Part One: Good Intentions
Dance Like There's No Tomorrow - 1
"I believe I owe you a dance," smirked a voice behind her.
Diana of Themiscyra, also known as Wonder Woman, didn't stiffen at the familiar and unfamiliar voice. She did turn her head a little, towards the man who stood, just beyond her shoulder, imposing himself in her personal space as few men would dare. "Mr. Wayne." Her voice was even, and her manner polite, if a little cool. They'd agreed on such a course of interaction up in the Watchtower, hours earlier. If they crossed paths at tonight's function, she would be dismissive and he would be dismissed.
A dance had not been in the plan.
"Come now," and the broad shoulder edged its way neatly into the circle, causing smaller men to shuffle aside, "You wouldn't have me renege on a debt, surely, your Highness?"
The disappointment of her admirers was plain enough, along with the sheer envy that Bruce Wayne had the cojones to do what no other man at the function was bold enough to do: actually ask the famed Wonder Woman for a dance. She withheld her sigh of exasperation, both at her teammate's deviation from the arrangement, and at the way this persona of his so effortlessly intimidated lesser-gifted mortals with his charm. The smile she gave the people around her showed her uppermost feelings: this dance was for politeness sake and nothing else.
She'd been invited to this Charity Ball after helping an aid organisation deliver much-needed supplies to a remote village where their workers were struggling against bureaucracy and corruption from the government. Her involvement with the organisation was fairly low-key, not well known. Evidently, that would change after tonight. Her attendance at this ball was very high profile. She hadn't had a moment's peace to herself all night.
Perhaps that was why she'd agreed to the dance.
Or perhaps it was the powerful tension she could feel in the upper arm and shoulder beneath her hands. The fierce intensity that could be masked by jacket and shirt, but not fully concealed by the air of the charming playboy that he projected to those around the room.
Power had always been an intoxicating aphrodisiac. One only had to look at Zeus' exploits to see that.
"Having a pleasant evening, Mr. Wayne?" Diana asked, deciding that she should at least make civil conversation. Now was not the time to chide her teammate for not following his own rules.
The full mouth smirked at her. "I am now."
Diana dared a glance across at him, and saw the way his lids drooped, heavy over eyes as black as the night in which his soul dwelled. Bruce was watching her like a predator hunting prey, and she felt his fingers pressing a little more firmly at her back, drawing her closer.
Hera grant her patience! "You do realise that it would have been..." She wanted to say 'wiser' but settled for, "...easier to let the debt go unpaid?"
The full mouth twitched a little, and when he replied, there was a hint of the Bat in the resonance of his voice. "But not as much fun."
"And you are so well known for your predisposition to having fun," she responded, careful to sound teasing, at least on the surface. He would hear the sarcasm that was meant for his ears alone.
"I'm well known for a lot of things, your Highness," he responded. "And I try to avoid being in debt."
Which, when applied to the Batman persona, meant he didn't accept help, he didn't show weakness, and he never showed affection.
Diana's fingers briefly flexed on his arm and shoulder, frustrated by the mysteries and intricacies of this man. Of all the men she'd met in Man's World, the one who intrigued her most was the one who was the hardest to reach.
Never let it be said that she wasn't up to a challenge.
They turned with consummate grace, and Diana thanked all the gods in the pantheon that the paparazzi had been forbidden to enter this ball - or, at least, not allowed in with their cameras. There would be no escaping the gossip, but, as the saying went, a picture was worth a thousand words, and the fewer words about this dance, the better.
"If you wished to keep all this low-key," she noted, indicating the room around them and referring to their conversation this morning, "Perhaps you should have picked a less public place to repay the debt?"
"Why, Princess," he smirked, "Are you flirting with me?"
Her question had been directed at Batman, however the answer had definitely come from Bruce Wayne.
This whole 'secret identity' thing was fast becoming annoying.
Diana lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. "I try not to make a habit of flirting with rich kids with issues, Mr. Wayne," she said at her most icily polite.
