Chapter Text
“Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;”
~Lysander, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, scene i
“What happened?” Batman asked. He eyed his protégés warily. He’d been on his way out when they’d arrived covered in mud. They were grinning like children and flicking drying mud at each other and the Cave. When a wayward handful of muck, splattered on his boots and marred the matte black finish with red clay, he had them sit on metal folding chairs while they waited for him to change his boots before making their reports.
“Here.” Upon his return, Batman tossed towels at Batgirl and Nightwing.
Batgirl caught hers and pushed her cowl back. She wiped at the mud on her face and hands. Nightwing, on the other hand, ignored the mud. The towel landed haphazardly across his shoulder. He had a grin on his face and his eyes sparkled with a private joke. Batman’s scowl deepened. They were acting like children. If time travel was involved, this would be a whole new headache. He squinted through the lens of his cowl, engaging the analysis function. No, not time travel. Nightwing and Batgirl were the same as they had been when they left—only dirtier. “I thought you were going on a date.”
“Well....” Nightwing drawled. “Funny you should mention that.”
Barbara bit her lip; this wasn’t going to start well. She felt a bit like she was a kid again under the critical eye of teacher. “That’s how it started. We went to a movie.”
Batman’s lips pulled into a tight line as he kept himself from chastising them. They were adults and could make their own decisions. Just because Bruce didn’t go to movie theatres anymore, didn’t mean they couldn’t. Sure, he’d invested in the best home entertainment system money could buy, but he couldn’t convince any of his children it was the only way to watch a movie.
When they had dated the first time, Dick had confided in Babs, that until they started dating, he hadn’t been out to see a movie since before his parents had died. After his admission, going to movies had become one of their favourite activities to do on dates. At first it felt a bit like they were getting away with something behind Batman’s back. Then, it became a way to escape Gotham for a couple of hours.
“The movie was fine,” Nightwing interrupted before Batman could do more than growl. “It was the walk home when things started to get weird.”
“Explain...”
Nightwing’s grin widened. He was in his element. Settling back in his chair, he began peeling his gloves off finger by finger. They landed on the ground with a squelching plop. “As I was saying, we were heading back before patrol when the trouble started...”
Dick and Babs stayed with the crowd as they exited the theatre. It was an old habit they’d adopted out of respect for Bruce. The odds of a random attack aimed at them lessened in they stayed with the crowd. However, tonight the crowd dispelled quickly and they were only half a block away from the theatre when they found themselves alone on the sidewalk. They didn’t increase their pace or change their direction.
“Do you want to try out the new ice cream shop on Lincoln?” Babs entwined her fingers between Dick’s. He adjusted his stride to match hers.
“Sure,” he said casually as he leaned his head closer to hers. “What do you know about Freeze’s whereabouts?”
Babs closed her eyes and sorted through her mental files. “Freeze is at Blackgate in the infirmary. Last report out said he was unconscious, so expect him to be out within the week. We should be okay for tonight.”
He pulled her close and kissed her fingers. “How do you keep all this straight?”
She shrugged. “Partly eidetic memory. Partly I’ve been doing this for years so I have systems in place to obtain the information I need. And,” she yawned, “partly because I get somewhere between Bruce and Tim levels of sleep.”
“Then, I suppose I will have to get you some coffee to go with your ice cream.”
“Sounds goo--.”
“Help!” The scream—high pitched and urgent—broke through the evening air.
They were off in a flash, all thoughts of ice cream had vanished. Following the screams even after they were silenced, Dick and Babs ended their chase at an alley wedged between two brick faced buildings. A rubbish bin had tipped, spilling crumpled food wrappers and empty coffee cups across the sidewalk. They needed to turn sideways in order to slip through the narrow opening. The alley itself was scarcely wider. Though there was not enough room for a fight, the rubbish and dirt that littered the ground showed signs of being recently disturbed.
Babs pulled a flashlight from her bag and shone it over the ground and walls, looking for clues. “Any idea where they went?”
