Chapter Thirty One

For once, none of the five women felt the need to ask questions, argue, deliberate, discuss, or any other act of considered hesitation.

Instead, Zatanna looked at Harley and said, “They’re already here.”

Harley grimaced and nodded once, sharply, then said, “Scarecrow’s fear toxin got him. Help me move him ta’ the bed.”

And that was all that was needed for all five to move into action. Barbara rolled her chair towards the bathroom, where she knew the emergency kit would be. Harley went to open the doors and clear the way, pulling the duvet away so it was a flat mattress. Zatanna locked the door behind the new visitors, and then joined Donna and Kory around Dick’s form.

That was when things started to go sideways.

The amber-skinned alien knelt and reached out to take ahold of Dick’s trembling form. Her movements were gentle and careful, which made the reaction all the more shocking.

The moment her fingers grazed his arm and thigh, he let out a bloodcurdling cry of sheer panic, the noise terrified and miserable. He flung his figure backwards from the touch so violently that a loud crack sounded as he struck the cabinets and wall behind him, even though his constant twitching never ceased.

His eyes shot open, moving and shifting rapidly around the space as if watching something only he could see. The pupils were so dilated it was almost impossible to see the thin ring of navy that encircled them, and his breath came in shuddering, rapid pants.

Kory recoiled, turning to the other women with uncertainty and pain in her eyes, “Wh-what do I- I don’t-”

“Ah don’t think it’s a good idea for ya to carry him. Or touch him, if we can help it.” Harley spoke up as she left the bedroom, her tone as flat as the blue of her eyes. “Zatanna, d’ya got any sound-blockin’ magic or shit? Don’t want cops called fa’ tha’ screamin’.”

Zatanna paled slightly, but nodded, and turned to place silencing spells around the boundary of the apartment. Meanwhile, Harley continued in that same hard, flat tone. “If Zatanna or me could move him, I’d say we do it, but he’s such a heavy fucker.”

Each of them looked slowly to Donna. The raven-haired Amazon’s eyes hardened, her jaw clenched, and her lips pressed into a hard line. Silently, she knelt, and firmly pressed her hands against Dick.

Slowly, she picked him up in her arms, and carried him through to the bedroom in excruciating quiet. The only sound was the pained cries that came from Dick, and even those gradually devolved from loud and frightened noises to pitiful whimpers and silent sobbing.

By the time Donna was able to place him down on the mattress, the noises had stopped entirely. Tear tracks marred her cheeks, the only break in her otherwise indomitable composure.

The four of them were caught for a moment, Zatanna and Harley on one side of the bed, Kory and Donna on the other, all of them just watching him. Dick simply laid still on the mattress, his only movement of his frame visible in the completely silent sobs that wracked his chest. The quiet whispers under his breath were more audible in here, in the silence.

Even then, they had to strain to make out the small and miserable voice, “...’m poison…no…”

They turned towards the door as Barbara rolled into the room with a frustrated frown on her face, “His first aid kit only has antidotes from over a year ago. Why the fuck hasn’t he updated it?”

The question was clearly rhetorical, but it seemed to be enough. Zatanna turned to face the redhead, her features hard, but she never got to open her lips.

Instead, Harley turned and practically snarled at Barbara, gradually growing louder as she spoke until she was shouting by the end. “You fuckin’ serious? Whattya fuckin’ think, he’d just find help somewhere else? It don’t take no fuckin’ genius to know he ain’t welcome around you Bats. Ya kicked him outta his home, where all his support was, right afta’ he fucking died!”

The others reeled from the sheer depth of fury that rolled off of the quirky blonde. It was completely uncharacteristic, but more than that, it was irrefutably powerful in a raw and emotional way. This wasn’t Harley lashing out, it was a woman defending the man she loved.

Before anyone could respond, could even begin to try, all eyes shot back to the bed as Dick started moving. Twisting and turning, at first, his voice too quiet or slurred to understand. Then steadily, the motions became more violent, faster, and his voice grew louder.

“Grab ‘im before he hurts himself!” Harley barked out the order, and the women responded without hesitation.

At the feeling of restraining hands, Dick’s response suddenly dialled to eleven. The movement became violent thrashing, his body bucking and slamming against the bed hard enough the cheap wood creaked dangerously. That would have been bad enough.

His words were worse. Loud, clear, damning.

“..what’s going on? What do you-”

A sharp inhale, his features contorting into disbelief and rejection.

“No. No! I can’t- I won’t do that to them!”

He was rejecting, but it sounded too much like pleading.

