BOP fic: Her Dark Secret (Babs/Dinah)
Oct. 24th, 2008 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Her Dark Secret
Fandom: DC comics
Rating: R
Word Count: 5,172
Characters/Pairings: Babs/Dinah, Helena Bertinelli, Zinda Blake
Summary: With her husband-to-be Oliver Queen lost in Transylvania, Dinah Lance is all alone in Gotham. Will she find companionship in the company of Countess Barbara, or something more?
Dinah had never figured herself for a fantasist. She knew all too well how hysterical women could become upon reading novels and other fictions to inflame the passions. But with Oliver gone, the house was so empty. She couldn’t even engage the servants in conversation or visit with her friends, the stigma of his disappearance was so great. And the book the Countess had left her was so tempting, the way its pages would shift in the wind and hint at one of the drawings within, drawings that demanded to be given an explanation by their fellow text.
Finally, fed up with embroidering, Dinah put on some tea, found herself a spot in the garden, and opened the book to read.
Before she knew it, the sun had set and she had to get candles to finish the book. She just couldn’t leave Professor Challenger stranded in the lost world.
***
The next morning, she went to return the book to the Countess, who lived on the waterfront where the more respectable genteel shied away. Dinah had always heard of that part of town as the sort of criminal enterprise that Sherlock Holmes might bust up, with Oliver even going so far as to suspect socialists among them! But everyone looked so happy. There were no streetwalkers or drunkards, just people sweeping up the roads and doing laundry in rain barrels filled with soapy water. Most peculiar.
Finally, she reached the Countess’s estate. It had once been a theater which showed all kinds of vulgar shows, but the Countess had converted it into a mansion. There were workers ripping away the rotten wood and replacing it with new lumber, and porters bringing in crates from one of the boats the Countess’s shipping company owed. Dinah could see Zinda, the Countess’s exotic private sailor, supervising the entire process.
“Excuse me, Captain Zinda,” she called on the dock, getting as near to the water as she dared.
Zinda looked down from her perch on the ship’s figurehead (which was scandalously carved to resemble a nude woman with bat wings open like the sails of the ship. Dinah would’ve expected such things from crude sailors, but those captained by a woman?). “Aye, how may I help ye?”
“I was looking for the Countess?”
“She be inside, landlubber. Just follow the crates! She always wants to be the first to see them!”
Dinah nodded politely. Zinda was an odd sort. Probably a Colonial.
She followed two of the porters into the house. It had Mr. Edison’s electric lights installed, the first of all the houses in London to be so modified. The light vaguely scared her. What was wrong with plain old gaslight? And there was another of the Countess’s servants, Helena, who scarcely wore more than a pinafore! If there was a dress under there, Dinah was hard-pressed to see it and not much inclined to look, what with the animalistic coloring of Helena’s skin.
“Dinah!” Helena called. “Come to watch the sailors?”
Dinah colored instantly. Helena always did that to her! “No, uh, no…”
“Yes, yes, of course, you would never cheat on your dear departed Oliver.”
“You say that like he’s dead!” Dinah accused.
“Why, yes, I suppose I do.” Helena settled back. With her customary dark amusement taken, she returned to her penny dreadful. Such things should come of reading! “Babs is upstairs.”
“That’s Countess Gordon to you,” Dinah sniffed as she paraded past Helena. But any hope she might’ve had of finding an ally in Barbara was ill-founded. There was the Countess, in those masculinely dark clothes, those waistcoats and trousers and cloaks that would’ve made her look like a man were it not for the ample bust and hips they were cut to emphasize. Her red hair, so indecently vibrant, clung to her face with sweat as she worked a crowbar into one of the crates, finally popping it open. Inside were row upon row of books. She sniffed them and exhaled with such satisfaction that Dinah could almost mistake them for poppy.
“Nothing like the smell of literature in the morning, is there Dinah? Here.” Barbara tossed her one and Dinah was forced to catch it. She opened it and found only a sort of gobbledygook inside. “What is this? A magic spell?”
“No, that hasn’t been delivered yet,” Barbara smirked. “It’s Chinese. We’ll be translating it. The Empire has never before read this!”
Dinah refrained from commenting that if it was Chinese, they were probably better off not reading it. The only thing China had ever contributed to the Crown was tea. But whenever Dinah talked like that, as any right-thinking Briton would, Barbara always looked so… disappointed in her.
“I’m glad you’re pleased,” Dinah said instead, with a lady-like curtsy of her overskirt. “I came to thank you for the loan of your book. I found it most edifying.”
There was something flame-like in Barbara’s smile, the way it was struck when Dinah appeared and then only waned and waxed, but never disappeared. And the way it lit up the room. “This is a library, Miss Lance. It is what we do.”
“Yes, I try not to hold it against you.” Dinah smiled beatifically.
“Oh, sweet Dinah.” Barbara touched her cheek in a way that made Dinah understand the vital importance held by gloves of kid-skin and silk. Imagine if a man were touched that way? Even Dinah, who was feminine to the marrow, felt peculiar’d by Barbara’s touch. “You keep me so honest.”
“Miss Gordon! Miss Gordon!” The clamoring was both the excited voice and dashing footsteps of Charlene, one of Countess Gordon’s three young wards. Rescued from the orphanage, bless her heart, though Barbara had once stated with a wink that they’d tried to filch her purse and she’d doubled the price.
There was Charlene, freckled with all the sun she’d been getting since moving in with Barbara. Then Steph, the bossiest if not the oldest, whose blonde curls were covered with a newsboy’s cap and who wore a purple cloak everywhere out of dire fear of rain. And finally Cass, so quiet she was like a coal put next to diamonds when compared to her sisters. She was an Asiatic, with black almond eyes and sallow skin, but when she smiled, Dinah forgave Barbara the eccentricity of taking her in.
“Look what we---“ Steph started to say upon bursting into the room, waving a playbill, but she stopped short upon seeing Dinah. “I didn’t know we had company,” she said sullenly.
“It’s quite alright, I was just returning a book to your mistress.” Steph’s mouth went slightly slack when she heard Dinah say that. “Here, let me see. Is that a new play opening? Perhaps we could all go together.”
Barbara “hmm”ed in approval at that, but when Dinah opened the paper, she saw it wasn’t a playbill at all. It was a penny dreadful! She held it up to Barbara.
“My countess, see what your wards have been reading! Don’t you know this tripe corrupts the morals and offends the senses!?”
“It does not!” Charlene cried.
“Don’t talk back to your elders.”
“It’s only about the adventures of the Bat-Girl,” Cass said ruefully.
“The Bat-Girl? I heard the vicar give a sermon on that menace. All those shameless tales about her theatrics and her adventuring and her… coupling! I would’ve thought bright young girls like you three would have more sense than to buy into this sensationalism!”
“Come now, Dinah, they’re only children.” Barbara put a hand on Dinah’s shoulder, calming her as she returned the penny dreadful to Steph. “We’ll discuss this later. For now, run along and play outside while I talk to Miss Lance.”
