The moon's reflection rippled and shimmered in the waters of the bay just before they were parted by a blast from the Batwing's engines. Now that it was night there was no longer a need for the battery taxing cloaking device, so Bruce had switched it off in order to conserve the ship's energy. The craft had been going for almost seven hours straight without a break, and judging by the smoldering skylines of the twin cities of Gotham and Metropolis in the distance, there was no end in sight.
After reaching a satisfactory distance out to sea, Bruce jammed a button on the control console. A port on the bottom of the aircraft whined open and dropped a metallic colored, egg shaped charge into the waters in a swift splash. The port closed and the Batwing climbed and swerved through the air towards the Metropolis end of the bay. The city quickly loomed large on the displays and Bruce was forced to lower his speed so he could navigate around the shattered buildings and flaming rubble. Before he could get very far into the city airspace, however, a low female voice came from the back of the craft and urgently commanded him to stop. Diana had been keeping her eyes on the monitors, looking for the next highest priority target to either rescue or destroy as the plight of the civilians and the threat of the invaders had sorted themselves out. Now the look on Diana's face was dire and Bruce decided not to argue. He took the Batwing into a steep dive, and the smoke and flames blasted out in a ring around where the ship lowered itself down.
Without a word of explanation, Diana slammed the button to open the exit ramp and she leapt out of the craft while they were still dozens of feet in the air. She crashed down into the street below with a force that would have shattered the bones of any regular human, but for Diana the street merely cracked beneath her boots. She rose to full height and dashed through the rubble until she found what she had glimpsed briefly on the monitor; the body of an Amazonian warrior lying face down in the wreckage of a building. Diana slid to her knees next to the body. She could already feel the tears starting to well up in her eyes as she reached for it, hesitated, and then turned it over. The blank face of her mother stared back at her and she let out a gasp of aguish.
Almost as if he had appeared there by magic, Bruce was standing next to her, looking grim beneath the dark face of his helm. He reached down with two pointed fingers and felt the pulse on the neck of the vanquished queen. Then he adjusted the sights on his helm's opticals, checking for any trace of other vitals. Finally, with a long sigh, he laid a hand on Diana's shoulder and declared, "I'm sorry Diana… she's gone."
Images of his own mother's face came blaring into Bruce's thoughts as Diana collapsed into his arms sobbing. It was all happening again. The images came in brief, staccato bursts: the pistol, the shot, the pearls, the blood, the screams, the look on his mother's face as she wheezed out "Bruuuuce" for the final time, the dilation in the pupils of her eyes as they went as dark as his soul would responsively become. The look on the face of Hippolyta was eerily similar. So it was with a solemn resolve that he reached out a hand and gently lowered the dead queen's eyelids.
He and Diana just sat there for a time as the world went to pieces around them. At last, Bruce croaked in a voice thick with sympathy, "Come on, she wouldn't want us to just sit here. I'll load her onto the car. We'll give her a burial fit for a queen… as soon as we bring her killer to justice."
Diana looked up into his eyes. Her own eyes were shot through with red as she growled, "Then let's go."
Minutes later Hippolyta's body had been draped with one of Bruce's spare capes. The Batmobile raced through the streets on remote and they loaded the body into the passenger compartment in the back.
Once the car raced off out of the city, Bruce and Diana returned to the Batwing. Bruce was about to take command of the craft once again when he thought better of it. He turned and watched Diana slowly walk aboard, the look on her face a mixture of grief and rage. He approached her and laid his hands on her shoulders. "Hey," he said, "Are you with me? I need you to be focused if we're going to make it through the night."
Diana's hands balled into fists which caused the leather in the palms of her gloves to crackle lightly. "I want to tear them all apart… every last one of them!"
"No," Bruce stated authoritatively as he quickly lifted Diana's head with a light touch of the chin. "You can't go into this fight with that kind of mindset. If you do, your enemies will take advantage of you. So are you angry?"
