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seriousficTitle: Themis, who protects the suppliant
Fandom: Birds of Prey comicverse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,930
Author's Notes: Betaed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lurkslikefox.
Characters/Pairings: Barbara Gordon, the Joker, Birds of Prey, references to Babs/Dinah
Summary: Sometimes, Barbara needs to remind herself why she’s the Oracle.
The clown didn’t struggle as he was hauled through the pouring rain, shoes slipping on the wet pavement, arms locked into the grips of Huntress and Barda. He was bowed over laughing, cuffed hands clapping spastically with each yelping guffaw. The Joker was dragged into the cargo hold of the Aerie and his laughter died down a little, rainwater dripping off his limp green hair, toes dragging on the riveted steel, then he made the heroines jolt with a renewed burst of insane merriment. Barda squeezed his arm, making the thin bone creak. The Joker smiled widely at her.
“Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Huntress said.
The Joker swung to face her. “Didn’t I shoot you? Because I remember shooting you. Now how impolite was it of you to stay alive after that? How about we give it another go and you do it right this time?”
Huntress said nothing. Just threw him into the cage in the middle of the cargo hold. Zoos had once used it to transport man-eaters.
The Joker landed, facefirst, then bounced his head off the floor a few more times.
“Aww, Bats had a pressing engagement, so he sent his cheerleading squad? I’m offended.” He saw they weren’t listening, were going back to the cockpit. “There’s no way you Batettes can get me back to Arkham!” he called after them.
A monitor flickered on opposite the cage. The Joker “ooh”ed and wiggled closer to it, until he was sitting up at his end of the cage, the monitor’s static-white light playing across him. The picture coalesced into a woman’s face, heart-shaped, green-eyed, red-haired, glasses.
“Hubba hubba!” The Joker bashed himself against the cage. “In-flight entertainment!”
***
Barbara stared at him across the gulf of cyberspace. Even in the air-conditioned cool of the Clocktower, even with hundreds of miles between them, some fight-or-flight part of her hindbrain was screaming run-run-run. He looked wrong. Before, he’d looked human, clownish. But that was before he killed Jason. Before he killed Batgirl.
Now he looked like some demented plastic surgeon had re-cut his face to fit an alien symmetry. His smile defied the contours of his face, full of yellow teeth and evil thoughts, irradiating her soul.
“What were you doing in Detroit?” she asked, no-nonsense.
“Every year I go someplace worse than Gotham and this year, Detroit delivered. I had my doubts, but they somehow managed to get that crime-rate up at the last second! Good for them! By the by, how’s blondie?” he asked casually. “I hear stomach wounds are a painful way to go. Me, I’d give them a fifteen out of thirty, tops.”
Barbara didn’t even need to check the medical read-out she had next to her console, receiving second-by-second updates. “Canary’s fine. The bullet missed all her vital organs. You must be getting sloppy in your old age. Is that a grayish-green hair I see?”
The Joker frowned, the expression grotesquely warring with his scars. “I know you from somewhere. Tell me, have you ever holidayed in Pasadena?”
It was getting easier and easier to fight down her revulsion, the answers she needed coming quicker to her lips. He was just a man. A fucked-up scumbag of a man, but she’d fought worse. She’d beaten worse. “We’re old friends. I thought we’d talk. Face to face.”
The Joker nodded before abruptly shaking his head. “Really now, did you think showing me your face means you’re not afraid of me? I’m still in here, trussed up like a naughty turkey, and you’re still in front of the webcam. Or maybe you have some other reason for showing your pretty mug to Unca Joker. Are you coming onto me? That’s sexual harassment and I don’t have to take it.”
Just a man. “You think you’re funny. You’re really not.”
“But you must admit, out of the two of us, I’m the one willing to suffer for my art.” He slammed his head against the bars again, splattering his nose. “…webcam-girlie.”
“I’ve already suffered. I looked you in the eye and made you cringe. Remember? You’re old news to me.”
The Joker blinked a few times, mouth twisting under the stream of blood from his broken nose. Twisting to unleash new gales of laughter, echoing through her control room. “Hahahahaha! Now I remember you! You’re Gordon’s little girl. How is the old bean, anyway? I hear he’s commish again. That is a very stressful position. Are you sure his heart can take it?”
