Disclaimer: If I owned them, I'd have hired Gail to write 'em from #1 onward...
Context: Set immediately following Huntress' departure in Birds of Prey #80
Thanks to Kathy for the beta!
A Road of Good Intentions
"She's gone," Dinah reports.
Barbara lowers her head in acknowledgement, but says nothing.
"Think she'll be back?"
Barbara's silence persists until Dinah despairs of a reply. "I hope so," the other woman says finally. "But I won't blame her if she isn't." She lifts off her glasses and begins to polish them with a chamois cloth.
"Was she right?" Dinah asks. She's dreading the answer, but she has to know. "Babs?"
Barbara sighs. "I… I guess she was."
She'd promised herself she wasn't going to ask the question if she couldn't handle the answer, but Oracle's admission triggers a hurt she hasn't prepared for. "Why?" She demands. "How…?" How could you manipulate both of us like that? And was I too blindsided by friendship to see it? Does this even still count as friendship…
"You needed it," Barbara says softly. "So did she."
"Needed what, exactly?" The anger is still there, but her curiosity keeps it at bay for now. She realizes that Barbara is still polishing her eyeglasses. At least, she's still rubbing the cloth mechanically over the lenses, but she never examines her progress.
"Think about it, Dinah." She forces herself to make eye contact. "We spend all our time saving the planet. Fine. Great. But what about us?"
She can't believe it. "So you… took it upon yourself to save… me?" Of all the humiliating, short-sighted…
"NO!" She replaces the glasses but spins the chair away from her. "Don't you see? I…" She spins the chair back and looks Dinah straight in the eye. "I didn't save you. You saved yourself. All I did was remind you how."