"Ouch," he murmured, and his wince wasn't all show. "You strike low blows, Princess."
"I've found it can be an effective way of getting the point across," she replied, smoothly.
The dark eyes gleamed, but there was a troubled expression in them, "Well, there are days when it seems I'm very bad at getting the point across, so maybe I should take a lesson from you?"
In other words, You weren't listening when I said why we were a bad idea.
Diana smiled. "Mr. Wayne, sometimes it's not so much a question of getting the point across, as realising that there is no point." You were bringing up reasons that don't apply to us.
"Do you always charm your dance partners with existential conversation, Princess? Or is it just me?"
Hera was definitely taking her time with the patience.
They shifted again, and she wondered if there were any gods who would grant her the ability to resist the warmth of his hand as it soaked through the thin material of her gown. Somehow, she doubted it.
At least the dance was drawing to a close, the easy time of the waltz flowing to an inevitable conclusion. "Did you have plans for later tonight, Princess?"
She glanced up at him, surprised. The way he'd asked the question was Bruce Wayne, but the voice had been Batman's. In return, he seemed a little startled by something he saw in her face as she considered her answer. "Not really," she replied at last.
His lips caressed her ear, daringly bold in the room full of people, but his words, although soft, were businesslike. "Top of the Civic Centre at midnight. I want to show you something. Wear black. And you might want to slap me when I pull back. Just to make sure Wayne's reputation remains intact." And when he drew back, the knowing smirk on his face infuriated her to the tips of her pointy-toed shoes.
Diana slapped him. She pulled it, of course, since he got enough beatings in the line of duty with the Justice League - to say nothing of his patrol of Gotham City - without his teammate playing the shrew. The sound echoed loudly through the room, causing heads to turn, eyes to stare, and tongues to wag.
They stopped dancing as she wrested herself from his grip. Around them, people continued dancing, but surreptitiously craned their necks to see this latest development in Bruce Wayne's love life – or lack thereof.
"I don't think so, Mr. Wayne," she said, firmly. Her colour rose as she realised just how many people were watching this little tableau. Somehow, it had been different when she was saving Audrey from the Kasnian rebels - that had been what Flash termed 'superhero stuff.' This was personal.
"I'm not your type, Princess?" Bruce asked, giving her a look that had doubtless melted harder hearts than Diana's.
She rolled her eyes, "I think it's probably closer to say that I'm not your type, Mr. Wayne," she retorted, and turned on her heel to walk away. "Thank you for the dance, and consider the debt paid."
The crowd parted before her, and she didn't look back at him at all, although she heard him make some flippant comment as she went. The people behind her laughed or chuckled, but she resisted the impulse to turn and glare at him - or slap him again, tempting though the thought might be.
Her friend Angelina - one of the directors of the aid organisation - was blinking madly when Diana reached her, "You do realise you just slapped Gotham's most eligible bachelor in the middle of a charity ball?"
"It was quite satisfying actually," she admitted, her irritation with Bruce finding satisfaction the memory of her palm against the smoothness of his jaw. She flexed her hand a little. "And I was nice."
The other woman was struggling not to laugh, "That was nice?"
She smiled, demure as a vestal virgin. "I did leave his jaw intact."
Angelina laughed out loud, as Diana accepted a glass of water from one of the waiters and drank it down slowly. It had been warmer out on the dance floor than she'd expected, and she was feeling rather breathless.
"A little hot?" The dark-haired woman gave her a knowing smirk, and Diana rolled her eyes.
"Nothing that a glass of water won't help," Diana said, stopping that conversation right there. "Although I could do with some food."
"You didn't come here straight from the Watchtower, did you?" Angelina asked, suddenly horrified. "Without eating anything?"
She laughed at her friend's horror. "There was nothing worth eating in the Watchtower," she said, frankly. "The League are not generally known for their cooking skills."
"Well, most humans aren't known for their cooking skills either," Angelina said, leading her friend along to the buffet table and handing her a plate.
The woman's voice rent the air. "I can't believe you..." There was a pause as she tried to gather together a suitably exasperated remark, finally just settling for the exclamation, "Bruce!"
