Chapter Text
Part I - It’s three in the morning and I’m afraid to hope.
If Metropolis is a fairytale, then Gotham is a cautionary tale. Recent studies prove that 6.72% of the adult US populace believes the city is just a myth. Those who do check Google Maps every now and then, people from other cities - heroes and civilians alike - sooner or later always ask Barbara the same thing:
“Why Gotham?”
She gets it, she truly does. Gotham is, and Barbara will readily admit this, one of the worst places to live in the world, if not the worst. Crime runs rampant at night and corruption doesn’t sleep during the day either. The sky is so polluted her father can expect without reasonable doubt that whenever he needs to light the batsign, there will be enough smog or clouds to project it against. And the people, well… The mirror doesn’t tell any lies. She’s one of them, but even she will admit they’re something else. Nobody likes Gotham, especially not those who know it like she does.
So when people ask her that question, Barbara does what any good Gothamite does: lie blatantly and without regret. She has a different story for every day of the week. Family ties, a debt to the man that shaped her heroic alter ego, going where people need you the most instead of going where is convenient, whatever makes the heroic types shut up the most efficiently. People ask once, and then never again.
And that right there is the true power of Gotham: it’s silence. Not that the city is ever quiet, quite the opposite really, but people know when to stick their head in the sand and keep their mouth shut. It’s both the thing that keeps them alive as well as the thing that doomed them in the first place, and Barbara learned from the very best. It’s been fourteen years since she first took justice into her own two, shaking hands, and yet her father has never slipped up, never called her out on it. ‘ Plausible deniability’ is a fragile thing that barely keeps him safe, and so she’ll grant him the same courtesy by going out of her way to avoid mixing up her two lives when he is around. She doesn’t ask how much he knows, doesn’t even wonder about it during her darkest nights. Just like he won’t question her increasingly flimsy excuses and ignore the things she can’t explain.
Despite all the festering rot upon which the city was built, the chaos and the utter lunacy of it all, there are a few rules that nobody dares to break. Rule number one: Gotham will always protect its own.
Superman is not Gotham, never has been and never will be despite his longtime friendship with Bruce and the rest of the batfamily. He doesn’t know the rules and even if he did, he would not abide them. And so it’s his eyes she feels metaphorically burning into her back the entirety of the impromptu three day JLA mission. She kept her spine ramrod straight, and sent him the most disappointed glare when he insisted that she is more valuable running ops from the Watchtower than on the field, but otherwise kept quiet. He’s probably right, which was why Batman ordered her to stay behind, but that didn’t make it sting any less. She’s 29, eight years older than Superman was when he first took up the mantle. It would do him well to remember that before his personal data might suddenly become corrupted.
She’s not one to hold a grudge for long, so she doesn’t hack his home computer during her break time. She has seen what petty revenge can do to a person, and has made an effort to learn to let things go after the second boy wonder came back with a vengeance. So Barbara swallows her damaged pride and pretends it was never hurt in the first place.
Which is why she was surprised when Clark confronted her privately while she was finishing up her final mission report at the Watchtower, long after most members had gone home to rest. The mission had been a success, despite some minor injuries on Tim’s part. Injuries that might have been prevented if she had been aiding him with his fieldwork, but that’s a line of thought she will not entertain a second longer than her team needs her to.
“Congratulations,” he said as a form of greeting and sat down in the chair next to her. Seeing him sitting like that, his posture uncomfortable and uncertain but still dressed the part of the world’s most well known superhero, never lost it’s strangeness. A puzzling mix between the man and the alien, between Clark Kent and Superman.
After the initial nod his way, Barbara barely looked up from her screen. She is a professional, and Superman would do well to remember that, a childish part of her mind chimes bitterly.
"Thank you, you performed well too during the mission.” Her tone was colder than it strictly needed to be, but she could blame that on the exhaustion after three days without sleep if she felt like defending herself.
Clark faltered for a second. “Eh.. that’s not what I meant.” He said, and rubbing his temple absentmindedly. Barbara spotted a few grey hairs sprouting up there, and she wondered if she should send him some of that hair dye Bruce pretended he hadn’t been using for years, if only to see the him squirm. He seemed to be doing just fine on his own in that department, so she catalogued that thought for later.
She didn’t ask him what was on his mind, just kept typing, observing him from the corner of her eyes until he broke down.
