Chapter Sixteen

Donna was not having a good night, but she suspected that was a recurring theme for tonight. She’d woken with a vague discomfort between her shoulders which had lingered there the entire day. Then, right as she was about to shrug it off to go to sleep, she’d gotten a text from Barbara Gordon, of all people.

She had not spoken to the woman in years. When she had, they had been teens, and the communication was sparing, at best. She had never disliked the redhead, and her heart had pitied the news of her disability when it arrived, yet the two of them had never connected properly. It was only ever through Dick’s glowing light that the sharp edges they both shared were dulled enough to not irritate the other.

It was a text saying one of the few things that truly frightened Donna. Dick was in trouble. And by Hera, she had forgotten that Dick did nothing by halves. A giant column of smoke climbed to the heavens in the distance, some kind of fire in the distance over in Gotham, a crazy blonde she last knew to be a damned villain directly opposing Dick kneeling next to him, and then the man himself.

Slumped against a concrete rooftop with his eyes cloudy from whatever awful **** mix he’d been dosed with, slurring his words, unable to move much, and she was certain that the slight colour change on his suit there was some kind of wound that was bleeding. A lot.

Now she was meant to take him to his home with this woman who she absolutely should not be giving knowledge of that location to. But what choice did she have? It was literally within sight, so even if she tried to fly and leave her behind, the blonde would see her. Not to mention Dick trusted her now, for some reason?

No. Stop. Now is the time for action. The time for reflection will come later.

“Harley Quinn.” Eyes stained with what looked suspiciously like barely withheld tears darted to her as she stood, “You are honoured with the trust of the greatest hero the League has ever been graced by.”

She carefully scooped her friend into her arms, motions soft and gentle, as if he were a treasure beyond reckoning. Her eyes hardened to sapphires and her voice was immovable as steel when she spoke, “If you dare to break that trust, there will be a reckoning beyond any this world has known.”

—

Harley knew that it was meant to be a threat, a promise of a terrible fate if she fucked it up. But it didn’t even give her the chill that Batman did when she first met him. There was no reaction, honestly, other than the two halves of her mind, both Quinn and Quinzel instantly agreeing to say, “I would deserve it.”

The momentary conjoining of her strange split should have been a huge deal, some great breakthrough to explore and celebrate. Instead, all she could do was worry about the strangely likeable kid bleeding out on the concrete beside her.

The imposing brunette before her nodded, a hint of respect entering her eyes and voice, “Yes. You would.” Her head turns to nod at a nearby building, “We go there, to the highest floor, the third window from the right on the nearest face.”

With that, the woman who Harley knew to be one of the Wonder Girls or Women from the lasso hanging on her waist, simply stepped into the air and began to fly, swiftly gliding to the building in question.

Without missing a beat, Harley got to her feet and started running, leaping across the rooftops as recklessly as she could without truly endangering herself. She would be no use if she fell.

It didn’t take long to get there, though she had to do some less than graceful grunting and jumping to climb the fire escape. She had no idea how Nightwing did it so cleanly, but she’d be finding out if she got a chance in the future.

She slid through the window, and didn’t hesitate a moment as she strode through to the bathroom where she had found the medic-grade first aid kit before, when Dick had been sleeping. She yanked it into her hand and half-ran back to the main room.

The heroine was stood with Nightwing in her arms still, eyes burning into Harley with questioning judgement. Harley headed off any questions, “How bad’s it lookin’?”

A moment passed, and then she was looking at the man and speaking to her. Judgement delayed, apparently. “Do you have experience with chest wounds? I understand you were once a doctor.”

Harley's eyes snapped to Wonder Girl's, “Do I have- I mean, uh, yeah, I do? Technically? But ya know, I assumed ya’d want- I mean, it's been years an’-”

The other woman's eyes flashed, only for a moment, with that uncertainty and fear, and it clicked for Harley, “Oh shit. Ya don’t get hurt like a normie. Ya have no fuckin' clue what to do.”

Her eyes blazed with fury, but Harley didn't care anymore. Suddenly, it became clear that she was the best qualified for this. Nightwing- Dick, even, needed her right now, and she wasn't going to let that trust fall away.