Diana turned, just enough to see her teammate being scolded by a blonde beauty in a daringly-cut gown of emerald green. For a man who, it was said, didn't know the meaning of 'apology,' he was doing a very good job of looking penitent.
"Don't be like that, Penny," she heard him say beneath the jumbled conversations. "It was just a dance, and I couldn't resist..."
Diana shook her head. When Bruce had persuaded her into the dance, she hadn't given a thought to the fact that he probably hadn't arrived alone, or that his partner for the evening might want the first dance.
"He really is quite the charmer," Angelina said. She was watching Diana like a hawk. "They say he's very sharp in the boardroom, intelligence at the genius level." She shook her head, "You'd think a man with so many gifts could find ways to use them for others instead of just hoarding it all away for himself."
If you only knew, Diana mused, her eyes lingering on the tall dark head across the room. "I don't believe that he has everything he wants," she limited herself to saying as she turned back to the buffet table.
"Well maybe not," her friend said dryly, "But sometimes it doesn't seem fair that some folks have all the wealth and luxury they can handle, and other folks..." The older woman trailed off and managed a smile as she selected some canapés to fill her plate. "I guess that's the way of the world."
"At least these people seem willing to remember the people who don't have as much as they do," Diana pointed out. "They may not devote their lives to good work, but they're here tonight." And not everyone has the heart for people that you do, Angelina, or the desire for justice like Bruce does.
Angelina sighed, "I suppose," she said, very quietly, as some others began lingering around the table. "It just angers me how little people are willing to give, particularly when some of them have so much."
The two women sat down at an empty table, and waited for guests to approach them. It didn't take very long for the first people - a middle-aged couple who'd been hovering just beyond the radius of what was polite - to come along and begin talking.
In the years since she'd entered 'Man's World', Diana had found that people would inevitably seek her out if given an opportunity. Celebrity was something that was quite unknown in Themiscyra. All the Amazons knew each other personally, so she'd been not a little disconcerted to suddenly find herself being 'name dropped' by people she didn't know at all.
"People like to be able to say they've spoken with a real live superhero," Flash had explained to her. "You learn to enjoy it after a while."
"You learn to enjoy it if you're the Flash," Green Lantern had said, pithily. "If you're anyone else, you learn not to say anything in public."
She wasn't as secretive as Green Lantern, nor as gregarious as Flash. In the end, she'd just endured it, privately considering that these people's lives must be just a little sad if the sum total of their valued experience was 'I once spoke with Wonder Woman!'
When she left the function, past eleven, she had answered enough questions to fill an encyclopaedia of knowledge. Much to her disappointment, very few of them were about her involvement with the organisation, most concerned the Justice League, the Thanagarian invasion, and her private or romantic life.
She had answered the first kind of question only when her friends' privacy was not at stake, the second where she had answers that were not concerning national security, and the third not at all.
Sometimes, she rather thought that Bruce and Clark had something in their assumption of alter egos. It would be nice to just blend into the population; to become an ordinary human being.
Not that you did all that well during the Thanagarian invasion, she reminded herself as she flew through the night, the cool air rippling the thin polyfibre of her dress, on her way to Angelina's apartment.
Maybe she should look into developing another identity, one which could move freely through the world. It wasn't impossible. Bruce had done it, and so had Wally. Clark managed it without ever putting a mask over his features - something which Diana would have to learn herself.
I'll ask him the next time I see him, she decided as she landed on Angelina's balcony. He'd be willing to at least talk it through with me. Maybe Bruce would help. If he didn't give her that stare that inquired what on Earth she thought she was doing. He was good at those.
Angelina had given Diana a key to get in and out of her apartment, and a drawer in which to keep some casual clothing, as well as other bits and pieces.
She dressed swiftly and simply in the outfit. It was skin-tight, a deep blue-black in shade, of a heavy material and with a matte surface, unlike the shiny material of her Wonder Woman costume. It covered her from neck to toe, leaving only her face uncovered. Her hair was neatly braided into a single plait, the loose strands brushed out of her face. It was maybe the fifth or sixth time she'd worn this costume and she was slowly getting used to it.