“Yes, Miss Gordon,” the girls all dutifully rung out before they scampered off, headed for the open window.
“And not down the drain pipe!” Barbara called after them, but they were already gone. “Kids. They’re a blessing… and a curse.” She put an arm around Dinah’s waist familiarly and led her through a door into a hallway, away from the laboring porters. “I must confess, there was a part of me that had hoped you wouldn’t return.”
“I know I’m not the richest, but tell me my dresses are not that threadbare!”
“No!” Barbara laughed. “No, not yet. It’s… It’s about Oliver.”
“My husband-to-be?” Dinah raised a hand to her mouth. “You have news of him?”
“Perhaps… come with me, please. We should not discuss this where wandering ears could overhear.”
“Of course, of course.”
They went to the study, which Dinah had always found slightly unnerving. Barbara’s extensive collection of foreign relics was so… foreign. She said she’d inherited them from her father, but then what of the daguerreotypes of foreign lands, with Barbara in khaki jackets, short pants, and pith hats, always gleefully in contact with some native? There was her meeting with Teth-Adam, the sheik of Khandaq, and with the warrior women of Themyscira… even of her in the fantastical looking glass world of the colonial captain and the arachnid man. Oh, how relieved Dinah had been when that “parallel world” had turned out to just be a hoax.
“Here.” Barbara said, bringing her a glass of sherry. “It should help the news go down easier.”
“I don’t drink. I’m a teetotaler.”
“I completely understand. I don’t drink… wine… either.” Barbara smiled glossily. “Perhaps some orange marmalade?”
“Please, Countess, tell me of my fiancé’s fate!”
“I suppose I can’t put it off any longer.” Barbara sat down in the chair opposite Dinah. “As you know, Dinah, I was in Transylvania at the same time as Oliver Queen’s mysterious disappearance.”
“Yes, the last letter from him and Hal did mention that he was going to visit your clock tower.”
“Indeed. And I did meet your friends, but not at my residence. I found them in a brothel.” Barbara took Dinah’s hand. “Dinah, your fiancé was… a fornicator.”
Dinah gasped. “No! It can’t be!”
“I saw it with my own eyes. He even tried to seduce me! I’ve no doubt his disappearance is due to him, the damnable idiot, preferring to romance foreign women rather than return to you.”
Dinah felt tears gathering in her eyes. “But… but why? Did he not think I would make a good wife?”
“It was not your fault, Dinah!” Barbara said stridently. “In fact, I have my doubts that Oliver’s preferences ran along the lines of the feminine at all! Did he not always share a single room with Hal, even a single bed?”
“No!” Dinah cried, horrified. “It can’t be true! It just can’t!”
“Oh, but it can. I myself overheard Oliver and his degenerate plans for Hal. Normally I would take no care in such matters, but when an innocent young woman such as yourself is involved… pining away, your beauty fading, while a contemptible man like Oliver abuses your trust… Oh, Dinah, I wish I could bring better news. I would rather take a thunderbolt through my own heart than share this burden with you, but perhaps now you can understand that Oliver isn’t worth your tears, nor your concern.”
“How right you are!” Dinah stood up, on fire with vengeful anger! “That hateful braggart! That contestable pig! That… that fuckster!” She fell back into her chair, sobbing. “Oh, my heart shatters. How is it that one might prefer their own sex to the proper love?”
“Take cheer, my dearest, you’re not the first to be so swindled by love’s cruel game. There are many who belong to the third sex. Even some women.”
Dinah laughed hysterically. “You try to salve my wounds with humor! How could a woman love another woman? The very thought is… is…”
“Have you forgotten my account of time spent among the natives of Themyscira, the so-called Paradise Island?” Barbara sprung up and retrieved a book from one of the many shelves that ringed the room. “I studied extensively how two women might so… take their pleasure.”
“But those are primitives, Countess, savages. How could an enlightened, Christian lady partake in such perversion?”
“Oh, it works much the same,” Barbara said cheerfully, turning her wooden chair around to straddle it in front of Dinah. “They kiss much as a man and woman do…”
“Disgusting!”
“But in the marriage bed, they use tongues, fingers, even…” Barbara tilted her chair forward, as if imparting some dread secret about her lineage. “Implements.”
“Implements!” Dinah cried, so horrified that even her grief over Oliver’s treachery was forgotten.
“Indeed. One of the Amazons even gifted me one as proof of their strange rituals.” Barbara opened a drawer under one of the bookshelf and took out something obscenely shaped, with numerous leather fetters dangling from it. She bore it closer and upon examination Dinah could see it was carved from whalebone and polished such that she could see her own reflection in its phallic form. “Turn around,” Barbara said, her voice suddenly as low and rough as a cobbled street at midnight.
Dinah obeyed without thinking and was totally unprepared when Barbara pressed against her like a rider upon a horse, her arms looping around Dinah’s body to rest the base of the implement at Dinah’s most private juncture.
“It would go here, you see, just like a man’s.” Barbara’s voice was hot in Dinah’s ear, and suddenly the young bride could think of nothing but that smoky sound. “And you would strap it on. This one went along the left leg, this one along the right, this the waist.” Barbara circled around Dinah, leaving the implement buckled around her like a belt. “And then…” Barbara nimbly stepped over it so that it protruded from Dinah to between Barbara’s legs. Dinah turned away from Barbara’s all-consuming green eyes to see that their shadows were copulating! “They went to bed!”
“No!”
“Yes! Sometimes not even two, but three, four, five, six…”
“Enough!” Dinah ripped the implement from her waist. “I tolerate your bizarreness when no one else in this city will, but you overstep your bounds!”
Barbara looked down contritely. “My apologies, Miss Lance. I just become so passionate about anthropology that I forget that not everyone shares my enthusiasm… or has learned enough to understand it as I do.”
“Perhaps you should learn of a more feminine pursuit. I abhor saying it, but a woman your age and of your beauty should have no trouble attracting gentlemen callers, yet you have no husband. I hear the most unsettling rumors.”
“Rumors?” Barbara’s smile was back, though it had never fully left. “What kind?”
“Oh dear, codswallop and hogwash, if you’ll pardon my language. Just old biddies gossiping about an easy target. If you would attend a party now and then…”
“You mean sit in a circle talking about the weather and the queen mum’s health while the men stink up the place with cigars?”
Dinah laughed. “Yes, exactly. Oh, how keen you are. I do not even feel the pang of Oliver’s loss anymore. You have remade me.”
“If you are remade, then you have spent your whole life up to now in this dusty old mausoleum. Come, let us promenade. The sun has set and the ocean brings a cool breeze.”
“Cool? I might catch pneumonia.”
“I will keep you warm,” Barbara promised, before taking two coats from a closet. “Here, you can borrow this cloak of mine. Made from the fur of Mr. Poe’s Rue Morgue murderer.”
“Oh, you are dreadful!”
Barbara’s smile reached its deepest flame. “You have no idea.”
