried in lasagna from the place down the road she liked and DVDs. “I got Clueless, I got 10 Things I hate about you, I got Practical Magic. What do you want to watch?”

Barbara snorted. “Didn’t you once tell me you were never going to watch another chick flick again?”

“What? No. That doesn’t sound like me?”

“I’m pretty sure after I made you watch Cinderella Story, you said they were all ridiculous, and you would pay me to watch them with someone else.”

Jim waved Practical Magic around. “You know I love Sandy and Nicole.”

Barbara did too, and Practical Magic was one of her favourite films, but she’d only watched it a few nights ago on TV. “So if I said I want to watch Clueless?”

Jim clutched his chest. “You wound me. But fine. Got a soft spot for Brittany Murphy too.”

After they ate dinner, Jim made popcorn, and they sat on the couch, side by side with the bowl between them. They started the film and got ten minutes in before Jim cleared his throat.

“So, Sarah told me...” Jim started, and Barbara’s gut twisted at the sentence. She stared straight ahead at the movie, ignoring the way her dad stared at her. She had hoped Sarah hadn’t ratted her out. “That she caught you and Dick kissing.”

Barbara flushed. It wasn’t what she had been expecting. She looked at Jim, narrowing her eyes. “If I promise to be nice to Sarah when she comes over for dinner, can you not talk about this?”

“Barb-”

“He kissed me because I was upset because I had a migraine and I couldn’t concentrate. We’ve kissed before. I like him, but I think we’re way too young to date, and I think he thinks that too, which is why we just don’t really talk about it. I know I can talk to my cousin Holly, I know I can talk to you, I just don’t want to because there’s nothing to talk about, and it’s awkward because it’s Dick and he’s still my best friend,” she said in one long spiel, staring her dad dead in the eye. He looked super uncomfortable, and Barbara sighed. “Dad, you won’t talk to me about periods or tampons, so maybe stick to your lane, and I’ll just ask my friends for advice if and when I need it.”

“I’d prefer if you asked your cousin Holly,” he grumbled.

“Fine, I’ll ask her too.”

“You could also talk to Sarah...” he added. Barbara glared at him, then grabbed some popcorn before turning back to the movie. “Pumpkin, she really does like you. You’re not very fair to her.”

Barbara huffed, still not looking at him. “No, I’m not. But if I’m fair to her, I’ll be unfair to you, and I sometimes see you more often than once a week at dinner. So maybe, just let me get over it by myself? She might be part of why I don’t have a mom and it kind of sucks when you force me to get along with her. Just... let it happen. Or not. Whatever. I’ll be nice, but it doesn’t mean I have to be her friend.”

Jim sighed and nodded. “Okay, Pumpkin. I love you no matter what, you know that, right?”

She looked at her Dad again and moved the popcorn onto her lap, shifting, so she was lying on her Dad’s chest. “Yeah, I do,” she mumbled.

Jim smiled and pecked her forehead, laying his arm over her stomach. They watched Clueless together, Jim muttering, “I forgot how many adult jokes were in this.”

“They’re not that adult if I get them,” she snorted.

“Yeah, but most kids don’t ask for the collection of Tolstoy and a Lizzie Mcguire barbie for their birthday.”

“I also wanted a pony, but you didn’t get me that.”

“I’m still trying to convince the homeowner association that it won’t make a mess in the elevator.”

Barbara laughed and curled up tighter against her dad’s chest.

In the second week of April, Barbara had her cast removed early on a Saturday morning, then caught three buses to Bristol Woods.

She felt stupid, but she walked along the road and went to the lake at the bottom of the waterfall, staring at the rockface where she knew the Batcave was. She thought, if I can just talk to him, I can change his mind about me, maybe I can do this. Maybe I still have a chance.

She didn’t have any equipment to try and hack the cave doors since Batman had cleaned her out, and she couldn’t afford anything new, so Barbara stood outside the gates and trailed her fingers over the surface.

It felt like real rock. It looked like real rock.

Barbara decided it was real rock, and Batman must have somehow carved the tunnel system out of the cliff face.

She stared at it and looked around the forest. If Batman had cameras everywhere in Gotham, there was doubt one nearby and she studied the cliff face but couldn’t see one. A strange idea struck her.

Barbara lifted her fist up and hesitated. This is so stupid, she thought, but swallowed and rapped her knuckles over the rock. It hurt a little. “Excuse me? Um… Mr Batman? Sir?” she called out.

When there was no response, Barbara huffed and sat down on the with her back to the cliff.

“Guess I’ll have to wait,” she sighed.

She sat out there for hours, waiting to see if the cliff face would open and the Batmobile would zip out, but nothing happened all day. She sat there, just to the right, where she guessed the doors opened from – Barbara’s memory of the evening was a little hazy and she couldn’t remember exactly where the opening was –as the sun began to set. She told herself she’d already missed the last bus hours ago, so there was no point in trying to get home. She texted her dad to see if he was coming home from work, and of course, a case was keeping him at the GCPD and her brother was at his friend’s place, so there was no one at home waiting for her.

The woods were admittedly frightening, but Barbara was determined, and she crossed her arms over her chest and stared them down angrily. You’re no different to the daytime woods, she thought, shoving her nose up in the air at the shadows in the trees that were trying to play mind games with her. You’re just darker now.

She fell asleep at some point and woke up with her arms across her chest as the sun rose over the treetops to the loud sound of jets. She looked up in the sky and huffed when she saw a jet landing on top of the mountain. Son of a… Barbara got up and dusted herself off. Her stomach made an angry sound. Barbara sighed because she would have to try again the following weekend. After all, she couldn’t camp out overnight on a Sunday without making her dad suspicious.

Barbara made the trek back to the bus stop. It somehow felt longer than it did the day before. When she got to the stop, she looked at her watch and the schedule printed in faded pages from weather damage and squinted at the numbers. The first bus for the morning back to the city wasn’t going to be there until nine, and according to her watch, it was only approaching seven. Groaning, Barbara dropped onto the bus seat and put one of her headphones in, flicking on her music. She laid back against the hard shell of the bus shelter and let her eyes fall shut against the still rising sun.