The first time Angelina had told her about the outfit, she'd been reluctant to use it. However, after some explanation of why the outfit was necessary, she agreed to wear it. And she had to admit that it was much harder to spot her in the black.
The supplies she'd dropped for the aid organisation had been done by night, and without any authorisation from the government of the country. The aid organisation insisted it was the only way to get the supplies to the right people on time and, after looking through the options herself, she concurred.
Subterfuge was still not a comfortable thing for her, hence the hesitation to develop herself an 'alter ego' like Clark's. But this...well, this outfit was necessary when she 'ran errands' for the aid organisation.
Or, she mused, when obsessive teammates ask you to join them on their city patrol and ask you to wear black.
As she tidied up behind her and moved through the empty apartment to the door, Diana reflected that there was an interesting shift of mindset in wearing darker colours for the purposes of camouflage. She felt the urge to retreat to the shadows, to move with caution, to take the less direct route. Perhaps she had been spending too much time around Batman.
The thought brought a faint smile to her face as she stepped out into the windy night. She closed and locked Angelina's balcony door, very quietly, and tucked the key into the base of the dead plant sitting on the outside windowsill of her bathroom.
Then she flew for Gotham.
----
"So this is his idea of a date?" Dick asked as she joined him in the shadows down by the ground.
He knew he'd said exactly the wrong thing when Diana turned and glared at him. He hadn't thought anyone but Bruce could give the Batglare, but this was a very good rendition of it. "Okay, not dating, got it." He shouldn't have asked, but he'd been curious, and he knew Babs would want the info... Heck, who was he kidding? He wanted the info.
Diana snorted, softly, then admitted, "I was surprised to be invited along to patrol." Nightwing wondered if she had any idea just how unique that made her in the annals of BatHistory. She probably did. Anyone who'd known Batman for over two weeks recognised that he really wasn't a people person.
Her eyes scanned the darkness ahead of them, her attention on the dockyards.
Heh. Maybe Bruce had been rubbing off on her. She was totally focused on the task at hand. Then again, judging by everything he'd seen and heard, Wonder Woman was a little on the intense side, just not quite as obsessive as Bruce.
Dick recalled himself and flipped his mask's sensors on, tracking movement, body heat, and noting all the little details Bruce had taught him to look for during one of these stakeouts.
"Which containers did you wish to investigate?"
He pointed out the ones he'd seen last night. "But not right now," he added, and indicated one of the warehouses. "We're going that way. They unpacked one of the containers this afternoon, and opening another will be noisy - and obvious without a diversion. We'll do that when we've finished checking out what they unpacked today - it'll be gone by tomorrow night."
"And give him time to find out what the others are up to?"
He shot her a grin over his shoulder before he started off into the darkness, "That, too."
As he wove his way in and out of the huge container boxes, dodging the occasional guard, he kept his eye out for the dogs. There were several of them, and while he had scent bombs to distract them, he didn't particularly wish to resort to that.
Gotham's shipping yards were reasonably large. They handled most of the shipping in and out of the city, and provided secondary transport to the bigger cities along the northeast coast. They were also a prime place for smuggling attempts.
Nightwing recalled his quip to Batman earlier, watching his mentor and Diana as they stood on the warehouse roof some hundred fifty yards away. "Y'know, couldn't you have chosen a city that doesn't breed crime like rabbits?" Then Diana had walked to the edge of the roof and crouched down, like a gargoyle watching over the Gotham Port Authority building. Definitely one of the best-looking gargoyles Nightwing had ever seen.
He'd switched to a private channel to speak to Bruce alone, and hoped that Diana's super-hearing didn't stretch that far if she didn't concentrate. "I thought you didn't want the League involved in Gotham." Particularly the patrols.
His answer had been a softly-growled, "I have my reasons."
Yup, that was Bruce. About as forthcoming as...well, as one of Gotham's gargoyles.
