"Light of Day"
By Eoraptor
Batman and related characters, property DC Comics, Kim Possible and related characters, property Walt Disney Animation. Rated T for language and situations.
She sighed heavily into the air as she took a seat at the outdoor cafe. It was one of those days. One of those days the demons decided to gang up on her all at once and overwhelm her, sandbagging her under with their efforts.
Days like this had kept her sidelined for over two years after she lost her mate. She'd finally managed to overcome them by forcing herself back to work, and by forcing herself to think about who she was, and especially what her mate would think of her if she knew that she was wallowing in self-pity.
She also knew why she was feeling this today. She wasn't active. She'd got waylaid by a random thought last night, and it had knocked the wind out of her psychologically.
She'd told the dark one that she was here to study the truly unstable mind. Especially as it compared to her own rogues gallery. He had warned her to stay away from one in particular.
It had turned out that his warning was slightly misaimed. It wasn't that one she had needed to worry about, but some of his company.
The redhead had found someone who was an almost direct comparison to one of her own villains, and intended to do some study-and-thwart. A biologist, plant-based, with a genius almost unparalleled. The differences started with the lack of a Y chromosome.
She had a dossier on this Doctor of Botany, which gave her all the particulars. Heck, her doctor and this one even shared a somewhat similar origin. The only difference there was that her doctor had been evil before his freak super-fertilizer accident, while as this woman had apparently merely been unpleasant.
She'd already made a few contacts with the underworld here in the old gothic city during the two weeks she'd been here; and had got it through the grapevine, so to speak, where the plant woman would be and at least roughly what she would be up to.
What the heroine in the black and purple suit hadn't expected was to be laid low by her own feelings when she laid eyes on this creature. The long, statuesque legs… the pointed fingernails, the mint colored skin, the positively dangerous curves…
And the long mane of blaze red hair.
It was like she'd been socked in the side of the head the moment she laid eyes on her.
It wasn't that the heroic redhead was attracted to the green woman, although she certainly was gorgeous… No, it was that, the very instant she saw the dangerous criminal, green skin, red hair… she had been thrown back in time five years.
She was lying beside her lover, their forms entwined casually, barely conscious the morning after a long night of passion, their bodies still flooded with oxytocin and endorphins.
"What are you thinking about, baby?"
She'd felt her mate's body instantly, imperceptibly tense despite the gentle kisses she was plying between her shoulders. That was obviously not the intended or desired reaction to a question so simple. It was certainly not like she'd said anything to hit one of her love's myriad of hot buttons.
"Baby?"
Again, the most minute of flinches.
After a moment, she began to parse that maybe it WAS something she'd said.
A moment later, a hoarse whisper confirmed for her.
"I want one."
There was a faint sniff.
Laying still, her lips held against her partner's shoulder as she kept her arms about her, she simply waited.
A sniffle passed through the dim light of the drawn curtains. Her mate was crying.
It wasn't the first time that the redhead had experienced this. Her love wore several inches of impenetrable armor around her heart and her mind. The heroine was the only person who had ever peeled it totally away. And when she did, sometimes, the built up pressure of emotions hidden beneath that armor would come roaring out at her.
Usually it was a literal roar, the villainess recoiling violently at her exposure and reflexively slamming the gates shut again. The gingersnap heroine would simply let her beloved expend her hurt fury. Their life was born of mortal combat against each other, and she knew that the thunder and ferocity was just a reflex; her partner would let her back in soon enough.
But once in a green moon, there was no fury. There was just a tiny, plaintive sob… a wound exposed to her that she'd never known was there.
This was one of them. She'd never before believed that the emerald lioness had a maternal bone in her body. She was feline passion personified, lazy and coy one moment, lethal the next. She'd felt profoundly stupid in that assumption when she remembered that Child Development was her beloved's fall-back career. Of course she did have such instincts. It might be one of the only 'normal' things about her.
They spoke quietly the rest of the day about it. Her mate revealed all her insecurities in a rare openness. How her unique condition probably prevented her ever having children of her own. How her criminal life and tendencies made it impossible. How her own sociopathy might be passed on; and she would hate herself for birthing a child cursed to such a life, neurodiversity be damned.
And how she was a lesbian… and such wonderful things were not allowed dirty green dykes anyway.
The redhead was long past wincing at the language her paramour used. Everything about the villainess was calculated for maximum offense. But she felt the emotions of her partner as though they were her own.
And strangely, she found… she truly did share them. If it were within her power, she would give her lioness everything she wanted, including children of their own wombs. She desired just the same thing.
Even without giving it voice, they both knew it could never be. The beautiful alien woman in her arms might be physically incapable of bearing children, but both of them knew that they lacked the fundamental biological equipment for the job even if she would be the one to carry such a child. Oh sure, in their world, there was always some sort of super-scientific of quasi-magical workaround…
But at the end of the day it was the social concerns, more than the physical ones, which made it an utter impossibility. Neither could, nor would, give up their way of life for the other. It had been the first thing they had decided upon when they seriously embarked on their relationship together; the redhead could never, EVER force herself to turn to a life of crime in support of her dearest, and the onyx haired woman would never be able to even feign altruism for anyone but the one woman she loved. Hers was a policy of "let 'em burn" and she held the matches in every fingertip.