***
The ocean was surprisingly beautiful under the setting sun. Although polite society preferred the boardwalk on the north side of the city, the harbor was much more lively. There were all the beautiful ships, Navy, merchants, and exotic traders from the Far East in their junks. There were friendly old-timers who fished for an after-dinner treat in the sea. There was the smell of sea salts and the sonorous sound of waves crashing against the shoals. And most of all, there was Barbara to share it with.
Dinah had never had many close friends, not growing up, not during finishing school, not during her season. Then, all too soon, she’d been pledged to Oliver and his wealth had saved her family’s business. But no sooner had their match been finalized then Oliver had set off to travel, leaving her behind. The loneliness had been so acute that she’d thought she’d go mad, but then Barbara had come into her life. The deep love they shared now reminded her of Ruth and Naomi.
“What are you thinking?” Barbara said, interrupting Dinah’s thoughts.
Dinah blushed. “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me."
They were already holding hands, so Barbara gave her hand a squeeze. “I was wrong. It’s quite a warm night. Let’s get rid of these awful gloves, which men certainly have no need for, and be as one flesh!”
That sounded like a splendid idea, and soon they were holding hands skin to skin and feeling out the bark of the palm trees as they passed. It was such a curious texture. Barbara tugged Dinah through the sand to the waves, where she made Dinah take a handful of wet sand. It slid through her fingers like jam and Dinah had to wash her hand off in the waves. Then she wiped her hand on Barbara’s clothes in revenge. Barbara squealed and pushed Dinah toward the waves, but saved her at the last moment by grabbing hold of Dinah’s dress and pulling her back.
“You shrew! I could’ve been soaked!”
“I wouldn’t ever let you fall,” Barbara promised, and they walked back to the cobblestone that ended the beach’s sand.
They kept wandering through the waterfront, on a path only Barbara seemed to know. Dinah was enthralled by the stars coming out, so they stopped to watch them. Barbara sat, very unlady-like, on a barrel.
“I hope I spot a shooting star!” Dinah said. “I would so like to see one.”
“I saw one where it landed.”
“The cheek! You tell stories!”
“I do not! There was a cylinder inside, metal, glowing red hot, and when it opened… oh, that’s a story for another time. It’d give you frights if I told you now.”
“We wouldn’t want that!” Dinah leaned back and gave the stars another look. “Countess?”
“You can call me Barbara.”
“Yes, Countess… you’re so wise. Is it strange that I feel… a little relieved Oliver won’t be coming back?”
Barbara’s gaze shifted from the stars to Dinah. “How so?”
“It’s nothing. But I always felt such trepidation over performing my wifely duties.”
“Why?”
“Do you not know what it entails? The man takes his organ and puts it inside until something breaks! There is blood! And what if I grow fat with child? What if I enjoy it? What if he wants it all the time?”
“You should be as lucky to snare a lover who wishes to take you to bed all hours of the day, not that anyone romancing you would have much choice in the matter.”
“You shock!”
“I do not! Aren’t you aware of how beautiful you are? That golden hair, that fair skin, that ample bosom…”
“Barbara!”
The Countess smiled and looked back up at the sky. “You called me Barbara.”
“…did you mean what you said? About women who prefer the company of other women?”
“They’re called Sapphists, Dinah.”
“And they really go to bed with other women?”
“You find that so strange? Is not a woman as beautiful as a man? Is not a woman as intelligent as a man? Is not a woman…”
“Be serious. So long as a lady has a choice in the matter, why would she choose another lady over a man?”
“Perhaps she has no choice,” Barbara muttered. “Perhaps love is like that.”
“Well, I know what I’d do if I fell in love with a woman.”
“What?”
Dinah leaned against the wall. “I’d march right up to here and say ‘Listen here, you Sapphist, you put that implement away because you’re not a man and you don’t need to sin that way!’”
Barbara laughed throatily. “It really doesn’t hurt that bad.”
“How would you know? You’re not married.”
“And yet…”
“No!”
“Yes!”
Dinah lunged at her. “How was it!? Tell me everything. What was his name, what was he like, was he handsome, I bet he was handsome if you made love to him.”
“Which one?”
Dinah’s jaw dropped. “You slattern!”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I will send you to a convent and save your soul!”
“The way I see it, it’s a greater sin to not enjoy it in the marriage-bed than to enjoy it on a table… or floor… or alley.”
Dinah slapped at her friend. “Cheeky girl!”
“Jealous!”
“Reprobate!”
Barbara grabbed Dinah’s slapping hands by the wrists and pulled her close. “Careful…”
“Oh, did I hurt you?”
“No.” Barbara put Dinah’s hands behind her neck, like they were dancing. The redhead seemed to tower over her. “Do you still want to know what it felt like?”
Dinah’s mouth was dry all of a sudden. “I’m not sure.”
Once more, Barbara leaned in to Dinah’s ear, as if sharing a great secret. “Perhaps I could only tell you a little… then you could decide if you wanted to hear more.”
“But I fear I should only hear a little and then have no choice but to hear it through to its conclusion.”
Barbara chuckled. “And what would be so bad about that?”
Suddenly, there was an awful holler and Dinah felt herself being shoved to the ground. A pockmarked cobble filled her vision and then there was pain shooting through her face.
“Stop, thief!” Barbara cried, and Dinah looked up to see that Barbara was standing over her, only Helena was there too.
“My purse is gone,” Dinah started to say, but Helena interrupted her to say “Mistress?”
“Take care of it. I’ll take her back to the manor.”
“As you wish,” Helena said, and disappeared like a horse out the gate.
Barbara helped Dinah to her feet. “Are you okay?”
Dinah put a finger to her mouth and felt something warm and liquid to correspond with the coppery taste on her lips. “I think…”
“Let me see.”
“It’s nothing.”
Barbara pulled Dinah’s hand away from her mouth with steel strength. Then she saw the blood, brackish in the moonlight, on Dinah’s fingers.
“Oh, Dinah…”
“It’s just a split lip. I’ve had worse during evening vespers.”
“But you’re so… sweet,” Barbara murmured, a million miles away.
“Why, thank you.”
There was a blood-curdling scream from a block away. Barbara didn’t move a muscle.
“What was that?” Dinah cried.
“Your purse being returned. I’m sorry, Dinah, I… forgive me.” And she buried Dinah’s fingers in her mouth.
Dinah had always wondered how a woman as warm as Barbara could have such cold skin when they touched, but Barbara was aflame now. Her mouth boiled and the only thing Dinah could relate it to was a time when she’d been out riding. The horse had spooked and ran and Dinah had bounced around on the saddle, trying to get her stead back under control. By the time she did, she’d outpaced the others, and between her adrenaline and the motion of the powerful muscles she was seated astride, she felt a sort of… churning between her legs.
And now she felt that same sort of sensation, only traveling through her hand, like she’d stuck it into warm water and the feeling was moving upward.
Barbara took Dinah’s finger out of her mouth. There was a red blush in her cheeks, a jade fire in her eyes. She was staring at Dinah like they were the only two things in the world.