She was drifting in and out when she heard a car approach, and she startled herself to get up and looked over to see a sleek, gunmetal car driving towards her. Not quite so much into cars, all Barbara could tell was that it was a Lamborghini judging by the triangle bull on the front. Barbara wasn’t surprised by the car – it was driving towards her from Gotham Estates, where everyone was rich and swanky – but she was wary of it. Cars approaching young girls at any time of the day were dangerous, and she berated herself for not bringing any weapons with her as the car slowed down in front of her.

The windows were tinted black, and the passenger side rolled down slowly. She frowned, guarding herself carefully when she recognised the driver. “Mr Wayne?” she asked.

“Barbara! I thought that was you. What are you doing out here by yourself this early in the morning?” he asked.

Barbara opened and shut her mouth like a fish struggling for breath on land. “Um…” She hadn’t had an excuse or a reason ready to go because she hadn’t expected to be seen by anyone she knew. “I um… I…” she stuttered, and she shrugged her shoulders. “I decided to go hiking?”

“By yourself?”

“Um... yes?”

She frowned.

Bruce stared.

The silence spread out between them awkwardly.

Then, with a flick of a switch, Bruce’s face broke out into a wide stupid smile. “Oh wow. That sounds amazing. Was it nice?”

“Yes,” she squeaked out.

“What are you doing now?”

Barbara blinked and pointed to the bus stop. “Waiting for my bus?”

“When does it come?”

Barbara started squirming at all the questions and rechecked her watch. “Another hour.”

Bruce beamed at her. “Well, if you don’t mind a stop along the way, I’m going to go into the city. Do you need a ride?”

Getting in cars with strangers wasn’t Barbara’s thing, but Bruce wasn’t a stranger. He was Dick’s adopted dad, and he always let Barbara stay over and invited her out to dinners and parties. But also, she had never really been alone with him, and it was always kind of weird to be alone with adults who weren’t your parents, and Bruce Wayne was still just as much of a mystery to her then as he was back at the Gotham History Museum. She didn’t even really get why he argued with Dick all the time, or why he let Dick go to Metropolis or Kansas or Blue Valley or New York or Central City, or sometimes even all the way to Star City. There was a lot that she just didn’t understand about him.

But then she blinked and remembered it was Bruce Wayne, the man who paid for her and her brother to go to Gotham Academy when Jim’s police paycheque didn’t cover it because Jim Gordon had taken care of Bruce when he was a kid. Her father and Bruce Wayne were bound together by tragedy. The Wayne family murders were Jim’s first case back in Gotham after he’d gotten out of the army and made detective, and it was the most difficult case he’d ever had to let go cold. “Bruce is a good man,” she heard Jim say in her head. “He might be a bit odd sometimes, but he does good by this city, and he’s done good by me, even though I never solved the Wayne murders. I trust him.”

Barbara nodded, getting off the bench. “Yes, please.”

She got in his car, throwing her bag over her shoulder into the backseat – there were no back doors for her to do it any other way.

The interior of the car was nice. It was all black leather, with yellow stitching and smelt brand new. “This car is…” she trailed off, looking at all the detailing and the seat warmers and just how shiny everything was. “Really nice.”

“It’s called a Murciélago,” he said. “First of the ranks. Luc sent me one to test drive.”

“Luc?”

“The designer.”

“Oh.” Barbara squished her eyebrows together. I’m two degrees of separation from the man who designs Lamborghini’s… Wow. She looked around the interior again. “Did you know that in Spanish, Murciélago means Bat?”

Bruce shook his head. “I did not. Yo no hablo español. But that is a cool fact.”

Barbara looked around, remembering how a few weeks ago she was sitting in the leather interior of the Batmobile and couldn’t help but compare. They were both sleek and black and made the same purring noise that radiated in her chest. But that’s where the comparison stopped, with the Batmobile being much cooler, mainly because it was Batman’s car. “Where were you going this early in the morning?” she asked him.

“To my parents’ grave,” he said sombrely.

Barbara looked up at him, her mouth falling open. “Oh no, Mr Wayne… I’m so sorry. I didn’t… You can drop me back off at the bus stop if you want to go alone.”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have offered if I did. Anyway, it’s nice having company sometimes. I just wanted to change the flowers because it’s been a while. In fact…” They had reached the suburban mall in Crest Hill. Crest Hill was mostly the Necropolis of Gotham, but there were some houses nearby, and it had its own school district. He turned the car into the parking lot of a supermarket and pointed towards the flower shop just off the complex. “If I give you my card, can you go in there and buy me some flowers? Any kind. I’m not fussed.”

Barbara hesitated but nodded. “Yeah… sure. How… how much do you want to spend?”

“I know it sounds bad, but it doesn’t matter. Spend as much or as little as you want. Just pick something nice. If you need it, the pin is 1-9-3-8.”

Barbara opened her mouth then shut it again. She thought that Bruce was odd but agreed and got out of the car and went into the flower shop. The floral smell hit her hard, and it was a little strange after the woods, and then the new leather car smell of the Lamborghini. She looked around the florist and tried to think of what was appropriate for a gravestone. Barbara had never known anyone who died, so it wasn’t something she ever had to think about.

Then she remembered the painting of Martha and Thomas Wayne in Bruce’s study. Dick had taken her in there a few times when they needed a specific book for class, and he knew he had it, and in the portrait, Martha was seated on a tall leather chair with Thomas standing to her right with a large bouquet of white roses on her left. She went up to the counter and cleared her throat to get the florist’s attention. She was a blonde woman who was singing along to the radio as she curled ribbon in batches, and she turned around when she heard Barbara and offered a welcoming grin. “What can I help you with?” she asked.

Barbara froze. She stared at the woman with bright blue eyes painted on red lips and recognised her immediately. She was the tall leggy teenager who went into Wayne Manor with Dick the night he was kidnapped. She’d been so caught up in him getting kidnapped at all that she had forgotten about the woman who had been in Wayne Manor with him. Barbara blinked, and her mind flew back to the video, where she saw the girl enter the study with Dick but never saw anyone walk out with him.

