Fic: Change My World 3/8 (Batman)
Feb. 18th, 2008 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Change My World 3/8
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Dick/Babs, Batman, Martian Manhunter
Word Count: 4,117
Series: Change My World
Summary: With some help from J’onn, Dick starts to remember his regrets.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
“Holy war of the worlds, Batman! A little green man!”
J’onn’s thick brow furrowed. “I have been called many things in my long life, but never little.”
Barbara could’ve slapped herself. J’onn was a bit down on humanity at the moment. She couldn’t blame him, not after the things he’d seen and been forced to do. But it didn’t make him fit company for a scared amnesiac either.
J’onn had arrived in the guise of what Barbara thought was a punk rocker. Lots of leather, lots of piercings, lots of hair. The whole effect had made Barbara wonder if Martians had mid-life crises. A look with Batman had conveyed that he felt the same.
As soon as they were behind closed doors, J’onn had dropped his human form as distastefully as a man taking off filthy clothes, hence Dick’s surprise.
Dick tensed slightly when green hands stroked his temples, almost as if trying to scrape off skin. His eyes darted about wildly with fear, trying to avoid J’onn’s face and the horribly blank expression on it.
“Will it hurt?” he asked in a voice trying so hard to be brave that it broke Barbara’s heart.
“There will be some discomfort,” J’onn said.
“Yes,” Batman clarified.
“Well, okay then. I just wanted to know.” He took a deep breath. “Will it hurt a lot?”
“That depends,” J’onn replied.
“On what?”
“On whether you keep wasting my time with stupid questions.”
“…is that a yes?”
***
Dick flinched. J’onn’s fingers pressed more firmly against his temple. A moment passed, Dick’s eyelids blinking in rapid sequence. Then he gasped in pain. Batman made a motion forward before he stopped himself and Barbara’s hand instinctively sought out Dick’s. He squeezed hard enough to cause pain, but she held on.
“Oh man,” Dick said. His eyes weren’t blinking anymore. “It’s like when you’re thinking of something and that makes you remember something else and the memory leads you deeper and deeper…” Tears glistened in his eyes. Barbara wiped one away when it fell down his cheek. Dick’s watery eyes glazed over and he was somewhere else. “Thank you, Bruce, thank you so much. I won’t let you down.”
The adoption. The training.
Batman stood a little stiffer. “Stop it. That’s enough.”
Barbara was going to rebuke him, but Dick’s sharp intake of breath interrupted her. He was panting, sweat corroding down his face, eyes peeled on some invisible sight in the distance as if in an agony of suspense. Then, just when his breathing seemed to be reaching a fever pitch, he screamed out “MOM! DAD!”
Batman grabbed J’onn’s wrist, wrenching it. J’onn released Dick. Barbara caught him. His breath had the stench of rising bile and his eyes were tightly shut. Barbara hugged him, drawing him out of himself with a single sliding touch that moved over his upper arm. He stirred under her touch, but not because of her. His body was trembling with barely controlled sobs.
“Get out!” Barbara hissed. “Both of you! Out!”
Batman didn’t even look cross. He led J’onn out by the arm, leaving Barbara alone with Dick. Dick brought his head up, looked into her eyes. His face was drawn with misery.
“I saw my parents die in front of me,” he said in fits and gasps, Barbara comfortingly stroking his face. His tears burned her hands. “I should’ve warned them, I should have said something was wrong. I let them down.”
Barbara touched him as much as possible, drawing him into a tight hug with her arms wrapped around his back, the crown of his head resting under her chin. She could feel his breath rasping through his mouth.
“It wasn’t your fault. It’s never our fault.”
Barbara’s hands moved up his back, feeling the landscape of scars under his shirt. She ended up gently petting his hair, cooing nonsense comfort with her head bent down so her lips hovered over his upturned ear. His trembling vibrated through her, steadied and blunted by the weight she added to him. When Dick finally lifted his face, he left her blouse stained with tears.
“I, uh…” he brushed a lock of black hair out of his face. Sniffled, trying to get back in control. She helped by not looking at his face. “I try not to think about it. You know. But I just have this horrible feeling that I can’t remember them. I can remember so much, but Mom and Dad are like a blank spot. And mebbe that’s cuz I don’t want to remember. Like, uh, it’s too painful. But why should I be afraid of pain? I’ve been trained to resist torture and stuff.”
“Some hurts run deeper than others.”
Like being so close to him and yet not touching him. Not really. She was far too cynical to not know she was just a warm body to be close to. Still, better her than someone who would take advantage of him. Like Catalina. Like Bruce, even. She could be dispassionate. She’d taken enough real pain that heart getting run over by a motorized wheelchair pain didn’t even register. It was just another thing. She could be a Bat, a voyeur, an Oracle. Close, but not touching. Befriended, but alone. Loved, but not in love.
Dick shook his head. “That’s no excuse. We can’t ignore part of ourselves because it hurts. We’re heroes. We’ve gotta soldier on. That’s what Batman would do.”
Barbara found that unspeakably funny, but she didn’t let herself laugh. Except a little.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I just… used to think of you as my bedrock,” she admitted, surprising even herself. “Now here I am, supporting you.”
He’d slid down to his knees, his cheek flat on top of her thighs. She moved her fingers through his hair, scratching her nails down the back of his neck. He exhaled, his warm breath traveling down her lap.