“Please don’t be frightened,” Barbara pleaded.
“I’m not,” Dinah said, surprised to realize it was the truth. Usually, everything frightened her. But how could she be scared of Barbara?
Then the Countess forced their mouths together, like Dinah had seen the young and foolish do on holiday. It caused the most peculiar pain to prickle through her lips. The churning, the tightening, was between her legs and in her stomach and she squeezed her thighs together to try to make it go away, but that just made it worse.
“If you only knew,” Barbara said when they parted, her lips oiled from Dinah’s blood in the moonlight. She licked them back to the very shade of red that an apple from the Tree of Knowledge would have for a sheen. “If you only knew how precious you are. I would give up all my lives for one with you.”
“Barbara, whatever you’re… we can’t! We mustn’t.”
“I must. Forgive me, my love, it has been so long…” And Dinah felt twin pains in her neck, so right, so true, so pure, and the churning deep within her tightened like a corset and then released and she could breath more freely than she ever had in her whole life.
***
Her consciousness faded with the pain into a deep, dreamless sleep in which she was vaguely aware of time passing, but it was as meaningless as a pint of water in a river. She woke up naked, which should have scandalized her. Why would she be naked if she weren’t in a bath? But her bed was as warm as a bath. There was something hard and unyielding at work between her legs, and something a good deal wetter and warmer touching her bosom.
Dinah moaned in delight as the pleasure traipsed through her, like electricity through the new lines that were being buried throughout the city. She didn’t know who was in bed with her and didn’t care—only she did know, on an instinctual level, that only one could ultimately bring her this kind of pleasure.
“Barbara,” she breathed, smiling with great glee.
As if summoned, the Countess appeared in the doorway and turned on the lights. Dinah barely had time to take in the bedroom—a four-poster bed with lewd sculptures of nymphs and satyrs and other mythological beasts carved into the bedposts, a Florentine painting of the Greek gods cavorting across from the foot of the bed (with the orgy depicted as lovingly as Botticelli would paint Venus, complete love and sensuality), and of course clothes strewn about the floor—when Barbara had crossed to the bed and pulled the sheets off.
Zinda and Helena were in bed with her, Zinda’s eyepatch the only bit of clothes between them. They were still caressing her when Barbara pulled them up by the hair like they were as light as feathers.
“She is mine!” Barbara roared, and threw the ladies toward the door. “I will punish you later!”
“Looking forward to it,” Helena quipped as Zinda pulled her out of the room. They were just embracing as the door slammed shut.
Barbara pulled the sheet back up over Dinah and pulled a chair to her bedside. She sat down heavily. There was blood drying on the front of her shirt, with her jacket and tie having disappeared.
“I must apologize for them. They had assumed—“ She shook her head. “I didn’t mean to move this fast.”
“You… planned this?” Dinah gathered the sheets more fully around herself.
“If I had told you outright of my particulars, what would you have done?”
“Probably panicked. Maybe… that still doesn’t make it okay, what you did.”
“I do know that.” Barbara rubbed at her temples. “I had hoped that, in time, you would come to understand. And when you did, you could make a fair choice from all the facts, just like my wards.”
“Are they vampires too?” Dinah demanded.
“Not yet. Vampirism freezes the aging process. I want them to be at least in their twenties before I do that. Besides which, they’re children. They’re not yet old enough to choose this life.”
“You bit me.” Dinah felt the linen of the bandage around her throat.
“My strain of vampirism allows me to consume normal food, but when I was that close to your blood, the temptation was just too great. Just the smell of it overstimulated my hypothalamus.”
“Oh… I never knew that was what it was called.”
“I stopped myself as soon as I could, but… I still took much. Luckily, Steph is your blood type. But I still imagine it will take some time for you to return to full health. You can speed the process by encompassing your diet, but… I’m so sorry, Dinah. I never meant to show you that side of myself. I know how it scares people. The hunger, the lust, the power. My worst nightmare was to dominate you so completely. I won’t ask your forgiveness. But I feel you deserve understanding, if only so your nightmares make sense.”
“Nightmares?” Barbara was starting to leave. “Countess… Barbara, wait!” Dinah got out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself haphazardly. She suddenly felt lightheaded and tripped, but Barbara was there to catch her with impossible speed. Dinah was lowered to the floor, Barbara still clutching her protectively.
“I warned you,” she started to say, but Dinah put a finger to her lips.
“It was a little romantic, actually.”
“You… what?”
“The way you were so lustful, yet so gentle about it…” Dinah petted Barbara’s hair. “I liked it.”
“…that’s the trauma talking, you don’t know what you’re saying. I’m a monster.”
“You’re my friend,” Dinah insisted. “Maybe… something more than that. I don’t know what. But if I go home, will you promise not to leave?”
“Dinah, I could’ve killed you.”
“No, you couldn’t have. I felt it, I felt the way you fought the hunger.”
“And lost.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Dinah searched Barbara’s face for a sign of the emotion she’d so delighted in earlier, but the Countess was cold as the grave. “Let’s give it some time. I’ll heal, you can work out a detailed explanation for all this, and we can see each other again.”
“I’ll take you back home,” Barbara agreed quietly.
“Can you give me a book to read?”
Barbara’s smile resurrected itself. “Of course, Dinah.”
“And… Barbara?”
“Yes, my bride?”
“Could you kiss me once more?”
“It may feel… very intense.”
Dinah nodded. “I’m ready now.”
As they kissed, Dinah’s tongue felt out the intriguing sharpness of Barbara’s canine teeth. What a thing to have hidden behind those pale lips. Almost like the passions hidden within the covers of one of Barbara’s humble books. There was no telling how many secrets the Countess hid. But Dinah wanted to know every one of them.
Fandom: DC comics
Rating: R
Word Count: 5,172
Characters/Pairings: Babs/Dinah, Helena Bertinelli, Zinda Blake
Summary: With her husband-to-be Oliver Queen lost in Transylvania, Dinah Lance is all alone in Gotham. Will she find companionship in the company of Countess Barbara, or something more?
Dinah had never figured herself for a fantasist. She knew all too well how hysterical women could become upon reading novels and other fictions to inflame the passions. But with Oliver gone, the house was so empty. She couldn’t even engage the servants in conversation or visit with her friends, the stigma of his disappearance was so great. And the book the Countess had left her was so tempting, the way its pages would shift in the wind and hint at one of the drawings within, drawings that demanded to be given an explanation by their fellow text.
Finally, fed up with embroidering, Dinah put on some tea, found herself a spot in the garden, and opened the book to read.
Before she knew it, the sun had set and she had to get candles to finish the book. She just couldn’t leave Professor Challenger stranded in the lost world.
***
The next morning, she went to return the book to the Countess, who lived on the waterfront where the more respectable genteel shied away. Dinah had always heard of that part of town as the sort of criminal enterprise that Sherlock Holmes might bust up, with Oliver even going so far as to suspect socialists among them! But everyone looked so happy. There were no streetwalkers or drunkards, just people sweeping up the roads and doing laundry in rain barrels filled with soapy water. Most peculiar.