It was as if some bizzaro switch had clicked in her mind. Without a moment more of hesitation, she strode over to the coffee table and tipped it over, then dragged it to the centre of the room. More takeout boxes and cheap cardboard coffee cups crushed beneath her feet, and some part of her tsked at how the mess had started to rebuild so soon.

“Bring him over here. Put him on the table.” The accent was dulled beneath the clinical sharpness that had overtaken her without warning. The heroine looked confused, but did as she was instructed.

Harley said, “Show me how to open this suit so I can get to the wound.”

Grim-faced and uncomfortable, the superpowered woman reached over and undid a couple of clasps around the midsection, removed a section of plating or whatever the hell the armour was, and gently rolled up a section to show how it divided at the waist. She opened her mouth to say something.

Harley ignored it and spoke before she could, “I need ya to pass me first aid supplies. Needles, thread, scissors. Antiseptic fluids. If anythin’ is missing from the bag, find a replacement. Superglue and duct tape work for missing needle and thread. **** can replace the antiseptic- but only something strong, whisky or vodka.”

The woman closed her mouth and nodded, moving to the bag with intent. Hopefully she knew Nightwing's home well enough to find anything missing. Meanwhile, Harley slowly but carefully peeled up the top of the suit. Very quickly, it became apparent that Wonder Girl was wrong. It was an upper abdominal wound, not a chest wound. It was also concerningly bloody around the point of entry and-

“Shit.” Harley quietly swore as the suit rugged against her soft pull.

The supplies she’d specified appeared at the edge of her vision, held in the heroine's hands. Her strong voice, shot through with concern, spoke from beside her, “What's the matter? Should I call reinforcements?”

Harley tsked sharply, “No, don't bother. I doubt anyone would be welcome in D-Nightwing's Nest without invitation, even if they could get ‘ere in time.” Her fingertips rolled across the tabletop rapidly in thought for a half second, “He still has shrapnel in ‘im.”

“What?! Remove it then, aid him!”

She tsked again, and a part of her reflected again on how strange it was that she was so calm and clear-headed. “He’s still under the effects of the ****, just passed out. Pain might make ‘im wake. Don't have antidote, or I don't know which it is, and I can't give ‘im any medication ‘case it mixes wrong.”

She reached over and dug in the bag for a second, then pulled out a pair of medical tweezers which looked more like pliers than anything else. Harley looked up grimly at the superheroine, and said “I need ya to pin ‘im down whilst I take out the shrapnel and tidy up, just in case he wakes.”

A still moment passed as the two stared at one another, neither relenting. Eventually, Wonder Girl gave a single sharp nod, which Harley returned.

Then both returned their attention to the hero that lay **** in a steadily growing pool of his own blood, and got to work.

—

Lights flickered in and out of his mind.

Skies bright, sharp, soft. Eyes blue, green, brown.

Hair red, black, yellow.

Heat everywhere. Then cold, colder than even Freeze’s frost.

Shooting, stabbing, piercing. Pain?

Pain.

Dick ripped from the confines of his mind with an animalistic shout. It clung, tugged, pulled to get him to drop back into the thoughts. The nightmares. The intrusive fingers in his body stopped him.

Conscious thought felt wrong, fast, slow. The pain centred him. Pain was familiar. The fingers told him they were real. Or were they?

Too consistent, careful, intense to be Crane’s poison. Real. Voices around him, close, distant, panicked.

“Wha…”

“...eed…”

“...the matter?”

“...n’t stop the bleeding!”

“How…help?”

It was foggy, sunny, hazy. Then it wasn't.

“I need someone who knows what the fuck they're doing, damnit!”

Harley. Blue eyes like the ocean. Blonde hair like gold. Trust.

His voice scratched, sawed, hurt. It would not cooperate fully, **** coughing again and again until, “H-Harls…tr-trusssst…youu…”

Dark again.

Nothing.

—

Barbara swore viciously to the empty clocktower, her voice echoing off of the lovely hardwood siding that she’d insisted she didn’t need and Dick had snuck into the refurbishment without asking.

Or, she thought it was only to the clocktower, until the forgotten comms crackled in her ear, and Alfred’s voice came through, “Oracle, is everything quite alright? You sound rather distressed considering tonight’s success.”

That much was true.

