seriousfic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seriousfic) wrote2008-10-09 10:57 am
seriousfic) wrote2008-10-09 10:57 am
BOP fic: The Sense of Touch (Babs/Dinah)
Title: The Sense of Touch
Fandom: Birds of Prey
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,566
Characters/Pairings: Babs/Dinah, Ollie/Dinah
Summary: Barbara can content herself with only have Dinah in her life by phone and e-mail. But when Dinah disappears altogether, she realizes she needs much more.
There was a time when all Dinah had to do was walk into a room and Barbara would get a silly little smile. But lately, that hadn’t been happening. With Dinah in Star City, busy with all of Ollie’s activism and pie-in-the-sky pet projects, there was less time for chatting and they usually resorted to e-mails or tweets. It shouldn’t have made a difference, but Barbara missed Dinah’s voice. Almost as much as she missed Dinah. It felt, at times, like someone was cutting away parts of herself. And in her dreams, that someone usually took the form of Dinah’s husband, Ollie.
Then Dinah stopped responding to her altogether. That alone would make Barbara loosen her grip on the dogs of war, but coming on the heels of a Society attack on Star City…
She tried all means to contact the Arrows, but they weren’t taking any calls. The Justice League said Ollie had told them to butt out and that he could handle it. That wasn’t nearly good enough. Dinah would’ve told Barbara if she was okay, even if she had to get Roy to send up a smoke signal to do it.
So Barbara used the oldest means of communication: the chain. She knew Robin, who knew Speedy, who had to know what was going on with Dinah. It took a day to get an answer back. Once she did, Barbara cancelled a drug bust, an undercover assignment, and a stake-out. Then she told Zinda to fuel up for Star City.
***
Barbara had never actually ridden in an APC before. She didn’t like it. The suspension would give Dinah a fit, nearly rattling the laptop off Barbara’s lap on several occasions. Helena and Zinda were riding in front, disguised as soldiers, while the rest of the BOP rode in the back.
“It’s like sitting on a washing machine!” Misfit exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t know,” Babs said.
“Neither would I,” said Barda. “They don’t build washing machines that strong.”
Barbara began typing with her the-keyboard-has-profoundly-offended-me force and Barda shut up, holding a hand over Misfit’s mouth for good measure. Not that Babs was mad at either of them, but Barda didn’t want to say the capital of Brazil was Rio and then face Babs’s editorial wrath. Half-an-hour later, Helena opened the hatch to the back.
“Our credentials checked. We’re inside Star City.”
“Of course we are. Star City’s never been that hard to get into, even under martial law.” She never took her eyes off her laptop. “Damnit, hospitals still aren’t showing anyone matching Dina’s description. Why isn’t Ollie bringing her in?”
“Maybe he doesn’t think the hospitals are safe,” Misfit suggested.
“It’s a Society invasion. Nowhere is safe. At least at a hospital, she won’t bleed out and,” Babs broke off for a second. “Huntress, what’s our ETA?”
“20 minutes.”
“Unacceptable. Go faster.”
“Babs, the streets are crawling with feds. If we attract their attention…”
“Then you’ll just have to lose them. Not a suggestion: Faster.”
Helena shut the hatch and put pedal to metal.
“It worries me when she’s crazier than you,” Zinda said.
“Same here,” Helena replied.
Five minutes later they were at Ollie’s place, and Barda could tell Barbara was brimming over with complaints about its defenselessness. She had much the same observation.
“So, we’re going to break into his city and ambush him at his front door,” Helena asked on their way up the driveway. In the distance, there were sirens and fires, but no active explosions.
“That’s the plan.”
“You would never do this in Gotham,” Helena accused.
“You think I’m afraid of Batman?”
“No. But Dinah’s here, not there.”
Barbara rang the doorbell. “I got engaged to Dick. She got engaged to Ollie.”
“But you didn’t get married.”
“She did,” Barbara said, jabbing the doorbell hard.
“Skipper, maybe he can’t hear you. You tried knocking…?”
“Good idea.” Barbara turned and jerked her thumb at the door. “Barda, knock.”