She followed him with a stealthiness that surprised him. The League did things in a certain way, Batman did them in another. While the two might sometimes mesh, there were just as many situations when they would clash - more, in fact. Which made Wonder Woman's inclusion tonight a puzzle. One that he'd talk over with Babs tomorrow, perhaps. She might have insights into Bruce's mind that he didn't.
Dick had to admit, he hadn't been all that close to Bruce lately, old hurts and quarrels rising up between them and affecting everything they said and did. Nothing new, there, old dance, same steps, one more time for the dummies.
They paused at the door to one of the warehouses that the guards had passed a good five minutes ago. They wouldn't be back for another fifty minutes, which left plenty of time to get inside, check out the boxes unpacked from the container earlier today, and get back out before the guards came around again.
Metal scraped softly against metal as he picked the lock, stretching his ears to hear not only the click of the padlock, but also the distant steps of the security guards.
Inside the warehouse, it was pitch black, and he switched his lenses to nightvision. Diana had no need of night-vision goggles, she moved through the darkness as though it were broad daylight, slipping between the high-piled boxes like the shadow Bruce had named her for the night.
Then he started looking for the cargo loaded off the Madeira Star.
The building was the size of a couple of football fields, side by side, and aisles were marked out in white paint, along with numbers for each storage bay. Even in the faint streetlight spilling through the windows beneath the warehouse eaves, it was easy to see where you were going.
Not so easy to see the surveillance cams, but Nightwing already had the positions and movements of those memorised.
He touched Diana's arm a yard or two before she would have stepped into the line of sight of one of the swivelling cameras. She frowned briefly at him and he explained, "Security cameras."
There were times Nightwing could understand Batman's exasperation with the metas. Most of them never stopped to use their most important ability of all: the power to think, to reason, to deduce. They just went in, fists flying, powers blazing - they didn't plan ahead.
Maybe he should be glad of that. A meta that thought everything through before trying to take over the world? Heaven help them all.
Now, they would have ten seconds to get to the next aisle after that camera swept away from their current position, and before the next camera swept back to find them. He told Diana this, and at the correct interval, they slipped through the darkness and into the 'dead zone' aisle.
As they paused in the shadow of some cardboard boxes marked with the 'MATTEL' stamp, Diana spoke, softening her voice so it didn't project up to the echoing roofspace. "How do you know where the cameras are?"
His response was beneath his breath, almost too soft for his transceiver to pick up. "Came in here yesterday and today. Checked their positions."
She blinked. "They let you... Oh." Her realisation that he hadn't come as 'Nightwing' was one step towards getting her to think differently. Not, Dick reminded himself, that it was his job to get her to think differently. But it couldn't hurt.
"What made you suspect drug-smuggling in the first place?" Diana asked.
"Lucky coincidence," Nightwing said.
Two nights ago, while on patrol, he'd uncovered a meeting between gang of perps with known affiliations to drug syndicates. He'd taken out three, caught one, and the police had dealt with the last two. Not bad work, if he did say so himself.
About the same time, Babs had been running computer simulations for the GCPD when she noticed unusual activity in two drug-related hotspots in the city. On a hunch, she'd pulled up the incoming schedules of the shipping liners from the Gotham Port Authority and found a minor cargo ship whose first officer had been previously suspected of drug-smuggling, but never convicted.
Nightwing explained this, in simplified form, without mentioning Babs by name or her job.
Diana seemed astonished. "Batgirl is a hacker?"
"Yep." Dick made no apologies for his friend and colleague. "A good one, too." He looked up at the boxes he'd seen taken out of the container this afternoon. "These are it."
It was the work of moments to climb up the 'walls' of the narrow aisle between the boxes. Nightwing did it by planting his back against one side and his feet against the other and slowly inching his way up.
Diana practically walked up the sides of the boxes. Nightwing watched in envy and admitted that some parts of his job would be considerably easier if he was able to fly.