Finally, she reached the Countess’s estate. It had once been a theater which showed all kinds of vulgar shows, but the Countess had converted it into a mansion. There were workers ripping away the rotten wood and replacing it with new lumber, and porters bringing in crates from one of the boats the Countess’s shipping company owed. Dinah could see Zinda, the Countess’s exotic private sailor, supervising the entire process.
“Excuse me, Captain Zinda,” she called on the dock, getting as near to the water as she dared.
Zinda looked down from her perch on the ship’s figurehead (which was scandalously carved to resemble a nude woman with bat wings open like the sails of the ship. Dinah would’ve expected such things from crude sailors, but those captained by a woman?). “Aye, how may I help ye?”
“I was looking for the Countess?”
“She be inside, landlubber. Just follow the crates! She always wants to be the first to see them!”
Dinah nodded politely. Zinda was an odd sort. Probably a Colonial.
She followed two of the porters into the house. It had Mr. Edison’s electric lights installed, the first of all the houses in London to be so modified. The light vaguely scared her. What was wrong with plain old gaslight? And there was another of the Countess’s servants, Helena, who scarcely wore more than a pinafore! If there was a dress under there, Dinah was hard-pressed to see it and not much inclined to look, what with the animalistic coloring of Helena’s skin.
“Dinah!” Helena called. “Come to watch the sailors?”
Dinah colored instantly. Helena always did that to her! “No, uh, no…”
“Yes, yes, of course, you would never cheat on your dear departed Oliver.”
“You say that like he’s dead!” Dinah accused.
“Why, yes, I suppose I do.” Helena settled back. With her customary dark amusement taken, she returned to her penny dreadful. Such things should come of reading! “Babs is upstairs.”
“That’s Countess Gordon to you,” Dinah sniffed as she paraded past Helena. But any hope she might’ve had of finding an ally in Barbara was ill-founded. There was the Countess, in those masculinely dark clothes, those waistcoats and trousers and cloaks that would’ve made her look like a man were it not for the ample bust and hips they were cut to emphasize. Her red hair, so indecently vibrant, clung to her face with sweat as she worked a crowbar into one of the crates, finally popping it open. Inside were row upon row of books. She sniffed them and exhaled with such satisfaction that Dinah could almost mistake them for poppy.
“Nothing like the smell of literature in the morning, is there Dinah? Here.” Barbara tossed her one and Dinah was forced to catch it. She opened it and found only a sort of gobbledygook inside. “What is this? A magic spell?”
“No, that hasn’t been delivered yet,” Barbara smirked. “It’s Chinese. We’ll be translating it. The Empire has never before read this!”
Dinah refrained from commenting that if it was Chinese, they were probably better off not reading it. The only thing China had ever contributed to the Crown was tea. But whenever Dinah talked like that, as any right-thinking Briton would, Barbara always looked so… disappointed in her.
“I’m glad you’re pleased,” Dinah said instead, with a lady-like curtsy of her overskirt. “I came to thank you for the loan of your book. I found it most edifying.”
There was something flame-like in Barbara’s smile, the way it was struck when Dinah appeared and then only waned and waxed, but never disappeared. And the way it lit up the room. “This is a library, Miss Lance. It is what we do.”
“Yes, I try not to hold it against you.” Dinah smiled beatifically.
“Oh, sweet Dinah.” Barbara touched her cheek in a way that made Dinah understand the vital importance held by gloves of kid-skin and silk. Imagine if a man were touched that way? Even Dinah, who was feminine to the marrow, felt peculiar’d by Barbara’s touch. “You keep me so honest.”
“Miss Gordon! Miss Gordon!” The clamoring was both the excited voice and dashing footsteps of Charlene, one of Countess Gordon’s three young wards. Rescued from the orphanage, bless her heart, though Barbara had once stated with a wink that they’d tried to filch her purse and she’d doubled the price.
There was Charlene, freckled with all the sun she’d been getting since moving in with Barbara. Then Steph, the bossiest if not the oldest, whose blonde curls were covered with a newsboy’s cap and who wore a purple cloak everywhere out of dire fear of rain. And finally Cass, so quiet she was like a coal put next to diamonds when compared to her sisters. She was an Asiatic, with black almond eyes and sallow skin, but when she smiled, Dinah forgave Barbara the eccentricity of taking her in.
“Look what we---“ Steph started to say upon bursting into the room, waving a playbill, but she stopped short upon seeing Dinah. “I didn’t know we had company,” she said sullenly.
“It’s quite alright, I was just returning a book to your mistress.” Steph’s mouth went slightly slack when she heard Dinah say that. “Here, let me see. Is that a new play opening? Perhaps we could all go together.”
Barbara “hmm”ed in approval at that, but when Dinah opened the paper, she saw it wasn’t a playbill at all. It was a penny dreadful! She held it up to Barbara.
“My countess, see what your wards have been reading! Don’t you know this tripe corrupts the morals and offends the senses!?”
“It does not!” Charlene cried.
“Don’t talk back to your elders.”
“It’s only about the adventures of the Bat-Girl,” Cass said ruefully.
“The Bat-Girl? I heard the vicar give a sermon on that menace. All those shameless tales about her theatrics and her adventuring and her… coupling! I would’ve thought bright young girls like you three would have more sense than to buy into this sensationalism!”
“Come now, Dinah, they’re only children.” Barbara put a hand on Dinah’s shoulder, calming her as she returned the penny dreadful to Steph. “We’ll discuss this later. For now, run along and play outside while I talk to Miss Lance.”
“Yes, Miss Gordon,” the girls all dutifully rung out before they scampered off, headed for the open window.
“And not down the drain pipe!” Barbara called after them, but they were already gone. “Kids. They’re a blessing… and a curse.” She put an arm around Dinah’s waist familiarly and led her through a door into a hallway, away from the laboring porters. “I must confess, there was a part of me that had hoped you wouldn’t return.”
“I know I’m not the richest, but tell me my dresses are not that threadbare!”
“No!” Barbara laughed. “No, not yet. It’s… It’s about Oliver.”
“My husband-to-be?” Dinah raised a hand to her mouth. “You have news of him?”
“Perhaps… come with me, please. We should not discuss this where wandering ears could overhear.”
“Of course, of course.”
They went to the study, which Dinah had always found slightly unnerving. Barbara’s extensive collection of foreign relics was so… foreign. She said she’d inherited them from her father, but then what of the daguerreotypes of foreign lands, with Barbara in khaki jackets, short pants, and pith hats, always gleefully in contact with some native? There was her meeting with Teth-Adam, the sheik of Khandaq, and with the warrior women of Themyscira… even of her in the fantastical looking glass world of the colonial captain and the arachnid man. Oh, how relieved Dinah had been when that “parallel world” had turned out to just be a hoax.