Barbara leaned back, crossed her arms. “You remember me and jokes about heart attacks are the best you can do? I expected more from you.”
The Joker’s voice hitched as his mouth hung open, panting laughter. “Oh, oh, right! I key-rippled you! So sorry, com-pletely blanked on that. Hee hee hee!” He cleared his throat. “Lemme start over. What do you call a drowning paraplegic? Oh, don’t give me that look. To you, losing your legs brought down the house. To me, it was a rimshot. Hardly anyone even died.” He turned away and muttered. “Next you’ll want to know why I did it—“
”I know why you did it. You’re a monster. I was there.”
The Joker looked up at her with a wide-eyed ‘shocked’ expression at being overheard. “No wonder I shot you! You just don’t get it! I did it because it was funny. If I’d done it to anyone else, you would’ve laughed. As the man said, tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and land on a baby.”
“No one laughs, Joker.” Barbara took off her glasses. “No one ever laughs.”
The Joker rested his head against the bars. His nose had stopped bleeding. He licked his mouth of blood and spat it on the floor. “If you don’t want a laugh, why are you talking to me? I am the Joker, you know. It is how I roll.”
“You tell me. You are the criminal genius.”
“Super-genius. Criminal geniuses are a dime a dozen, but they don’t have my charm and good looks. Huh. Let me think… green eyes… red hair… oh, how stupid of me.” The Joker extravagantly threw his head back, then bobbed it with each word of the next sentence. “I know how this works!” he mocked like a bratty child. He fixated on her. “Learned it from the ex-Robin, and I mean ‘ex’ in OH-so-many ways. You’re angry at the Bat. If he really loved you, he would’ve killed me. How does it feel, knowing that I mean more to him than you? And of course,” the Joker mused, eyebrows lifting, “there’s daddy dearest. Battie told me alllll about how Gordon wanted me brought in alive after I ruined shoe sales for you forever. Now, see, that would depress me. My own father valuing law and order over my well-being? Why, it’s enough to make me pop Pops, if I hadn’t already.” He scrunched up against the bars again, eyeballs bulging for her reaction. “Oh, yes, I know you’re Batgirl. Were Batgirl. Don’t worry. Why would I go after a washed-up old Bat-wannabe? Seems like beating a dead horse, without even the fun of watching the pony’s stomach burst.”
Barbara stared at him, coldly, inscrutably. The Joker’s eyes hungrily ran over her face, looking for a glimmer of tears or a hint of a grin. He found neither.
“I’m dead-on, aren’t I?” The Joker settled back on his haunches. “Why else would you talk to me?”
“You said you’d escape, remember? And yet here we are, back in Arkham. Home sweet home.” Barbara leaned forward, smiling as the plane touched down. “Time flies, huh?”
The Joker looked around, teeth snapping as white-suited orderlies cautiously filed up the cargo ramp. “Laugh while you can. Since you gave me the courtesy of showing me your face, perhaps I’ll show you mine. Make it a running gag. Well, actually, you’ll never be a running gag, but still… I’ll think up a kicker for you.”
“No, here’s the kicker. No one gets your jokes. No one laughs at your punch-lines. You’re all alone. But I have something you can never take from me.”
”The power of friendship? Oh, Babs, stop living in de-nile, you’ll get your hair wet. How long have you spent talking with the psychopathic killer? Stop me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing you’re a little starved for conversation. I think maybe I took more than your legs when I shot you. That joke was a double entendre. All those quips about you being Batgirl didn’t strike a nerve, but how many nerves are there left to strike? There’s a reason Bats doesn’t go for me, and it’s not because he has a thriving social life. You can beat me all you like, but you can never beat the world.”
The monitor dissolved to static.
***
“Goddamn, Babs, if I’d pulled a stunt like that you would’ve slipped Demerol in my oatmeal before you let me out the front door and you’d have been right.” Dinah collapsed into the chair beside Barbara’s console, head in her hands. “You don’t need someone like that in your head. It gets crowded enough as it is.”