“Used to?”
She stopped petting his hair.
“You said I used to be your bedrock. What changed?”
Barbara closed her eyes. “We changed.”
***
They didn’t talk for a while after that, just clung to each other. Like it did him any good, being held. Warm bodies as a temporary salve. Barbara wished she was that easy. She could just order one of the Birds to give her a hug now and then and be all set. But even with Dick’s body pressed against hers, her mind wouldn’t stop ticking away. How wrong this was, no matter how right it felt. It’d taken a confession of anguish to bring him to her, after a goddamned blow to the head. Not exactly a fairy tale ending, and not one she’d settle for. She didn’t want this. No matter how right it felt. No matter…
Part of him didn’t forgive her for seeing him cry. Part didn’t forgive himself. All those years playing the sprite to Bruce’s dark, foreboding specter… it must’ve seemed like a mockery of his parents’ memory. Barbara remembered how she’d felt when Helena had co-opted the name of Batgirl.
Dick had retooled his old life, his costume’s design, even his parents’ special name for him… turned those precious memories into a mask. A weapon against evil. It kept their memory alive. It kept the pain alive.
***
Funny. Dick wasn’t even there anymore, yet she couldn’t get him out of her head. Bruce had taken him to see more doctors. Barbara pitied him. Perhaps she was in a nostalgic mood. Her thoughts jumped back to the hospital. The last two times she had spent any significant time there were after the shooting and during her infection with the Brainiac virus. Neither of those were particularly good memories. Thinking of Dick being poked and prodded made her think back to her crippling. Daddy and her had sworn never to give up. They’d ordered the tests run again and again, but it was hopeless.
I would never walk again. Admitting that had to be the worst night of my life.
The Brainiac virus had given her back some feeling below the waist, just enough to spur Dick on like a challenge (she blushed at the memory). And Dick leaving… Dick leaving had been bittersweet. They’d at least managed to lie to each other that it wasn’t forever. But real couples worked their problems out instead of having trysts and secrets and fights and round-the-world trips with fucking egomaniacal…
Well. So that was where her recent wellspring of dislike for Bruce had come from. Sometimes, her psyche surprised her. It rasped her throat, but she laughed at the thought of Bruce blaming himself for her marriage’s abrupt end. Just one more thing to throw on the pile.
With a focused effort of will, Barbara’s inner pump-it-up soundtrack came on. She cracked her neck. Okay, no more wallowing in nostalgia or presentalgia or whatever it was Dick with a puppy-dog crush on her was giving her (other than wet panties). She could do work. Surely, there was something that needed to be done.
Only… not really. No heroes calling for assistance, no situations flagged by the computers for her to form a team around. Oh, crime would dry up just now. When she was actually happy, she couldn’t afford to peel herself away from the keyboard, but now…
Although, there was a possibility that could solve both her Dick Grayson and her (eww) monsoon season problems.
The porn ‘bot was a highly intuitive search program she’d written to find and report things like kiddie porn, snuff films, that kind of thing. But with a little modification, the search parameters could be changed from “look for participants under eighteen years of age” to “look for participants code-identified as Nightwing.”
God, she was pathetic. Who downloaded porn about an ex-boyfriend instead of just calling them on the phone? Even more disheartening, most of the hits she got were of Starfire sex tapes. Some of them might even be real. She clicked one. The guy wore the right kind of mask, but that couldn’t disguise the fact that his musculature came from popping steroids instead of busting heads. And the woman that was supposed to be Kory had obviously been enhanced more by surgeons than Psions. Plus, her wig was awful.
Still, she seemed to be really into it, even if the name they’d made up for Nightwing’s alter-ego didn’t make it easy. Really, what about Nightwing suggested that his real name was Smoke Manmeat? That sounded like something more out of the purported Nightwing-Arsenal sex tapes.
I am the most pathetic, depressing person alive. If there was a biopic about me, they wouldn’t have to do a scene of me hitting rock bottom, they could just film this.
Barbara locked the Tower down, set all the alerts on vibrate (the double entrende occurred to her), and cued the movie up. She spent a good five minutes on the set-up, just mentally riffing on all the inanities in the dialogue. Nightwing would never stop Two-Face from robbing the Doubleday book publishers because double a day would either have no nights or two days and two nights, making it uneven. “Kory’s” dialogue was spot-on, though. Mostly variations of “Oh, it’s so big!” and such. Method acting. Get that woman an Emmy, or whatever it was you gave to Jenna Jameson wannabes.
Button by button, Barbara undid her blouse, then moved down to her pants. She bracketed her elbows on the arms of her wheelchair to lift herself up high enough to shimmy her jeans down. She gave brief thought to doing this with some self-fantasizing… Goddamn if the last few days with Dick hadn’t given her enough material, from the awkward groping to the dance to that kiss which still had her touching her mouth absently when she wasn’t watching herself… but no, that wasn’t quite pathetic enough. Had to be internet pornography.
Refocusing her attention on the mpeg, where “Kory” had just gotten around to giving “Nightwing” the Hero’s Reward, Barbara slipped a hand under her panties.
”And the Most Pathetic Sentient Being Ever Award goes to… Barbara Gordon, for masturbating to fake sex tape of her ex! Miss Koriand’r, how do you feel about your rival for Dick Grayson’s affections checking the status of the I/O port to pornography about you?”