“Here.” Barbara said, bringing her a glass of sherry. “It should help the news go down easier.”
“I don’t drink. I’m a teetotaler.”
“I completely understand. I don’t drink… wine… either.” Barbara smiled glossily. “Perhaps some orange marmalade?”
“Please, Countess, tell me of my fiancé’s fate!”
“I suppose I can’t put it off any longer.” Barbara sat down in the chair opposite Dinah. “As you know, Dinah, I was in Transylvania at the same time as Oliver Queen’s mysterious disappearance.”
“Yes, the last letter from him and Hal did mention that he was going to visit your clock tower.”
“Indeed. And I did meet your friends, but not at my residence. I found them in a brothel.” Barbara took Dinah’s hand. “Dinah, your fiancé was… a fornicator.”
Dinah gasped. “No! It can’t be!”
“I saw it with my own eyes. He even tried to seduce me! I’ve no doubt his disappearance is due to him, the damnable idiot, preferring to romance foreign women rather than return to you.”
Dinah felt tears gathering in her eyes. “But… but why? Did he not think I would make a good wife?”
“It was not your fault, Dinah!” Barbara said stridently. “In fact, I have my doubts that Oliver’s preferences ran along the lines of the feminine at all! Did he not always share a single room with Hal, even a single bed?”
“No!” Dinah cried, horrified. “It can’t be true! It just can’t!”
“Oh, but it can. I myself overheard Oliver and his degenerate plans for Hal. Normally I would take no care in such matters, but when an innocent young woman such as yourself is involved… pining away, your beauty fading, while a contemptible man like Oliver abuses your trust… Oh, Dinah, I wish I could bring better news. I would rather take a thunderbolt through my own heart than share this burden with you, but perhaps now you can understand that Oliver isn’t worth your tears, nor your concern.”
“How right you are!” Dinah stood up, on fire with vengeful anger! “That hateful braggart! That contestable pig! That… that fuckster!” She fell back into her chair, sobbing. “Oh, my heart shatters. How is it that one might prefer their own sex to the proper love?”
“Take cheer, my dearest, you’re not the first to be so swindled by love’s cruel game. There are many who belong to the third sex. Even some women.”
Dinah laughed hysterically. “You try to salve my wounds with humor! How could a woman love another woman? The very thought is… is…”
“Have you forgotten my account of time spent among the natives of Themyscira, the so-called Paradise Island?” Barbara sprung up and retrieved a book from one of the many shelves that ringed the room. “I studied extensively how two women might so… take their pleasure.”
“But those are primitives, Countess, savages. How could an enlightened, Christian lady partake in such perversion?”
“Oh, it works much the same,” Barbara said cheerfully, turning her wooden chair around to straddle it in front of Dinah. “They kiss much as a man and woman do…”
“Disgusting!”
“But in the marriage bed, they use tongues, fingers, even…” Barbara tilted her chair forward, as if imparting some dread secret about her lineage. “Implements.”
“Implements!” Dinah cried, so horrified that even her grief over Oliver’s treachery was forgotten.
“Indeed. One of the Amazons even gifted me one as proof of their strange rituals.” Barbara opened a drawer under one of the bookshelf and took out something obscenely shaped, with numerous leather fetters dangling from it. She bore it closer and upon examination Dinah could see it was carved from whalebone and polished such that she could see her own reflection in its phallic form. “Turn around,” Barbara said, her voice suddenly as low and rough as a cobbled street at midnight.
Dinah obeyed without thinking and was totally unprepared when Barbara pressed against her like a rider upon a horse, her arms looping around Dinah’s body to rest the base of the implement at Dinah’s most private juncture.
“It would go here, you see, just like a man’s.” Barbara’s voice was hot in Dinah’s ear, and suddenly the young bride could think of nothing but that smoky sound. “And you would strap it on. This one went along the left leg, this one along the right, this the waist.” Barbara circled around Dinah, leaving the implement buckled around her like a belt. “And then…” Barbara nimbly stepped over it so that it protruded from Dinah to between Barbara’s legs. Dinah turned away from Barbara’s all-consuming green eyes to see that their shadows were copulating! “They went to bed!”
“No!”
“Yes! Sometimes not even two, but three, four, five, six…”
“Enough!” Dinah ripped the implement from her waist. “I tolerate your bizarreness when no one else in this city will, but you overstep your bounds!”
Barbara looked down contritely. “My apologies, Miss Lance. I just become so passionate about anthropology that I forget that not everyone shares my enthusiasm… or has learned enough to understand it as I do.”
“Perhaps you should learn of a more feminine pursuit. I abhor saying it, but a woman your age and of your beauty should have no trouble attracting gentlemen callers, yet you have no husband. I hear the most unsettling rumors.”
“Rumors?” Barbara’s smile was back, though it had never fully left. “What kind?”
“Oh dear, codswallop and hogwash, if you’ll pardon my language. Just old biddies gossiping about an easy target. If you would attend a party now and then…”
“You mean sit in a circle talking about the weather and the queen mum’s health while the men stink up the place with cigars?”
Dinah laughed. “Yes, exactly. Oh, how keen you are. I do not even feel the pang of Oliver’s loss anymore. You have remade me.”
“If you are remade, then you have spent your whole life up to now in this dusty old mausoleum. Come, let us promenade. The sun has set and the ocean brings a cool breeze.”
“Cool? I might catch pneumonia.”
“I will keep you warm,” Barbara promised, before taking two coats from a closet. “Here, you can borrow this cloak of mine. Made from the fur of Mr. Poe’s Rue Morgue murderer.”
“Oh, you are dreadful!”
Barbara’s smile reached its deepest flame. “You have no idea.”
***
The ocean was surprisingly beautiful under the setting sun. Although polite society preferred the boardwalk on the north side of the city, the harbor was much more lively. There were all the beautiful ships, Navy, merchants, and exotic traders from the Far East in their junks. There were friendly old-timers who fished for an after-dinner treat in the sea. There was the smell of sea salts and the sonorous sound of waves crashing against the shoals. And most of all, there was Barbara to share it with.
Dinah had never had many close friends, not growing up, not during finishing school, not during her season. Then, all too soon, she’d been pledged to Oliver and his wealth had saved her family’s business. But no sooner had their match been finalized then Oliver had set off to travel, leaving her behind. The loneliness had been so acute that she’d thought she’d go mad, but then Barbara had come into her life. The deep love they shared now reminded her of Ruth and Naomi.
“What are you thinking?” Barbara said, interrupting Dinah’s thoughts.
Dinah blushed. “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me."
They were already holding hands, so Barbara gave her hand a squeeze. “I was wrong. It’s quite a warm night. Let’s get rid of these awful gloves, which men certainly have no need for, and be as one flesh!”