The hairs on the back of her neck tingled. This can’t be a coincidence, she thought. “Um… what’s an appropriate number of flowers for a grave?” she asked, eyeing her warily.

“Hmm, not sure… I guess it depends. What kind of flowers are you thinking about?” The girl wore a long blue cardigan that dragged along the floor, black shorts with blue fishnets underneath and knee-high buckle boots. The corset and choker she wore didn't look very comfortable, but she was leaning over the counter and playing with a rose with ease not many people possessed.

Barbara swallowed and couldn’t sense any danger coming off the woman. But why was she there with Dick that day, and what had happened to her? Why was she working the flower shop now? “White roses,” she said.

The woman – Dinah, according to her nametag – nodded. “Okidoke. Well, do you have a price range?”

“Unlimited.”

Dinah whistled. “Fancy. Okay, maybe a dozen?”

There are two graves, she remembered. “Okay… I’ll get two dozen white roses, please.” She handed her Bruce’s card. “Just on that.”

Dinah clicked her tongue together twice and winked at Barbara. “Give me like… five minutes. That’s a big order you got there, and I’m all alone this morning.” When Dinah disappeared out the back of the florist, Barbara could hear her begin to sing along to LeAnn Rimes’ Can’t Fight the Moonlight, belting out all the right notes before she returned with her arms filled with flowers and dropped them all onto the table. Barbara thought she had a pretty voice, but it was still weird that she went into the study with Dick, and he came out alone later. “I have two white dozen roses,” she said proudly. “Just let me put those bouquets together for you, Miss….” Dinah picked up the black card and read the name, then squinted her eyes at Barbara. “Miss Bruce Thomas Wayne. Hmm. You don’t look like a playboy philanthropist, but what do I know?”

“My name is Barbara. Bruce is in the car.” She pointed outside, and Dinah looked over Barbara’s head to the Murciélago, and understanding flashed across her face. “Oh… Brucie has them working young now, I see.”

“I’m Dick’s friend,” she said. “And Lieutenant Jim Gordon’s daughter.”

Dinah grinned sheepishly. “I know. I’m just joking with you. You’re the background on Dick’s phone. The kid does not know how to shut up about you.” Barbara’s cheeks flushed as Dinah began to wrap the flowers. “I’m a family friend of the Wayne’s. My mom is friends with Bruce.”

“Oh,” she said and looked back over her shoulder at the Lamborghini. Surely if that were the case, Bruce would have told her she was going to meet someone he knew? Wouldn’t he? “I also know your dad,” Dinah said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. Well, I haven’t seen him for a long time. My dad was a cop too. Lawrence Lance.”

“Oh.” It rang a bell. Barbara looked at Dinah again and then remembered attending a funeral for a Captain Lawrence Lance almost two years before and a blond girl crying in the front row of the church. “Oh,” she repeated, her eyes widening in horror as she remembered walking up to Dinah with James and telling her how sad she was that her dad had died. Dinah had smiled at her through her tears and thanked her and her and her brother for coming. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t recognise you. I'm so, so, sorry.”

Dinah shrugged. “It’s fine, calm down. I wouldn’t have recognised you from the funeral either.”

“Still,” she said. Dinah gave her a sad look because she knew exactly what Barbara was doing in her head at that moment. It was something all police officer’s children, wives and husbands did after they heard a police officer had died on duty. They imagined what would have happened if it had been their parent or partner.

“You know, I’m not supposed to say anything, but Dick kind of told me what you did for him when he got kidnapped,” Dinah said, changing the topic.

Barbara sucked in a breath and looked over her shoulder as if someone was going to overhear them. “What did he say?”

“That you got dressed up like a superhero, and you helped Batman rescue him from a basem*nt in Burnside.” Dinah grinned, her red coloured lips spreading across her face. Barbara noticed for the first time the collection of little earrings that trailed up her ear and the little diamond that glittered there. Her long nails were painted black, and her eyeliner was perfectly winged. She was chewing bright blue bubble gum with ease. Barbara hated to admit it, but Dinah seemed like one of those people who were effortlessly cool. And it wasn’t just because she sounded impressed with Barbara.

“I kind of did,” Barbara admitted. “But please don’t tell anyone. My dad would kill me if he found out.”

“My lips are sealed,” Dinah said, swiping her hand across her mouth. “So, what’s your hero name?”

“I don’t have one. I’m not a hero,” she said, her voice tinged with disappointment.

“Why not?” Dinah asked.

Barbara hesitated. She didn’t know Dinah. They might have had some people in common, but that didn’t mean much. Still, no one had seemed so excited to talk to her about her heroing. “I asked Batman to train me, and he said no.”

Unbeknownst to Barbara, Dinah’s eyes flickered up to the Lamborghini, and she frowned. “And why not?”

“It’s dangerous. I’m... Jim Gordon’s daughter. Jim Gordon is the only person in the GCPD holding the peace between Batman and city officials. If my dad finds out, I’m a hero...” Barbara deflated, and she closed her eyes. She knew what Batman would have said if he’d found her at the door. It was impossible. It would put too many lives in danger. Maybe some people would be fine - those targeted by people like the Falcone's and the Maroni's - but for the villains like Penguin and Riddler and Joker... The lives of everyone in the city would hang in the balance if Batman and Jim Gordon fell out. “It was a dumb idea anyway. I think I broke every bone in my arm.”

“So?” Dinah asked. Barbara blinked, and Dinah was still tying the roses, focused on her work as she wrapped the bouquets. “Bones can break, but they heal too. You should ask Batman again.”

“There’s no point. I don’t want to be the reason my dad stops believing in Batman,” Barbara sighed.

“If you are as good at being a hero as I think you are, your dad's just going to have to live with it. Or, don’t tell him.” Dinah finished wrapping the flowers and passed over the two bundles of roses. “Here you go,” she said, and Barbara took the flowers, staring at Dinah in stunned silence. “If you managed to save Dick without any help whatsoever... could you imagine how good you’d be with a little bit more training and if you believed in yourself? You, Barbara Gordon, would be kickass.”

Barbara couldn’t help but smile up at Dinah. “And if I become a superhero, will you keep my secret identity?”

