Nightwing:
He rousted us out of bed at 2 AM and summoned us to Helena's apartment. At the time, I didn't give it any thought. Just loaded Barbara and her chair into my car and headed over, grumbling about the hour. Batman has never been one for schedules, or sleeping, or even common courtesy, and I wish I could say this was the first time such a thing had happened.
We'd been enjoying our first decent night's sleep... and other things... since this whole mess started, and I stole a glance at her as I drove, her red hair softly tousled and her face, pretty without a speck of makeup, lost in some half-awake dreamland. I rested my free hand on her knee and she looked over, smiling at me with half-closed eyes. "Helena better have coffee." I knew she did. She even kept a bag of the high octane stuff we brew at the station, just for me. It was in the back of the cabinet behind the canned goods, along with a bottle of Grappa and a butterfly knife. I just nodded. "I hope so too."
The Bat answered the door, shirtless but cowled. He looked like hell. His left arm was wound in bloody gauze and his shoulders were covered in shallow scratches, a handful of bruises blossoming on his chest. There was no sign of Helena. I admitted a touch of disappointment to myself, but I wasn't surprised. It wasn't like she was going to just hang around and let her apartment become Batcave 2.0 without a fight, but that wasn't a fight she would have won, and I guessed she'd gone out to sulk and take out her frustration on the denizens of the night.
He sank onto the couch as I shut and locked the door behind us. With a glance at the closed bedroom door, he shucked off his cowl and dropped it onto the coffee table with a dull thunk, revealing a pale, drawn visage, his hair plastered to his scalp. Barbara let out an involuntary cry of surprise, and I reached for her hand, squeezing it gently.
"What happened?" I asked.
"She calls herself Primal." He said wearily, scrubbing a hand through the sweaty mop of hair. "She's got it out for mankind. Something about men no longer being the dominant sex, and showing their true natures. She's got something. A toxin. Airborne but the filters on the cowl didn't catch it. She blew it at me from her hand and I just... saw red."
I froze. Out of control, there would be no one who could stop him. If Batman went rabid...
Barbara spoke before I could. "But you're okay now."
He nodded.
"Did you kill anyone?" Blunt though she was, I loved her in that moment for having the guts to ask what I didn't.
He glanced at the door again, and was silent.
So were we.
The creak of a floorboard shot him into action like I've never seen, back into the cowl in a matter of seconds as the bedroom door opened and Helena padded out, barefoot and bruised, the healing bite on her shoulder oozing a thin line of blood from a broken scab. She was wearing a black tank top and a pair of boxer shorts covered in... yellow ovals with bats in them... I couldn't help it. I laughed.
"WHERE did you get those?" I felt rather than saw Batman's face start to flush, anger rising in his voice.
She sank nonchalantly into her armchair, draping one long leg over the arm. "What? They sell them at Target, you didn't know?"
He was practically shaking. "NOIDIDNOTKNOW."
I grinned at her. "Those are great."
She grinned back. "I know. Any excuse to yank his chain, right?" She shifted, winced, and gingerly touched her shoulder.
Batman was furious. Why did he care so much?
Barbara put it together about 15 seconds before I did, with a strangled "Oh. My. GOD."
Helena looked at her, arching one perfect Sicilian brow. "What?"
"You FUCKED him!" I stared at her. Profanity was one thing for Helena and I, our rough and tumble back alley world, but Barbara was normally above that, both literally and figuratively, and she was most certainly what I would have described as lady-like.
"THAT IS IRRELEVANT!" Batman roared, startling all of us.
Helena just shrugged, picking up a tissue from an end table and holding it to her arm. "So? Jealous?"
I was. Oh lord was I ever.
We sat in awkward silence. I broke it first, standing up. "Helena, where's your coffee? I'm never going to survive the rest of this conversation without it."
She didn't even look up. "Left cabinet over the sink." That's where she keeps the fancy flavored stuff she drinks. Mine was under the sink. So that was how we were we were going to play this. I opened the cabinet and fumbled around, pretending to look for it for a moment, then selected a bag of chocolate caramel coconut blend and dumped it into the basket of the coffee maker. Meanwhile, the three of them just sat in silence, the Bat seething, Barbara in shock, and Helena doing her best to look nonchalant about the whole thing in her silly Bat-shorts and failing miserably.
The coffee finished brewing before anyone said another word, and I handed it out in mugs with various Italian phrases on them. The only one I recognized was "Vai a morire ammazzato," "go and die murdered." I assumed the rest were equally offensive.
Finally, as we all sat nursing our candy-flavored caffeine habits, Batman spoke. It was his usual dark, unreadable growl, and I assumed he was over his annoyance, or at least had repressed it along with the rest of his humanity. "We need to know more about this Primal."
Babs, grateful for the segue, nodded. "Where do we start?"
He studied his coffee so intently I half expected it to spontaneously combust. "She didn't come from nowhere. We start aggregating data. Everyone in the country... in the WORLD... with the skills to do something like this and the dark past to instigate it. She's young and female, that should limit it significantly. This is a sophisticated biological agent and she knows how to use it. Chances are excellent that she created it, and that sort of sophistication doesn't happen quietly or in a vacuum."
Barbara nodded, lapsing back into her thoughts. After a long moment, she murmured "I should get back to the clock tower."
Batman shook his head. "We're beyond that. You're all coming to Gotham until we get this figured out. Go back and pack what you need, and meet me back here at sunset."
Helena lifted her head and I saw her wince, almost imperceptibly. Her neck hurt. My fingers twitched reflexively thinking of the way she would drop her head forward onto her chest and groan softly as I expertly kneaded the muscles.
"I'm not going to Gotham," she said. "I have too much to do here and these people are in danger."
"The only way you can help them is by finding a way to stop Primal," he snapped back. "The National Guard has people quarantined and a curfew in effect, that's more than sufficient to minimize casualties while we work."
He fixed his eyes on her and I could feel the intensity even through the unreadable lenses.
She fidgeted for a moment under his gaze, then nodded grudgingly. "Only for a day or two though. They've closed the schools until this is over but I'll have to go back to work at some point."
He nodded. "It's settled. Dick, Barbara, I'll see you tonight." I watched Helena catch the implication that he was spending the day here, and the dismay that rolled across her face translated to pure satisfaction on mine. She lifted her eyes and our gazes locked for a long moment. I could tell she wished it was me. I did too.
I wrapped an arm around Barbara's shoulder reflexively. "C'mon Babs. Let's go try and snag some more shut-eye." She nodded gratefully, resting her head on my chest and closing her eyes, so trusting. I felt like the world's biggest asshole at that moment. I probably wasn't wrong.
As we shut the door behind us, I heard them start to argue about something. The shorts, I think. I did not envy them the day they were about to have, not one bit.