The door flew off its hinges.
Ollie looked up from the bow he’d been stringing. “Sonuva… oh, hey. Guess you aren’t selling Girl Scout cookies?”
“The only thing I want to hear from you is Dinah’s exact location.”
“I’m sure she appreciates the concern, but the doctor said she needs rest.”
“You took her to a doctor?”
“When I do, that’s what he’ll—“
“Find her,” Barbara ordered her agents.
They started a sweep of the house. Ollie sat down, bluff called. “This is my city. My wife. I can handle…”
“You should’ve told me the moment she went missing.”
“And let you do to Star City what you did to Metropolis?”
As bad as Barbara’s rare freak-outs were, the times when she got scary-calm were worse. Whatever Barbara could do angry, she could do ten times worse when she was calm. Misfit teleported behind Barda.
“Queen, I realize you’re given a certain amount of latitude by others. Maybe they’re charmed by you, maybe they’re used to you, I really don’t know or care. But when you screw up, they let you off the hook. Me, I’m not your friend, not your teammate, and I. Don’t. Like you. If you got my friend hurt… if you didn’t do everything in your power to help her… I won’t care why. I won’t even care that you’re a ‘superhero’. I will hurt you. I won’t be caught. I won’t feel remorse. And I won’t stop.”
“I see the Bat passed on his talent for professional courtesy.”
“You lost courtesy two days ago, when Dinah was still missing and you kept it a secret.”
Barda came down the stairs. “Found her.”
***
Dinah’d been tortured. It was the red that swallowed up Barbara’s vision at the sight of her. Dinah had been in pain, alone, while Barbara had been helpless and ignorant to save her. Because of Ollie. It was only her desperate need to know that Dinah was okay keeping her from ripping him apart. She felt Dinah’s pulse. Still strong. After all she’d been through, still strong.
Dinah didn’t open her eyes, not under the bandages covering them, but she did stiffen with wakefulness. And pain. “Babs?”
Barbara took her hand, careful of the broken bones. “Right here.”
“Promise you won’t take it out on Ollie?”
“Sure.”
”See? She’s fine,” Ollie said. “Hey, there’s an in-progress on Saxon. You gonna be okay here?” he asked Dinah.
“Go,” Dinah said.
Ollie was grinning as he went into battle.
“You guys better go with,” Barbara told the Birds of Prey. “You see anything that even smells of Society, capture and detain. I want confessions before they go to the cops and I don’t particularly care how.”
They filed out. Barbara stayed at Dinah’s side, even when Dinah let go of her hand.
“I don’t hear a keyboard.”
“They’ll do fine on their own. They’re a good team. Helena’s a good leader.”
“Misfit working out okay? She sounded like she’d be trouble in your letters.”
“The team needs someone like her to give the rest of us hope.”
“Does she?”
“The others. Not me. But I don’t need any. You want water or…”
“Some music would be nice.”
“Where…” Barbara spotted the stereo, the CD tower next to it. She wheeled up to it. “What do you like?”
“Those aren’t my CDs. The iPod on the piano.”
Barbara picked it up, found the ear buds. Then she looked at the state of Dinah’s ears and plugged it into the laptop, letting the surprisingly powerful speaker take over. A sappy Boston ballad took over. The music was soft, soothing, maybe even romantic but not obviously so. Barbara wondered who Dinah listened to it with.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Yeah. I wanna talk about it. I want to talk about how I can be alone in the dark for three days and my husband expects me to be okay just because he rescued me. I want to talk about how I miss my flower shop, and Mia and Connor are like strangers but I’m supposed to be okay with that because this is where Ollie lives and this is his family. I miss Zinda, I miss Helena, and I miss you. All the time. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought Ollie would be my partner. Like you were.”
Barbara tented her fingers. “I’m going to take you to a doctor now.”
“We don’t have a car with hand controls.”
“Misfit can drive.”
***
“Watch the divider, watch the divider… you’re drifting!”
“The steering’s shot to shit—“
“Language!”
“I missed this too,” Dinah said.