Dinah’s eyes twinkled, and she leant down on the table to get closer to her. “Only if you keep mine,” she whispered. Confusion swept over her, and Barbara frowned as Dinah tipped her head back and laughed, wiping her hands on her jacket, and going to the flowers she’d been tending before Barbara had walked in. “Say hey to Bruce, would you?”

Nodding numbly, Barbara took too confused steps back and frowned. “When was the last time you saw him?” she couldn’t help but ask.

Dinah hummed. “I don’t know… I was over at the house a few days back. Why?”

“Just curious. I’ve never met you before, and I go around to the Manor a lot.”

“We must keep missing each other. We’re ships in the night,” she teased.

“We must be. Thank you for the advice,” Barbara said as she left the flower shop. She walked through the parking lot, paused, and looked over her shoulder at Dinah again. She was back to singing along to her music and had thrown in an extra few dance moves as she wandered around the shop to water the flowers. This is so weird.

Barbara went to get back in the car, but it was locked. She knocked on the window and tipped her head in close to peer through the dark tint when she noticed that no one was inside. Before she could worry, though, she turned around and saw Bruce walking towards her with a tray of drinks and two bags of what looked like food in his other hand. “Got us some breakfast,” he said as he got closer. “My treat. Those flowers are beautiful. White roses were my mother’s favourite.”

“Dinah put them together,” Barbara said, testing him.

Bruce beamed back. “I was hoping she was working this morning. She’s a great florist, that Dinah. Good girl too, when she’s not driving her mother up the wall.” He unlocked the car, put the food bag on the roof, and then held the flowers so Barbara could get in before collecting the bags and getting in on the other side himself. They took a moment to orientate themselves – Bruce put the flowers in the backseat and then divided up the drinks for them. “I got you a hot chocolate,” he said, handing her the drink. “And a bottle of water because you were hiking. And I’ve never really had a grocery store premade sandwich before, but these looked okay. Do you want ham and cheese or egg salad?”

Barbara stared at all the food, unsure of how she would eat any of it in the fancy car and then swallowed. “Ham and cheese, please.”

“Ham and cheese it is! Oh, and cinnamon rolls. My dad really loved these. Here, this one is yours.”

She held all the food on her lap and watched as Bruce began to peel back the sandwich packaging on the egg salad and eat, spilling lettuce on his lap. “Hm, I’ll clean it up later,” he murmured, brushing it from his knees. Well, he doesn’t seem to mind. She had a cup holder for her hot chocolate and slipped it inside as Bruce Wayne started up the engine, driving as he ate. “You’d think it would be harder to drive a manual car with your knees, but it’s really not,” he noted at one point.

Barbara couldn’t help but laugh at him, her day taking an unexpected turn. “So um… Dinah. How do you know her?” she asked as they zipped through Crest Hill towards the cemetery. Barbara felt guilty asking, but she just had to double-check.

“Her mom is a friend of mine. When Dinah’s dad died, Dinah ran away from home, and I tried to look out for her as a favour for her mom. I convinced her to come back and live in Crest Hill where I could keep an eye on her for her mom and got her the job at the florist.” He took a bite into his sandwich and swallowed it quickly. “I’m in trouble with her mom. A few weeks ago, Dinah came over to my house, took one of my bikes, and drove cross-country to California to meet this guy she likes in Star City. Long story short, her mom is angry at me.” Bruce looked at her, a tight smile on his lips. “I guess haven’t done the best job looking out for her.”

Barbara raised her eyebrow. “When did she steal the bike?”

Bruce thought about it. “The day Dick was kidnapped, I think.” He looked down at her arm. Since the kidnapping, Bruce had seen Barbara twice and had, both times, mentioned to her how grateful he was that Dick had friends who loved him as much as she did but also that he didn’t want her to put herself in harm’s way again. He didn’t tell her father what she’d done, which was a relief, but he did tell her it would be best if she didn’t do it again. She kind of understood from those awkward interactions why he struggled to look out for people. “By the way, how are you healing?” he asked.

Barbara turned her previously broken arm over. “My arm’s healed,” she said. “My ribs still need a few more weeks, apparently, but I feel fine. It doesn’t hurt to breathe anymore.”

“That’s good.” Bruce nodded and looked out in front of him. “With Dinah… I care about her a lot. But that night, I was distracted with other things, and I didn’t notice my car was missing for a few hours.”

“You went missing that night, too,” she said. “And Alfred. My dad thought all three of you were kidnapped.”

“We were out trying to find Dick,” Bruce said evenly. “Once I noticed the car was gone, I thought he’d left with Dinah, but when I did get in contact with her….”

“Is there a staircase from your study to your garage?” she blurted out.

It took a minute, but Bruce let the question sink in and raised an eyebrow. “Um… not that I know of. Why?”

Why indeed, Barbara? She scolded herself for not thinking of a lie before she asked the question. How could she explain that she saw Dinah walk into his study with Dick but never walk out? “No reason,” she said. “I just… Dick told me he was in the study when he was kidnapped. And I was wondering if… he could have escaped another way.”

Bruce hummed. “Not really. Dick and I have had a serious discussion about abduction situations. I don’t think he’ll go after the bad guys again if they come knocking on our door.”

So how did she get out of there without me seeing it on the cameras? And why are the cameras even there? “Oh. Okay.”

They approached the cemetery, and Bruce offered for Barbara to wait in the car, but she felt strange just sitting there, especially after he said he would eat his cinnamon roll at the grave. She got out with him, taking hers with her and held one of the flowers bouquets. The Wayne Family Crypts were up on the top of Crest Hill, above the parking lot and alongside the other Five Families – the Wayne’s, the Kane’s, the Elliot’s, the Dumas’s, and the Crowne’s. Barbara hadn’t ever really gone up that way. She’d rarely been to the cemetery, except when her dad took her when he was visiting the graves of relatives Barbara had never heard of. “Are Dick’s parents nearby?” Barbara asked, looking around.

“Yes. They’re up near my parents.”

“Really?” Barbara asked.

Bruce nodded. “They were buried in an unmarked mass grave originally. Haly couldn’t afford it otherwise. Dick asked me to help him find them a year ago, and that’s what we did. He picked out their markers, and now they’re up here.”

