Work Text:
Nick Gage was not falling in love with the Batgirl, Stephanie Brown.
The idea was totally ridiculous. She was a college freshman. She was a vigilante. She wouldn’t tell him her real name (the fact that he had figured it out anyway was beside the point). She was eighteen, and he was old enough to know better.
That, and he suspected that if he ever did try anything with the little blonde Bat, his boss would kill him.
All the determination and good reasons in the world couldn’t seem to change the way he found himself smiling when she was around, though. Couldn’t stop his heart from stuttering a little every time that he saw her perform one of those death-defying leaps across the rooftops of Gotham, couldn’t stop himself from fearing the day when she missed a landing and ended up with worse than a dislocated shoulder.
Nick was a twenty-five-year-old cynic with a shattered heart and a shadowy past, marking his time until his scanty supply of luck finally ran out; but somehow he felt less broken with Steph. And he never had been much good at lying to himself.
Gotham was supposed to be his way out – taking a job as a detective in a cursed and dangerous city as a passive method of suicide. It was not supposed to be the place where he finally found something to live for.
*~*
The noise of the helicopter made it hard to hear anything else, but Batgirl’s voice had a way of carrying over the top of whatever else was going on. Maybe it was because she was being so damn passionate about what she was about to do. Or maybe Nick’s pathetic obsession was just showing.
“I need to find out why they haven’t left,” she yelled over the whir of the chopper blades, and Batgirl’s dumb, suicidal plan became suddenly, terrifyingly clear.
“Wait,” Nick yelled, knowing that she wouldn’t listen but forced to try all the same. “You can’t just jump down into the middle of a freaking riot!” He grabbed her hand, and wished he had the guts to do something more shocking. Wished that he really believed that doing something more shocking would stop her from doing this incredibly, incredibly idiotic thing.
“I can, and I will,” Steph replied. “It’s stupid, but it’s what I do.”
Nick barely heard her expression of regret about his fiancée over the frantic beating of his own heart as he tried to come up with something to say to her, or some way of tying her up until her backup, whoever they are, can get here. He knows that Stephanie can handle herself. He’s spent months watching her handle herself. But he could hear the farewell in her words, and he had the terrifying idea that maybe this was one adventure that she didn’t actually expect to come back from.
“Give Barbara a call sometime,” Steph said in an unforseen change of subject.
“What did you just- -“ Nick stuttered to a stop, unsure where to even take that sentence. What the hell is she thinking, and how the fuck can she be so blind?
“She digs you, even though she’d never say she digs you. Or that she digs anything,” Steph continued, apparently unaware of the fact that she had just caused Nick’s brain to explode.
“How did you- -“ Nick started, and then he isn’t sure where to take that sentence either. ‘Arrive at that incredibly irrelevant point’ maybe, or ‘Totally miss the fact that I’m half in love with you’ perhaps. And then it doesn’t matter what he was going to say, because Steph had taken advantage of his distraction and thrown herself out of the helicopter door and into the melee below.
And then it’s all Nick can do to watch with his heart in his throat as Gotham’s latest Batgirl does her level best to get herself killed. If he thought that landing this bird and racing in there with his gun drawn would do anything except give Steph someone else to worry about down there, he would do it in an instant. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt this helpless.
Nick had never been so glad to see a group of scantily clad females in his life than he was when Steph’s ‘backup’ appeared. The tide of the battle turned almost instantly, and Nick began to feel like he may actually be able to breathe again.
And then Steph disappeared into the prison itself, and Nick stopped breathing all over again. The riot itself was actually dying down, but frankly Nick could care less. When, several minutes later, the riot had ebbed to something that the SWAT team could handle without super-help, and Steph still hadn’t reappeared, Nick yelled out to get Supergirl’s attention.
“Nick, right?” she said, flying in through the chopper door. “How can I help?”
“Batgirl went into the prison a while ago. She hasn’t come back out.”
