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Dinah Lance sighed and stared out of the window of the car as the landscape slid past.
By mutual agreement, she and her mother had opted to let the radio play rather than talk for a while. Or argue in their case.
They were moving from Gotham to Kansas. Home of moonshine, tractor pulls, dungarees and apple pie.
To a town called Smallville. Terrible name for a town.
She was leaving behind everything she knew, everyone she knew, because she'd been kicked out of her school for fighting.
Again.
It didn't matter that she hadn't started it this time.
It didn't matter that she was sticking up for another student who was being picked on by bullies.
It didn't matter that they'd never pick on that student ever again.
All that mattered was that three of the bullies in question had to go to the E.R. For broken bones, cracked ribs and one dislocated kneecap.
And Dinah had been expelled because the spoilt brats were heirs' to the fortunes of the gotham elite.
Dinah sighed again.
Her mom hadn't taken her side, she'd simply lectured her on the dangers of using her superior skills to fight idiots with no training.
When Uncle Ted had found out he'd winked and smiled at her like a proud father. Well, when mom wasn't looking.
Dinah Drake Lance, Di to her friends, mother of Dinah Lance, was the only person Ted Grant would ever admit to being afraid of.
Dinah sighed yet again. She was entirely too young to be sighing so much.
She'd thought her mom would be proud, she'd stood up for someone else, defended someone who couldn't defend themselves.
She'd expected at the very least for her mom to hear her side of it.
But no, instead here they were, everything they owned packed up into the beat up old van her mom used for her flower deliveries. Heading to a place called Smallville.
Dinah Drake Lance spared a glance at her daughter as she stared out of the passenger side window.
Her daughter was mad at her still. That was easy to tell.
The guilt she felt warred with her pride in her daughter.
Dinah Lance, daughter of Dinah Drake Lance, was so much like her mother it was frightening.
Because of a family tradition, every first born daughter was named Dinah. When she had been her daughter's age she had thought it an absurd and embarrassing thing to do to a child.
But after so much had been taken away from them. From her, from Ted, Carter, Nelson, the others, she had felt she could at least share this with her daughter.
She wanted to tell her daughter about her time with the group, about the good they had done, the people they'd helped. About the adventures of the Black Canary.
But that would mean explaining how it had ended. How Shayera had died, how Carter had lost it, how they'd all tried to carry on when they were all falling apart from the loss.
And ultimately how the government had taken down their group before they could go public.
The Justice Society of America was supposed to be a team of heroes who stood for something in the public eye.
Instead, they had stayed in the shadows. Opting to eke out meagre lives instead of becoming the government's pet vigilante's.
"I'd rather die on my feet! Then live on my knees!" Shayera had once told her. She'd envied her friend so much for that. Shayera had died how she lived. Eyes full of life, smile full of teeth and that damn mace of hers swinging at any dumb fool stupid enough to get in her way.
Shayera hadn't had to live through what came after. The arrests, the trials, the damage that had been done was irrepairable. By then they couldn't have gone public if they'd even wanted to, with the falsified criminal records nobody would ever trust them.
It was while speaking with the principal and the other parents that she'd had an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Alarm bells in her head sounding so loud she couldn't ignore them when words like 'investigation' and 'evaluation' were spoken.
She'd let them expel her daughter without a fight, no matter how much it went against her nature, telling herself it was safer for all involved.
When someone she was positive she'd never laid eyes on before turned up at her shop asking questions a few days later, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camels back.
Smallville was a safer option. A quiet, unhurried pace compared to the hustle and bustle of Gotham City. Plus there would be the added benefit of a complete and utter lack of anonymity that a small town community provided, there was no such thing as a face in the crowd. Everybody knew everybody else in small towns.
Where others saw gossip and intrigue. Di saw the best kind of intelligence network that equally crippled and frustrated the efforts of government agents and investigators.
Sherwood Florist would be opening it's doors in Smallville within a week, because everybody bought flowers at some point, making it the perfect cover for someone with her skill set to spot dangers and potential threats.
She had been called the Black Canary for a reason after all.
Author's Note: If Dinah Drake Lance had made an appearance in Smallville, in my mind, she would be played by Amanda Tapping.