They walked up the last part of the hill together, and what he said was true. She could see the Wayne Family crypt, but Thomas and Martha had graves just outside, on the top of the hill, and John and Mary Grayson were only a row away where would have been empty a few years ago. “Do you want to leave that bouquet for Dick’s parents?” Bruce asked her. “I don’t think my parents would mind sharing these beautiful roses, and I think Dick might appreciate it.”

Barbara nodded, and before they went to Bruce’s parents' plot, he walked her over to Dick’s parents and knelt, scraping away some leaves and removing the old flowers from the graves inbuilt marble vase. With minimal ceremony, Bruce unravelled the bouquet in his hands, placing six roses in both John and Mary’s vases, pulling some weeds around the grave and putting all the rubbish into the bouquet paper. She was kind of surprised at how natural it all came to him as if he’d done it time and time again when, to Barbara, cleaning a gravestone seemed like such a foreign concept. When the place was cleaner and looked prettier, Bruce laid his hand on the marble and focused on stones in silence.

Barbara blushed and tipped her head down respectfully and wondered what Bruce said to two people he had never met. Probably that he’ll take care of their son, she thought, staring at Bruce’s back. He did a lot for Dick without any questions asked, like moving his parent’s graves for him and creating an indoor gymnasium fit for an Olympic athlete just because Dick missed the trapeze. But four years ago, he hadn’t even known him, and Barbara couldn’t understand why someone like Bruce Wayne cared about someone like Dick Grayson at all. “Why did you adopt Dick?” Barbara asked. Bruce startled out of his concentration and looked over his shoulder at Barbara. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt… I just… You look after him like a dad. Why?”

“I... am his dad," Bruce said slowly.

Barbara shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean-” Barbara cut herself off. “I know you’re his dad now, but you didn’t know Dick when you first met him. Why did you adopt him at all? You didn’t have to. You just... went to the circus and went home with a kid.”

“I guess I did,” Bruce said slowly, a small frown on his face. He pushed himself up out of his squat, dusting some of the dirt off his pants. He turned more sombre. “Dick and I both watched our parents die. That’s a difficult thing to get through. I understood it, and I thought I could help him. It wasn’t supposed to be forever. The GCPD wouldn’t let him stay at the circus until the investigation was over, and… I’ve been an orphanage. I didn’t want him to go through so that, so I organised to take him home. I knew he would need to feel safe, and I between Alfred and I, I thought we could do that for him.”

“But then you fostered,” Barbara pointed out. “And you didn’t… adopt him straight away.”

“Dick didn’t want me to.”

“Why?”

Bruce hummed. “It’s complicated. It has more to do with Dick than with me. Haly couldn’t afford to look after Dick. The circus is performers only, and Dick was too young to perform on his own. So, I took him in. I offered to adopt him, but he felt like that was betraying his parents and his uncle.”

“Dick has an uncle?”

Bruce nodded. “Richard Arthur Grayson. He was also on the trapeze when the rope snapped, along with his wife and son. He was the only one not to die that night, but he was paralysed from the neck down. He can’t take care of Dick, but Dick goes and sees him a few times a year at the clinic he’s at.” He looked concerned about this but did not further elaborate.

“So… what made Dick change his mind?”

Bruce hesitated. “You should maybe ask Dick. I’m happy he did. I… I really love having him as my son. But ultimately, it was up to him. I didn’t want to push him.” Bruce tapped the marble one last time, then walked to his parent’s graves and held his hand out for Barbara’s bouquet.

Thomas and Martha Wayne’s graves were slightly more ornate than John and Martha’s, but it still had the marble vase, and Bruce slipped the new flowers in then fell back off his knees and onto his behind. He looked up at Barbra. “Want to sit with me for a minute? You don’t have to, but….” He pulled out his coffee and cinnamon roll. “It’s nice to have company for a change.”

It still felt bizarre, sitting in a cemetery with her best friend’s dad, but Barbara agreed. She crossed her legs and sat beside Bruce as he began to bite into his cinnamon roll and smiled. “Today is my dad’s birthday,” he said. “There used to be this movie theatre in Otisburg. It shut down when I left Gotham, and I hate that it did because they had my dad’s favourite cinnamon rolls. For every birthday of his that I can remember, we would go down to that theatre, and he would order half a dozen cinnamon rolls just for himself. Mom would remind him he was a doctor, and it wasn’t the healthiest thing for him to eat, but Dad would point out it was his birthday, and he could do whatever he wanted for it.” Bruce was smiling wistfully, and Barbara didn’t ever think she’d seen that expression on him before.

He looked… young.

Very young.

Barbara looked at the Waynes’ grave and then back up and Bruce. He knew the story of the Wayne Family murders. Everyone did. It was a tragedy that shrouded Gotham for two decades. An eight-year-old boy watched his parents get shot in front of his eyes for a set of pearls. It was why so many people in Gotham’s media looked so kindly upon Bruce, no matter how womanising or stupid he seemed to act.

But this was different. Bruce was only twenty-eight. He had stubble on his chin, but it was patchy, not fully able to grow out yet. He would joke around with Dick and was fiercely protective of his adopted son. Alfred worked for him, but Barbara had caught Alfred asleep at the kitchen table once and Bruce silently doing the dishes, humming to himself. And now he was sitting cross-legged in a pair of suit pants with a nice shirt in front of his parent’s grave.

She had always said Bruce Wayne was a hard person to read, but that was because he acted like a different person depending on who he was. But right then and there, she understood why.

Bruce Wayne was just a giant kid who missed his parents.

Barbara felt her heart pang.

It was just as sad as Dick’s parent’s death, but she hadn’t noticed because he was just another adult to her. Until then, she had never seen Bruce Wayne, ‘the kid’. It was why he adopted Dick, it was why he was so protective over his parents' company, and it even explained why he acted so immature sometimes.

Tears sprung up in her eyes, and she turned to face the gravestone again, hoping Bruce didn’t notice. She felt stupid, staring at Bruce’s parents’ grave, and feeling her own tears. They sat there quietly, and Bruce turned his head to look at her and frowned. “Barbara are you okay?” he asked, reaching out.