“I know. I just needed to talk to him once, on my terms. To let him know he couldn’t beat me. Just once, I wanted a clean sweep.”
Dinah self-consciously rubbed at the bandage covering her bullet wound. “Did you get it?”
Barbara thought for a moment. Then she sent her computer into shutdown and leaned back in her wheelchair. “You know, I’ve never met Roy? Not officially.”
“Roy? My Roy?”
“Yeah. He’s your friend, he’s Dick’s friend, he’s Helena’s… acquaintance. And I don’t know him from Adam. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?”
“I don’t know, Babs.” Dinah scooted her chair next to Barbara’s, which had happened so often that the scuff-marks were worn into the floor. “It’s kinda who you are, isn’t it?”
“No.” Barbara took a deep breath. “Why don’t you invite him along?”
“Along?”
“To the after-mission party. I know you and the girls always have one, you just stopped inviting me to them after the millionth time I said no. You and me and Helena and Zinda and… and Dick, why not, we can even see if Barda and Scott want to come. Get the whole team together, get a banquet table somewhere. There’s got to be a restaurant you’ve been wanting to try, unless you’ve been replaced by a pod-person.”
“Hey, I’m not the one leading the sedentary lifestyle.” Dinah pinched at Barbara’s belly, commencing in a brief pinching-war that ended with Barbara pulling her arm around Dinah in an embrace that was only half-joking. “I think you’ll like Roy. And Dick’ll be glad to see you. And you know me, can’t get enough of spending time with my favorite girl.”
Barbara held onto Dinah, long enough for the friendly clinch to be something more. Dinah said nothing, just rubbed Barbara’s back and savored what little time they had before Barbara’s defenses went back up, like they had to. She knew Barbara, and that woman was strong and beautiful and pure, but she wasn’t hard enough to wade through the world of men like the Joker each day and feel every death. No one was.
And so Barbara was strong, for Dinah, for the world, and sometimes she let Dinah thank her for that. And sometimes Dinah got a look at Barbara, a real look.
“You’re my favorite girl too,” Barbara said.
She was a goddess.
Fandom: Birds of Prey comicverse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,930
Author's Notes: Betaed by
lurkslikefox.Characters/Pairings: Barbara Gordon, the Joker, Birds of Prey, references to Babs/Dinah
Summary: Sometimes, Barbara needs to remind herself why she’s the Oracle.
The clown didn’t struggle as he was hauled through the pouring rain, shoes slipping on the wet pavement, arms locked into the grips of Huntress and Barda. He was bowed over laughing, cuffed hands clapping spastically with each yelping guffaw. The Joker was dragged into the cargo hold of the Aerie and his laughter died down a little, rainwater dripping off his limp green hair, toes dragging on the riveted steel, then he made the heroines jolt with a renewed burst of insane merriment. Barda squeezed his arm, making the thin bone creak. The Joker smiled widely at her.
“Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Huntress said.
The Joker swung to face her. “Didn’t I shoot you? Because I remember shooting you. Now how impolite was it of you to stay alive after that? How about we give it another go and you do it right this time?”
Huntress said nothing. Just threw him into the cage in the middle of the cargo hold. Zoos had once used it to transport man-eaters.
The Joker landed, facefirst, then bounced his head off the floor a few more times.
“Aww, Bats had a pressing engagement, so he sent his cheerleading squad? I’m offended.” He saw they weren’t listening, were going back to the cockpit. “There’s no way you Batettes can get me back to Arkham!” he called after them.
A monitor flickered on opposite the cage. The Joker “ooh”ed and wiggled closer to it, until he was sitting up at his end of the cage, the monitor’s static-white light playing across him. The picture coalesced into a woman’s face, heart-shaped, green-eyed, red-haired, glasses.
“Hubba hubba!” The Joker bashed himself against the cage. “In-flight entertainment!”
***
Barbara stared at him across the gulf of cyberspace. Even in the air-conditioned cool of the Clocktower, even with hundreds of miles between them, some fight-or-flight part of her hindbrain was screaming run-run-run. He looked wrong. Before, he’d looked human, clownish. But that was before he killed Jason. Before he killed Batgirl.