“Well, Bob, it just goes to show you how much better I am than her, as a woman, and as a person in general. After all, when I get all hot and bothered, I just call up my good friend Dick for some casual sex.”
“Ha ha! That’s great. Now let’s go to Dinah on sports.”
Barbara’s head was a really weird place to be sometimes.
With her free hand she opened her bra (black) at the clasp in the front, which she had not worn because Dick was over. As proof, Dick was no longer over and she was still wearing it. So there, subconscious.
Yes, you sure showed me. Now we’re masturbating to badly-lit porno. I’ve talked to Libido and even he can’t get interested in this.
My Libido’s a guy?
Don’t act so surprised.
Barbara shook her head. That shrill, small voice in her head had a point. She wasn’t get anything out of this. She leaned forward to press pause…
And as soon as she did, she saw Dick reflected in the monitor. “Don’t stop on my account.”
“Dick!” Barbara pulled her blouse closed as Dick looked at the screen.
“It certainly is. Cree-yipes, does he have a permit for that? And whoa, who’s the redhead?”
“No one!” Barbara shrunk the window, which just revealed the window beneath it… full of thumbnails of the Nightwing porn she could’ve been watching.
“Is that supposed to be me and Bruce?”
Barbara shrunk that window too. “Try not to think about it.”
“But who could possibly think Batman’s a ginger?” Dick wondered.
She grabbed a nearly flannel blanket and pulled it over her lap, hoping he hadn’t noticed that her pants were around her ankles. “What are you doing here?”
“The doctors checked me out. The unanimous opinion appears to be that I should wait for the memories to come back on their own. In the meantime, they tell me I should get plenty of breast… rest!”
“That sounds like a good idea. The rest thing, not the breast…” Although that might be a good idea too…
Dick nodded. “So I’ll just get off then… be off, then.”
“Yeah, that would be…” Barbara pulled her blanket up to her neck. And now he could see that her pants were around her ankles. “Night!”
“Yeah, I’m going to clitoris… bed!” He shook his head. “Those didn’t even sound alike!”
Dick walked to the door. He paused there, for a moment, then went through.
“Have wet dreams!” Barbara called after him.
Dick poked his head back through the door.
“Pleasant dreams,” she corrected herself.
“Same difference.”
***
“So, you’re up,” Barbara said to him the next morning.
Dick looked down at his crotch before realizing that wasn’t a Freudian slip. He smiled gently and sat down in the kitchen nook with her, where he gave her cereal box of shredded wheat a baleful glance.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just wondering when you started eating old people stuff.”
“There’s some bagels in the bowl on top of the refrigerator.”
Dick stood, putting his hands together and mock-bowing in a gesture of thanks. Then he went to the refrigerator. When he reached up to grab the big bowl, his shirt rode up to expose a tattoo (an arrowhead, twin to the Robin-R Roy had on his lower back… boys being boys and all that) and the last brooding of an old bruise. And his vertebrae disappearing down into his back. Damn it all.
“I had a dream last night,” Dick said as he heated the sliced bagel in the toaster, waiting for them to pop up.
“What about?” Barbara prompted, after he didn’t say anything more.
“I was in this suit. Black, like Batman’s, leathery. Mask, gloves, boots.”
“Sexy.”
“With me in it, yes.” Inside the toaster, the coils were red-hot. As Barbara watched, Dick’s spine stiffened with the memory. “I was fighting. Not a normal fight, a serious one. Lots of bad guys, lots of property damage. And the Joker was there…”
Barbara shuddered instinctively.
“Yeah. I hurt him. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because it made me feel good,” he stressed, his voice despondent. “I think… I think I killed him.”
“Unfortunately for all of us, the Joker’s still alive and well.”
“It was so real…” Dick persisted, not even noticing when the toaster shot up two bits of charred bread. “I could feel the life leaving his body. He wasn’t unconscious, he was dead.”
“You want to see a video feed of his cell?”
Dick looked up, a tad disgusted. “No. I trust you.” He grabbed the bagel. “Just a weird dream, is all.”
Barbara waited until he’d returned to the table with a bucket of cream cheese. She grabbed his hand before he could spread it over his bagel.
“You would never hurt someone unless they deserved it.”
“And if they did deserve it?”
Hating herself, hating the world, Barbara brought his fist to her lips for a quick kiss. It did the trick.
“Like you said, it was just a dream,” Barbara said.
Dick didn’t take his hand back until Barbara let go of it. There was an equilibrium of sorts to the moment, brought about by Barbara’s unexpected affection. Not the foreplay kind, that would’ve been easy to spoil. Something deeper.
Dick sat back in his chair, munched on a bagel, rolled up the sleeve of his left arm. The Joker’s scar was there, sitting angrily atop the bicep like someone had chiseled away at the muscle. Barbara wondered if he felt a twinge when moved his arm. If he was used to it by now. That bullet had eventually forced Dick to quit being Robin, just as another had closed the door on Batgirl for good. Even when the Joker couldn’t kill them, he brought about death.
He noticed her eyeing the scar and self-consciously rubbed it with his hand, covering it. “I remember the pain,” he said. He brought his hand down to his thigh and she could see the raised scar tissue there through the flat khaki. “But this is much clearer, in my mind. Who…?”
“A cop. Gotham cop.”