“I’m sorry, Mr Wayne,” she said. “I don’t….”

But Bruce put his large hand on her shoulder anyway. “I’m sorry. We’ve put out the flowers. We can go now.”

“No,” she said, putting her hand over his as he got up. “It’s just… sad.”

“Sorry?”

Barbara sniffed, crossing her arms over her chest, and tipping her head down. “You were just a kid….”

Bruce stared at her, his face stiff and unmoving. He looked slightly uncomfortable and a little lost. He’d finished his drink and half his cinnamon roll at some point and shifted closer to Barbara. He placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it lightly. “Barbara, it’s… okay. I’m okay.”

“Are you?” she asked. The part inside of her that constantly felt bad twinged in her chest and scratched at her to be released. “How?”

“How?” Bruce stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, my mom didn’t die… She just left me, and my dad is trying, but he’s not there, and I’m just alone so much… How can you be fine, and I feel…?” Barbara pressed her hands to her chest and clenched, trying to show Bruce how she felt. How everything inside of her felt twisted and empty. She felt buried under the weight of everything inside of her, and she had to get it out. She tried to show with her hands, fingers curling to show how it clenched inside of her and felt like ripping.

“Barbara, Barbara…” Bruce reached out and grabbed her wrists, pushing his thumbs into her palms to relax her grip. “Stop it. Breathe. Relax.” He squeezed her wrists, then let one go to press his hand on her back. “Breathe. Keep breathing.” He repeated himself, rubbing between her shoulder blades and Barbara did, sucking in a deep breath and releasing it. The tears that had been burning her eyes subsided and Barbara felt stupid. She swallowed and shook her head. A bottle of water was pushed into her hand. “Drink some. It will help.”

She took the water gratefully and sipped some, her mouth dry. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being so stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re being stupid,” Bruce said, still not taking his hand off her back. “I get it. Really, I do,” he added when she stared at him sceptically. “I’ve never asked Jim, but… do you speak with your mother at all?”

Barbara shook her head. “No, I… I don’t even know where she is. She just left.” Barbara said, her voice hollow. “Ever since Batman said I… He said I couldn’t be a hero…” She looked up at Bruce, not sure whether he was going to tell on her or not, but his face remained neutral as he listened to her. “I… I keep remembering all this stuff about her. How… how unhappy she was. I think… I think she loved me. But I don’t think she liked what her life was. I don’t think she was okay. I think that’s why she left.” Barbara sipped more water and cleared her throat. “I don’t think I am either.”

Bruce sighed. “Have you told your dad this is how you feel?”

She shrugged. “Sort of… He’s been trying really hard to come how more often and cook dinner more, but it’s just a part of his job. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“It does matter,” he said gently. “You and your feelings matter.”

“I want to stop feeling like this,” she whispered and looked up at him. “I know, this sounds stupid but… You said you’re okay and… And I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to be okay, and… would it be weird if I asked you to teach me how you become okay? Because you’re nice and funny and you care about a lot of people and… And you always seem to be okay and…, and someone once told me I have to just keep trying to make it okay. But I’m all out of ideas.” She babbled and finally looked up at Bruce and the older man opened his mouth and shut it again, frowning with a pained look of regret on his face.

He looked at his parent’s grave, intensely, not answering Barbara but eyes darting back and forth between his parents’ headstones. He then looked over his shoulder where Dick’s family were and huffed. “That person sounds stupid for telling a kid something like that,” he said. Barbara blinked, not expecting that as an answer, but Bruce was suddenly looking at her with the same ferocity he’d just had for the graves. “How…?” he stumbled over his next words, and Barbara had seen many personalities of Bruce Wayne, but not a single one of them had stuttered. Not until now. “How did it feel? Tracking Dick. Finding the clues? Fighting Killer Moth? Tell me the truth.”

Barbara shifted her weight beneath her, suddenly sitting up. This felt… important somehow. She tried to gather her thoughts and feelings and come up with an answer and she thought she might have constructed a very diplomatic one in her head but when she opened her mouth to speak all that rushed out was a short breathy few words. “Like I was alive.”

Bruce was staring at her, but also… Barbara felt he was looking right through her. Sometimes he was easy to read, but that look was hard to catalogue. He almost looked angry with someone, but there was also a cool lack of emotion in there. “Mr Wayne?” she asked, playing with her fingers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean–”

“You don’t have to call me Mr Wayne. Bruce is fine,” he said, his voice different. It was lower, calmer. He lost a small amount of his childish exuberance and looked… older. More put together. Barbara frowned. It was like he took off one mask and replaced it with another. “I should get you home.”

Barbara winced. “I’m sorry… Bruce.” She tested the name in his mouth. “I didn’t mean to ruin–”

“Barbara,” he said, cutting her off with a weary sigh. He raised his hands to his eyes and rubbed them, huffing as he did so, and removing them a moment later. Barbara hated the amount of pity he saw in his eyes. She didn’t like being pitied. She didn’t like being babied. She didn’t like anything that made her feel small or hurt. “You did nothing wrong. You’re not… You never have been a problem. Not to your dad. Not to your mother. Not even to me. Alfred and I were just talking about the other day how much nicer it is to have you and Dick in the house. Dick loves you. We all do.”

“Thank you, Mist- Bruce. That really means a lot,” Barbara said, politely. It really did. Barbara felt like Wayne Manor was her second home sometimes. She hadn’t been there for a while, since before the kidnapping, but that was because her dad had been trying so hard lately. But she missed it. She missed hanging out in the library with Dick or sitting at the kitchen bench and watching Alfred cook or when Dick would rope Bruce into a movie night, and he would occasionally comment on how unrealistic the explosions are.

Bruce was still lost in thought and huffed. “Come on. I’ve held you hear long enough. I should take you home.” He started standing, and Barbara noticed his half-eaten cinnamon roll.

“But you haven’t finished your roll,” Barbara said, pointing at the half-crushed pastry in his hands.

Bruce shook his head and held his clean hand out to help Barbara up. “It’s not that good. I miss the Otisburg theatre ones.” Barbara took Bruce’s hand and let herself be hoisted up.