“I meant… you know I have superior hearing right? I can hear a heartbeat, no matter how faint or small.”
“I am well aware of the extent of your abilities, Superman. B had me memorize and recite them back when I was still a kid.” Not just his powers, truth to be told. Bat homework had always been more about finding and exploiting weaknesses than knowing your allies strengths. But some things were better left unsaid.
“Right so… I know ,” he stressed the word, looking deeply into her eyes. “Knew immediately with Jon, too,” he added almost as an afterthought.
Barbara halted her typing reluctantly and finally turned towards him fully. “Know what?”
Clark’s expression changed immediately, as did his tone. “Wait, you.. didn’t know? That explains more than few things…” he met her eyes without abandon, and put a hand on his stomach meaningfully.
Her own decided to twist painfully at that exact moment. It had been doing that a lot lately, come to think of it. She’d been feeling nauseous too, and more picky about her food than usual. She hadn’t thought much of it, but in hindsight...
Hope soared and died in the time span roughly akin to time it took a bullet to hit it’s target after it was fired, and all that remained was a bitter reminder of a pipe dream she had buried a long time ago.
“If you are implying what I think you are implying, I would suggest you get your ears checked out by a professional, and I might have to redo that homework assignment for B.”
“Barbara…”
“No names on duty.”
Clark sighed deeply, almost fondly. “The mission is over. Everyone is home, as you should be,” he reasoned with her like she was one of his rogues, eyes all shining and full of promise, his hand covering hers. “I’m serious Barbara. You should go see a doctor.”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Despite what you might think Superman, I’m an adult and I can take care of myself.”
“At least tell Dick. It’s his decision too.” The thing about Superman was, that despite all his kind bravado, he knew how to pack a hit, and make it hurt too.
Barbara winced, a long forgotten dream of electric blue eyes on a face not unlike her own, smiling at her. She killed the vision before it could consume her, but it didn’t make her feel any less like she was drowning.
“I mean, it is his, right?” Clark added awkwardly after she didn’t react to his statement, like their relationship hadn’t been the worst kept secret in the community for the past odd two years.
Barbara swallowed down the bile of dread that had started to form at the simple mention of his name and gritted out “There is nothing to tell him about. I can’t be… My body can’t…” the words to finish those sentences never came because the thing is, you can’t speak a language you’ve never learned.
So instead she settled on anger, a more familiar emotion. Not Dick’s destructive kind, but the subtle spark that has been bubbling in the back of her mind for years, long before the Joker shot her, before she even put on the cowl.
The pity written all over Clark’s face was only fuel for the flames.
She shut down her laptop more violently than strictly necessary and stood up, reminding herself that she could. “I would appreciate it if you would stop taking liberties talking about my private life on the job,” Barbara all but hissed at him.
Clark looked like he was about to say something, but this was a man who had stuck by Bruce for roughly twenty years, if not more. He knew when he was losing a battle against a bat, and Barbara had learned from the best.
He apologized more formally than she was used to from him, which she considered a victory, and dragged himself out of the chair. Clark paused for a moment, debating what to say, thoughts plainly displayed on his face. Dick would know what was going on in that peculiar mind, but he wasn’t here, now was he? He was covering for Bruce in Gotham, and Barbara wasn’t ready to go back just yet.
She’d never know what he had really wanted to say when he settled on a tauntingly familiar shoulder clasp, followed by: “Take care of yourself Barbara. And… talk to him.”
He didn’t wait around long enough to face her inevitable retort and for once she was glad.
Working fully on autopilot, Barbara continued typing up her report, flawlessly and detailed. If it took her any longer than necessary to return to Gotham then that was only because she was a professional and her reports needed to reflect that.
(Not because her hands shook, or tears kept blurring her vision, nor because nausea threatened to overcome her. Definitely not.)
They weren’t careful when it came to sex, didn’t take any precautions because there was no reason to be careful: ever since the bullet that paralyzed her also tore through a part of her womb, all hopes of a child had been shattered. Her implant might have given her back the ability to walk and fight on the front lines, it didn’t heal the damage done. It never was a perfect solution, but she’s from Gotham, spat out in this hell and raised on those infested streets, so she did what everyone who ever spent any considerable time in her city learned to do: suck it up, keep walking, and never talk about it. Rule two, so to speak.