***
The hospital was on the verge of triage, but a doctor was able to take a few minutes to set Dinah’s broken bones and shoot her full of painkillers. They rested in a maternity ward that looked like a refugee camp, the spaces between beds lined with bruised and bandaged patients.
“Ironically,” Dinah said, stoned, “I’m beginning to think saying all that was a bad idea.”
“Ya think?”
“I don’t love him.”
“I know.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
Barbara mentally flipped a coin and laughed instead of crying. “You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“He looks at other women. He doesn’t go further—I don’t think—but he acts like I’m the bad guy when I call him on it.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I shouldn’t have left.”
“So, what, you’re just going to take it back? Pretend it never happened?”
A moment passed. “Wouldn’t it be nice?”
“Yes, of course, but…”
“I don’t love him,” Dinah said when Barbara wouldn’t finish her thought. “I love you. Even more than I love the pretty lights that flash the color of candy.”
“Get some sleep, Dinah.”
“Stay with me, Hamtaro?”
“Of course.”
***
That evening, the nurses changed Dinah’s crude homemade bandages. Her eyes were uncovered and the first thing she saw was Barbara, crying at the sight of her.
“Don’t—“ Dinah said, before more painkillers came and reduced her to a far easier level of consciousness. “Cry…”
***
Dinah woke in the middle of the night to find Barbara at her bedside, slumped back in her chair with her glasses askew. Dinah sat up, groaning, to take off Barbara’s glasses and throw one of her own blankets over the hacker’s goose-pimped skin. Barbara sighed in her sleep.
“Yeah, me too.” Dinah settled back into bed.
***
The Society had been attacking in waves – Dinah’s kidnapping at the same time as a superpowered rampage, a bank robbery – so Barbara made the case for pairing up: Helena and Zinda, Connor and Roy, Misfit and Barda, Mia and Ollie. Each incident would get a doubled response, preventing the supervillains from escaping like they had before.
Barbara managed to get Dinah transferred to a private room ear-marked for a city father with a broken leg. Watching Dinah sleep was the only thing that kept the knife in Barbara’s chest from breaking loose and cutting into her.
She opened a private line to Helena. “Helena, hypothetically speaking… if the man you loved was trapped in a loveless marriage, would you still be with him?”
“Hypothetically speaking, you love Dinah. What’s more important than that?”
“She’s married. Am I the only one concerned with that?”
“I’m sure Ollie is.”
“Not helping.”
“What do you expect? Dinah leaves him, he gives Hal a blowjob and everyone lives happily ever after? What you have to do is weight his happiness against everyone else’s.”
“Thanks for the advice. And that brain-bleach-demanding image.”
“I live to serve.”
***
Dinah woke that morning just in time for breakfast. Her hands were wrapped in plaster by then, so Barbara snuck in a breakfast smoothie and held it for Dinah to drink.
“You made this yourself?”
“Drink one every day,” Barbara confirmed.
“Your standards have just gone to pot without me, haven’t they?”
Barbara giggled. “I give you breakfast in bed and you still complain.”
“You know me. Insatiable.”
Dinah laughed. Barbara didn’t.
The thumb and middle finger on Dinah’s right hand were intact, making card games a possibility. Only simple games, so Dinah didn’t have to tax herself too much. Mostly Go Fish. Dinah fell asleep in the middle of more than one game, allowing Barbara to cheat and let Dinah win. When Dinah caught her at it, she just smiled like it was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.
“Laptop to the rescue.” Barbara pulled her MacBook from its carry case. “Anything you’d like to watch? Comedy? Women’s soccer? Gay porn?”
“The gay porn is tempting, but… do you have any Ugly Betty? I haven’t been keeping up on it.”
Barbara was shocked. “You love that show!”
Dinah’s smile took on a tinge of force. “Ollie’s football is on at the same time. So is Mia’s teen soap opera. The Tivo can only record two things at once, so… I manage.”
“You shouldn’t have to manage,” Barbara insisted.
“You’re still hung up on last night, aren’t you?”