“Crap,” he breathed. “Was I…?”
“No. You were on the side of angels.” Then. So much she couldn’t say. Couldn’t even hint at. “My dad retired for a while and the new guy didn’t exactly appreciate us.” Not that Bruce helped on that account.
Dick grinned, impossibly. “The more things change, right?”
She nodded. “The more they stay the same.”
He tugged his shirt sleeve back over his older scar. Before she could control herself, she reached out and smoothed it for him, feeling the hard knot of corrupted flesh through the fabric. Her hand came away and he watched it, just eyes seeming just that much dimmer.
“You have any spare neoprene, Nomex, leather, kevlar, that kind of stuff?”
Barbara had a mouthful of shredded wheat and milk. “Cothtoome thluff?” She swallowed. “Costume stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you need it?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“It’s a secret.”
“Surprise,” he insisted.
“There are some spares in the locker room. Take the stairs down.”
“Cool.” He was out of his chair, bagel in hand, and moved to kiss her cheek before he remembered not to. So he paused there, breath hot against her ear in a way that just had to make her tingle, and said, quiet and deep within himself, “You said I would never hurt someone unless they deserved it. But I hurt you, didn’t I?”
“That was necessary. When two people aren’t meant to be together… and they are together… then they have to part. And it hurts, but it would’ve hurt more if we’d let it linger. Like… like amputating a diseased limb to save a healthy body.”
“Which one of us was the diseased limb?” Dick asked, half-jokingly.
“I was.”
***
Whatever his project was, it kept him out of her hair. Perversely, that just spurred on thoughts of him. He did seem to have aged, mentally, with the revelation of what had happened to him. Or maybe it was just learning they’d broken up. He was slipping back into the supple, rolling movements he’d cultivated out of the comparatively coltish grace of earlier. He walked like a predator now, dangerous, as if expecting attack from any quarter. Training or paranoia? Or experience?
Barbara massaged her temples, but got no reprieve from the migraine threatening to bite through her skull. How disturbing was it to watch him get used to rolling with the punches. Especially when some of the punches were hers.
Okay, brain, I wasn’t there for him when he needed me, repeat ad nauseam. But I can be there now.
With a surprising amount of ease, she left the computer and went to see if Dick needed her.
***
She half-expected to find Dick going through a series of katas or making a foray into meditation. Instead, when she found him in the workshop, the first thing that greeted Barbara was the sound of an industrial sewing machine. She passed the vault of spare costumes, wincing at the sight of Big Barda’s armor on a mannequin. Dick was inside the repair section, surrounded by torn capes and costumes hanging empty like shed skins.
He was hunched over the workbench, his white undershirt gilding the muscles of his back. She cleared her throat. Dick lifted his foot and the machine stopped. Then he swiveled on his stool to face her, keeping his body between Barbara and whatever he was working on. His brow was furrowed with concentration, his lips tight. Barbara stopped herself from wondering what Bruce had looked like at that age.
“Hey.”
“For horses.” He raised his hand. A blister had burst on his fourth finger and lurked there like a crater in the skin. “Needed something to do with my hands.” A completely innocent phrase if not for the wink he gave her.
“I just came down to ask if… do you want to talk?”
Dick crossed his arms seriously and half-pulled it off. “Yes.” She sighed in relief. “I want to talk about us.”
Another brilliant plan pays off dividends. At least this won’t be awkward.
“My subconscious is a bitch.”
“Wha?”
“Nothing.” Barbara tugged on her ear. “Let me think… what was the story of us, other than a crappy Bruce Willis movie?” Even if Dick got the reference, he wasn’t amused. His de rigueur smile was more grim than gamely. “Well, we had fun.”
Dick perked, sitting up a little straighter. “Goshdarn right we did… will… did.”
“You’re allowed to curse.”
“And take the Lord’s name in vain?”
She laughed. It was at least half-a-joke, coming from him, but that was funnier to her than a full joke from someone else.
“Tell me something.” He crossed his ankles, knuckles wrapped around the lip of his stool’s top like a schoolboy. “And be honest. Did you fall in love with me when I was… like this, then fall out of love with me when I became whoever?”
“No, Dick, never.” She reached out to touch his cheek and hated the way he thrilled at her touch. “You become… an amazing person. Just not the person for me.”
“So there’s someone else?”
“No. Not for me.”
“For me then?”
“Not really.”
“So we’re both just doomed to be alone for the rest of our lives and I can’t even remember why?”
“Because we hurt each other!” He stared at her, turning each word over in his head, as Barbara realized how fast her breath was coming. “That’s what we do when we try to make it as a couple. We end up hurting each other. Always.”
“If I promise I won’t hurt you…” he said, pathetically.
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked down. “I’m going out tonight. I’d ask if that’s cool with you, but it’s obvious you don’t care.”
She knew he didn’t mean it, so she didn’t contest the point. Whatever he’d sewn, he picked it up and shielded it from her in his arms as he staggered to the door.
“Oh,” he said from the doorway, like an afterthought, even though she could tell it was weighting heavily on him, “just because we’re not in a relationship doesn’t mean you can’t hurt me.”
He slammed the door behind him.
“Case in point,” Barbara said to herself.
Chapter 4
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Dick/Babs, Batman, Martian Manhunter
Word Count: 4,117
Series: Change My World
Summary: With some help from J’onn, Dick starts to remember his regrets.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
“Holy war of the worlds, Batman! A little green man!”