Diana nodded her head vigorously as she smeared away a few more tears with a lazy wipe of the hand.
"Anger makes you weak," Bruce insisted. "Our foes did this to you in order to make you this way. They want you to get emotional. They want you to start thinking with your brawn and not your brains. If you want to avenge Hippolyta's death, it can't be about vengeance itself. It has to be about justice."
"What does it matter how I feel?" Diana hissed back. "What does it matter what this is about? You get vengeance on the same criminals who murdered your parents and call it justice, but it's all the same. Don't patronize me with your ridiculous claims of a higher cause. Now come on, let's go."
Diana tried to brush past Bruce but he held his ground with a firm hand to her chest. "The criminal who murdered my parents is dead," Bruce admitted in a suddenly somber tone. "In the years before I became who I am now… I stood by and did nothing as he was murdered; yet another victim of the circle of crime and vengeance that had consumed my city long before it consumed my parents."
The look on Diana's face changed from the rage it had been to one of sudden shame. "But I always thought…" she started and then trailed off.
"You thought my crusade against crime was about vengeance," Bruce finished. He cast a thoughtful look at the ground as he continued, "I know… so did I for a time. But after a while I realized that there was nothing that was going to bring my parents back, but that didn't mean that I should still do nothing. When I returned to Gotham, I started my mission against the evil forces which had infected it because it was the right thing to do. I honor my parents' memory, and I lose sleep trying to make sure what happened to them never happens to anyone else, but I don't labor under the illusion that what I do is for some sort of revenge."
Diana swayed where she stood. Her shoulders slumped and she asked earnestly, "You said you started out that way, though. How did you do it? How did you make it about justice and not revenge, because the only feeling I have in my heart right now is hate for the monster who did this."
Bruce took a deep breath and explained, "It would be naïve of me to say I overcame the need for revenge entirely, or else I wouldn't be out here right now, but leveling the playing field became my main motivation in much the same way that it ceased to be after… after I thought I lost Jason and Barbara. It took forces of incredible darkness for me to see that I must learn to wield the darkness in order to defeat it, but stray too far and you can become the darkness you wish to destroy." Bruce reached a gentle hand out to Diana's cheek. "Don't let your hate consume you. Use it. I will help you in every way I can, but you have to decide your own motivations. You told me yourself that if I couldn't believe in myself and my ability to continue to do good in the world anymore, then I had no business becoming the Dark Knight. You showed me the way, and now I just want to make sure you follow your own advice."
After a long pause, a look of understanding and new resolve came into Diana's eyes as they suddenly stared up into Bruce's. "You're right," she declared. "We have to be smart about this. This enemy is too great for us to just go in with blind rage… Thank you for being so patient."
Bruce smirked. "Now you finally know how that feels." They both chuckled for a bit and, after a brief pause, shared a kiss. When they broke apart, Bruce leapt into the pilot's chair and powered the Batwing back up and brought it soaring into the sky.
Within moments of being airborne again, Bruce had to quickly throw the craft into a spiral to avoid the massive looming shape of the alien ship as it emerged from behind a building. The control panel lit up red with threat vectors and a claxon sounded to drive home the warning of incoming projectiles. Bruce slammed on the countermeasures and the craft sent chaff flying into the air in a desperate hope that the enemy projectiles were heat seeking. When a series of angling beams of light vaporized their way through the countermeasures, however, Bruce yelled, "Hold on!" to the woman in the back who had her hands clenched on a suspension hook in the ceiling of the plane. She looked like she was about to be sick with all of the motion which made Bruce feel all the more worse when he was forced to bank and turn sharply, dodging around buildings and flinging his way through the sky. The engines toiled against exhaustion and Bruce knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he was not going to be able to keep this up forever, so a thrilling idea popped into his head and he swung the craft around in a wide arc reaching out into the bay, the waters of which were sliced by flaring engines and streaking energy beams.