Supergirl said something harsh-sounding in Kryptonian. “I’ll find her. Wait here.”
It was maybe five minutes before Supergirl reappeared, with Steph cradled in her arms. It felt like five lifetimes. Stargirl, Bombshell and Miss Martian have regrouped in the helicopter by the time Supergirl reappears, and Nick has turned the controls over to Stargirl. He’ll cop hell from Commissioner Gordon if he finds out that Nick turned over the controls of a GCPD helicopter to a teenage girl, but he can’t help but feel that it would be worse if he crashed the damn thing, and he feels so sick with worry that he can’t help but feel that crashing or letting someone else fly are his only remaining options.
When Supergirl placed Steph on the floor of the helicopter, Nick dove forward in a panic. “Oh, God. Steph, wake up. Wake up wake up wake up.”
“She won’t wake,” Supergirl said. “I found Black Mercy in the cell with her. She must have breathed in the spores.”
“Oh, God, Steph. Please, please wake up,” Nick said, brushing her blonde hair back with one hand and pressing a kiss to her forehead. He would probably live to regret that later. He could only pray that she would do the same.
“Bombshell, get Doc Mid-Nite and meet us at West Mercy Hospital,” Supergirl’s voice was clear and calm, and Nick was distantly glad that someone else was holding it together when he had so obviously just fallen apart. “Stargirl, can you actually fly this thing?”
“Like, to the hospital? Not so much. I can fly, what would I need to use a helicopter for?”
“Why the hell would you offer to fly a helicopter you don’t know how to control?” Nick asked. Commissioner Gordon was going to murder him, even if he didn’t find out about the whole ‘falling for Batgirl despite obvious threats’ thing.
“Because you were about two seconds from throwing yourself away from the controls whether or not there was someone there to take them from you, and I didn’t want you to die?” Stargirl answered snippily as Nick took the controls from her, forcing himself to stay on task for at least long enough to get Steph help. He could fall apart again once she’s not going to die.
*~*
Nick chickened out when they get to the hospital, and didn’t follow Stephanie inside. A group of teenage superheroines bringing an unconscious Batgirl to hospital was going to draw all kinds of attention, and Nick’s not in any kind of condition to explain why he’s there, let alone why he looked like hell when he was the only one not fighting. He made Supergirl promise to come get him if Steph’s condition changed at all, and decided not to risk flying the helicopter back to the precinct when he still feels like he might fall apart at any second.
He radioed in the location of the chopper instead, and walked back to his apartment. Nick then spent the next few hours getting systematically drunk, trying to outrun both his fears for Steph’s health and his crush on her, and failing on both counts.
Supergirl showed up late the next afternoon, while Nick was curled up on the couch watching trashy television and still feeling seedy. The sight of her was like having hot coffee poured over all of his senses, every nerve suddenly alert and braced for bad news. “Oh God,” he said. “What’s happened? Tell me she’s all right.”
“All right is stretching things,” Supergirl said. “She’s still asleep. But she’s not any worse, and the transfusion Doc Mid-Nite gave her looks like it’s fixing things. It just takes time.”
“Oh, thank God,” Nick said with significantly more reverence than he normally applied to the phrase.
“Actually,” Supergirl said, “I’m here to talk to you. How long have you been in love with my best friend?”
Nick exhaled slowly, and wondered how much damage Supergirl could theoretically inflict on a human she took a dislike to. “Can we start with an easier question?”
“Okay,” Supergirl replied with a shrug. “When did she tell you her civilian identity? She didn’t tell me that she told you.”
“That would be because she didn’t,” Nick answered. “I worked it out. It wasn’t hard. I’m a trained detective, and Stephanie isn’t as stealthy as she likes to think she is. How did you know that I knew, anyway?”
Supergirl gave him a strange look. “How clearly do you remember last night?” she asked. “You called her ‘Steph’ about twenty times when I brought her back to the helicopter. If everyone on that helicopter hadn’t already known who she was, I would be seriously annoyed right now.”
