Chapter Ten

Not Faint Canaries

There was no one around at that time of night to witness the trio entering the hospital through a side door, though they were making no particular attempt at secrecy. The door had been locked hours earlier, but Batman's lock-pick made short work of the obstacle.

The uniformed young officer standing sentry outside Room 504 went slack-jawed with amazement as he saw the three costumed individuals heading his way. He stood up straight, determined to stand his ground no matter what they said, until he caught sight of the third member of the party. He'd seen Batman once or twice from a distance, talking to the commissioner. This was the man Gordon considered his most trusted ally, so as far as the officer knew, he was entitled to go wherever he pleased. The young officer didn't recognise the other two costumed figures, but if they were with Batman that was good enough for him. He stood aside and let them pass, gulping in awe as the imposing caped figure swept by him.

Diana was sleeping lightly, her pain medication having finally kicked in a little while ago. She stirred as she sensed someone approach; she still hadn't managed to get used to the constant comings and goings in a hospital.

"Mom?" Dinah touched her mother's shoulder.

Diana opened her eyes, surprised to find her daughter standing by her side in the darkness. She felt for the appropriate button on the panel next to the headboard and pressed it. The area around the bed was flooded with fluorescent light.

"What in the world?" she questioned, staring from one of her visitors to another. But her glance lingered longest on her daughter, mesmerised by the appallingly familiar costume she wore.

Dinah beamed at her. "It's all over!" she announced triumphantly, but her mother didn't seem to hear.

"Good...lord," she said weakly. "It's like looking into a mirror." The first Black Canary stared at her successor, shaking her head in disbelief. "Somebody turned the clock back thirty years."

Oliver stepped forward and laid a hand on Dinah's shoulder. "Chip off the old block, eh?" he grinned.

Diana looked at him accusingly. "I thought I told you to keep her out of all this."

He snorted. "You've tried that yourself," he pointed out unrepentantly. "You oughtta know just how well it doesn't work. Besides, your daughter's the one who took down Young."

"Well," Dinah hedged. She was justifiably proud of herself, but in the interest of fairness she felt compelled to point out, "Batman found out where Young's files were stashed, and Oliver —" Oliver trusted me, she thought, with a loving glance in his direction. He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

"All I did was keep a couple of guys covered while you kicked pretty boy's butt, that's all," he finished for her.

Diana preferred not to witness their mutual admirations. Concentrating on the salient point, she said, "You found Young's files? All of them?"

"And Ballard's," her third visitor added from the shadows. He seemed to prefer to stay there in the dim recesses of the room, out of the circle of light spilling from the wall fixture above the bed. "I'd be interested to see how the information we found matches up with what you collected years ago."

"I'll think about that," she replied noncommittally. "In the meantime, thank you. For all your help."

"Always happy to help out a 'living legend'," he answered drily.

"Takes one to know one," was Diana's mischievous response. "And I'm glad I finally got to meet you. But if you don't mind, I think I'd like to spend a little time with my daughter right now. That goes for you too, ya bearded old goat," she added to Oliver.

Her tone held considerably less venom than he was used to, and he looked at her in surprise. "Fine, I know when I'm not wanted," he said huffily, but the wink he gave Dinah made it clear it was all an act. "C'mon, Bats. Let's leave these two birds to their girl talk."

- >>> ———————— >

"How do you feel?" Dinah asked, guiltily realising that they'd come bursting into a hospital room at 3 a.m. with no consideration for the patient at all.

Her mother gave her a slightly strained smile. "A little better in a way, if all this is really over. A little worse if my daughter's going to take up crimefighting again."

"I just meant, are you in any pain?"

"No," the older woman answered shortly.

She continued to stare at her daughter until Dinah grew uncomfortable under the cold scrutiny of those blue eyes. She knew she was expected to provide an answer to the question that hadn't quite been asked, an answer she wasn't entirely certain of herself. With a tiny shrug of resignation she drew up a chair and sat down.

"I don't know if I'm going back to it or not," she said quietly. "I have responsibilities now, a business to run... I'm not nineteen anymore. But I can't deny there's a pull. It was exciting! I'd forgotten just how good it can feel. The adrenaline rush, the feeling of doing something important..."

"I remember." Diana's voice was gentle, quiet, barely more than a whisper. "There's not a thing you can tell me about how good it feels — or how terrible — that I didn't experience first." The old refrain again. It was my creation. But she didn't say it this time. Her eyes were sad as they beheld her scion, giving a whole different context to the frowning mouth. "I hoped I'd never have to see you like this."

Dinah tried not to be hurt. "Well...now that you have, what do you think?" she asked hopefully.

"I don't know, Dinah. I just...don't."

The two women sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time, carefully avoiding one another's eyes. Darkness, even partial darkness, brought with it a deceptive feeling of intimacy, a dangerous impulse to reveal too much. It was easier, in the daylight, to hide their feelings from themselves and each other. Then, too, they were seldom alone for very long. Doctors and nurses bustled in and out, the patient slept a good deal of the time, Dinah had any number of errands to run, and there was a steady stream of visitors from among Diana's many friends.

The silence stretched to the breaking point. "Do you remember being kidnapped when you were little?" Diana asked suddenly.

Dinah raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I was kidnapped?"

