The Queen Estate. The luxurious home I inherited from my parents, conveniently situated away from the hustle and bustle of Star City proper. It always intrigued me how similar my life is to Batman's. The biggest difference, of course, is that he lost his parents at a much younger age, and the reason he took to crimefighting is because of what happened to them. I didn't lose my dad until I was out of college, and I didn't lose my mom until I was almost thirty. The reason I took to crimefighting is to atone for my own mistakes. Sometimes I wonder if my parents' deaths were payment for me not appreciating how good my young life was compared to Bruce's.
Thinking back to my conversation with Barbara on the factory roof the previous night, I thought something that I had thought many times before. Maybe part of the reason I became a crimefighter is because of Batman. The secret Arrowcave, the short-lived Arrowmobile, even the idea of training a sidekick: Batman had done it all first. Maybe it wasn't "plagiarism", as Babs had so eloquently put it. Maybe it was more of a tribute, to the man who did it first, and did it better.
As I was standing in the kitchen on Sunday morning, thinking my life over for the millionth time, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Barbara with wet hair, having just taken a shower, and wrapped in one of my wife's bathrobes.
"Are you sure Dinah would be okay with me using this?" she asked me.
"Of course," I answered, smiling. "She would insist."
She smiled back, then smelled the air. "Are you making coffee?"
"Sure am," I said, stepping aside to show her the expensive coffee brewer on the counter. I turned back around and opened the cupboard, getting two cups out. "How do you like yours?"
"I'm not picky," she responded, making her way to the middle of the kitchen and taking a seat at the island counter.
There was silence for a moment, as I prepared both cups of coffee the way I preferred, then I turned to face her again. This may have been the very first time I had ever gotten a good look at Barbara without her mask on. I had found out her secret identity during her Oracle years, and I was vaguely aware of what she looked like because of her friendship with Dinah, but I had never gotten a chance to study her features the way I had Bruce and some of the others.
"How did you sleep?" I asked her, trying to break what I perceived as a rather awkward silence.
"Good enough. It took me a while to actually get to sleep. I normally stay up a lot later than that."
Walking her coffee over to her, I opened my mouth to say something like "I do too," but before I spoke, we were greeted with the sound of someone stumbling down the stairs.
In walked Beast Boy, still half-asleep, and still in his black and purple outfit. "What… what's for breakfast?" he asked, trying desperately to keep his eyes open and not fall over.
"We have coffee," I said, sitting down opposite Barbara. "If you want food, I suppose we can stop somewhere on the way out. Where's Conner?"
"He's on the phone. He said he has to tell the Kents why he didn't come home last night," said Beast Boy, crossing his arms and leaning in the doorway. "Are you sure you don't have anything I can eat? Cereal or something? I've got a pretty high metabolism."
Sighing a little, I told him which cupboards and drawers he could get a bowl, some cereal, and a spoon from, and I looked back at Barbara. "Alright, first things first. What do we know so far?"
"Practically nothing we didn't know before. We know that Clayface, Ivy, and Croc are in this city, and they got here by unconventional means."
"Karen was probably in the city at some point too," piped Beast Boy, referring to Bumblebee. "Her communicator was in the pond at the park."
"You said she had been missing for two days," I said to him. "And you," I continued, looking at Barbara this time, "said that two of the escaped Arkham patients, maybe all three, have been here longer than that. Could we assume that maybe Bumblebee was in town investigating the same thing we are?"
"Maybe, but why would she do that without letting the other Titans in on what she was doing?" Babs postulated.
"We do have one thing," came Conner's voice from the same doorway the rest of us had come through. "When Croc was telling us about how he got here, he gave us a suspect."
"And who would that be?" I asked, as we all turned to face him.
"The only person I know that fits the description Croc gave us is Doctor Psycho," Connor stated, making his way to the island, choosing to stand rather than sit on a stool like the rest of us. "A short man, with black hair and a goatee."
"That would explain the portal thing too. Psycho always has a hand in experimental tech," Barbara noted, putting her coffee down and resting her head on her hands. "Where was his last known location?"
"Last I heard, Superman had handed him over to the police, but he escaped again," the Boy of Steel responded. "He's been on the down low for months."
After a much shorter silence than the one before, Barbara, unsurprisingly, was the first to make a suggestion. "I think we should look for at least one of the other two Arkham escapees today."
"Which one?" I asked her. "You said that Clayface was sighted more recently, but if you ask me, he'll be much harder to find."
"Then it sounds like we have a decision," she said with authority. "We're going after Poison Ivy."