The ride back to Gotham was strange. They sat in uncomfortable silence as Bruce drove, almost on autopilot all the way to Barbara’s place. Barbara wasn’t sure what had happened to make him so quiet, but he was like a different man. She stared at him, a little confused, but he ignored her and sort of looked mad.

Was it something I said?

They pulled up in front of her apartment and Bruce found parking and pulled up the handbrake. He stared straight ahead and said nothing and Barbara wasn’t sure what to do or whether or not she should leave. “I’m sorry for getting emotional,” Barbara said nervously. “But thank you for the ride.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. You did nothing wrong,” Bruce repeated, sighing in exasperation.

Barbara blinked. “Um… okay, then.” She went to open the door, but Bruce cut her off.

“No, wait, Barbara,” he said quickly, squeezing his eyes shut. Barbara paused, feeling very awkward as Bruce sat there in deep thought for a minute before reopening his eyes, looking more determined. “I’m going to send a car around tonight to pick you up for dinner,” Bruce said, cutting off any other apologies she might have. “You and Dick can have a sleepover, and I’ll take you to school in the morning after Alfred makes one of his big breakfasts.”

Barbara frowned. “I have to babysit my brother,” she said slowly.

Bruce considered it then nodded once curtly. “Leave that with me.”

“Leave that…?”

“I’ll organise it with your father. Just be ready to go by six.”

“I… okay? That… that actually sounds really nice. Thanks?” Barbara hadn’t been expecting that at all, but Bruce was staring ahead at the road, very serious, no trace of the man who had sat with a cinnamon roll at his parents’ grave. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”

Bruce smiled, but it wasn’t like the carefree one he’d shot at her earlier. It was forced. Pained, even. “I think it will be good. See you then.”

After she went into her room and showered, Barbara got a call from her dad about that evening. “Bruce told me Dick is still haven’t a hard time. Nightmares from being kidnapped. Are you going to be okay to stay the night there with him? Your brother will stay at your grandparents another night.”

She curled the home phone cord around her finger. “Um… yeah. It’ll be good.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, then sighed. “I bumped into Mr Wayne… I mean, Bruce today, and he told me to come over, but… I don’t know if I want to.”

“Why not?”

“I’m… in a weird mood.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked at her feet. “But also, I want to go. I always have a good time there, and I miss Dick. Do you ever really want to be alone and also with someone all at the same time?”

“Yeah, Pumpkin. Sometimes.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

Jim sighed. “Well, your brother is already on his way to your grandparents, and I’m busy all night. We both know you’re going to have a lot more fun at Wayne Manor than home alone. So why don’t you pack your school uniform tomorrow and have some fun? You deserve that every once in a while.”

Barbara’s face softened, and she chuckled. “Okay. Will do. Thanks, Dad."

“Anytime, Pumpkin.”

The more Barbara thought about it, the more she knew her dad was right. Nights at Wayne Manor usually consisted of movies and big fancy feasts and board games and video games. With that in mind, she decided to pack her bag as early as possible and realised her skirt and school things would have to be in a suit bag or they’d be crumpled. Then she packed some extra clothes just in case they were going out at any point – even though that wasn’t likely – then felt content with a duffle, plus her school bag filled with books and a tote bag of toiletries.

She was packed and ready by four and had to wait two excruciating hours for the car to arrive. But at six o’clock exactly, Barbara’s doorbell rang, and she flew out of her seat and almost ran straight out of the apartment before she realised she had to check who it was first. “Hello?” she answered as quickly as she could.

“Car for Miss Barbara Gordon?”

“Coming down!”

“Do you need assistance with any bags?”

Barbara looked at her duffle bag, school bag and suit bag and wondered realistically if she would need that many clothing options but felt anxious going without it. “Yes?”

She let up the man – a hired driver through Wayne Enterprises – and he helped her with her things and carried it downstairs.

Bruce had hired her a town car, and the windows were tinted black enough that no one outside would be able to tell she was there. The seats were big and leather, and she slipped into the middle chair, wanting to see everything she could. They were driving through the city towards the highway to Gotham Estates.

Barbara shifted and leant on the window, looking out to see Gotham City pass her by.

She was looking forward to dinner. Looking forward to being with Bruce and Dick. Her Dad had been around more often, but she was still alone a lot. Barbara slipped back into the middle seat and looked up to the sunroof. “Can I open it?” she asked, pointing up above her as the car reached the highway.

“Sure.” He opened the sunroof for her, and Barbara stood up, holding onto the roof as the wind whipped through her hair. She took a deep breath in. The city usually smelt rank, but the wind whipped away most of the odours as they got on the highway that went over the harbour.

She watched as the city melted away into the suburbs and the suburbs into the estate and manors. Her legs ached slightly from keeping her upright as the car twisted and turned as they approached the Wayne Manor. They turned into the gate, and it opened as they approached.

Wayne Manor sat on 150 acres of land, the biggest in all of Gotham. The estate backed onto Bristol Woods and had gardens, a maze, pools – indoor and outdoor – and fountains everywhere. They pulled into the round driveway, and Barbara noticed the front door to the Manor was already open. That was… odd.

The driver hopped out of the car, opened her door, and got her bags out. “Unfortunately, this is as far as I can go. Or so I’ve been told.”

Barbara nodded as he handed her her things. She looked up the stairs at Wayne Manor, frowning when she noticed the door was ajar. “Thanks for letting me open up the sunroof.”

The driver just nodded and got back in his town car, leaving Barbara holding all her bags on the steps. She went up slowly as not to stumble over her suit bag and looked around the place.

It was eerily silent.

And eerily still.

The door creaked as she pushed it open further. The front door opened into Wayne Manor’s foyer, and although she had seen it one hundred times before, it was frightening how much the room changed when it was completely empty, other than Barbara. “Hello?” she called, stepping inside warily. “Mr… Bruce? Dick! Alfred?”

But no one responded.

In the middle of the grand foyer was the table that usually consisted of a fresh bouquet of flowers and where Dick had knocked over a vase. But that evening, there was only a piece of paper sitting up like a desk nameplate, and her name was the one inscribed on it. Barbara walked to the table, putting her bags down. “Alfred?” she tried again as she picked up the paper.

