Dick had fallen asleep hours ago, slumbering through the day, but I didn't dare move away from his unconscious grip on my arm, and instead took advantage of the super deluxe cable package that was hooked up to the wide, flat screen, LCD TV nailed to the opposite wall. Dick began to stir.
"I probably should go back home sometime." I mumbled noncommittally from my seat, lounging against the headboard of Dick's bed as said owner was curled against my side. Dick murmured something, obviously disagreeing, but incoherent. "I've stayed here all night and most of the day. What will the butler think?" Dick turned and made a face at me.
"I'm uncomfortable with thinking about what Alfred thinks about us." He said awake now and picking up the remote, mindlessly flipping through the hundreds of channels on his TV.
"He hates me, you know." I added.
"No he doesn't." Dick paused for a while on a cooking show before continuing on. "He just met you."
"He had 'the look,' the 'he's too good for you' look.(The 'hurt him, and a very large flying mammal will be after you' look.) I managed to physically use air quotes even with my arm now around Dick's shoulders.
"You're being paranoid."
"No, you're being naïve... Wait, stop!" I snatched the remote from Dick's hand and turned up the volume to the point where the newscaster's voice rang in my ear.
"- custody for questioning. The police have been keeping the case secret for a while, but as most of the city knows by now, the GP headquarters was blown up last night." I sat up, trying to get as close to TV as possible. "Luckily, they were in the middle of moving the headquarters to another location, and only a few handfuls of officers were in the building. A total of seven casualties occurred.
"Commissioner Gordon released this morning that that they are indeed working on the Red Raven/Joker case." I stopped breathing as a pixilated image of Raven and another girl about Raven's age came on the screen. "They suspect that the police building blowing up was due to this other young green-haired girl seen fleeing from the scene of the crime. Just what is happening in Gotham? Why are the police being targeted? Are we in for another rain of clown terror?"
I turned the TV off, and the silence following was numbing. I slowly relaxed from my painfully straight sitting position, and Dick gingerly touched my arm. "That's where you were, wasn't it?" I whispered, and then looked up to the teen next to me. "You fought her…" He looked unsure of what to say in fear of upsetting me, but I needed him to tell me what happened.
"She was trying to blow up the police station, and had already set the bombs when I got there. I fought both her and the green haired girl." He said, gesturing to the blank TV. "She hit her head, and when the bombs detonated, I tried to get her out of there." I couldn't breathe as the word "tried" escaped his lips, and Dick panicked. "No, she still made it out." He assured me, and I let in a shaky breath. "Her partner, Asteria, took her."
As that information sunk in, I found that with every breath I took in, a sort of rage filled me. "Partner?" I twitched. "She has a new partner!" I was standing on my knees, accusing the empty space in front of me. Dick took hold of my wrists and tried to pull me down, but I wouldn't hear of it, and he only achieved in falling backwards and towing me down so that I was yelling at him, my hands bracing my body up from their places on the mattress by the sides of Dick's head. (Or is that what he wanted?) "What the hell is that all about? She goes out and replaces me, and after all we've been through."
"You're jealous?" Dick asked, tilting his head to the side. That stupid boy's trying to distract me.
"Yes, yes I am." I snarled. "Plus, she's certainly not coming back if she' with a partner and The Joker. A family."
"I don't think that you can consider The Joker a father figure." Dick argued.
"Why not?" The idea wasn't too weird to me. If a pair of crazed orphaned thieves could be a family, then a crime lord like The Joker would be a perfect father. "He's respected, powerful, and wicked smart. If Raven found a place in his upper ranks, she'll be protected by him."
"That's insane." Dick looked somewhere between confused, disgusted, and afraid that I was defending The Joker. I pursed my lips at him, scowling.
"I don't like it; she's still not safe. Being associated with him will make her a target to…" My scowled deepened and I sat back, resting between Dick's knees. Slowly, pieces of information began to fit together. "I have to find her before… Oh my god." Realization hit me like a freight train. "The bombing was a distraction." I jumped off the bed and tore through the desk by the spotless window, snatching paper and pencil. I began furiously scribbling, almost tearing through the thin sheet.
"What are you doing?" Dick came up behind me and tried to decipher my mess of a chart.
"What was stolen?" I asked, concentrating.
"An ancient Azura Puzzle piece, one of three, theoretically." Dick answered. He was perceptibly still confused. "There was one piece here, and I don't know where the two others are; they were really only rumored to exist." I added that bit of information in an angry scrawl across the top of the page. "Together, they're involved in a doomsday ritual, but they need some sort of a key to work."
"Well, that makes sense. If he had all of the pieces, why wouldn't the ritual have happened already? So, where's the key?" I paused for the answer, the now blunt point of the pencil hovering over a dark triangle at the center of my sketch.
"No one really knows what the key is, much less where."
I hoped that the disgusted noise I made wasn't taken offensively. "An ancient ritual with an ancient key… They keep old things in… museums?" I mused, tapping the eraser on the desktop in a frantic pace. Looking behind me, I noticed that Dick had mysteriously disappeared, but I brushed it off in an attempt to figure out what the clues of this realization meant. "Three pieces…" I mumbled. "and The Joker wants them, but he sent Raven…" I mentally ran over what I saw at the scene of the break in, and sketched a few images. Wait, if Raven came here to steal something, then why did she have to use a knife?
There was a fight. That's it! Someone else was there, but who was it? I quickly jotted a list down, muttering each name out loud. "Not a mob boss," (They wouldn't be interested in rituals) "and no mercenaries or scientists either." (That takes out Bane, Deadshot, Hugo Strange, The Mad Hatter…) "Perhaps a violent entrepreneur… Someone who wants the pieces, not for himself, but to sell to the highest bidder… Dick said that Penguin had attacked the mansion."
I snatched the paper off the table, now in a hurry without really understanding why. In a rare moment of clear-headedness, I remembered to get my jacket this time as I rushed out of the mansion, through a wide garden, and into a large second building. As I walked in, I almost cried.
The glittering supercars that filled the room made this a temporary heaven, until I remembered what I was doing. Scanning the room for keys, I sighed as I found none. Not letting that stop me, I approached a black Porsche 997 GT2, and tried not to think about it too hard as I jimmied the door and cracked the wheel base open. Carefully, I hotwired the car to roaring life and wasted no time to speed away from Wayne Manor.