J’onn’s thick brow furrowed. “I have been called many things in my long life, but never little.”
Barbara could’ve slapped herself. J’onn was a bit down on humanity at the moment. She couldn’t blame him, not after the things he’d seen and been forced to do. But it didn’t make him fit company for a scared amnesiac either.
J’onn had arrived in the guise of what Barbara thought was a punk rocker. Lots of leather, lots of piercings, lots of hair. The whole effect had made Barbara wonder if Martians had mid-life crises. A look with Batman had conveyed that he felt the same.
As soon as they were behind closed doors, J’onn had dropped his human form as distastefully as a man taking off filthy clothes, hence Dick’s surprise.
Dick tensed slightly when green hands stroked his temples, almost as if trying to scrape off skin. His eyes darted about wildly with fear, trying to avoid J’onn’s face and the horribly blank expression on it.
“Will it hurt?” he asked in a voice trying so hard to be brave that it broke Barbara’s heart.
“There will be some discomfort,” J’onn said.
“Yes,” Batman clarified.
“Well, okay then. I just wanted to know.” He took a deep breath. “Will it hurt a lot?”
“That depends,” J’onn replied.
“On what?”
“On whether you keep wasting my time with stupid questions.”
“…is that a yes?”
***
Dick flinched. J’onn’s fingers pressed more firmly against his temple. A moment passed, Dick’s eyelids blinking in rapid sequence. Then he gasped in pain. Batman made a motion forward before he stopped himself and Barbara’s hand instinctively sought out Dick’s. He squeezed hard enough to cause pain, but she held on.
“Oh man,” Dick said. His eyes weren’t blinking anymore. “It’s like when you’re thinking of something and that makes you remember something else and the memory leads you deeper and deeper…” Tears glistened in his eyes. Barbara wiped one away when it fell down his cheek. Dick’s watery eyes glazed over and he was somewhere else. “Thank you, Bruce, thank you so much. I won’t let you down.”
The adoption. The training.
Batman stood a little stiffer. “Stop it. That’s enough.”
Barbara was going to rebuke him, but Dick’s sharp intake of breath interrupted her. He was panting, sweat corroding down his face, eyes peeled on some invisible sight in the distance as if in an agony of suspense. Then, just when his breathing seemed to be reaching a fever pitch, he screamed out “MOM! DAD!”
Batman grabbed J’onn’s wrist, wrenching it. J’onn released Dick. Barbara caught him. His breath had the stench of rising bile and his eyes were tightly shut. Barbara hugged him, drawing him out of himself with a single sliding touch that moved over his upper arm. He stirred under her touch, but not because of her. His body was trembling with barely controlled sobs.
“Get out!” Barbara hissed. “Both of you! Out!”
Batman didn’t even look cross. He led J’onn out by the arm, leaving Barbara alone with Dick. Dick brought his head up, looked into her eyes. His face was drawn with misery.
“I saw my parents die in front of me,” he said in fits and gasps, Barbara comfortingly stroking his face. His tears burned her hands. “I should’ve warned them, I should have said something was wrong. I let them down.”
Barbara touched him as much as possible, drawing him into a tight hug with her arms wrapped around his back, the crown of his head resting under her chin. She could feel his breath rasping through his mouth.
“It wasn’t your fault. It’s never our fault.”
Barbara’s hands moved up his back, feeling the landscape of scars under his shirt. She ended up gently petting his hair, cooing nonsense comfort with her head bent down so her lips hovered over his upturned ear. His trembling vibrated through her, steadied and blunted by the weight she added to him. When Dick finally lifted his face, he left her blouse stained with tears.
“I, uh…” he brushed a lock of black hair out of his face. Sniffled, trying to get back in control. She helped by not looking at his face. “I try not to think about it. You know. But I just have this horrible feeling that I can’t remember them. I can remember so much, but Mom and Dad are like a blank spot. And mebbe that’s cuz I don’t want to remember. Like, uh, it’s too painful. But why should I be afraid of pain? I’ve been trained to resist torture and stuff.”
“Some hurts run deeper than others.”
Like being so close to him and yet not touching him. Not really. She was far too cynical to not know she was just a warm body to be close to. Still, better her than someone who would take advantage of him. Like Catalina. Like Bruce, even. She could be dispassionate. She’d taken enough real pain that heart getting run over by a motorized wheelchair pain didn’t even register. It was just another thing. She could be a Bat, a voyeur, an Oracle. Close, but not touching. Befriended, but alone. Loved, but not in love.
Dick shook his head. “That’s no excuse. We can’t ignore part of ourselves because it hurts. We’re heroes. We’ve gotta soldier on. That’s what Batman would do.”
Barbara found that unspeakably funny, but she didn’t let herself laugh. Except a little.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I just… used to think of you as my bedrock,” she admitted, surprising even herself. “Now here I am, supporting you.”
He’d slid down to his knees, his cheek flat on top of her thighs. She moved her fingers through his hair, scratching her nails down the back of his neck. He exhaled, his warm breath traveling down her lap.
“Used to?”
She stopped petting his hair.
“You said I used to be your bedrock. What changed?”
Barbara closed her eyes. “We changed.”