Barbara took one last look around the still Manor, then read the letter written in an elegant loopy script.

Dear Barbara,

I’m sorry for letting you down and not understanding. I hope I never will again.

Here are all the keys you will need.

Please go to the study and look at the clock at 10:48. You can leave your bags at the door.

Sincerely,

Bruce

The letter made no sense. Barbara stared at the letter then looked back at the table with a set of keys on it – some big, some small – and a fob that looked like a garage key. She flipped it over in her hands, looking at it experimentally but finding nothing on it that looked out of the ordinary, then looked up at the stairs. What is going on? she thought, but something in her gut told her to push on.

Barbara left her bags and slowly walked up to the study, the house creaking and echoing around her. “Bruce?” she called out again as she walked down the hall just outside where she knew his office to be. “You in… here?”

There was no one there. There was no fire on, and no one waiting for her. She looked back at the letter again, kind of annoyed that she’d been at the Wayne Manor for five minutes and her evening of dinner, movies, and board games hadn’t started. What is going on?

She looked at the letter again that told her to look at the clock at 10:48. Last she checked on her phone, it was 6:45, but – her annoyance growing – she realised she’d left her phone in her bag that was downstairs and couldn’t tell what the time was now. In the study was a giant grandfather clock, and Barbara walked up to it with a pinched face to see that – just her luck – it wasn’t even ticking. The damn thing doesn’t work.

She looked around the room for a working clock quickly before resigning her fate to the fact she was just going to have to go back downstairs. Before she left the room, though, she glanced at the old grandfather clock, thinking it was strange how it was taller than most men but just as wide.

How did Dinah get out of this room?

She stared at the clock and blinked. The clock was big enough to walk through. She looked around the room and couldn’t see any other way to go.

Barbara's brain fizzled out as some sort of instinct overtook her. She stopped her retreat downstairs and turned towards the clock, slipping the keys out of her hand. On the set, she’d noticed before, a tiny gold one. It seemed odd and out of place, but she’d just been given a random collection of keys and hadn’t put much thought into it. The key looked just about the right size as the clock cabinet, and she unlocked it then stared at the unmoving clock face.

…look at the clock at 10:48.

Barbara got on her tiptoes to move the clock face around and around until it was set to 10:47. There was something that felt big about it. Her insides squirmed with excitement, and Barbara wasn’t sure, but she knew the next minute – literally, figuratively, maybe metaphorically – would be important. She was momentarily overwhelmed by the gravity of it all, though she couldn’t figure out why. There was something right in front of her that she just wasn’t seeing, and she pushed the minute hand up to 10:48, knowing that the veil was about to be lifted.

The clock shifted. Barbara jumped back as the clock raised off the ground, revealing wheels that were hidden beneath. She gasped and pulled at the grandfather clock open, finding a long winding staircase descending into the earth, lit up by scones of light. “What the…”

Barbara stepped onto the staircase and could hear something echoing from below. Voices, harshly breathing like they were in the middle of a fight. “ Heh – ha – oof – ha!” Softer ones were being shouted back. More like grunts and puffs of wind. Barbara stepped down the winding staircase carefully and felt like she was going down them forever when…

Barbara gasped, stepping into the Batcave.

The Batcave.

She’d been there before, but this was from a different angle. Instead of coming up from the garage, she’d descended from above and could now see the entire thing in a sweeping landscape.

The dinosaur was still there, the coin, the gym. She could see the laboratory better from that angle. There was a large med bay that Barbara knew she had spent the night in...

She was in the Batcave again.

Below Bruce Wayne’s Manor.

Below Bruce Wayne’s Manor?!

Bruce Wayne.

Bruce WAYNE!?!

Bruce Wayne’s Manor had access to the Batcave.

Bruce Wayne was…

“Barbara?”

Barbara finally saw the people in the cave she’d heard on the stairs.

Dick Grayson was staring at her, his mouth hanging open as he stared up at her from the gym. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed. He was so busy staring that he didn’t see Bruce, who had been sparring with, throw a punch at his head. Dick grunted, flying back and falling on the matt.

“What did I say about distractions?” Bruce asked.

Barbara blinked. Bruce Wayne. Dick Grayson. Sparring.

“Bruce!” Dick shouted, sitting up and looking unaffected by the pun. He was pointing at Barbara. “She’s in… Barbara’s in the… What is she doing in the cave?!”

“I invited her,” Bruce cut him off. He straightened up and looked over at Barbara. “To join us. It’s no good her going off on her own, is it Miss Gordon?”

Bruce, Richard, Alfred.

Batman, Robin, A.

It had literally been looking at her in the face all along. It was so obvious, how could she not have realised?

She gaped and looked around the place again, her throat closing with tears. She had so many questions – a million, trillion, gazillion questions – but in that second, Barbara knew what Bruce – Batman, Bruce Wayne was Batman her deep-dive analysis on that was going to have to wait – was inviting her to do. She was no longer so annoyed that she wasn’t playing board games. “Um… Yeah. No good at all.” She couldn’t help but beam at him.

“Well, come down here. Your training begins tonight, and before dinner, Alfred will measure you up to help and help you make a proper, protective suit. But for now, go get changed into your training gear. Your locker is through there, and it has your name on it.”

“Bruce, she can’t–”

“Dick, we’ll talk about it later,” Bruce cut Dick off from any protest he had. “Barbara. Go.”

“Thank you,” she said breathlessly, jogging down the rest of the stairs to the floor of the Batcave. She wanted to throw herself at Bruce and hug him but stopped herself, remembering what he said. She looked over to the lockers and nodded. “I’ll go. Change. Now. Thank you.”

Barbara changed trajectory and ran into the lockers, giddy and excited. She could hear Dick arguing with Bruce in hushed tones, but it didn’t bother her. Because when Barbara Gordon ran into lockers and looked around the room to find her locker amongst all the hero names – Black Canary, Wonder Woman, Superman – she found it, and it was spectacular.

It looked just like all the others except for one thing.

The gold lettering printed across the door read: Batgirl