Helena threw on a pair of shorts and a tank top and rushed down the stairs. She slid into the kitchen in her socks to grab a bagel and walked in on her parents kissing.
"Ugh, you guys are so gross." She made an exaggerated gagging noise and opened the fridge to get some cream cheese.
Mom pulled away from Dad to swat Helena on the arm. "You know, you wouldn't be here if we weren't so gross."
Helena shuddered. "Thanks, Mom. You just made it worse." She shoved the bagel in her mouth and opened the back door, her shoes in hand. "I'm running late. See you later!"
"Where are you going?" Dad asked, leaning to see out the door.
"Running!" she said around the bagel. "Meeting with Kara at the park."
"Be safe!" Dad said, as if she didn't do a million more dangerous things every day of her life. Of course, she was only sixteen, and she guessed all dads worried about their teenage daughters. Her mom worried less, but lately Helena had begun to wonder if maybe her mother was just better at hiding that worry than Dad was.
Of course, she supposed any parent would have been apprehensive after what had happened last week. She'd gotten cornered while on patrol, and if Dad hadn't shown up in the nick of time, she probably wouldn't have been running –or walking—at all.
"You shouldn't have left Dick," Dad had said when they got back to the cave, his voice still in his Batman growl.
"I was fine, Dad!"
"You almost died!"
The worst part was, it hadn't been an exaggeration. Helena had crossed her arms and pretended that his words were silly, that they didn't matter, but the truth was, she'd gotten in way over her head and she knew it. She knew she was only sixteen. But her siblings? They'd all been given much more freedom at that age than she ever had. Maybe it came with being the baby of the family; she didn't know. But she'd tried to go at it alone, and this had happened. So much for proving herself.
"You got there in time," Mom said to Dad, placing herself in the conversation. "All of us need backup sometimes. And it is time Helena was given more responsibility."
"And she'll get it, when she knows that facing twelve armed men by herself is not something she's ready for!"
Mom put her hand on Dad's arm, and Helena saw a fraction of the tension leave his body. Not all of it, but some.
Helena looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes. "I'm sorry."
"We'll discuss this tomorrow," Mom said. She patted Dad's arm. "You need to get to bed. You've gotten three hours of sleep in the past two days."
"Selina—"
"I'm not arguing with you."
Dad nodded and left towards the showers.
Helena turned to go upstairs. Dad hadn't even looked at her before she left, and somehow that hurt.
"Wait."
Helena stopped and turned at her mother's voice.
"Your father's right, Helena."
Helena groaned. "Mom—"
"Don't "Mom" me," she said. She took Helena by the shoulders, and Helena saw something in her eyes that she hadn't before. Fear. Her mother had been scared. Mom never let anyone see when she was scared. Somehow this was worse than Dad's anger.
"That was too close of a call. You're not ready for that yet."
"But Mom, Dad's just—"
"Don't you dare call your father overprotective, not when he's letting you go out like this in the first place. Normal parents don't."
"No one ever accused us of being normal."
Her mother's face softened. "No." She hesitated a moment and then pulled Helena into her arms. "You're worth far too much to us for you to put yourself out there recklessly just to prove something." She said softly against her daughter's hair. "Please, please, be more careful."
Helena felt her eyes water, and she swallowed before replying. "I will. Just remember I feel the same way about you and Dad, deal?"
"Deal."
Helena awoke to low voices. She blinked, trying to make out the words, but she was uncomfortable. It took her a second to clear her head and realize that her hands had been tied behind her back.
"You said she wanted your help breaking into the lab? Do you know why?"
"Yeah. It sounded crazy. She said she wanted some glowing purple stone, whatever that is."
A small grunt escaped Helena involuntarily as she tried to wiggle out of her bonds. She heard footsteps and a moment later Selina was standing over her.
"She's up."
The other face that peered over her was just as familiar.
"Hey, what is this?" Helena struggled and sat up. "Why'd you bring him here?"
"What do you want at Wayne Labs?"
"I heard you talking," Helena said. "You know what I want."
Bruce glanced at Selina.
"I know you have it," Helena said. "It's in your files."
"That's what you where doing yesterday," Bruce said with understanding. "You were hacking into my computer system."