And a child, born to a hero and a villain, would forever be torn. Forced to choose one parent or the other, one home or the other; there would be an unspoken hurt always lingering there over whose life the child took up. Worse, such a child would also forever be a target… a lever to be used against them in the most horrendous ways.
No, even her love, evil as she was, would not bring a child into such a world. The redhead would not do so either.
A few months later, the issue was washed away by the growth discovered in her beloved's barren left ovary, rendered moot by the real monster which would forever separate them just three years later..
But that night, peering in through a skylight high above a hothouse floor, the heroine felt for all the world like she was looking down upon that fantastical child. A daughter; with brains, beauty, charisma, and an ironwood core… with pistachio skin from one mother, cerise locks from the other, and green eyes from them both.
It was a stupid delusion… the criminal below her was actually older than either of them had been, and merely looked so good because, according to reports, she was functionally immortal due to the compounds swarming her blood.
Her head only spun further out of control when another woman sauntered into the laboratory… in a harlequin patterned body stocking, and speaking in a brassy accent as they began to banter. It was too much, too familiar, too similar to a long buried fantasy of offspring with their shared traits.
The vertiginous feeling caused the heroine to wretch into the gravel that made up the roof she perched on.
That gave her position away to both the unstable criminals below her.
Purple tracers rocketed all along her body in the night as she leaped to her feet and got the hell away from the window as fast as cybernetically enhanced clothing could carry her. There but for the grace of God went she as vines exploded through the skylight behind her, smashing it and the spot she had been crouched in an instant before.
Adrenaline wiped from her mind any hallucinations about a wonder-child as she vaulted and jinked, dodging yet more vines piercing the roof every time she put her feet to it. How the heck was a woman thirty feet below her hitting with such preternatural accuracy? Through a solid black tar roof?!
The answer came to her a moment later when she saw something from the corner of her eye, glistening in the moonlight. To anyone else, it was just a common lichen, feeding on moisture dripping out of the air circulators on the roof. But to the well-studied heroine, it was a plant-based spy feeding information to the woman below her.
She had planned for just such contingencies, and leaped into the air. Flicking her wrist over her belt, she produced four small purple capsules between her fingers. A fling sent them down at the roof, and they instantly coated it in a noxious purple mist, bursting on contact with the rough asphalt.
She landed a moment behind the vials. Thankfully, no vines found her this time, the powerful broad-spectrum herbicide having instantly stunted or killed any plant and fungus within its reach. She heard an anguished scream from somewhere behind and below, and realized that perhaps that hadn't been its only effect.
She'd lost her opportunity to gather intelligence on the ivy woman and her brassy friend, but she still had a mission to accomplish. She executed three backflips and dove down through the devastated hothouse roof. She heard the click and twisted her body, narrowly avoiding a rocket-propelled… boxing glove?
Wasn't that the archer's shtick?
She didn't have a moment to spare the thought, however; as she hit the ground, rolling to dump her momentum from the thirty foot drop. She came up, only to stare down the barrel of the second most comically over-sized revolver she had ever seen.
And attached to it, a boxing glove.
"What did you do to her?! You hurt her! Your Hurt her! YOU HURT HER!"
The clown girl pulled the trigger again, and the redhead was sure she was going to go down in history with her last vision a bad comedy trope.
Except she was bowled to one side at the last possible moment by somebody almost as wiry as her ex-boyfriend.
Okay, she'd realized after a moment to gather her scattered thoughts, he was actually built hellaciously well. Slender, but muscular. If she'd happened to be straight, well…
She also knew her benefactor. The blue wing stretched across his lithe chest was give-away enough. But they had already met once or twice, and she thanked the stars for his legendary weakness to anything with red hair. The backup was well appreciated considering the alternative.
"Geeze, what the heck did you do!? I haven't seen her this flipped out since someone shot her hyena!" he crouched with the heroine behind a bank of grow lights.
"Tetradiazanone bio-toxin," she nodded, flipping a fifth capsule out of her belt and handing it to him, "Used it on the slime molds on the roof, apparently her partner,"
"Girlfriend,"
"…really? But I thought she and…"
The handsome acrobat shook his head, smirking and then nodding, "Yeah… it's… complicated. Very new age love."
The heroine shrugged, "Anyway, I used that on the stuff growing on the roof, and apparently Vines Mcgee over there was connected to them when they died."
"Eeeesh," the winged wonder shivered, "No wonder she's fit to be tied. You may as well have punched her lover right in the eye and then pissed in it."
"Ewww… TMI much?"
The clown girl's savage fury served as both help and hindrance to the two black-clad heroes. She was both unpredictable and deadly with that rocket-boosted artillery in her hand, as well as the giant mallet she produced when she ran out of ammo. But she was also so insane with anguish that she was missing virtually every shot with either.
It took them almost thirty minutes, but they managed to subdue the harlequin, the ginger heroine binding her down with a well-placed grapple. Her plant-themed mistress put up no such fight, merely spitting vicious curses at them as the leaves around her hairline twitched limply and wilted.