***
They didn’t talk for a while after that, just clung to each other. Like it did him any good, being held. Warm bodies as a temporary salve. Barbara wished she was that easy. She could just order one of the Birds to give her a hug now and then and be all set. But even with Dick’s body pressed against hers, her mind wouldn’t stop ticking away. How wrong this was, no matter how right it felt. It’d taken a confession of anguish to bring him to her, after a goddamned blow to the head. Not exactly a fairy tale ending, and not one she’d settle for. She didn’t want this. No matter how right it felt. No matter…
Part of him didn’t forgive her for seeing him cry. Part didn’t forgive himself. All those years playing the sprite to Bruce’s dark, foreboding specter… it must’ve seemed like a mockery of his parents’ memory. Barbara remembered how she’d felt when Helena had co-opted the name of Batgirl.
Dick had retooled his old life, his costume’s design, even his parents’ special name for him… turned those precious memories into a mask. A weapon against evil. It kept their memory alive. It kept the pain alive.
***
Funny. Dick wasn’t even there anymore, yet she couldn’t get him out of her head. Bruce had taken him to see more doctors. Barbara pitied him. Perhaps she was in a nostalgic mood. Her thoughts jumped back to the hospital. The last two times she had spent any significant time there were after the shooting and during her infection with the Brainiac virus. Neither of those were particularly good memories. Thinking of Dick being poked and prodded made her think back to her crippling. Daddy and her had sworn never to give up. They’d ordered the tests run again and again, but it was hopeless.
I would never walk again. Admitting that had to be the worst night of my life.
The Brainiac virus had given her back some feeling below the waist, just enough to spur Dick on like a challenge (she blushed at the memory). And Dick leaving… Dick leaving had been bittersweet. They’d at least managed to lie to each other that it wasn’t forever. But real couples worked their problems out instead of having trysts and secrets and fights and round-the-world trips with fucking egomaniacal…
Well. So that was where her recent wellspring of dislike for Bruce had come from. Sometimes, her psyche surprised her. It rasped her throat, but she laughed at the thought of Bruce blaming himself for her marriage’s abrupt end. Just one more thing to throw on the pile.
With a focused effort of will, Barbara’s inner pump-it-up soundtrack came on. She cracked her neck. Okay, no more wallowing in nostalgia or presentalgia or whatever it was Dick with a puppy-dog crush on her was giving her (other than wet panties). She could do work. Surely, there was something that needed to be done.
Only… not really. No heroes calling for assistance, no situations flagged by the computers for her to form a team around. Oh, crime would dry up just now. When she was actually happy, she couldn’t afford to peel herself away from the keyboard, but now…
Although, there was a possibility that could solve both her Dick Grayson and her (eww) monsoon season problems.
The porn ‘bot was a highly intuitive search program she’d written to find and report things like kiddie porn, snuff films, that kind of thing. But with a little modification, the search parameters could be changed from “look for participants under eighteen years of age” to “look for participants code-identified as Nightwing.”
God, she was pathetic. Who downloaded porn about an ex-boyfriend instead of just calling them on the phone? Even more disheartening, most of the hits she got were of Starfire sex tapes. Some of them might even be real. She clicked one. The guy wore the right kind of mask, but that couldn’t disguise the fact that his musculature came from popping steroids instead of busting heads. And the woman that was supposed to be Kory had obviously been enhanced more by surgeons than Psions. Plus, her wig was awful.
Still, she seemed to be really into it, even if the name they’d made up for Nightwing’s alter-ego didn’t make it easy. Really, what about Nightwing suggested that his real name was Smoke Manmeat? That sounded like something more out of the purported Nightwing-Arsenal sex tapes.
I am the most pathetic, depressing person alive. If there was a biopic about me, they wouldn’t have to do a scene of me hitting rock bottom, they could just film this.
Barbara locked the Tower down, set all the alerts on vibrate (the double entrende occurred to her), and cued the movie up. She spent a good five minutes on the set-up, just mentally riffing on all the inanities in the dialogue. Nightwing would never stop Two-Face from robbing the Doubleday book publishers because double a day would either have no nights or two days and two nights, making it uneven. “Kory’s” dialogue was spot-on, though. Mostly variations of “Oh, it’s so big!” and such. Method acting. Get that woman an Emmy, or whatever it was you gave to Jenna Jameson wannabes.
Button by button, Barbara undid her blouse, then moved down to her pants. She bracketed her elbows on the arms of her wheelchair to lift herself up high enough to shimmy her jeans down. She gave brief thought to doing this with some self-fantasizing… Goddamn if the last few days with Dick hadn’t given her enough material, from the awkward groping to the dance to that kiss which still had her touching her mouth absently when she wasn’t watching herself… but no, that wasn’t quite pathetic enough. Had to be internet pornography.
Refocusing her attention on the mpeg, where “Kory” had just gotten around to giving “Nightwing” the Hero’s Reward, Barbara slipped a hand under her panties.
”And the Most Pathetic Sentient Being Ever Award goes to… Barbara Gordon, for masturbating to fake sex tape of her ex! Miss Koriand’r, how do you feel about your rival for Dick Grayson’s affections checking the status of the I/O port to pornography about you?”
“Well, Bob, it just goes to show you how much better I am than her, as a woman, and as a person in general. After all, when I get all hot and bothered, I just call up my good friend Dick for some casual sex.”
“Ha ha! That’s great. Now let’s go to Dinah on sports.”