Nick swore. He couldn’t be careless with Steph’s identity like that. She could get hurt if he slipped up around the wrong people.
“You were panicking. And as I said, everyone who heard you already knew who Steph is.” Supergirl shrugged. “If you can’t keep the secret from here on in, I might have to kill you. But I’ll forgive you for last night… on one condition.”
“What’s that?” Nick asked, although he thought that he already both knew and dreaded the answer.
“When Steph wakes up, you have to tell her that you know who she is.”
“That’s all I have to tell her?” Nick asked, feeling a weight lift from his shoulders. “Not… anything else you asked about?”
“That’s up to you. Just know that if you hurt her, I can and will throw you into the sun.” And with that almost-cheerful threat, Supergirl smiled at him, and flew out of his window.
*~*
Nick didn’t visit Steph in hospital. Commissioner Gordon casually dropped the name of one of Batgirl’s nurses into a conversation, with a significant look which told Nick that the fact that Steph was under the care of a Nurse Brown was no coincidence, and Nick decided that in this case discretion may be the better part of valour. It’s not like she’s awake yet, anyway.
Commissioner Gordon was surprisingly forthcoming with information about Batgirl’s condition, however, and so Nick knew the second that she was let out of hospital; and managed to ‘accidentally’ run into her before the purple sunrise had even faded from the sky.
“Detective Gage,” she said, walking across the rooftop she’s just swung onto to stand next to him. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“You’re looking better… Stephanie,” he replied, and prayed she wouldn’t freak out.
“Did you just call me- -“ She stopped mid-question, obviously figuring that playing dumb wasn’t going to fly with him. “How long have you known?”
“A while,” Nick admitted. “Pretty much since the first time I met you-as-Stephanie.”
“Weirdly personal statements from the girl you just met,” Steph guessed.
“That was a pretty good clue, yeah,” Nick confirmed.
“So, Detective, on the theme of personal statements… Have you called Barbara yet?”
“No,” Nick answered, wincing inwardly. He had kind of hoped that she’d forgotten about the whole ‘setting Nick up with her professor before running off to maybe-die’ thing. “And I’m not going to. I’m sure Barbara’s a lovely woman; but I, kind of… have feelings for someone else.”
“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so?” Steph asked, twisting the end of her ponytail around her fingers.
“I was going to,” Nick said, though he’s not actually sure if that’s the truth. “But then you decided to go off and get yourself killed in a prison riot.”
“To be fair, I didn’t actually die,” Steph pointed out.
“You frightened the life out of me, though,” Nick said, reaching out and grabbing the hand she has tangled in her hair. “I realise that stupid and dangerous is what you do, but it doesn’t make it easy to watch.”
“Hey,” Steph said, “Detective, won’t the person you ‘have feelings for’ kind of object to you standing around on rooftops holding my hand?”
“I don’t know,” Nick replied. “Does she?”
“What- -“ Steph stuttered to a stop, and Nick drew a deep breath as he prepared to lay all his cards on the table.
“I like you, Stephanie Brown. More than like you, really,” he said. “It’s about twelve different kinds of inappropriate, and I don’t expect you to return my feelings, but-“
Nick didn’t know what he was about to say next. But it didn’t much matter, because at that moment Nick found his ability to speak somewhat impeded by the fact that Steph had thrown her arms around his neck and was kissing him as though both of their lives depended upon it.
Nick still thinks that his boss might try to kill him when he finds out that Nick’s gone and fallen for a college-aged superheroine. And he’s beginning to think that Commissioner Gordon may have to get in line behind a Batman or two, a registered nurse and maybe even a wheelchair-bound college professor. But as Stephanie laughs at him, pulling him across the rooftops of Gotham while around them the sunrise changes from the purple of her cape to the gold of her hair, Nick can’t help but feel that it’s kind of worth the risk.