"You look like you had a late night. Coffee?"
He was even more handsome in the daylight, his chin pointed more than his mentor's. He was just starting to show a few strands of silver at his temples, even though she knew they were only separated by a year or two in age.
The life of a crime fighter didn't exactly serve to make people immortal, and she felt fortunate that she wasn't yet getting silver at thirty-two. Her love would have never let her hear the end of it.
She gave a half-hearted chuckle and took the offered styrofoam cup, sipping it. She was surprised to find that it was very close to exactly the way she would have ordered it for herself, muttering beneath her breath, "Buncha detectives."
"Well, unlike me, you keep a media profile… 'How does she take her coffee?' is actually on more than one culinary website." He smiled, settling in across from her. "Or had you never heard of Tumblr, Miss I-Have-a-Website-and-an-app-for-that?"
She was no stranger to this careful verbal dance. She wore her heroism on her sleeve, no masks and no caves. Others, however, chose to play at duality. She could hardly call the handsome socialite sitting with her by his nightly name in public. "Coffee is good. Yeah, you could say I had a long night. Study session went south."
"Studying? You?" he cocked a coy eyebrow, "I don't believe it for a second, there's no way you're old enough to be in college yet."
She smiled in spite of herself. It felt nice to be flirted with, even if she didn't have the slightest interest and they both knew it. "But I suppose I should count myself lucky, some guy swung by and picked me up before I got in too deep. Wish I'd got his number."
"Oh, I might be able to shine a light on that…" he smirked, canting his eyes towards the roof of the police station, where a spotlight hung visibly from one corner with a black symbol on the lens.
"I don't know if she'd have liked you, or if she'd have gutted you on sight for daring to sit with me," she chuckled a bit, swinging away from the enlightening offer. "She was almost as bad as that girl in the red spandex for that sometimes."
Her lioness still hung on her mind, even the morning after. But at least the demons were quieting down now that she had some backup. "You know… I haven't met your little brother yet."
"Which one?" he arched a brow at that curiously.
"The one who likes swords."
Her guest at the outdoor table gave a laugh and shook his head, "I don't think he'd be too impressed with you. He is a perfectionist. You'd never hear the end of having to be rescued from your study date."
She laughed as well, tilting her head, "Oh… he shoulda gone to my highschool then. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one of us perfectionists. If it wasn't me, it was my cheerleading co-captain and her cadre of style enforcers."
"Were any of them blondes? He's got a real weakness for blondes… met this girl from Metropolis a few years back and, I'm sure there's something going on there, even if he does hide it better than any ninja I ever met."
"Blonde ninjas with swords," she rolled her eyes, "Boy does that bring back some memories. But, wait, I think I might know this girl… maybe?"
She tilted a fingertip to her chin as though trying to recall, "Wears glasses, ties her hair up with a pencil, real salt of the earth farmgirl from Kansas?"
"Sounds like the one," he nodded, smirking. "Why am I not surprised that you two would know each other?"
"Us goody-two-shoes types stick together… club meetings alternate Tuesdays in the basement at the Y… free cup of coffee with the secret handshake."
Her coffee friend gave a bark of laughter at that. "So… you think there might be something between them?"
"I dunno actually," she tilted her head, "She's a real secretive type you see… with a capital S."
He rolled his eyes… this was going from coy to downright comical. Still, he was enjoying it. Maybe it was the fact that there wasn't REALLY any sexual tension. He'd learned his lesson the last time he'd tried to hit on a redheaded lesbian, "Speaking of blondes with swords… I never met yours. I always thought we could train together, at the gym."
"Oh? I dunno, he's more into drunken monkey antics than the flying trapeze. Still, if you want, I could shine a light on it?" She cast her eyes at the roof of the police precinct pointedly.
He was about to respond when there was a faint buzzing. Both of them checked their smart watches. It was he who got up first, "Yeeesh, I swear… long nights just get longer, don't they?"
"Let me guess, one of my study buddies is in trouble?"
"Yeah, though I wouldn't go making any defoliation jokes…"
"I was deflorinated a long time ago," she winked, and finally earned a blush out of the handsome acrobat.
He had caught the difference between the two words and smirked, "You could get me into so much trouble."
"Yeah, well let me know if you need any help" she straightened, clipping her pocket book closed after leaving a tip, "It seems I owe someone for getting me out of trouble, should pay it forward."
"You want to deal with the gruesome twosome again so soon?" He canted an eyebrow at her.
"You saw the website, anything's Possible for me."
He gave a broad smile at that, "I'll let you know."
AN: So, I'd had the idea of the coffee date in mind almost since the moment I finished Knight Watch… Problem was I didn't really have anything interesting for them to talk about. Then, last night, it hit my like a bolt from the blackness, this concept of just what a certain mad plant-villain looked like. The only difficult bit was figuring the guy. In the BB comics, he was shot to hell and left for dead, so I had to decide if that had happened or not yet in this story, or if it was even still canon.
Once again, like Knight Watch, I experimented with the absence of names. Hope it works well. Please, Reviews = Love and Resharing is Caring!