"I promise I don't mean you any harm," Helena said. "This has nothing to do with you or…the mob…or whatever current nutjob has got Gotham under his thumb right now. I just need that stone."
"Is someone after you?"
"No."
"Is someone else after the stone?"
Helena sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, pulling together the story she'd planned. She'd had to make it specifically for them, a plight they'd be willing to help her with. "I can't disclose my employer," she said. "But I can tell you that he needs the stone for a good reason—to keep it from someone else who would use it. And not for good."
"Who's after it?" Bruce asked.
"Some scientist," Helena baited. "Weird name, literally. Strange."
Bruce and Selina looked at each other.
"And what does your employer plan to do with it?" Bruce asked.
"I don't know, I was just hired to get it out of Gotham. But I trust him. He's a good man."
Selina scoffed. "Why did he send you?" she asked.
"Despite what it may look like at the moment, I'm normally pretty good with this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I had an…incident." She glanced at Selina. "I lost most of my equipment, and I have no contact with my employer." She looked back at Bruce. "We're not criminals. I could have gone for help for any one of the crooks for hire here. But I wanted someone with a conscience."
"So you went to Selina?" Bruce glanced at her with a look in his eye that Helena couldn't quite interpret. It was somewhere between pride and satisfaction—maybe the pleasure of a confirmed guess.
Selina rolled her eyes. "Thanks, B."
"He didn't mean it that way," Helena said, and then wished she hadn't when both of them looked at her as if she was intruding. "Well, didn't you?"
Bruce stared at her a moment and then looked to Selina. "I think we should help her."
"Your funeral," Selina mumbled. "Shouldn't we at least—I don't know—tell Alfred?"
"That's something I don't hear from you every day."
"Yeah, well, this whole situation strikes me as fishy, and believe or not, I think Alfred would agree with me."
"Who's Alfred?" Helena said innocently.
"His grumpy British butler."
"Oh." Helen nodded in understanding, as if the man in question hadn't been her surrogate grandfather for the past twenty years.
Selina leaned behind Helena to reach her wrists.
"I should have been suspicious of the tea," Helena said as Selina untied her. Helena could have gotten out of them if she'd really tried, but she didn't think her life was in any mortal danger.
"Yeah, you should have. I could have killed you." Selina's tone of voice made it clear she thought Helena was an idiot.
"I just wasn't expecting you…" Helena shook her head. "Never mind." She cursed her lapse of foresight. Who was she to these people? No one. A complete stranger. She shouldn't have expected them to treat her as anything less (or more) than a threat. It gave her an unexpected pain, even though she thought she had hardened herself against it. They were everything to her. And at the moment, she was nothing to them.
"The car's out front," Bruce said as the three of them exited the apartment. "By the way." He opened the door of the car and looked at Helena. "I never got your name."
"It's Bertinelli," Helena said.
"No, it's not."
Helena shrugged. "It's all you're going to get."
"Fair enough." He climbed in the front seat and started the car.
Surprised he didn't press her for more, Helena settled in the back of the car and adjusted the seatbelt. It wasn't the batmobile, but it was a pretty nice car anyway.
"I can't believe you drove this car here," Selina grumbled to Bruce. "In broad daylight."
"It's stealthy."
"It's nice."
"Thank you."
"That's not what I meant."
In the rearview mirror, Helena could see the corners of his mouth turn up into an almost-smile. "I know."
The rest of the ride was silent, and Helena wondered if it was because she was there, or if they were always this…non-communicative. Of course, neither of her parents were known for being particularly chatty, but their silences were generally comfortable ones. This silence was just this side of awkward, perhaps best described as simply "stiff."
Luckily, she knew the way home. Which meant she only had—she glanced at the clock on the dashboard—twelve minutes of this left.
Well, it was only the second most uncomfortable ride home she'd ever had.
(That night they'd had to pick her up from a friend's sleepover because she'd started a fistfight over some girl insulting Nightwing—how could anyone dislike Nightwing?—was definitively the worst. She supposed that even in Gotham, it was the first time the cops had ever been called on a party consisting solely of a bunch of rowdy thirteen-year-old girls. But Dick had taken her out for ice cream the next day, so she couldn't complain too much.)