“We got the bad guys, by the way. So you don’t have to worry. Roy and Barda’s teams managed captures, while Ollie and Helena reported that their baddies fled. Star City’s safe so…”
“Barbara, last night… talk to me about last night. Please.”
“You said a lot.”
“I meant a lot.”
“All of it?”
“Do you love me?”
“Helena seems to think so…”
“Damnit Babs!” Dinah threw her head back against her pillow. “At least I know where Ollie stands. With you, there’s always this armor…”
“I need it. I all but tell you I’m in love with you and you still marry that—“
“All you had to say was that you loved me and I wouldn’t have left!” Dinah reached out and, after a moment, Barbara let her take her hand. “Would it hurt that bad to let someone in?”
“It did with Dick.”
There was another long silence, broken only by Barbara going back to her laptop.
“I shouldn’t have left.” In the silence, Dinah’s voice was like a gunshot. “But you should’ve told me.”
Barbara’s face cracked into a smile. “I thought I did. I thought you knew. All the trust I placed in you, all the times we—how could you not know?”
“I needed to hear it.”
“I love you. I--love you,” Barbara repeated louder. “I’ve loved you since before I knew I could love anyone. I trusted you when you couldn’t trust myself and more than anything. I want you. As a partner, as a friend, as anything.”
“All you had to do was ask.”
***
Ollie took the news of Dinah’s departure like a man who’d had all the symptoms of a fatal disease, only to have the diagnosis confirmed. He signed the divorce papers without seeming to see them. “What’d I do wrong?” he asked Dinah.
“I was the one who was wrong,” she answered.
Dinah went to a hospital in Platinum Flats which specialized in bone reconstruction. Every day at six PM, both women’s moods would brighten as Barbara came in for a visit. After seven months, Dinah moved into Barbara’s home to continue her recovery. The nurse Barbara hired had the easiest assignment of his career, as Barbara did practically everything. Five months after that, Dinah had recovered enough to walk down the aisle. She promptly did so. And Barbara has had no trouble telling Dinah she was loved ever since.
Fandom: Birds of Prey
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,566
Characters/Pairings: Babs/Dinah, Ollie/Dinah
Summary: Barbara can content herself with only have Dinah in her life by phone and e-mail. But when Dinah disappears altogether, she realizes she needs much more.
There was a time when all Dinah had to do was walk into a room and Barbara would get a silly little smile. But lately, that hadn’t been happening. With Dinah in Star City, busy with all of Ollie’s activism and pie-in-the-sky pet projects, there was less time for chatting and they usually resorted to e-mails or tweets. It shouldn’t have made a difference, but Barbara missed Dinah’s voice. Almost as much as she missed Dinah. It felt, at times, like someone was cutting away parts of herself. And in her dreams, that someone usually took the form of Dinah’s husband, Ollie.
Then Dinah stopped responding to her altogether. That alone would make Barbara loosen her grip on the dogs of war, but coming on the heels of a Society attack on Star City…
She tried all means to contact the Arrows, but they weren’t taking any calls. The Justice League said Ollie had told them to butt out and that he could handle it. That wasn’t nearly good enough. Dinah would’ve told Barbara if she was okay, even if she had to get Roy to send up a smoke signal to do it.
So Barbara used the oldest means of communication: the chain. She knew Robin, who knew Speedy, who had to know what was going on with Dinah. It took a day to get an answer back. Once she did, Barbara cancelled a drug bust, an undercover assignment, and a stake-out. Then she told Zinda to fuel up for Star City.
***
Barbara had never actually ridden in an APC before. She didn’t like it. The suspension would give Dinah a fit, nearly rattling the laptop off Barbara’s lap on several occasions. Helena and Zinda were riding in front, disguised as soldiers, while the rest of the BOP rode in the back.
“It’s like sitting on a washing machine!” Misfit exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t know,” Babs said.
“Neither would I,” said Barda. “They don’t build washing machines that strong.”