As the alien ship loomed large on the display once again and began to grow ever larger as they raced towards it, the look on Diana's face went from distress to panic. "Bruce?" was all she could initially manage to say as the craft shot straight for the alien capital ship. "Bruce!" she yelled, this time more as a means of protest, just before she realized that they were going to crash into the ship at full speed. She had one last chance to scream his name before her voice was forced into a grunt at the impact of the craft into the side of the alien ship.
The Batwing plowed into the metal hull of the ship at an angle causing it to skid along the side, burrowing deep into the steel and shedding large chunks of itself as it went. The beams that had been chasing them collided with the side of the ship and exploded in a spectacular display of light and flame. By the time the Batwing came to a halt, it was a level or two inside the alien ship which was now lurching precariously in the sky after the impact of its own weapons, and all that remained of the Batwing itself was the fuselage containing its two passengers.
Diana brought herself back to her feet after having been thrown by the violence of the crash. She brushed a few arrant strands of hair out of her face and then a few arrant tangles of the Batwing's wiring after that. Needless she was supremely displeased and reflected this dissatisfaction in her first words to the pilot. "What in Hera's name were you thinking?"
Bruce rose from the pilot's chair and flipped a few more switches on the dashboard to check what systems remained and to turn them off if necessary. "The weapons on Darkseid's ship were designed for interstellar war so it stands to reason that they'll do more damage to his own ship than anything we could throw at him. Other than that," Bruce said with a grin, "I'll be honest, I had no idea if we were going to survive or not."
Diana let out something between a grunt and a wail as she was reminded yet again of just how single minded Bruce could be some times. She didn't have anything to counter his statement with, though, since she knew as well as he did that they were in the risk taking business, and sometimes you had to play everything you had if you were going to stop evil from winning the day. So instead of arguing, she drew her sword and said, "Well that's great, so what now?"
Bruce grew stern as he flicked a batarang from his belt. It snapped into shape in his hand and a red button blinked in the center of it indicating its explosive nature. "Now," he said, "We take this thing out of the sky, and hopefully the leader with it." The Amazonian couldn't help but smile at the implication.
By the time the occupants were ready to emerge, the wreckage of the Batwing had already been surrounded by a troop of winged parademons. They were caught off guard when the back of the Batwing exploded off its hinges and a fully armored Amazon flew out, yelling a battle cry and slashing away at the drones. A few black specs flew out from the crashed craft and exploded into some of the parademons sending them spiraling away. Then batman emerged from the plane and pumped his fist towards the ground. Three batwing shaped claws extended from his hand and he sliced away the first parademon that tried to assail him. The creature let out a shriek and stumbled backwards. Bruce let out a sigh. It was going to be a long way to the command deck.
And indeed a long way later there was a violent thrashing noise being made against the exterior of the imposing blast doors that separated the command deck from the rest of the ship. The creatures within had ceased their studious piloting of the ship to stare at the door, their eyes full of apprehension at the noise and the increasing size of the dent in the steel. No one was more filled with terror than the stooped form of Steppenwolf as he cowered behind his command consol. So it was with an audible cry that he reacted to the sight of the door smashing in and flying through the room to crash into the far wall just behind him. Nestled in the dent was the broken form of a parademon who fell from the wreckage of the door lifelessly to the floor.
Out of the smoke which poured into the room came the shining sight of Diana, resplendent in her battle armor. She held her sword out and called down the hall, "Your guards have been defeated and your ship crippled. Surrender command to us or face destruction!"
Steppenwolf looked confused. He squinted at the smoke behind Diana but no one else entered after the woman so he was forced to assume she was alone. "Who is this "us" you speak of?" he then asked. "I see only a single warrior before me, and the number of paradeomons I have here in this room is more than enough to overwhelm you."