"Mm hmm. You weren't quite three. I'd taken you to the playground, and it was getting cold so I turned around to get another sweater for you, and when I looked around again you were gone. It was hours before we found you. I thought I'd go out of my mind.

"I knew what must have happened, of course; I was playing with some dangerous characters, and Ballard knew who I was. He made it clear he was more than willing to use that information if I didn't stay out of his operations. Next time, he said, I wouldn't be able to find you."

"You let him blackmail you like that!" Dinah exclaimed, horrified.

"Dinah, what choice did I have, honestly? Things were different then. That man might have had the reputation of being a soft-hearted so-called 'gentleman', but he was dangerous," she said earnestly. "The big name crime lords today are just penny ante compared to the sort of power he had. I was in way, way over my head, and I wish I had realised the fact sooner than I did. Sure, I had the means to cripple his operation, but putting him behind bars wouldn't have neutralized the threat. It wouldn't have been any trouble at all for him to strike back at me from some nice, safe cell."

"So you just...gave up crimefighting. Just like that."

Diana leaned back against the pillows feebly. The story, and all the emotions it brought up, had drained her strength. Eyes closed, she answered in a weak voice, "Not just like that. I went on keeping up the pretense for about another year. And then one nice, springlike day we all went for a family outing in the park, and I looked up and there they were. He said he was going to keep an eye on my family, and he did.

"I'm not denying I did a lot of good in my day, but in the end the whole costumed nonsense just didn't seem to matter a whole lot. You and your father did. My responsibility was to the two of you, not this stinking city."

The younger Black Canary gazed down at the gloved hands she held folded in her lap, sickened by everything she'd just heard. She realised, with a shock of enlightenment, that deep down her mother must have resented the hell out of her, probably without even knowing it. Perhaps her father as well, though she never remembered any strife between them. To give up...everything for them. That would have to leave some kind of scar, surely. And it was obvious she'd always felt some sort of resentment about her only child taking on the same identity she'd been forced to give up; she wouldn't harp on it so much if she didn't.

One day she'd find the courage to ask her, but this wasn't the time. Not tonight.

Dinah felt sad and obscurely guilty. She gazed at her mother's pallid face, her expression wretched, and wished she could change...well, everything. For both of them.

At length she spoke, voice low and confiding. "I had a Sam Ballard, myself, you know."

Diana's eyes flickered open briefly. "Really? You want to tell me?"

A frown creased her daughter's pretty face. "Are you sure you're up for it?" she asked. After a brief nod of assent she went on. "He was a drug lord by the name of Derek Rambaldi. We'd been running across his people for years, getting them off the streets one by one, watching them multiply like roaches. Couldn't touch him, of course."

"Naturally."

"Anyway, this high school girl who worked at the same shop I did died of a drug overdose. She'd never given anybody a reason to think she was involved with drugs, she was one of the cleanest kids you'd ever hope to meet. But her boyfriend was another story. I did a little digging and found out he was one of Rambaldi's people, low echelon. So I took off on a crusade and tracked the chain from him right up to the top, tipped off the police, and cheered when they hauled him off. And then three weeks later the courts let him go, claiming they didn't have enough evidence for an indictment.

"And it just happened to hit me at a really low point. We had money problems, Oliver had just lost his job, I was so tired I couldn't see straight most of the time; it was absolutely the last straw. I decided I was tired of the whole game, and I never looked back. Not as dramatic as yours, I admit."

The older woman gave her a look of sympathy and understanding. "It can still tear you to pieces, though," she said knowingly.

"It did that, all right. And to add insult to injury, a couple of years later Green Arrow brought him down single-handedly. So," she concluded with a shrug, "after everything I did, Rambaldi's rotting in prison because of Oliver, who barely even remembers his name."

"How'd you handle that?" Diana asked curiously.

Dinah thought carefully about how to answer that one. Some things her mother was better off not knowing, especially where Oliver was concerned. "Not well," she admitted finally. "At first I just felt worse about myself. You know, if only I had done a better job, if only... And then I started resenting him a little."

Which was putting it mildly. They'd hit a rough patch in their relationship not long afterwards, and that previously unsuspected resentment had played more than a small part in the crisis.

"You wouldn't be human if you didn't."

The younger woman shot her a suspicious look, searching for hidden meanings in her words. That simple sentence might hold the answer to her question right there — or it might be little more than polite interest. Still, knowing that shrewd old character, she was a lot more inclined to believe the former.

"I guess you'd know something about that yourself," she said slyly. She might have been mistaken, but she could have sworn she saw the faintest hint of a smirk around the patient's pale lips.

"It's late, Dinah," she said. "I'm glad we had a chance to really talk, but I'm tired out now. Do you mind?"

Dinah was instantly contrite. "Oh! No, of course not. I'm sorry I kept you up. I'll go now so you can get some rest. See you in the morning, Mom."

She got to her feet, but her mother put out a restraining hand. "Not in the morning," she said firmly. "Sleep in tomorrow. You've earned it...Canary."

It was her way of telling her daughter, "I'm proud of you," without actually saying it, but Dinah realised what she meant without needing it spelled out. With an expression of unaccustomed tenderness on her face, she squeezed her mother's hand and bent over to kiss her on the forehead.

"Goodnight...Canary," she smiled.

Chapter title refers to a line in one of John Donne's elegies: "Not faint canaries, but ambrosial". Personally, I stole it from Dorothy Sayers...