“Yeah.” Dick grimaced and rolled his foot to the side. A gooey viscous substance connected the sole of his new trainer to the alley in oozing strands. “And I think I know who we’re dealing with.”
“Me too. Clayface.” Her flashlight traced the trail of muddy amorphous hand- and footprints up the side of the building.
“There’s a safe house a block south of here. We can change, then pick up the trail.” Even with needing to change, Dick knew that it would be faster to go themselves than call in backup from the Cave.
Babs shifted her backpack around, exchanging the flashlight for her grapple gun. She shot the grapple up to the roof and waited for it to catch. “Let’s go.”
Dick held onto Babs and the grapple as the automated winch assisted in pulling them up.
Twenty minutes later, they were back on the same rooftop, this time as Batgirl and Nightwing. It didn’t take the world’s greatest detective to follow the path left by Clayface. Goopy footprints led the way like breadcrumbs. Either this was a trap, or Clayface’s consistency was changing again. Probably both. The footprints stopped outside an abandoned theatre in a part of town that had seen better days.
Batgirl recognised the theatre from a mention in the Wayne Enterprises city revitalisation files. At some point after the no man’s land quarantine, Ratcatcher had used the theatre as a hideout. After his capture, the place had been condemned as a health hazard, though no one had gotten around to knocking it down. Next, Mr. Freeze had occupied the building, using the remaining roosting rats as test subjects for his latest cryogenic experiments. Once Batman had taken him down, the building had laid fallow until a group of avant-garde theatre students thought it was a perfect setting for their piece on the Nature of Gotham. Only, they hadn’t counted on the people’s aversion to setting foot in a known villain hideout and the play flopped. Since then, there had been no record of occupation.
“Front door?” Nightwing asked, when their surveillance of the perimeter came up empty except for more muddy footprints.
“No. Backdoor. We can enter through backstage. Whatever Clayface has planned, he’s most likely to be on stage.”
She was mostly right.
The way was clear until they reached backstage. Crowded among rat eaten flats and mouldy curtains, dozens of clay figures moved about the tasks of a stage crew—lights and rigging, props and costumes. Stagehands moved creaking set pieces.
“The antagonists have arrive, right on cue,” Clayface said in a voice that sounded like he was gargling. His maw-like mouth drooped in a simulated frown. “I was hoping for the A-list talent, I suppose the understudies will have to do. After all, the show must go on.”
“Show?” Nightwing mouthed.
Batgirl shrugged as several of Clayface’s muddy minions oozed up around Batgirl and Nightwing. The more the heroes tried to struggle against the undulating forms, the more they were subsumed.
“Relax,” Batgirl said, spitting out a mouthful of mud.
Once they stopped resisting, the clay figures ushered them out to center stage, then seeped back into their places backstage. Batgirl and Nightwing peered past the blinding stage lights and into the audience. The seats were filled with the silhouetted forms of gagged men and women tied to the chairs. Hostages.
Clay figures with more defined appearances took their places on the stage. They moved to prescribed actions according to a script that neither Nightwing nor Batgirl knew. When the heroes tried to leave the stage, more of the oozing amorphous stagehands materialised along the edge of the stage and ushered them back to center.
“He called us antagonists.” Nightwing unsheathed his eskrima sticks and slipped into a fighting stance. “He wants us to fight them.”
Batgirl’s rapid analysis of the situation concurred with Nightwing’s. Clayface had once been an actor and even in this form, he couldn’t resist the lure of the stage. And, in every good story, protagonist and antagonist alike saw themselves as the hero of their own story. If Clayface wrote the scrip, he would be the protagonist.
She punched the nearest figure right in the center of its body mass. Her fist went through the chest, creating a hole and splattering mud over everything—from her face to the front few rows of the audience. The people screamed around their gags. From backstage, Clayface roared.
Nightwing and Batgirl exchanged significant glances, carrying on a silent conversation of suppositions and theories. Nightwing swung his eskrima at the figure closest to him, knocking its head to the ground. This time Clayface’s scream was louder, more intense. He was connected to the cast and crew. Controlling them.