"Sure you want to test that?" A dark voice said from behind Steppenwolf. The stooped humanoid's shoulders hiked in fear and his eyes went wide. Then he turned his head slowly to see the bat-eared creature of the Justice League standing right behind him with a bared batarang. He quickly turned his head back to see that the Amazon was much closer now. He threw up his hands and said, "As you wish! The ship is yours."
Diana smiled warmly, "Thank you sir… now get out." Moments later and Steppenwolf and all the parademons had leapt from the ship into the city below only to be immediately menaced by the converging forces of the human military. After this had all been accomplished, Diana sheathed her sword, placed her hands on her hips and said to Bruce, "Well, no Darkseid on this ship, so what now?"
"We find him," Bruce said as he scanned the various monitors on the command bridge overhead. Finally his eyes landed on a monitor that displayed their quarry, floating above the city central park. A large yellow omega icon hovered above him on the monitor and Bruce quickly spotted the same icon on Steppenwolf's control consol. After some more reverse engineering and more than a few lucky guesses, Bruce managed to get the ship to start hovering forward again. It wasn't far to the park where Darkseid was wreaking havoc. Bruce grabbed the ship navigation stick and throttled it right at the stone fleshed terror. Without warning, the ship collided right into the hovering figure and then ploughed into the ground of the park. After that, the engines died and the consoles went dark.
"Did we get him?" Diana asked.
"There's only one way to find out," Bruce replied. He headed to one of the now many gaps in the ship's hull allowing access to the outside and shot a grapnel to a distant building. He swung out of the ship and Diana leapt through the sky after him. They both eventually landed on the ground near to the nose of the ship which was buried in the ground along with, they hoped, the leader of the invasion.
For a long while, all they could hear was the sound of wreckage smoldering and burning. Then an ominous crashing sound came from behind them. Before they had time to react, however, Darkseid was already upon them. His stone fist smashed into the back of Bruce's helm and his other hand smacked Diana out of the way before she had time to draw her sword. They both went flying apart and skidded to a stop in the distant dirt.
Bruce rose from the ground, his vision bleary from the impact, and his suit's HUD flickering. He gave his helm a few light taps which stung horribly after the impact, but the display steadied. He saw that Darkseid had apparently assessed Diana to be the greater of the two threats and gone after her first.
Before his laser vision reached her, however, Diana had brought her sword out in a flash and used the flat of the blade to reflect the beams back at their originator. They collided back into Darkseid and he let out a roar of pain. "Once I am done here, I vow Themyscira will be next!" he bellowed.
"Once you're done here, you will be in the ground," Diana seethed back. Darkseid roared again and charged after his opponent. Diana managed to block his first strike, but his second caught her off balance and Darkseid managed to grab one of the wings of her helm. He used it as leverage to lift her off the ground and fling her into a nearby building. The helmet stayed in his hand but the woman sailed through the air and collided into a pile of wreckage. Then Darkseid discarded the helm as though he were throwing away a piece of trash and turned his attention to his other opponent.
He didn't have time to focus his vision on Bruce, however, since a series of batarangs warped his depth perception as they suddenly appeared right in front of him and exploded, leaving him temporarily blinded. A whistling sound travelled through the air Darkseid felt his legs snap together involuntarily.
Bruce watched as the stone fleshed giant collapsed to the ground like a toppled statue thanks to the rope binds he had flung around his legs. Then Bruce flipped a panel on his utility belt and mashed a red button. Sparks flew from the binding and Darkseid let out a low rumble of pain as the wire arced and spat electricity.
While the enemy was distracted, Bruce dashed over to the rubble Diana had crashed into. She was lying in a creator of debris, just beginning to stir as Bruce approached. He leapt into the creator and reached out a hand to the woman who took it, with a gentle smile starting to crease her lips.
"Are you alright?" Bruce asked her.
"I am now… thanks," Diana said, shaking her head to get the stars out of her vision.
The sound of an enormous blast brought both their eyes skyward as a still sparking Darkseid flew into the air and ripped his way out of the electro-binds with seemingly incredible force. Then he plummeted back down to Earth fist first and landed with a shockwave that threw Bruce completely off his feet while Diana used the momentum to launch herself into the air.
