Queen to Knight's Level
Pt. 1: 'Proselyte'
Note: So my computer massively crashed and fic will be generally delayed as a result, but I already had a draft of this uploaded into ffdotnet, so here we are.
Nightwing had lain stunned for too long after Talia's weapon—Damian's clone—had shattered a glass case with his skull.
He wasn't sure how long it had been, but it was too long, because he'd just opened his eyes to see his little brother studded with arrows and dripping with blood, engaged in furious single combat with the giant who had recently defeated Batman. Dick tried to leap to his feet—his body failed him, and he could have screamed, more from horror than from pain, as he had to start again, subduing his muscles one at a time, and it was taking too long.
The Heretic was on fire but didn't seem perturbed, and Dick put everything he had into moving, knowing everything he had was nothing close to enough. The sword was coming up and Damian didn't look afraid, even though he had to be, and there was no more time—
Clang!
Clang was not the sound of a child being run through.
Dick opened eyes that had clenched themselves in desperation. The Heretic's sword was locked against another—a long, straight, double-edged blade that looked somehow familiar—in the hand of a white-cloaked figure; tall, but smaller than the Heretic. Damian lay at the figure's feet, apparently knocked to the ground out of the way, breathing but not yet sitting up; the hand Dick could see on the defending sword-hilt was slim, pale…Raven, he'd thought in the first instant, when he saw the shape of the hood, but he could already tell it wasn't, even before a throaty voice, one Dick could not place and yet felt he recognized, pronounced, "Mine."
The woman shoved at the Heretic's blade with her own, one handed, and it worked. The wall of flesh Talia had sent to kill her son was knocked off-balance for a moment, and as the monster wavered, the new figure's other hand snapped to the side from inside her cloak, bringing up a wildly swinging pair of—scales?
"Did you think I'd let another be taken so soon?" she demanded. "On my own ground?"
She brandished the golden scales at the Fatherless even as he gathered himself for another attack, and even though they seemed to be empty one pan dropped sharply while the other rose, and…the muscled figure seemed to wither away to nothing inside its armor.
The flaming sword clattered to the ground and the sorceress-from-nowhere lifted her head and spat, "Talia bint al Ghul. I know you're listening. Try what you will. Set fire and flood and hell itself to work. The Bat was mine long before you ever saw him, and the little bird you lost to me years ago. You never had a chance."
In the heap of tattered white fabric and plated armor that had been the Heretic something had started squirming, and Dick prepared himself for some hideous transformation, but what emerged was…a baby, a naked, bloody, hairless little boy-child no more than three, wearing a baffled expression. The cloaked woman's hood bent over it, and her voice rang with contempt when she asked, "Did you send this wretch in the faith I would not want it?" She kicked the child in the chin, and sent it tumbling backward head over heels, the oversized Bat-eared helmet flying off and rolling away.
Dick didn't even care that Batman apparently had some other crazy stalker lady to worry about and this one was magic, because she'd saved Dami and could have Bruce for all he cared. He winced at the shoe slamming into the face of a toddler, but a few seconds ago that toddler had been a giant monster who'd killed a friend and had been about to kill his baby brother, so his sympathy was only the reflexive kind.
As the creature landed, and pulled itself into a sitting position, to stare up at the intercessor with a kind of blank fury, he realized it had Damian's eyes, and looked away.
To find that Bruce had appeared in the doorway at some point, and was surveying the scene with something that looked like the aftermath of panic, splitting his focus between the bizarre tableau in the middle of the room and the remaining enemies along its side.
"Get it to its mother," the strange woman told Leviathan's arrayed forces, which seemed to pulse in indecision. They didn't attack, though, and she seemed to have no more interest in them. Her hands vanished inside her cloak, and when they emerged again were empty, as she bent over Damian, who was trying to sit up, and heaved him into her arms.
Dick finished scrambling to his feet, at that, and started forward only a little unsteadily to intercept her path toward Bruce. Robin had been badly beaten, had all kinds of arrow shafts sticking out of him, and he'd like to see his baby brother carried with a little more delicacy, thank you, even if returning him to Batman showed approximately the right idea.
"I don't share, little bird," the woman murmured to Dami as she strode across the ruined expanse of the great white room, just as Dick got close. She paused to glance at him, then, and he finally got a look at her face. She was blindfolded, was the first thing he noticed, despite having acted so far as if she could see. And then, suddenly, he knew her. Knew where he'd seen her, and her weapon.
Blind Justice, the vast statue that stood over the harbor—Lady Gotham, they called it, with her sword and unequal scales. Dick's mind seized up with the way it all made sense now and nothing about this made sense at all.
Gotham thrust Damian carelessly into his arms, and as Dick struggled to cradle Damian gently and not strain any of his injuries, muttering something soothing and wordless in response to his still-much-too-little-though-a-bit-too-big-to-hold-like-this Robin's bleary "'m fine, Grayson," she stalked the rest of the way to Batman.
Who had clearly worked out what he was dealing with even before Nightwing had, but didn't seem to know what to say. The city gave him no time to consider. She lunged, and Dick's heart leapt in alarm in spite of himself, but she stopped without striking, eye to eye with the battered Dark Knight.
"Mine," Gotham hissed again across half an inch of air, and Dick understood the familiarity of her voice now, could hear the rushing of tires and the lap of the river; the horns blaring in traffic; the wind ruffling through the leaves of Robinson Park, screaming up the avenues when it came hard from the East heavy with the smell of the sea, slicing across the gargoyles' wings and making the skyscrapers sway with a deep, faint groan; the low gabble of other voices in a dozen languages, overlaying one another endlessly; the shuff of hundreds of feet on concrete…a scream, a gunshot, a child's giggle, a snatch of music from a fiddler on a streetcorner—
Gotham grabbed the back of Batman's neck, over the cowl, with that slim pale hand, and kissed him.
Violently, Dick couldn't help noticing, and with more tongue than he wanted to think about. Bruce's normally excellent reaction time was nowhere to be seen, or maybe he didn't want to resist. He didn't seem to be exactly kissing back, but…
Then he had a hand flat against her chest, and pushed. After exactly one second, like she was making sure he knew she was humoring him, she let herself be pushed. And then she smiled. All the filth and cruelty and freedom and beauty and endlessness and hope and mortality of the city in that skyline-glittering smile.
"Now save me," she commanded.
And the cloaked figure shredded away into smoke, the white hand on the back of Batman's neck last to go.
Note: Justice is not traditionally depicted with a hood, but the genius loci figure in Battle for the Cowl had one. (She doesn't dislike Dick, but Nightwing doesn't belong to her, so he's not important.)