They’d clawed back a win across the board, despite the odds, and hadn’t even needed to call in meta help. Tim had managed to solve the Riddler’s traps faster than anticipated, exploiting a weakness in the design to collapse the last quarter or so simultaneously, and then managed to bring Riddler in without needing backup.

The toxin dose in Jason burnt through his system faster than expected, probably due to what Barbara guessed was a massively improved metabolism against foreign entities given by the Lazarus Pit and activated with the pit rage. She could only guess though, since he had refused to engage with the tests needed to confirm.

Regardless, that had left both him and the girls free to go and help catch Penguin and Bane, an easy success with so much firepower. Afterwards, Damien had woken up without issues, just a small lump on his head, whilst Bruce was clearly going to be bruised to hell by tomorrow, but by some impossibility, nothing significant was outright broken or damaged.

By all normal measures, it would be a miraculous success of a night. Except, “Nightwing is still MIA.” Barbara bit off her reply sharply.

“Ah.”

“Yeah. His comm is down, his suit’s connection is down, I can’t find him on any of the cameras, and all I have is this goddamn unreliable health monitor running on decades old tech!” Her hands shook with how tightly she held it. She suspected it would be broken by now if not for the steel casing.

But what else could she do? Fucking wheel herself to Bludhaven, up half a dozen flights of stairs somewhere, and then do damned flip tricks in her chair to run the rooftops until she found him?

The line was quiet aside from the breaths that heaved from her chest. Too quiet, she realised, for Alfred. He would usually be trying to comfort or develop a plan of action, knowing that the Bats only found relief in action.

“...Miss Oracle? Would you say this constitutes a, ahem, ‘absolutely catastrophic clusterfluff of an emergency’?”

Barbara could feel her eyebrows raising without intending to. “There’s no way you’re not quoting Nightwing right now.”

The grandfatherly butler’s wry smile was clear in his voice, “Indeed, I am quoting Master Nightwing. Would you agree this meets those requirements?”

She thought for a moment, a denial halted on her tongue. He had just been saying what a success this night was, how well it had gone. One offline bat wasn’t even near to a minor emergency, nevermind the severity he was suggesting. Hell, Jason regularly went off-grid for days at a time, and nobody batted an eye. So why would-

Understanding hit her, “Yes, yes I absolutely would, Agent A. Is there a protocol in place?”

He cleared his throat, “Security code Alpha-Gamma-7-4-7-2-5-9. Grant access to Clocktower for feeds N-1 through 6, using Protocol…” The older man let out a resigned sigh, “...Clusterfuck Kerfuffle.”

Despite herself, Barbara giggled. Trust Dick to make whoever was saving his ass sound like an idiot doing it. The feeds popped up on her screens. It took her a moment to understand exactly what Alfred had just given her, and her eyes must have been comically wide when she did.

Camera feeds. Six of them, all peering directly into Dick’s apartment. Hell, even his bathroom had one. But they shouldn’t have existed to begin with, as far as Barbara knew. And she knew every camera in Gotham, and most of the Bludhaven ones near Dick, by this point, so she clearly recalled that he’d refused to install these when Bruce demanded it.
More than that, when Bruce did it anyway, because he’s an asshole without any respect for privacy, Dick had set up some kind of security field that outright nuked any and all spytech that made it’s way into the building.

Bruce had spent weeks trying to learn what was doing it, and though he never admitted it, Barbara had come across the report explaining that he’d given up due to a lack of leads. The best theory suggested it was some kind of permanent EMP field that operated on the specific range of frequencies that the spyware used to function. Clearly, that was wrong, because these cameras were running just fine.

Apparently, he just specifically didn't want Bruce to have access.

It was only after that realisation that the contents of the feed registered. Equal measures of confusion and concern drew her brows together. Dick was lying on a coffee table, seemingly **** with his suit partially open to show a patch of skin marred by a large white bandage. Somehow, that bit made the most sense.

What didn't make sense was the fact that Donna Troy was sat back on the couch with one arm over the back, looking to the kitchen through what Barbara reckoned used to be a wall, where Harley-fucking-Quinn seemed to be deep-cleaning and dancing as she chatted to the raven-haired woman.

Under her breath, Barbara muttered, “…What the actual fuck?”