All of the characters and story lines and everything else I can think of are the property of DC comics and the WB network.  The only bits that're mine are the words and the voice.   

Chapter 6:  Despair

            He should have killed her.

            He should have gone ahead and finished her off.  He should have taken that damn gun and put another bullet into her brain.  He'd nearly done it.  She remembered the cold steel of the barrel pressed against her temple, the maniacal laughter, her certainty that this was her last moment.  Silently, she'd cried out within her soul with every fiber of her being, willing someone, anyone, to hear her, to save her. 

            Then, he'd changed his mind.  "Breaking you will be more fun than killing you," he'd decided, chortling.  Snatching up her half-full wine glass, he'd sipped it, leering at her, "A romantic evening by the fire," he'd jeered, "what a perfect end to your life." 

            Then, he'd gone about the business of breaking her, and a masterful job he'd done of it.  The rape had been the least of it.  The psychological games he'd played with her had been far more devastating.  He had made her helpless, weak.  He'd forced her to beg for mercy and to choose between horrific tortures.  He'd taken polaroids of everything he'd done to her, then forced her to view them, while gleefully constructing imaginary scenarios of the reactions of Bruce, her father, all of her loved ones when they would view them, later.  And, show them, he had.  Then he'd left her alive, knowing that death would have been a mercy.

            Her shame had been unbearable. 

            But she could have survived all of it.  She could have recovered and gone on.  Except, he took from her the one thing that would have made it possible for her to endure.  He took Batgirl.     

            Barbara sighed despondently as she overlooked the city from the balcony of the clocktower.  What was the point of working out all the time to regain her strength?  What was the point of learning to function in this damn chair?  She didn't want to learn to live with a wheelchair; she wanted to die.  Really, she had died.  She was nothing, nobody.  Batgirl had been more than a secret identity; she'd been Barbara—the real, authentic Barbara—the best part of who she was.  The Barbara Gordon everyone else knew was a fake, a mask, a façade constructed to protect the richness and depth of what had been hidden behind it. 

            And now, the riches were gone and she was left with the façade, the empty shell.  Without Batgirl, who was Barbara Gordon? 

            Shells were meant to be discarded.  Their sole value was to protect their contents.  Remove the contents, and what did you have left? 

            What was left was fit only to grace a landfill. 

            What was the point of that?