Barbara’s head was a really weird place to be sometimes.
With her free hand she opened her bra (black) at the clasp in the front, which she had not worn because Dick was over. As proof, Dick was no longer over and she was still wearing it. So there, subconscious.
Yes, you sure showed me. Now we’re masturbating to badly-lit porno. I’ve talked to Libido and even he can’t get interested in this.
My Libido’s a guy?
Don’t act so surprised.
Barbara shook her head. That shrill, small voice in her head had a point. She wasn’t get anything out of this. She leaned forward to press pause…
And as soon as she did, she saw Dick reflected in the monitor. “Don’t stop on my account.”
“Dick!” Barbara pulled her blouse closed as Dick looked at the screen.
“It certainly is. Cree-yipes, does he have a permit for that? And whoa, who’s the redhead?”
“No one!” Barbara shrunk the window, which just revealed the window beneath it… full of thumbnails of the Nightwing porn she could’ve been watching.
“Is that supposed to be me and Bruce?”
Barbara shrunk that window too. “Try not to think about it.”
“But who could possibly think Batman’s a ginger?” Dick wondered.
She grabbed a nearly flannel blanket and pulled it over her lap, hoping he hadn’t noticed that her pants were around her ankles. “What are you doing here?”
“The doctors checked me out. The unanimous opinion appears to be that I should wait for the memories to come back on their own. In the meantime, they tell me I should get plenty of breast… rest!”
“That sounds like a good idea. The rest thing, not the breast…” Although that might be a good idea too…
Dick nodded. “So I’ll just get off then… be off, then.”
“Yeah, that would be…” Barbara pulled her blanket up to her neck. And now he could see that her pants were around her ankles. “Night!”
“Yeah, I’m going to clitoris… bed!” He shook his head. “Those didn’t even sound alike!”
Dick walked to the door. He paused there, for a moment, then went through.
“Have wet dreams!” Barbara called after him.
Dick poked his head back through the door.
“Pleasant dreams,” she corrected herself.
“Same difference.”
***
“So, you’re up,” Barbara said to him the next morning.
Dick looked down at his crotch before realizing that wasn’t a Freudian slip. He smiled gently and sat down in the kitchen nook with her, where he gave her cereal box of shredded wheat a baleful glance.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just wondering when you started eating old people stuff.”
“There’s some bagels in the bowl on top of the refrigerator.”
Dick stood, putting his hands together and mock-bowing in a gesture of thanks. Then he went to the refrigerator. When he reached up to grab the big bowl, his shirt rode up to expose a tattoo (an arrowhead, twin to the Robin-R Roy had on his lower back… boys being boys and all that) and the last brooding of an old bruise. And his vertebrae disappearing down into his back. Damn it all.
“I had a dream last night,” Dick said as he heated the sliced bagel in the toaster, waiting for them to pop up.
“What about?” Barbara prompted, after he didn’t say anything more.
“I was in this suit. Black, like Batman’s, leathery. Mask, gloves, boots.”
“Sexy.”
“With me in it, yes.” Inside the toaster, the coils were red-hot. As Barbara watched, Dick’s spine stiffened with the memory. “I was fighting. Not a normal fight, a serious one. Lots of bad guys, lots of property damage. And the Joker was there…”
Barbara shuddered instinctively.
“Yeah. I hurt him. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because it made me feel good,” he stressed, his voice despondent. “I think… I think I killed him.”
“Unfortunately for all of us, the Joker’s still alive and well.”
“It was so real…” Dick persisted, not even noticing when the toaster shot up two bits of charred bread. “I could feel the life leaving his body. He wasn’t unconscious, he was dead.”
“You want to see a video feed of his cell?”
Dick looked up, a tad disgusted. “No. I trust you.” He grabbed the bagel. “Just a weird dream, is all.”
Barbara waited until he’d returned to the table with a bucket of cream cheese. She grabbed his hand before he could spread it over his bagel.
“You would never hurt someone unless they deserved it.”
“And if they did deserve it?”
Hating herself, hating the world, Barbara brought his fist to her lips for a quick kiss. It did the trick.
“Like you said, it was just a dream,” Barbara said.
Dick didn’t take his hand back until Barbara let go of it. There was an equilibrium of sorts to the moment, brought about by Barbara’s unexpected affection. Not the foreplay kind, that would’ve been easy to spoil. Something deeper.
Dick sat back in his chair, munched on a bagel, rolled up the sleeve of his left arm. The Joker’s scar was there, sitting angrily atop the bicep like someone had chiseled away at the muscle. Barbara wondered if he felt a twinge when moved his arm. If he was used to it by now. That bullet had eventually forced Dick to quit being Robin, just as another had closed the door on Batgirl for good. Even when the Joker couldn’t kill them, he brought about death.
He noticed her eyeing the scar and self-consciously rubbed it with his hand, covering it. “I remember the pain,” he said. He brought his hand down to his thigh and she could see the raised scar tissue there through the flat khaki. “But this is much clearer, in my mind. Who…?”
“A cop. Gotham cop.”
“Crap,” he breathed. “Was I…?”
“No. You were on the side of angels.” Then. So much she couldn’t say. Couldn’t even hint at. “My dad retired for a while and the new guy didn’t exactly appreciate us.” Not that Bruce helped on that account.