Barbara began typing with her the-keyboard-has-profoundly-offended-me force and Barda shut up, holding a hand over Misfit’s mouth for good measure. Not that Babs was mad at either of them, but Barda didn’t want to say the capital of Brazil was Rio and then face Babs’s editorial wrath. Half-an-hour later, Helena opened the hatch to the back.
“Our credentials checked. We’re inside Star City.”
“Of course we are. Star City’s never been that hard to get into, even under martial law.” She never took her eyes off her laptop. “Damnit, hospitals still aren’t showing anyone matching Dina’s description. Why isn’t Ollie bringing her in?”
“Maybe he doesn’t think the hospitals are safe,” Misfit suggested.
“It’s a Society invasion. Nowhere is safe. At least at a hospital, she won’t bleed out and,” Babs broke off for a second. “Huntress, what’s our ETA?”
“20 minutes.”
“Unacceptable. Go faster.”
“Babs, the streets are crawling with feds. If we attract their attention…”
“Then you’ll just have to lose them. Not a suggestion: Faster.”
Helena shut the hatch and put pedal to metal.
“It worries me when she’s crazier than you,” Zinda said.
“Same here,” Helena replied.
Five minutes later they were at Ollie’s place, and Barda could tell Barbara was brimming over with complaints about its defenselessness. She had much the same observation.
“So, we’re going to break into his city and ambush him at his front door,” Helena asked on their way up the driveway. In the distance, there were sirens and fires, but no active explosions.
“That’s the plan.”
“You would never do this in Gotham,” Helena accused.
“You think I’m afraid of Batman?”
“No. But Dinah’s here, not there.”
Barbara rang the doorbell. “I got engaged to Dick. She got engaged to Ollie.”
“But you didn’t get married.”
“She did,” Barbara said, jabbing the doorbell hard.
“Skipper, maybe he can’t hear you. You tried knocking…?”
“Good idea.” Barbara turned and jerked her thumb at the door. “Barda, knock.”
The door flew off its hinges.
Ollie looked up from the bow he’d been stringing. “Sonuva… oh, hey. Guess you aren’t selling Girl Scout cookies?”
“The only thing I want to hear from you is Dinah’s exact location.”
“I’m sure she appreciates the concern, but the doctor said she needs rest.”
“You took her to a doctor?”
“When I do, that’s what he’ll—“
“Find her,” Barbara ordered her agents.
They started a sweep of the house. Ollie sat down, bluff called. “This is my city. My wife. I can handle…”
“You should’ve told me the moment she went missing.”
“And let you do to Star City what you did to Metropolis?”
As bad as Barbara’s rare freak-outs were, the times when she got scary-calm were worse. Whatever Barbara could do angry, she could do ten times worse when she was calm. Misfit teleported behind Barda.
“Queen, I realize you’re given a certain amount of latitude by others. Maybe they’re charmed by you, maybe they’re used to you, I really don’t know or care. But when you screw up, they let you off the hook. Me, I’m not your friend, not your teammate, and I. Don’t. Like you. If you got my friend hurt… if you didn’t do everything in your power to help her… I won’t care why. I won’t even care that you’re a ‘superhero’. I will hurt you. I won’t be caught. I won’t feel remorse. And I won’t stop.”
“I see the Bat passed on his talent for professional courtesy.”
“You lost courtesy two days ago, when Dinah was still missing and you kept it a secret.”
Barda came down the stairs. “Found her.”
***
Dinah’d been tortured. It was the red that swallowed up Barbara’s vision at the sight of her. Dinah had been in pain, alone, while Barbara had been helpless and ignorant to save her. Because of Ollie. It was only her desperate need to know that Dinah was okay keeping her from ripping him apart. She felt Dinah’s pulse. Still strong. After all she’d been through, still strong.
Dinah didn’t open her eyes, not under the bandages covering them, but she did stiffen with wakefulness. And pain. “Babs?”
Barbara took her hand, careful of the broken bones. “Right here.”
“Promise you won’t take it out on Ollie?”
“Sure.”
”See? She’s fine,” Ollie said. “Hey, there’s an in-progress on Saxon. You gonna be okay here?” he asked Dinah.
