Chapter Text
Voices drift over her like oil on water. Dr. Thompkins’ she recognizes, sensible and buoying, accompanied by a new voice, a man’s—low and even and occasionally wry, mellifluous accent. Helena can’t make out their words, but there’s a warmth and weaving to the interplay that suggests something more than merely collegial rapport.
It’s too much effort to open her eyes, to form the question, so Helena sinks back beneath the surface.
***
She’s been awake for two days.
News arrives in fragments, carried in buzzing whispers by the hive of medical staff that Lexcorp and Wayne Enterprises and STAR Labs and the Army have flown or ferried in: Joker in custody, Essen dead. Electricity restored to several blocks in Coventry and the university sector, sewage and water in the Upper West Side. Novick Tunnel half-cleared. A fresh crop of 1,000 WE hirees dispatched to assist reconstruction efforts in Burnley and Newtown. There are rumors of fireworks tonight.
She hurts everywhere, deeper than just bullet-shredded muscles and bruised bones.
The owner of the mystery voice is a tall, straight-backed British man in his sixties, she estimates, with the lined face and hands of someone who is no stranger to calamity or toil. He was the one to tell her, as he helped her down a cup of weak tea, that all the babies Joker had kidnapped had been recovered, all alive.
It had taken her several minutes for her to realize he’d shared this information unprompted, and what that meant. Alarm had flared briefly, distantly, cooling to cynical resignation (what could she even do about it from her present position?), tempered not quite to trust as she’s watched him dully from her hospital cot since.
He never refers to her by name—either name—even in the presence of the others. Instead he addresses her as “Miss” and “my dear,” terms she’d resent if they came from most any other stranger. But she thinks she understands the gesture, if not the why behind it. Something to do with preservation, in a time when there is precious little left to salvage.
Helena shifts uncomfortably, uselessly, studies the vaulted ceiling overhead. Most of her tent-mates have hobbled outside to join in the countdown, even the amputee on the other side of her privacy curtain. The chanting grows more exuberant as midnight ticks closer: thirty seconds to go.
Bootfalls on hard-packed earth—the heavy tent flap parting—a blast of wintry air snaking in ahead of a shock of electric blue—the scent of roses—and for a few seconds, it isn’t pain and exhaustion anchoring her to the world, but warm lips on hers and a cold glove on her cheek.
The tears ambush her with all the mercy and restraint of a thunderstorm. Something horrified and desolate howls without sound in the cavern behind her ribs, a leviathan rising to splinter a ship. She breaks the kiss.
Then, she just breaks.
Against the cacophony of fireworks and the giddy cheers of those whose year-long nightmares have ended, Nightwing gingerly curls himself around her shuddering body and stays with her until sleep overtakes the pain.
She doesn’t feel him leave.