It’s easier not to talk about all the things they can’t have. Dick wasn’t born in Gotham, but he might as well have been with how well he passed for a Gothamite. He bled so much for the city that the taint at some point must have seeped into the wounds, spreading the same filth through his veins until it became part of him, of them, body and soul. He could talk, could probably wax bad poetry for days if he wanted to, but like any good Gothamite knows when to apply rule number two, and stick to it.
(You don’t question why your neighbor suddenly has to move or why your daughter never picks up her phone between 9PM and 4AM. And if you ever see a bat, you look the other way. You suck it up, soldier on, never look at the sky and wonder if the smog will clear one day to reveal the stars you know should be up there somewhere.)
For all Dick’s talk of restlessness, of circus days and southern winds carrying him far away, Barbara without fail finds him every morning in the penthouse in one of the worst parts of Gotham, barely waking up when she closed the door behind her and crawled into bed next to him. He smiled at her and muttered something that probably means ‘welcome back’ at her before falling back into the ignorant bliss of sleep.
It’s just one of the (many) things Barbara likes about him, that despite all the darkness that she knows lurks inside him, he can still sleep with such an unguarded expression on his face. It’s inviting - comfortable even - to forget everything for a second. Things are good between them right now, have been for awhile. The things they don’t speak about never felt like a weight before, especially since there is so much they do talk about, on top of buildings at 3am or at their 11am breakfast of their sort-of shared apartment.
Not everything that went unspoken is a bad thing. He never asked her to move in with him, she’s just staying there most nights. And if most of her personal belongings sit comfortably in a drawer of the master bedroom, he won’t mention it, and neither will she because he’s not really living here either, just crashing for awhile. Dick’s mail is still being delivered to an apartment in Blüdhaven and Stephanie comes over every now and then to drop it off. She never asked, but whenever she checks the footage of the security cameras outside of the Blüdhaven loft, it’s Stephanie who is hauling groceries inside, not Dick.
Technically Bruce owns the penthouse Dick has been laying his head down every night for the past two years, ever since he returned from his mission with Spyral, but then again what else is new? The Wayne family’s territorial streak runs deep in their blood, and donning the cowl has not lessened Bruce’s desire to put his mark on everything he considers his own even in the slightest. That includes them, Barbara thought absentmindedly while she traced the shape on her chest, secretly slipping over her flat stomach every now and then. She still wore his symbol, a tribute to mission they share and the family it shaped them into, for better or for worse. She’s a bat, not by birth but by choice. They all are, even if some of them haven’t ever worn the symbol.
And yet there is something that sets them apart from Bruce, who would probably remain in Wayne manor long after it had burned to the ground, sipping tea with Alfred amongst the ashes, making polite conversation about how they had been considering renovating the southern wing anyway.
But her and Dick? Timmy, Steph, Jay and even ‘little’ Damian - who had all but claimed the largest bedroom in the penthouse as his own and crashed there after patrol more often than not - they’re birds, too. They migrate to wherever city needs them most, never quite staying long enough to call any place their own. Legally, Barbara still lives with her father, although she hasn’t spoken to him out of costume in weeks let alone slept in her own bed. It’s a crazy life they’re living, but putting on a mask every night makes all the little things easy to ignore.
Or at least, it used to. Her fingers kept trailing down of their own devices, and for all her faults, Barbara has always prided her that at least she was always honest to herself.
Which brings her down to this. The big P word.
Superman isn’t stupid, despite Bruce’s taunts. Barbara knew that, just like she knew that she couldn’t be just that: pregnant. And yet…
She was a detective, conditioned at a young age to always connect the dots. To look at the evidence bared before her and see the truth through smoke and mirrors. Her fingers ghosted over the skin of her stomach, ignoring numbers and probabilities as her mind echoed a single word over and over again.
Pregnant.
At that exact moment, Dick groaned in his sleep and turned around to favor his other shoulder. The sound made her jump out of bed in a heartbeat, fighting instincts drilled into her to the bone awakening with a vengeance.
Fine, so she wasn’t going to sleep. It wasn’t like her to draw conclusions on hearsay anyway. She gathered her own data, did her own investigation, and only when she had all the facts did she act. That was the way of the bat, how Oracle worked her wonders. This was just another case, nothing personal until proven otherwise.