“Go,” Dinah said.
Ollie was grinning as he went into battle.
“You guys better go with,” Barbara told the Birds of Prey. “You see anything that even smells of Society, capture and detain. I want confessions before they go to the cops and I don’t particularly care how.”
They filed out. Barbara stayed at Dinah’s side, even when Dinah let go of her hand.
“I don’t hear a keyboard.”
“They’ll do fine on their own. They’re a good team. Helena’s a good leader.”
“Misfit working out okay? She sounded like she’d be trouble in your letters.”
“The team needs someone like her to give the rest of us hope.”
“Does she?”
“The others. Not me. But I don’t need any. You want water or…”
“Some music would be nice.”
“Where…” Barbara spotted the stereo, the CD tower next to it. She wheeled up to it. “What do you like?”
“Those aren’t my CDs. The iPod on the piano.”
Barbara picked it up, found the ear buds. Then she looked at the state of Dinah’s ears and plugged it into the laptop, letting the surprisingly powerful speaker take over. A sappy Boston ballad took over. The music was soft, soothing, maybe even romantic but not obviously so. Barbara wondered who Dinah listened to it with.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Yeah. I wanna talk about it. I want to talk about how I can be alone in the dark for three days and my husband expects me to be okay just because he rescued me. I want to talk about how I miss my flower shop, and Mia and Connor are like strangers but I’m supposed to be okay with that because this is where Ollie lives and this is his family. I miss Zinda, I miss Helena, and I miss you. All the time. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought Ollie would be my partner. Like you were.”
Barbara tented her fingers. “I’m going to take you to a doctor now.”
“We don’t have a car with hand controls.”
“Misfit can drive.”
***
“Watch the divider, watch the divider… you’re drifting!”
“The steering’s shot to shit—“
“Language!”
“I missed this too,” Dinah said.
***
The hospital was on the verge of triage, but a doctor was able to take a few minutes to set Dinah’s broken bones and shoot her full of painkillers. They rested in a maternity ward that looked like a refugee camp, the spaces between beds lined with bruised and bandaged patients.
“Ironically,” Dinah said, stoned, “I’m beginning to think saying all that was a bad idea.”
“Ya think?”
“I don’t love him.”
“I know.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”
Barbara mentally flipped a coin and laughed instead of crying. “You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“He looks at other women. He doesn’t go further—I don’t think—but he acts like I’m the bad guy when I call him on it.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I shouldn’t have left.”
“So, what, you’re just going to take it back? Pretend it never happened?”
A moment passed. “Wouldn’t it be nice?”
“Yes, of course, but…”
“I don’t love him,” Dinah said when Barbara wouldn’t finish her thought. “I love you. Even more than I love the pretty lights that flash the color of candy.”
“Get some sleep, Dinah.”
“Stay with me, Hamtaro?”
“Of course.”
***
That evening, the nurses changed Dinah’s crude homemade bandages. Her eyes were uncovered and the first thing she saw was Barbara, crying at the sight of her.
“Don’t—“ Dinah said, before more painkillers came and reduced her to a far easier level of consciousness. “Cry…”
***
Dinah woke in the middle of the night to find Barbara at her bedside, slumped back in her chair with her glasses askew. Dinah sat up, groaning, to take off Barbara’s glasses and throw one of her own blankets over the hacker’s goose-pimped skin. Barbara sighed in her sleep.
“Yeah, me too.” Dinah settled back into bed.
***
The Society had been attacking in waves – Dinah’s kidnapping at the same time as a superpowered rampage, a bank robbery – so Barbara made the case for pairing up: Helena and Zinda, Connor and Roy, Misfit and Barda, Mia and Ollie. Each incident would get a doubled response, preventing the supervillains from escaping like they had before.
Barbara managed to get Dinah transferred to a private room ear-marked for a city father with a broken leg. Watching Dinah sleep was the only thing that kept the knife in Barbara’s chest from breaking loose and cutting into her.
She opened a private line to Helena. “Helena, hypothetically speaking… if the man you loved was trapped in a loveless marriage, would you still be with him?”