Dick grinned, impossibly. “The more things change, right?”
She nodded. “The more they stay the same.”
He tugged his shirt sleeve back over his older scar. Before she could control herself, she reached out and smoothed it for him, feeling the hard knot of corrupted flesh through the fabric. Her hand came away and he watched it, just eyes seeming just that much dimmer.
“You have any spare neoprene, Nomex, leather, kevlar, that kind of stuff?”
Barbara had a mouthful of shredded wheat and milk. “Cothtoome thluff?” She swallowed. “Costume stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you need it?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“It’s a secret.”
“Surprise,” he insisted.
“There are some spares in the locker room. Take the stairs down.”
“Cool.” He was out of his chair, bagel in hand, and moved to kiss her cheek before he remembered not to. So he paused there, breath hot against her ear in a way that just had to make her tingle, and said, quiet and deep within himself, “You said I would never hurt someone unless they deserved it. But I hurt you, didn’t I?”
“That was necessary. When two people aren’t meant to be together… and they are together… then they have to part. And it hurts, but it would’ve hurt more if we’d let it linger. Like… like amputating a diseased limb to save a healthy body.”
“Which one of us was the diseased limb?” Dick asked, half-jokingly.
“I was.”
***
Whatever his project was, it kept him out of her hair. Perversely, that just spurred on thoughts of him. He did seem to have aged, mentally, with the revelation of what had happened to him. Or maybe it was just learning they’d broken up. He was slipping back into the supple, rolling movements he’d cultivated out of the comparatively coltish grace of earlier. He walked like a predator now, dangerous, as if expecting attack from any quarter. Training or paranoia? Or experience?
Barbara massaged her temples, but got no reprieve from the migraine threatening to bite through her skull. How disturbing was it to watch him get used to rolling with the punches. Especially when some of the punches were hers.
Okay, brain, I wasn’t there for him when he needed me, repeat ad nauseam. But I can be there now.
With a surprising amount of ease, she left the computer and went to see if Dick needed her.
***
She half-expected to find Dick going through a series of katas or making a foray into meditation. Instead, when she found him in the workshop, the first thing that greeted Barbara was the sound of an industrial sewing machine. She passed the vault of spare costumes, wincing at the sight of Big Barda’s armor on a mannequin. Dick was inside the repair section, surrounded by torn capes and costumes hanging empty like shed skins.
He was hunched over the workbench, his white undershirt gilding the muscles of his back. She cleared her throat. Dick lifted his foot and the machine stopped. Then he swiveled on his stool to face her, keeping his body between Barbara and whatever he was working on. His brow was furrowed with concentration, his lips tight. Barbara stopped herself from wondering what Bruce had looked like at that age.
“Hey.”
“For horses.” He raised his hand. A blister had burst on his fourth finger and lurked there like a crater in the skin. “Needed something to do with my hands.” A completely innocent phrase if not for the wink he gave her.
“I just came down to ask if… do you want to talk?”
Dick crossed his arms seriously and half-pulled it off. “Yes.” She sighed in relief. “I want to talk about us.”
Another brilliant plan pays off dividends. At least this won’t be awkward.
“My subconscious is a bitch.”
“Wha?”
“Nothing.” Barbara tugged on her ear. “Let me think… what was the story of us, other than a crappy Bruce Willis movie?” Even if Dick got the reference, he wasn’t amused. His de rigueur smile was more grim than gamely. “Well, we had fun.”
Dick perked, sitting up a little straighter. “Goshdarn right we did… will… did.”
“You’re allowed to curse.”
“And take the Lord’s name in vain?”
She laughed. It was at least half-a-joke, coming from him, but that was funnier to her than a full joke from someone else.
“Tell me something.” He crossed his ankles, knuckles wrapped around the lip of his stool’s top like a schoolboy. “And be honest. Did you fall in love with me when I was… like this, then fall out of love with me when I became whoever?”
“No, Dick, never.” She reached out to touch his cheek and hated the way he thrilled at her touch. “You become… an amazing person. Just not the person for me.”
“So there’s someone else?”
“No. Not for me.”
“For me then?”
“Not really.”
“So we’re both just doomed to be alone for the rest of our lives and I can’t even remember why?”
“Because we hurt each other!” He stared at her, turning each word over in his head, as Barbara realized how fast her breath was coming. “That’s what we do when we try to make it as a couple. We end up hurting each other. Always.”
“If I promise I won’t hurt you…” he said, pathetically.
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked down. “I’m going out tonight. I’d ask if that’s cool with you, but it’s obvious you don’t care.”
She knew he didn’t mean it, so she didn’t contest the point. Whatever he’d sewn, he picked it up and shielded it from her in his arms as he staggered to the door.
“Oh,” he said from the doorway, like an afterthought, even though she could tell it was weighting heavily on him, “just because we’re not in a relationship doesn’t mean you can’t hurt me.”
He slammed the door behind him.
“Case in point,” Barbara said to herself.
Chapter 4
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 03:46 pm (UTC)“Oh,” he said from the doorway, like an afterthought, even though she could tell it was weighting heavily on him, “just because we’re not in a relationship doesn’t mean you can’t hurt me.”
Great line.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 06:25 pm (UTC)This part just got me. Painful description, but I suppose fitting in her mind.
I'm loving this story very much! Can't wait for more!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-13 06:11 am (UTC)