With a poised fist she came down on Darkseid, smacking him in the face. The giant managed to grab her by the throat at the same time and a scary grin cut across his gray face. "Just like your mother," he rumbled. Then he drove her bodily into the ground and began to pummel her. He was interrupted when Bruce flew in through the air with his wings out to give him more momentum. Bruce drove both his feet into Darkseid's face and fired the small jets at the end of the boots that were originally installed there for impact reduction, but which now shot gouts of flame into the face of his foe.
Darkseid howled and grabbed Bruce by the legs, slamming him down into the ground. Bruce landed with a loud grunt as the sensor on his HUD screamed "impact compensation" at his eyeballs. He deftly reached for the nearest tool on his utility belt and tossed out a series of black spheres which hissed black gas into Darkseid's leering face. The monster staggered back with a growl while Bruce leapt back to his feet and closed the distance. Continuing his theme of abuse to the face, he cocked a fist back and, with suit enhanced force, brought the strongest blow to the face of the giant that he could. The bones in his arm rattled at the impact and Darkseid flinched only for a second before returning the punch with one of his own which landed on Bruce's face with enough force to partially shatter his helm and send him flying backwards to land ignominiously in the dirt.
As the world swam around in a great blur of misery and destruction, Bruce tried to reorder his thoughts into something resembling coherency. Instead all that went through his mind was the distant sound of thudding as Darkseid resumed driving fists into a helpless Diana. Every nerve in his body screamed out for him to get up and fight, but when he tried, they would only scream louder in pain. The cracked and flickering heads up display scrolled "critical failure" across the parts of his vision that weren't exposed to the orange and black sky through the jagged gap in his helm. So for a brief moment, all he could do was lay there in a paralysis as deep as the one he was in after his first encounter with the villain Bane all those many months ago.
Not long into this paralysis, however, there came a noise in the distance. It was faint at first and Bruce thought he had imagined it. But then the noise sounded again; a horn, blowing low and deep, echoing off the shattered spires of the city. Then a pouch on Bruce's utility belt vibrated and he summoned just enough strength to reach down and grab the small monitor out of the pouch. He looked at the monitor flashing a status update on the beacon he had dropped into the water not that long ago. He smiled with satisfaction as a beam of energy shot out of nowhere and blasted Darkseid away from Daian and sent him spiraling through the air before skidding into a nearby car.
Bruce sat up wearily, ripping off his helm since its broken pieces were starting to dig into his skin. Then he turned a bruised and cut face in the direction from which the beam had come. A large, scaled looking tank had just rumbled into the park. It was immediately followed up by a swarm of air speeders with men in aquatic looking battle suits guiding them through the air. The speeders spat projectiles at some parademons hovering nearby and sent them scattering, and then, with a great echoing below, Arthur Curry, the prince of Atlantis, came riding in on the back of a giant lizard, his golden trident held high. "Men of Atlantis! Drive these beasts back to the abyss!" he cried as his army swept into Central Park and began going building to building, clearing the city of enemies.
As Arthur closed in on the still visibly shaken Darkseid, Bruce began crawling over to where Diana lay. Not long after Arthur had reached Darkseid, Bruce could here Darkseid's increasingly distressed cries of pain as he crawled nearer to the woman. As he reached her, Bruce saw that she was still conscious, though heavily battered. Bruce took her hand in his and snorted out a laugh, "Your one tough woman," he said, repressing a bloody cough.
"Takes a lot more than some overgrown rock to keep me down," she said, smiling through teeth clenched in what was clearly a lot of pain.
As the din of battle ebbed and receded around them, and the city was washed clean by the victorious forces of Atlantis, all Bruce and Diana could do was lay there, battered and bruised, and wait for rescue. All the while, Bruce whispered to Diana, "We're going to be alright."