Now he looked like some demented plastic surgeon had re-cut his face to fit an alien symmetry. His smile defied the contours of his face, full of yellow teeth and evil thoughts, irradiating her soul.
“What were you doing in Detroit?” she asked, no-nonsense.
“Every year I go someplace worse than Gotham and this year, Detroit delivered. I had my doubts, but they somehow managed to get that crime-rate up at the last second! Good for them! By the by, how’s blondie?” he asked casually. “I hear stomach wounds are a painful way to go. Me, I’d give them a fifteen out of thirty, tops.”
Barbara didn’t even need to check the medical read-out she had next to her console, receiving second-by-second updates. “Canary’s fine. The bullet missed all her vital organs. You must be getting sloppy in your old age. Is that a grayish-green hair I see?”
The Joker frowned, the expression grotesquely warring with his scars. “I know you from somewhere. Tell me, have you ever holidayed in Pasadena?”
It was getting easier and easier to fight down her revulsion, the answers she needed coming quicker to her lips. He was just a man. A fucked-up scumbag of a man, but she’d fought worse. She’d beaten worse. “We’re old friends. I thought we’d talk. Face to face.”
The Joker nodded before abruptly shaking his head. “Really now, did you think showing me your face means you’re not afraid of me? I’m still in here, trussed up like a naughty turkey, and you’re still in front of the webcam. Or maybe you have some other reason for showing your pretty mug to Unca Joker. Are you coming onto me? That’s sexual harassment and I don’t have to take it.”
Just a man. “You think you’re funny. You’re really not.”
“But you must admit, out of the two of us, I’m the one willing to suffer for my art.” He slammed his head against the bars again, splattering his nose. “…webcam-girlie.”
“I’ve already suffered. I looked you in the eye and made you cringe. Remember? You’re old news to me.”
The Joker blinked a few times, mouth twisting under the stream of blood from his broken nose. Twisting to unleash new gales of laughter, echoing through her control room. “Hahahahaha! Now I remember you! You’re Gordon’s little girl. How is the old bean, anyway? I hear he’s commish again. That is a very stressful position. Are you sure his heart can take it?”
Barbara leaned back, crossed her arms. “You remember me and jokes about heart attacks are the best you can do? I expected more from you.”
The Joker’s voice hitched as his mouth hung open, panting laughter. “Oh, oh, right! I key-rippled you! So sorry, com-pletely blanked on that. Hee hee hee!” He cleared his throat. “Lemme start over. What do you call a drowning paraplegic? Oh, don’t give me that look. To you, losing your legs brought down the house. To me, it was a rimshot. Hardly anyone even died.” He turned away and muttered. “Next you’ll want to know why I did it—“
”I know why you did it. You’re a monster. I was there.”
The Joker looked up at her with a wide-eyed ‘shocked’ expression at being overheard. “No wonder I shot you! You just don’t get it! I did it because it was funny. If I’d done it to anyone else, you would’ve laughed. As the man said, tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and land on a baby.”
“No one laughs, Joker.” Barbara took off her glasses. “No one ever laughs.”
The Joker rested his head against the bars. His nose had stopped bleeding. He licked his mouth of blood and spat it on the floor. “If you don’t want a laugh, why are you talking to me? I am the Joker, you know. It is how I roll.”
“You tell me. You are the criminal genius.”
“Super-genius. Criminal geniuses are a dime a dozen, but they don’t have my charm and good looks. Huh. Let me think… green eyes… red hair… oh, how stupid of me.” The Joker extravagantly threw his head back, then bobbed it with each word of the next sentence. “I know how this works!” he mocked like a bratty child. He fixated on her. “Learned it from the ex-Robin, and I mean ‘ex’ in OH-so-many ways. You’re angry at the Bat. If he really loved you, he would’ve killed me. How does it feel, knowing that I mean more to him than you? And of course,” the Joker mused, eyebrows lifting, “there’s daddy dearest. Battie told me alllll about how Gordon wanted me brought in alive after I ruined shoe sales for you forever. Now, see, that would depress me. My own father valuing law and order over my well-being? Why, it’s enough to make me pop Pops, if I hadn’t already.” He scrunched up against the bars again, eyeballs bulging for her reaction. “Oh, yes, I know you’re Batgirl. Were Batgirl. Don’t worry. Why would I go after a washed-up old Bat-wannabe? Seems like beating a dead horse, without even the fun of watching the pony’s stomach burst.”