It could have been her heavy breathing, or perhaps her less than graceful flight out of the bed, but Dick woke up and it did nothing for her stress levels.
“Everything okay, sweetness?” He muttered at her drunkenly, not bothering to suppress a yawn as he hoisted himself up into a sitting position. The neon lights that filtered in through the curtains were a pale substitute for moonlight, but dancing upon Dick’s skin just as mesmerizing.
Who would have ever thought that her tiny boy wonder would turn into… well… this ?
“I’m fine. Nothing that can’t wait till the morning,” Barbara dismissed him gently, forcing herself to crawl back into bed despite the maelstrom in her mind. It was nearly three in the morning, sunrise not scheduled for another four hours, give or take a few minutes.
“You sure? You don’t sound like it,” Dick said and instead of falling back into the pillows like he might have done any other night, pulled her by the hand and made that face that made her knees go weak. “Come on, talk to me.”
Barbara allowed herself to be pulled into his embrace with little to no resistance. “You’re tired, it’s late and both of us should be asleep,” she muttered against his bare chest, pressing small butterfly kisses against his skin until she felt him shiver.
“All true, as always,” Dick conceded readily. “But we’re not sleeping, so you might as well tell me what’s keeping you up. Unless you’ve got something better in mind…”
That was all the warning she got before his hands started to wander, caressing her breast, circling her nipple through her nightshirt, slipping lower and lower until they reached her stomach and all alarm bells in her head suddenly went off.
“No!” Barbara shrieked, pushing his hands far away from her belly with more force than she ever had before. Great job of proving to him that you’re fine, Gordon. Stellar performance, ten out of ten.
Dick recoiled immediately, and she didn’t need to see in order to know the look of shame on his face. “Sorry Babs, that was insensitive of me, I just…” He didn’t need to finish that sentence. They experienced sex differently, as they established early in their relationship. It had been an issue in the past when they were teenagers, but something they had figured out between the two of them long before she had started wearing his ring again, albeit on a chain under her shirt.
“It’s fine Dick, I’m just not in the mood,” Barbara whispered gently, coaxing him back into her embrace with a gentle peck on the cheek.
Dick nodded and kissed her back shyly, a far cry from his usual confidence. He never argued with her when she said ‘ no ’ during any kind of sexual act, and while she had at first had thought it to be due to an absolute respect for her boundaries, lately she had a nagging feeling that there was something else hiding deep within those gorgeous blue eyes. Another thing they didn’t talk about. He didn’t pry her for more answers, and Barbara caught herself wishing that he did, perhaps now more than ever.
The words started to build up in her mind, then in her throat, and then, before she could stop herself, they slipped out of her mouth. “I’m going to make a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.”
Her partner stilled his ministrations instantly, his gaze from loving to inquisitive in the blink of an eyes. “What’s wrong? Should I call Alfred, or Leslie? You know you shouldn’t keep going on an injury if it’s not strictly necessary for the mission.”
Which was rich coming a bat, really, and Barbara didn’t hesitate to tell him exactly that.
But Dick was persistent, calloused hands carefully checking her body for injuries. “Is it the implant? You could probably turn it off a few days if it’s putting too much strain on your body. You’ve earned a break after the past few weeks.”
Barbara sighed, cradling his wayward hand before it could sink below her ribs. She hadn’t intended to put it on her stomach, to press it so close against her that it almost felt as if they were one. But that’s exactly what she did, and only while intertwined with his did she feel strong enough to let her own hands remain exactly where they were.
“I think I might be pregnant.” The words tumbled out before she could stop them, and when they were out she felt empty.
Barbara would have given up so much to keep the smile that instantly lit up Dick’s face alive for a few more precious seconds, before it crashed down brutally.
Just because they didn’t talk about it, didn’t mean they didn’t both know exactly how much damage the Joker had done to her that fateful night. He’d been here, holding her hand quite the same way, when the doctors told her the news. She had buried any dream of children of her own in the painful year that followed, and when they promised to follow each other until the end of the world no matter how deep down the drain this godforsaken city sunk, he had done the same.
But not buried deep enough, it seemed.
“P-pregnant?” Dick uttered incredulously, his eyes searching hers. “But you can’t… When did you take a test? Those things aren’t 100% reliable, you know, and our bloodworks aren’t exactly clean either with the amount of toxins Scarecrow keeps throwing our way...”