That sounded like a splendid idea, and soon they were holding hands skin to skin and feeling out the bark of the palm trees as they passed. It was such a curious texture. Barbara tugged Dinah through the sand to the waves, where she made Dinah take a handful of wet sand. It slid through her fingers like jam and Dinah had to wash her hand off in the waves. Then she wiped her hand on Barbara’s clothes in revenge. Barbara squealed and pushed Dinah toward the waves, but saved her at the last moment by grabbing hold of Dinah’s dress and pulling her back.
“You shrew! I could’ve been soaked!”
“I wouldn’t ever let you fall,” Barbara promised, and they walked back to the cobblestone that ended the beach’s sand.
They kept wandering through the waterfront, on a path only Barbara seemed to know. Dinah was enthralled by the stars coming out, so they stopped to watch them. Barbara sat, very unlady-like, on a barrel.
“I hope I spot a shooting star!” Dinah said. “I would so like to see one.”
“I saw one where it landed.”
“The cheek! You tell stories!”
“I do not! There was a cylinder inside, metal, glowing red hot, and when it opened… oh, that’s a story for another time. It’d give you frights if I told you now.”
“We wouldn’t want that!” Dinah leaned back and gave the stars another look. “Countess?”
“You can call me Barbara.”
“Yes, Countess… you’re so wise. Is it strange that I feel… a little relieved Oliver won’t be coming back?”
Barbara’s gaze shifted from the stars to Dinah. “How so?”
“It’s nothing. But I always felt such trepidation over performing my wifely duties.”
“Why?”
“Do you not know what it entails? The man takes his organ and puts it inside until something breaks! There is blood! And what if I grow fat with child? What if I enjoy it? What if he wants it all the time?”
“You should be as lucky to snare a lover who wishes to take you to bed all hours of the day, not that anyone romancing you would have much choice in the matter.”
“You shock!”
“I do not! Aren’t you aware of how beautiful you are? That golden hair, that fair skin, that ample bosom…”
“Barbara!”
The Countess smiled and looked back up at the sky. “You called me Barbara.”
“…did you mean what you said? About women who prefer the company of other women?”
“They’re called Sapphists, Dinah.”
“And they really go to bed with other women?”
“You find that so strange? Is not a woman as beautiful as a man? Is not a woman as intelligent as a man? Is not a woman…”
“Be serious. So long as a lady has a choice in the matter, why would she choose another lady over a man?”
“Perhaps she has no choice,” Barbara muttered. “Perhaps love is like that.”
“Well, I know what I’d do if I fell in love with a woman.”
“What?”
Dinah leaned against the wall. “I’d march right up to here and say ‘Listen here, you Sapphist, you put that implement away because you’re not a man and you don’t need to sin that way!’”
Barbara laughed throatily. “It really doesn’t hurt that bad.”
“How would you know? You’re not married.”
“And yet…”
“No!”
“Yes!”
Dinah lunged at her. “How was it!? Tell me everything. What was his name, what was he like, was he handsome, I bet he was handsome if you made love to him.”
“Which one?”
Dinah’s jaw dropped. “You slattern!”
“Guilty as charged.”
“I will send you to a convent and save your soul!”
“The way I see it, it’s a greater sin to not enjoy it in the marriage-bed than to enjoy it on a table… or floor… or alley.”
Dinah slapped at her friend. “Cheeky girl!”
“Jealous!”
“Reprobate!”
Barbara grabbed Dinah’s slapping hands by the wrists and pulled her close. “Careful…”
“Oh, did I hurt you?”
“No.” Barbara put Dinah’s hands behind her neck, like they were dancing. The redhead seemed to tower over her. “Do you still want to know what it felt like?”
Dinah’s mouth was dry all of a sudden. “I’m not sure.”
Once more, Barbara leaned in to Dinah’s ear, as if sharing a great secret. “Perhaps I could only tell you a little… then you could decide if you wanted to hear more.”
“But I fear I should only hear a little and then have no choice but to hear it through to its conclusion.”
Barbara chuckled. “And what would be so bad about that?”
Suddenly, there was an awful holler and Dinah felt herself being shoved to the ground. A pockmarked cobble filled her vision and then there was pain shooting through her face.
“Stop, thief!” Barbara cried, and Dinah looked up to see that Barbara was standing over her, only Helena was there too.
“My purse is gone,” Dinah started to say, but Helena interrupted her to say “Mistress?”
“Take care of it. I’ll take her back to the manor.”
“As you wish,” Helena said, and disappeared like a horse out the gate.
Barbara helped Dinah to her feet. “Are you okay?”
Dinah put a finger to her mouth and felt something warm and liquid to correspond with the coppery taste on her lips. “I think…”
“Let me see.”
“It’s nothing.”
Barbara pulled Dinah’s hand away from her mouth with steel strength. Then she saw the blood, brackish in the moonlight, on Dinah’s fingers.
“Oh, Dinah…”
“It’s just a split lip. I’ve had worse during evening vespers.”
“But you’re so… sweet,” Barbara murmured, a million miles away.
“Why, thank you.”
There was a blood-curdling scream from a block away. Barbara didn’t move a muscle.
“What was that?” Dinah cried.
“Your purse being returned. I’m sorry, Dinah, I… forgive me.” And she buried Dinah’s fingers in her mouth.
Dinah had always wondered how a woman as warm as Barbara could have such cold skin when they touched, but Barbara was aflame now. Her mouth boiled and the only thing Dinah could relate it to was a time when she’d been out riding. The horse had spooked and ran and Dinah had bounced around on the saddle, trying to get her stead back under control. By the time she did, she’d outpaced the others, and between her adrenaline and the motion of the powerful muscles she was seated astride, she felt a sort of… churning between her legs.
And now she felt that same sort of sensation, only traveling through her hand, like she’d stuck it into warm water and the feeling was moving upward.
Barbara took Dinah’s finger out of her mouth. There was a red blush in her cheeks, a jade fire in her eyes. She was staring at Dinah like they were the only two things in the world.
“Please don’t be frightened,” Barbara pleaded.
“I’m not,” Dinah said, surprised to realize it was the truth. Usually, everything frightened her. But how could she be scared of Barbara?
Then the Countess forced their mouths together, like Dinah had seen the young and foolish do on holiday. It caused the most peculiar pain to prickle through her lips. The churning, the tightening, was between her legs and in her stomach and she squeezed her thighs together to try to make it go away, but that just made it worse.
“If you only knew,” Barbara said when they parted, her lips oiled from Dinah’s blood in the moonlight. She licked them back to the very shade of red that an apple from the Tree of Knowledge would have for a sheen. “If you only knew how precious you are. I would give up all my lives for one with you.”
“Barbara, whatever you’re… we can’t! We mustn’t.”
“I must. Forgive me, my love, it has been so long…” And Dinah felt twin pains in her neck, so right, so true, so pure, and the churning deep within her tightened like a corset and then released and she could breath more freely than she ever had in her whole life.
***
Her consciousness faded with the pain into a deep, dreamless sleep in which she was vaguely aware of time passing, but it was as meaningless as a pint of water in a river. She woke up naked, which should have scandalized her. Why would she be naked if she weren’t in a bath? But her bed was as warm as a bath. There was something hard and unyielding at work between her legs, and something a good deal wetter and warmer touching her bosom.