“Hypothetically speaking, you love Dinah. What’s more important than that?”
“She’s married. Am I the only one concerned with that?”
“I’m sure Ollie is.”
“Not helping.”
“What do you expect? Dinah leaves him, he gives Hal a blowjob and everyone lives happily ever after? What you have to do is weight his happiness against everyone else’s.”
“Thanks for the advice. And that brain-bleach-demanding image.”
“I live to serve.”
***
Dinah woke that morning just in time for breakfast. Her hands were wrapped in plaster by then, so Barbara snuck in a breakfast smoothie and held it for Dinah to drink.
“You made this yourself?”
“Drink one every day,” Barbara confirmed.
“Your standards have just gone to pot without me, haven’t they?”
Barbara giggled. “I give you breakfast in bed and you still complain.”
“You know me. Insatiable.”
Dinah laughed. Barbara didn’t.
The thumb and middle finger on Dinah’s right hand were intact, making card games a possibility. Only simple games, so Dinah didn’t have to tax herself too much. Mostly Go Fish. Dinah fell asleep in the middle of more than one game, allowing Barbara to cheat and let Dinah win. When Dinah caught her at it, she just smiled like it was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.
“Laptop to the rescue.” Barbara pulled her MacBook from its carry case. “Anything you’d like to watch? Comedy? Women’s soccer? Gay porn?”
“The gay porn is tempting, but… do you have any Ugly Betty? I haven’t been keeping up on it.”
Barbara was shocked. “You love that show!”
Dinah’s smile took on a tinge of force. “Ollie’s football is on at the same time. So is Mia’s teen soap opera. The Tivo can only record two things at once, so… I manage.”
“You shouldn’t have to manage,” Barbara insisted.
“You’re still hung up on last night, aren’t you?”
“We got the bad guys, by the way. So you don’t have to worry. Roy and Barda’s teams managed captures, while Ollie and Helena reported that their baddies fled. Star City’s safe so…”
“Barbara, last night… talk to me about last night. Please.”
“You said a lot.”
“I meant a lot.”
“All of it?”
“Do you love me?”
“Helena seems to think so…”
“Damnit Babs!” Dinah threw her head back against her pillow. “At least I know where Ollie stands. With you, there’s always this armor…”
“I need it. I all but tell you I’m in love with you and you still marry that—“
“All you had to say was that you loved me and I wouldn’t have left!” Dinah reached out and, after a moment, Barbara let her take her hand. “Would it hurt that bad to let someone in?”
“It did with Dick.”
There was another long silence, broken only by Barbara going back to her laptop.
“I shouldn’t have left.” In the silence, Dinah’s voice was like a gunshot. “But you should’ve told me.”
Barbara’s face cracked into a smile. “I thought I did. I thought you knew. All the trust I placed in you, all the times we—how could you not know?”
“I needed to hear it.”
“I love you. I--love you,” Barbara repeated louder. “I’ve loved you since before I knew I could love anyone. I trusted you when you couldn’t trust myself and more than anything. I want you. As a partner, as a friend, as anything.”
“All you had to do was ask.”
***
Ollie took the news of Dinah’s departure like a man who’d had all the symptoms of a fatal disease, only to have the diagnosis confirmed. He signed the divorce papers without seeming to see them. “What’d I do wrong?” he asked Dinah.
“I was the one who was wrong,” she answered.
Dinah went to a hospital in Platinum Flats which specialized in bone reconstruction. Every day at six PM, both women’s moods would brighten as Barbara came in for a visit. After seven months, Dinah moved into Barbara’s home to continue her recovery. The nurse Barbara hired had the easiest assignment of his career, as Barbara did practically everything. Five months after that, Dinah had recovered enough to walk down the aisle. She promptly did so. And Barbara has had no trouble telling Dinah she was loved ever since.
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And, of course, I approve of any story where Dinah picks Babs over Ollie.
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excellent story, thanks for sharing
WS
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What can I say? The Birds of Prey are just so much love. (Although they clearly need Dinah and Barda back.)
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