Barbara sighed and cut off his increasingly incoherent ramble. “I know that, Boy Wonder. I didn’t take any test. Clark told me after we finished the mission.”
Dick frowned. “Clark…?”
“He heard the- a heartbeat, or so he told me in not so many words. Kept me in the Watchtower the entire mission because he thought I was expecting,” she explained softly, putting the pieces together.
“God, that’s….” a ghost of a smile crept over Dick’s face. “Not what I was expecting. We live strange lives, Babs.”
“You’re only figuring that one out now?” She elbowed him gently. “I didn’t believe him, of course. The doctors were very clear about it , and I haven’t had my period in seven months. I think I’d know if I was seven months pregnant.”
The thing about Dick was that despite everything that had happened, everything he’d lost, he never quite lost his ability to hope. “But then again they also said you would never walk again, and yet here we are, you kicking my ass more often than not. I’ve been dead, and got better. As a matter of fact, so have all other Robins. It’s not impossible…”
And normally, Barbara loved that about him. But right now… “Dick, I didn’t take a dip in a lazarus pit. Nothing changed, I’m still-” Damaged. But not broken. Never broken.
Mercifully, Dick didn’t make her say the words. “Okay. So let’s play a game of Clue. Lay down the facts for me.”
“I’ve been nauseous lately, at random moments. More tired than usual too, and my body feels… different.” It wasn’t something she could explain, not up until now at least. “Separately, it’s nothing to worry about, but when you put it all into context…”
“Then one and one might just make three,” Dick counted with bare, naked joy palpable in his voice. He moved their intertwined hands carefully over her stomach, gently grazing her scarred bulletwound. “A baby. Our baby . That’s not something I have dared to dream about in a long time.”
She did not share his joy. “Don’t start dreaming yet.”
“We’re… happy about this, right?” He asked, stilling the movement of his hand momentarily to search her eyes for any answers she wasn’t telling him.
“I’m trying very hard not to feel anything until we have more data. It’s too early to draw conclusions, with so little to work with.”
“Now you sound just like Bruce.” Coming from Dick, despite his love for and eternal devotion to the man, that was rarely a compliment.
Then it hit her. Bruce . The world’s self proclaimed greatest detective. If Clark had figured it out, then her old mentor was probably not far behind.
“Speaking of your father ,” Barbara said while untangling their hands. “He has no sense of privacy whatsoever, and I’m barely willing to talk about this with you, let alone him. I’m booking a doctor’s appointment under a fake name in out of town tomorrow, so you’d better not breathe a word to him in the meantime.”
While they did not always agree on all things batman, the look in his eyes betrayed that at least they were completely on one line this time. “Don’t worry about B. Damian’s the problem, since he’s sleeping just two corridors away from here and I had made plans with him to hit the gym tomorrow morning after he finished his coursework. He doesn’t take it well when I cancel on him last minute.”
Only then it dawned upon her that he expected to go with her. “Dick, I can go alone.”
“I know you can,” Dick said carefully, and if she didn’t know him like the back of her hand, she would have missed the hint of anger underneath his carefully chosen words. “But if Clark is right, then that’s my baby as much as it is yours. And I need to see this for myself as much as you do.”
“You can’t let drop one kid for the next the moment a newer version appears Dick. That’s Bruce’s mojo.”
Dick frowned deeply. “I’m not Damian’s- Look, can we stop avoiding the issue? I’m not letting you go alone. I want to be there, for better or for worse, for richer or for poor, for-”
She cut him off with a desperate kiss before he proved her point about waxing bad poetry on a whim even more. He’s warm against her lips, alive and oh so wonderful. For a second, she’s more afraid than anything in her life for something that she could possibly never have.
“I get it, Richard. I do,” she whispered against his lips after they parted, the mention of his full name sending a shiver up his spine. If those words held a different meaning for them, then neither would call the other out on it. “I’ll book the appointment in the morning. Better yet, I’ll just hack their system and put the appointment in their agenda myself. It’s not like I’m going to sleep anymore after this.”
“Babs…” There was more he was going to say, but he couldn’t quite find the words. Instead, they put on the television and watched some terrible early morning tv that neither of them paid any attention to, and carefully, almost secretly, rubbed circles on her flat stomach, wondering.