“They need to know! Alf, Tim and Jay, Steph-” A catch in his voice. “-Babs! I can’t let them think-”

The rejection slowly sliding into begging, desperation bleeding clearly as his volume increased with every word.

“No! I won’t! Not after Jason- after Damian! They’re family! They’re my family!”

His body slumped hard, hitting the mattress limply. His voice was broken, pitiful.

“I-I can’t…I can’t stay dead… you watched me die- But I’m alive Bruce!”

A wild and overwhelming energy overtook him. Desperation filled with hope, delight filled with misery. Awe, above it all, as if witnessing a miracle. A scream that echoed inside the room, a pure expression of life.

“I’M ALIVE!!”

One of his arms broke free from Zatanna’s grip to slam desperately against his chest when he screamed, even as tears flowed from his eyes.

Throughout the entire time, each woman’s expression had slowly collapsed.

For Donna, her implacable determination had fractured, blood running from where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek so hard that it had torn, her eyes shiny.

Kory’s tall and powerful frame shook with the power of her sobs, her features twisted in anguish, tears running as freely as water.

Zatanna quietly wept, and her hands squeezed Dick’s arm tightly as she reaffirmed her promise from only a short while ago, vowing never to leave him to suffer alone again.

In Barbara’s case, misery and sorrow battled with equal anger and loathing. The weight of understanding, more so than any of the other women because she was a part of the Batclan, was crushing her chest. Yet, for all the upset it offered, she found an equal degree of self-hatred burning within, and not for the first time, she cursed her disability that kept her sitting there uselessly watching.

The only one of the five women that wasn’t falling to pieces from the **** words of the man they all loved, writhing on the bed, was Harley. On her striking features, there was only a grim determination to be found.

Apparently, the screamed declaration, the demand for reality to accept that Dick still lived, proved too much. Before she could think, Barbara rolled to his side, and pressed a hand to his cheek. “Dick, wake up, it’s Babs. Please- It’s okay, I promise, it’s me-”

She cut off.

At her touch, or maybe at her words, something changed for the original Boy Wonder. His body fell limp again, pliable, offering no resistance anymore. His eyes fluttered, never managing to reach past a half-lidded gaze. Goosebumps ran along any skin exposed by his thrashing.

He inexplicably shivered, despite the warmth of the room. A low moan fell from his lips, one that three of the women almost recognised from their relationships with him. Yet… it wasn’t right.

There was a note of…pain?

“...no, ’m poisonn…don’t-”

Another low moan shivered through him, a sickening blend of unwelcome pleasure and wordless misery.

“...cold, ‘m colllld…”

Barbara’s hand shook uncontrollably as she pulled it away slowly, eyes transfixed in horror on the face of the boy she had known and loved since they were children.

“...can’t touch, ‘m poison… C-Cat, pleass….”

The name struck Barbara like a steel bat to the face. She barely managed to say “I’m gonna be sick-” before she was spinning her chair around and vomiting violently onto the bare floorboards.

Dick’s soft words continued, pleading and resigned, to the sound of the disabled redhead’s stomach emptying with **** prejudice.

Minutes passed excruciatingly slowly. Eventually, Barbara’s stomach had nothing left to offer, and she joined the other women in their vigil.

Sometime later, at least an hour though none of them had checked a clock or even tracked the time, his mutterings fell silent with a soft sigh, and he curled up slightly. He had fallen asleep.

With a degree of gentleness and care that belied the depths of her affection, Harley quietly moved. The other women got out of her way as she stripped the duvet, put a new cover on it, then pulled it over Dick’s sleeping figure. Each of them noticed how she tucked it into his frame so it would hug him tightly, exactly the way he’d always done for himself.

She blinked away a single tear, the only one she had shed the entire time, as she leaned in and kissed his forehead, the lightest graze of her lips, as if he was the most fragile and invaluably precious thing she had ever laid eyes on.

Then she straightened, and the gentle care that filled her features melted away under the scorching fury that burned out at them all, though ever so slightly less at Zatanna.

“All of ya. Go sit out there.” She curtly bit out, and jabbed a fingertip to the door.

There, she stood, as one by one, each of the heroines left the room. Zatanna softly pulled it shut behind her, the latch clicking shut.

In the dark and still of the bedroom, Harley silently moved around, removing her shoes, and gently pressed herself against Dick’s back, wrapping her arms around him.

His nose flared slightly as she entered his space, and when her arms held him, his figure seemed to lose a hint of tension, as if he knew it was here.

He didn’t wake up to see the way tears flooded from Harley’s eyes to ruin her makeup, despite how motionless the rest of her was.