Disclaimer: If I owned the DC universe, there wouldn't be a new crisis every other year. Because seriously, youse guys: the one on Infinite Earths was plenty.
A/N: This story has been brewing in my head since mid-December, 2008. It's one of those things that needed time to congeal before I started work on it and now, with a lot of thinking behind me, I'm ready to dive in. It also didn't help that every time I started writing it, whatever laptop I was using at the time would up and die, erasing everything. I've written the first chapter of this story more than a dozen times, damn it.
With all due acknowledgement to the works that inspired this story's creation. "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" being the most influential; "The Pit and the Pendulum"; and finally the short story "Daddy's Girl" from the fiction anthology "The Further Adventures of Batman", a book that I read so often growing up that I literally wore out the spine.
Barbara Gordon sinks up to her neck in water just a few degrees below scalding. Sucks air in through her teeth as she drops fully into the steaming water. Her knees flush red with the heat of the bath and she lies back, eyes sliding shut with pure pleasure. The scent of aloe and water lily curls inside her nostrils. As the back of her head hits the wall, she silently muses about that: aloe has no scent, water lily smells nothing like this. Considering the ring of bruises around her neck, courtesy of Poison Ivy's own personal hybrid variety, she ought to know.
She inhales a few times, lungs expanding and contracting, slowly, evenly, and then opens her eyes. Within these few minutes, already her aching muscles have loosened. She sighs again before drawing in a big breath and scoots down in the tub, just enough to submerge her head for a few seconds. She holds her breath and listens to the sounds her father's house makes—here, with her ears beneath the water—sound is amplified and she can hear the creaking of the pipes, the settling of the walls, the moaning and groaning of the home she grew up in, as though it were a living entity. Ever since she was a little girl, she's loved this feeling—this sensation of being apart from the whole world but still acutely aware of it in ways no one else is—and it soothes her to be in this cocoon of familiarity.
Sometimes she still wonders if this is what Superman's super hearing is like.
"Barbara?"
She opens her eyes. The water stings a little.
"Barbara, are you in there?"
James Gordon's voice sounds strange and alien from here, wavering and heavy.
She surfaces and dashes the water from her eyes. "Yes, Dad?"
"Oh."
Silence from outside. Barbara rolls her eyes. "Did you want something, Dad?"
She hears him clearing his throat awkwardly and knows he's fidgeting with his pipe. "Just…you're in pretty late."
Barbara smiles despite herself. "My study group ran long, so we decided to go for pizza atDurango's."
"Oh?" He asks conversationally. "Durango's East? They've got those nice little Italian pastries…"
Barbara rolls her eyes. "Yeah,Durango's East. I had one of the chocolate ones."
"I see." He takes a beat. "Was that Grayson boy there?"
The smile fades. 'That Grayson boy', as though he hasn't heard his first name a hundred times before. Passive aggression doesn't work for you, Commissioner Gordon.
"Yeah, Dick was there," she responds, picking up her loofah absentmindedly.
"I see." Another beat. "You kids hear anything about Poison Ivy's latest spree over on Moench?"
"Not a thing, Dad." She dips the loofah in the water and gives it a squeeze, watching as soap suds bubble up from the netting.
"Funny," he comments. She hears the change in his voice as he clenches his pipe between his teeth. "Durango's East is at the corner of Moench andDixon."
Barbara's eyes go wide. The loofah hits the water with a sploosh. The soap suds scatter across the surface of the water.
"Epsom salts are under the bathroom sink," he adds.
His footsteps echo down the hallway.
Barbara reminds herself to resume breathing. She's always supposed he'd had…suspicions. After all, James Gordon is, above all other things—even father—a cop. Not just a cop, but a detective. She always knew this day was coming: the day when she'd have to sit down across from the man she loved more than anything in the whole world and say, "Daddy? I have something to tell you. I'm Batgirl."
She just didn't realize this day was coming so soon…
She bites her lip and breathes deeply, the formerly fascinating conundrum of the scent of aloe and water lily bubble bath completely forgotten. For a moment, she feels a disconnect with reality as her mind careens in a dozen different directions at once.
Abruptly, she flops back in the tub, completely submerging herself without even bothering to take a breath. She stays under for as long as she can stand before surfacing, gasping for air. What this action was supposed to accomplish, she doesn't know; she only knows that it seemed like The Thing to Do. Reality feels more solid now. The air feels cooler. Water trickles in rivulets down her spine. She casts her eyes to the bathroom door, gaze traveling over the somewhat shoddy paintjob she'd done with her father as an eleven year old girl. Her attention hangs on the middle hinge where the paint around it has started to crack and peel a little, showing the old forest green under the white in jagged shapes that have always reminded her a little of Alfred Hitchcock's profile. She looks down at the fuzzy bathmat where her library copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? lies…she planned to finish reading it in the tub, but now…
Her eyes snap back to the doorway. She has to face the music sometime…
Knees a little wobbly, Barbara stands and fumbles for a towel. She steps out of the tub and…
She staggers. Drops the towel. Her shoulder collides with the wall, but the impact feels dull.
What…?
Her knees give way and she slides down the wall, landing gracelessly. She takes a breath but her body feels slow and unresponsive; her lungs can't seem to inflate all the way.
Aloe and water lily smell nothing like this, she thinks distantly. Drugged. Some kind of…airborne toxin? How? Oh, no. Dad—
And then, she's gone.