Not that he did all that badly with acrobatic agility and training. As Bruce had repeatedly shown, being human was no barrier to being a hero. At the top, he wedged himself between the two stacks and regarded the boxes before him.
He slid the pointed edge of a batarang along the taped edge of a box. The rasp of the tip against the cardboard sounded too loud in the pointed stillness of the warehous. Dust unfurled, and he brushed it away and braced himself against the urge to sneeze. Then they peered inside.
And stopped.
"You're sure this is the one?" Diana asked as she pulled out one of the objects with a rustle of plastic wrapper.
Children's toys. Plastic children's toys. They looked a lot like a Japanese animator's attempt at rendering a cross between Disney's 'Three Little Pigs' and Chucky the killer doll - which was to say that they had big eyes and were as ugly as hell.
Dick Grayson, board member of Wayne Enterprises and college senior in corporate business, looked at the toys and shuddered. This business venture would be some marketing manager's nightmare.
Nightwing merely frowned slightly and leaned out, checking the internal security cameras of the warehouse. "Are you able to lift this pallet up over onto the next pile?" He tapped the blue wooden pallet. "The security cameras only swivelled along a horizontal plane, assuming that anyone intending to break in would not be able to get past the ground-level security. This high up, they were safe from notice, and even the huge pallet block - if correctly handled - would not be noticed as it was moved away, then moved back.
An explosion filled the night outside, sending shockwaves across the dock complex and rattling the glass windows in their aluminium frames. They turned their heads, the flaming light splashing across their alarmed faces.
Shit.
Swiftly, Nightwing keyed his comlink. "Batman?"
"Found anything yet?"
He schooled his expression against relief, in spite of the fact that his mentor couldn't see him. As much as he and Bruce argued and clashed, they were still...family.
"Where are you?"
"Next to Shed F, now get back-- " The communications broke off with a grunt, and Dick looked out across the yard.
The grunt could mean two things. Either it was no longer safe to talk, or Batman was no longer capable of talking. He hoped it was the first, but there was always the possibility of the second.
Conscious, there was nobody to match Batman. Unconscious...
"Can you manage this on your own?" Diana asked. She'd given up the appearance of clinging to the sides of the boxes and was fully hovering in the air ready to go and help Bruce out.
Thing was, Bruce didn't like being helped. Nightwing had fought it out with his mentor often enough to know that one of Batman's first rules was, 'I don't need help.' Even if he sometimes did.
Of course, Bruce's stubborn pride had never stopped any of his sidekicks from worrying about him.
"Yes," Nightwing said, making the decision in that instant. "Take the same route out, then keep to the rooftops and out of the line of sight of the security cameras - you saw them on the way in, didn't you?"
She nodded.
"Good. Check things out, if he needs help, give it." He hoped he wasn't coming across as bossy - she was a superhero in her own right, but this was Batman's city and, by adoptive extension, Nightwing's. "If he doesn't, come back. No, see how close you can get to the explosion, then come back." Batman had trusted her stealth skills, Nightwing would do the same.
He opened his mouth to issue one last command, and saw the smile that twitched her lips.
"What?"
"The next thing out of your mouth was going to be 'no obvious flying.'"
Dick huffed, but couldn't deny it, and her smile flashed for a brilliant instant. "I promise to be good," she teased him, then dropped to the floor below. He watched as she moved on silent feet through the warehouse, a barely-seen shadow shifting through the night - just like the code-name Batman gave her earlier.
He was still curious about why she was on patrol with them. But if she didn't know, then Bruce hadn't told her; and if Bruce hadn't told her, there was no way he was going to tell Dick.
Back to work, Dick. He pulled out the batarang again, climbed down the narrow walls of the aisle to the boxes on the next pallet down. Behind him, the fire still flickered, making normal visuals difficult. He switched to night vision, fixed his mind on the matter at hand, and didn't think about any situations Bruce might be in.
Bruce wasn't alone, he had Diana going in to help him. Of course, he'd be mad as hell that he needed help - assuming he needed help, of course. But if Bruce did need help Dick trusted Diana to provide it.
He set to work.
----