Barbara stared at him, coldly, inscrutably. The Joker’s eyes hungrily ran over her face, looking for a glimmer of tears or a hint of a grin. He found neither.
“I’m dead-on, aren’t I?” The Joker settled back on his haunches. “Why else would you talk to me?”
“You said you’d escape, remember? And yet here we are, back in Arkham. Home sweet home.” Barbara leaned forward, smiling as the plane touched down. “Time flies, huh?”
The Joker looked around, teeth snapping as white-suited orderlies cautiously filed up the cargo ramp. “Laugh while you can. Since you gave me the courtesy of showing me your face, perhaps I’ll show you mine. Make it a running gag. Well, actually, you’ll never be a running gag, but still… I’ll think up a kicker for you.”
“No, here’s the kicker. No one gets your jokes. No one laughs at your punch-lines. You’re all alone. But I have something you can never take from me.”
”The power of friendship? Oh, Babs, stop living in de-nile, you’ll get your hair wet. How long have you spent talking with the psychopathic killer? Stop me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing you’re a little starved for conversation. I think maybe I took more than your legs when I shot you. That joke was a double entendre. All those quips about you being Batgirl didn’t strike a nerve, but how many nerves are there left to strike? There’s a reason Bats doesn’t go for me, and it’s not because he has a thriving social life. You can beat me all you like, but you can never beat the world.”
The monitor dissolved to static.
***
“Goddamn, Babs, if I’d pulled a stunt like that you would’ve slipped Demerol in my oatmeal before you let me out the front door and you’d have been right.” Dinah collapsed into the chair beside Barbara’s console, head in her hands. “You don’t need someone like that in your head. It gets crowded enough as it is.”
“I know. I just needed to talk to him once, on my terms. To let him know he couldn’t beat me. Just once, I wanted a clean sweep.”
Dinah self-consciously rubbed at the bandage covering her bullet wound. “Did you get it?”
Barbara thought for a moment. Then she sent her computer into shutdown and leaned back in her wheelchair. “You know, I’ve never met Roy? Not officially.”
“Roy? My Roy?”
“Yeah. He’s your friend, he’s Dick’s friend, he’s Helena’s… acquaintance. And I don’t know him from Adam. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?”
“I don’t know, Babs.” Dinah scooted her chair next to Barbara’s, which had happened so often that the scuff-marks were worn into the floor. “It’s kinda who you are, isn’t it?”
“No.” Barbara took a deep breath. “Why don’t you invite him along?”
“Along?”
“To the after-mission party. I know you and the girls always have one, you just stopped inviting me to them after the millionth time I said no. You and me and Helena and Zinda and… and Dick, why not, we can even see if Barda and Scott want to come. Get the whole team together, get a banquet table somewhere. There’s got to be a restaurant you’ve been wanting to try, unless you’ve been replaced by a pod-person.”
“Hey, I’m not the one leading the sedentary lifestyle.” Dinah pinched at Barbara’s belly, commencing in a brief pinching-war that ended with Barbara pulling her arm around Dinah in an embrace that was only half-joking. “I think you’ll like Roy. And Dick’ll be glad to see you. And you know me, can’t get enough of spending time with my favorite girl.”
Barbara held onto Dinah, long enough for the friendly clinch to be something more. Dinah said nothing, just rubbed Barbara’s back and savored what little time they had before Barbara’s defenses went back up, like they had to. She knew Barbara, and that woman was strong and beautiful and pure, but she wasn’t hard enough to wade through the world of men like the Joker each day and feel every death. No one was.
And so Barbara was strong, for Dinah, for the world, and sometimes she let Dinah thank her for that. And sometimes Dinah got a look at Barbara, a real look.
“You’re my favorite girl too,” Barbara said.
She was a goddess.
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Date: 2009-05-11 11:54 pm (UTC)