“The show, the show. Play your parts.” Clayface ambled onto stage, a large menacing presence. He grabbed alternately at his head and chest, as through trying to hold himself together. “This isn’t a dumbshow. Say your lines!”
If there was prescribed lines, Batgirl didn’t know them. Though, by this point in the evening, she realised the best way to distract Clayface was to antagonise him. She’d take a page from Nightwing’s playbook, this case called for banter.
“I agreed to go to the movies tonight, not star in them.” Batgirl dodged as one of the oozing clay people began soliloquising in a mumbled rumble. It sounded like it was talking around a mouthful of rocks. Maybe it was.
Nightwing grinned as he swung his eskrima sticks into another of the gooey forms before sending an electric charge through the clay figure and disrupting the psychic connection between it and Clayface’s central form. The fried figure melted into a puddle of mud. “Well, I always thought I’d do quite well if I decided to change professions. I’d be a star.”
At that remark, the remaining clay polyps turned their attention on Nightwing. “Star,” they moaned in unison. They began to meld into each other. “Clayface is the star.”
“I’ve got a plan.” Nightwing nodded up at the ceiling. “Have your grapple gun ready.”
Batgirl followed his gaze and surmised his plan without further explanation.
“No, there’s too many of you to be the star. Ensemble maybe, but your dialogue really isn’t working.” She edged around the en massing amalgam of actors and stagehands, partly shepherding them into center stage, partly getting into place for Nightwing’s plan.
“Can you believe he called us the understudies? I think we’re smashing.” Nightwing swung at another of the clay actors, slicing through where its stomach would have been if it had been human and splattered mud over the stage.
“If only we didn’t have to perform with such rank amateurs,” she said, drawing the remaining stagehands to join the undulating mass. Nearly every mud figure had joined the mass at center stage. It writhed as Nightwing and Batgirl continued to batter at it. Various heads and mouths appeared, then disappeared, each reciting a different monologue.
“Now,” Nightwing called. Both vigilantes aimed their grapple guns up at the creaking catwalk. Jerking at the cables in unison, then engaging the automated winches, they pulled the catwalk to the stage, trapping the mud actors underneath the metal framework.
“Stay back,” he warned before touching the end of his eskrimas to the catwalk and initiating the charge. Electricity danced along the metallic grate and through the mud people. It disrupted the psychic link that Clayface used to control them. As all the former clay figures exploded, showering the entire theatre in mud, psychic feedback shot through Clayface. He dropped unconscious to the ground in an oozing shapeless mass of mud.
Nightwing somersaulted off the stage and began freeing the audience while Batgirl put in a call to GCPD and the Batcave.
“And that’s what happened.” Nightwing sat up straight and peeled the domino mask from his face. The contrast between the red mud and the clean skin under the mask made it appear as though he was still wearing a mask.
Batgirl grimaced at the towel, trying to find a clean corner to wipe away the streak of drying mud dripping from her hair. How had she gotten mud in her hair? She swiped Dick’s towel and chafed at the mud. “Can we go shower now?”
Batman head throbbed. Massaging his temples through the cowl, he considered not going out this evening after all. He didn’t think he ever had a date that went this disastrous. No, maybe he didn’t want to contemplate that.
“Go,” he said in more of a Bruce voice than a Batman voice. That settled it. He was staying in.
“Thanks. I’ll make my additions to Dick’s incident report once I’m clean.” Babs crumpled the towels in her hands.
“Hey, why am I writing the report?” Dick looped an arm around her waist.
Finding a partially clean corner of the towel, she scrubbed at the mud on his cheek before kissing the clean-ish skin. “Because you did such a fine job of telling the story. See you.”
Dick watched her leave.
Bruce caught Dick by the arm before he could follow her back to the locker rooms. “Two things. First, shower before touching my computer.”
“Aye aye Captain. And your second command?”
“Next time, try to avoid the super villains on your date.”
Dick grinned and gave Bruce a cheeky wink. “I’ll try.”
Bruce sighed and let go of Dick, his hand covered in the red clay.