Dinah moaned in delight as the pleasure traipsed through her, like electricity through the new lines that were being buried throughout the city. She didn’t know who was in bed with her and didn’t care—only she did know, on an instinctual level, that only one could ultimately bring her this kind of pleasure.
“Barbara,” she breathed, smiling with great glee.
As if summoned, the Countess appeared in the doorway and turned on the lights. Dinah barely had time to take in the bedroom—a four-poster bed with lewd sculptures of nymphs and satyrs and other mythological beasts carved into the bedposts, a Florentine painting of the Greek gods cavorting across from the foot of the bed (with the orgy depicted as lovingly as Botticelli would paint Venus, complete love and sensuality), and of course clothes strewn about the floor—when Barbara had crossed to the bed and pulled the sheets off.
Zinda and Helena were in bed with her, Zinda’s eyepatch the only bit of clothes between them. They were still caressing her when Barbara pulled them up by the hair like they were as light as feathers.
“She is mine!” Barbara roared, and threw the ladies toward the door. “I will punish you later!”
“Looking forward to it,” Helena quipped as Zinda pulled her out of the room. They were just embracing as the door slammed shut.
Barbara pulled the sheet back up over Dinah and pulled a chair to her bedside. She sat down heavily. There was blood drying on the front of her shirt, with her jacket and tie having disappeared.
“I must apologize for them. They had assumed—“ She shook her head. “I didn’t mean to move this fast.”
“You… planned this?” Dinah gathered the sheets more fully around herself.
“If I had told you outright of my particulars, what would you have done?”
“Probably panicked. Maybe… that still doesn’t make it okay, what you did.”
“I do know that.” Barbara rubbed at her temples. “I had hoped that, in time, you would come to understand. And when you did, you could make a fair choice from all the facts, just like my wards.”
“Are they vampires too?” Dinah demanded.
“Not yet. Vampirism freezes the aging process. I want them to be at least in their twenties before I do that. Besides which, they’re children. They’re not yet old enough to choose this life.”
“You bit me.” Dinah felt the linen of the bandage around her throat.
“My strain of vampirism allows me to consume normal food, but when I was that close to your blood, the temptation was just too great. Just the smell of it overstimulated my hypothalamus.”
“Oh… I never knew that was what it was called.”
“I stopped myself as soon as I could, but… I still took much. Luckily, Steph is your blood type. But I still imagine it will take some time for you to return to full health. You can speed the process by encompassing your diet, but… I’m so sorry, Dinah. I never meant to show you that side of myself. I know how it scares people. The hunger, the lust, the power. My worst nightmare was to dominate you so completely. I won’t ask your forgiveness. But I feel you deserve understanding, if only so your nightmares make sense.”
“Nightmares?” Barbara was starting to leave. “Countess… Barbara, wait!” Dinah got out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself haphazardly. She suddenly felt lightheaded and tripped, but Barbara was there to catch her with impossible speed. Dinah was lowered to the floor, Barbara still clutching her protectively.
“I warned you,” she started to say, but Dinah put a finger to her lips.
“It was a little romantic, actually.”
“You… what?”
“The way you were so lustful, yet so gentle about it…” Dinah petted Barbara’s hair. “I liked it.”
“…that’s the trauma talking, you don’t know what you’re saying. I’m a monster.”
“You’re my friend,” Dinah insisted. “Maybe… something more than that. I don’t know what. But if I go home, will you promise not to leave?”
“Dinah, I could’ve killed you.”
“No, you couldn’t have. I felt it, I felt the way you fought the hunger.”
“And lost.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Dinah searched Barbara’s face for a sign of the emotion she’d so delighted in earlier, but the Countess was cold as the grave. “Let’s give it some time. I’ll heal, you can work out a detailed explanation for all this, and we can see each other again.”
“I’ll take you back home,” Barbara agreed quietly.
“Can you give me a book to read?”
Barbara’s smile resurrected itself. “Of course, Dinah.”
“And… Barbara?”
“Yes, my bride?”
“Could you kiss me once more?”
“It may feel… very intense.”
Dinah nodded. “I’m ready now.”
As they kissed, Dinah’s tongue felt out the intriguing sharpness of Barbara’s canine teeth. What a thing to have hidden behind those pale lips. Almost like the passions hidden within the covers of one of Barbara’s humble books. There was no telling how many secrets the Countess hid. But Dinah wanted to know every one of them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 04:01 pm (UTC)You... totally win at life.
(Isn't it great that Hel's such a cheeky git? I love this so much, there are no words.)
More? Please?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 01:58 am (UTC)Helena didn't even notice she'd become a vampire for three months, because she already partied til dawn and slept all day.
More? Please?
MUST... NOT... write sequel about Barda the stern governness and Scott the humble dock worker who became a vampire to seduce her away from her dismal life of servitude...
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 04:48 am (UTC)I... really really really love this line. You are, seriously, so awesome. I will bask in the brilliance of your brain.
That Barda thing? Would totally rock my socks. Moremoremoremore! I will love you forever! (But I do already... ahwell.)
HEL/ZINDAAAAA. Please? *begs*
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 05:52 am (UTC)Oh my God, the King Shark arc of BOP was clearly about Helena and Zinda's all-consuming love. They're like the servants in a medieval comedy. While Babs and Dinah are wooing each other and cross-dressing and making witty puns, Helena and Zinda are... doing the same thing. But less dramatically.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 05:57 am (UTC)And I just... cannot get the image of Zinda in an EYEPATCH out of my head. Because I have this thing with pirate!fic that's just borderline obsessive. Almost.
Which means you really must write more! *grins* Because absolutely nobody writes Hel/Zinda, even after that King Shark arc.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 06:02 am (UTC)Their debates could last long into the night. Semi-automatics versus cross-bows, hot-pants versus short skirts... and the ever-popular scar comparison (better known as "excuse no. 1 for Helena to take off her shirt").
That must be part of the BOP life. Get greviously injured, no problem, it's just a scar waiting to happen for ladies' night.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-25 11:34 pm (UTC)I lol'd.
Was Babs a vamp when she visited Themyscira? If so, I'm extremely impressed they let her on the island.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 02:00 am (UTC)I lol'd.
Always nice to meet a fan. :)
Was Babs a vamp when she visited Themyscira? If so, I'm extremely impressed they let her on the island.
The way I have it, she was an adventurer/explorer (kinda like Allan Quatermain without the hunting... and with ovaries) until she met the Joker and became a vampire. Most of her adventures happened before then, as afterward she was a recluse in her Transylvanian clock tower until moving to London.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 03:09 am (UTC)The fictional Bat-Girl, for instance, does a lot more fornicating than Barbara really does, but the writers know that sex sells. Also, attributing the actions of all the vampires (Barbara, Zinda, and Helena) to one Bat-Girl adds to the mystique.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-27 01:05 am (UTC)Wonderful!