Barbara Gordon had known from the moment she cut a desperate deal with Punchline that it wouldn't last. In the world of the undead, trust was a currency that had been devalued to the point of extinction. It was a cold reality she had integrated into her mind.
Crazy women like Punchline never truly honored agreements, they used them as a countdown to a more profitable betrayal.
Barbara had spent years in the shadows of Gotham learning how to read the cadence of a lunatic's whim, from the likes of the Joker, Ivy, the pig, mad hatter, and, funny enough, given her current company, Harley Quinn. And Punchline was not so different from them all, she was as predictable as a ticking bomb.
She had seen the way the woman looked at her when she caught them. Barbara had anticipated the inevitable double-cross, setting her own traps.
When Punchline finally made her move, her eyes gleaming with the prospect of selling Batgirl to the highest bidder, Barbara ended it the only way it ever could have ended.
Quickly and Permanently.
And she made sure it hurt. After all the problems the woman had given them both before and after the vampire thing, Barbara had a lot of anger towards the jester wannabe.
After killing her, they continued making their way towards their original destination.
They didn't stop to look back at the carnage they had left, killing Punchline, who had been the head of the underground vampires.
Barbara, Harley, and their strike group reached the designated rooftop, the first phase of her contingency plan. Across the city, repurposed signal towers flared to life one by one. The Bat-signals cut through the thick, smog-choked sky, not just one, but dozens of them, scattered across Blüdhaven like a luminous spider's web, and like obvious, the flies came flying in just seconds after, it was also the call that it was time to fight back.
The resistance answered quickly, as if they had been waiting for this day.
From the crumbling tenements and the hidden sewer bunkers, the remnants of humanity rose up, emboldened by the sight of the symbol they once believed in, the signal that once was a symbol of fear to criminals everywhere.
Everything after that had been a blur of movement and violence. They fought through streets that had been turned into literal slaughterhouses, pushing toward Nightwing's central building while the city burned in the background.
It was all chaotic, brutal, and physically and mentally draining… but it was still within her calculations. She had mapped the routes, estimated the response times of the vampire elites, and accounted for the attrition of her own forces.
Barely.
Then reality tore open like wet paper, and all the "calculation" she had done went up in smoke.
"Of course," Barbara muttered, shielding her eyes as the emerald-green rift spilled its contents into the street.
Out of it came the Australia group, courtesy of John motherfucking Constantine.
She'd buried him. She'd watched the dirt settle over his cold, still body and felt the hollow ache of losing one of the few people who could have been of use to save the world.
Apparently, the bastard had decided that death was merely a suggestion, as expected of John. He was a ghost now, a shimmering, translucent figure looking, as Mary Marvel and Supergirl followed him through the rift.
Any gratitude Barbara might have felt for the reinforcements died instantly when she saw Supergirl's pale face and trembling hands. The girl was still powerless. Worse, two vampire Martians had dropped in right behind them.
Her jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
As if she didn't already have enough trouble at the moment.
This wasn't in the plan. None of this was in the plan. Constantine's "back-up plan" for his own demise had brought a new set of problems to her doorstep, she felt like getting her hands on the man and killing him again.
And as if the universe itself had decided she hadn't suffered enough, the sky seemed to come down as two beings landed in the middle of everything.
Superman. Shazam.
They descended like the gods they were, their capes snapping in the wind like the wings. Barbara felt the frown settle on her face.
She had taken so many steps to ensure Nightwing's heavy hitters were elsewhere. Superman was supposed to be pinned down by the crisis in Smallville, distracted by the "Human Farms" uprising. Shazam was supposed to be delayed by the magical decoys she'd spent weeks preparing.
Apparently, fate had other ideas, and they were all blood-soaked. Her hope that Clark was too occupied to notice her move had been a desperate gamble, and it had failed.
Her eyes flicked across the battlefield, frantically cataloging damage, losses, and whether the plan could really be salvaged. When she spotted Erza and Vandalieu in the distance, her stomach tightened.
She didn't trust those foreigners. Now that her plan was falling apart, a dark part of her wondered if they had somehow been the reason for it. Everything seemed to have been going well until they showed up.
But she didn't have time for paranoia. Because the moment she began thinking about how they could possibly deal with these two god like beings, the ground beneath them simply stopped holding up as it caved in.
The earth collapsed in.
Both Superman and Shazam were taken by surprise and slammed to their knees, the impact cracking the reinforced concrete like eggshells. Barbara froze.
And then something fell from the sky.
A white streak.
It hit Superman head-on. The sound was a dull, heavy thud that Barbara felt in the marrow of her bones as the Man of Steel's skull was driven into the dirt.
In that same heartbeat, a flash of silver steel tore across Shazam's chest. The Champion of Magic let out a grunt of pain, a jagged red line appearing across his invulnerable skin as he retreated in a blur of golden lightning to create distance.
The attacker stood between them, steady and calm.
A white mask. A katana and a mace in his other hand.
Barbara narrowed her eyes in the mace. She recognized it, it was Hawkgirl's mace, but it was different, it had what looked like kryptonite melted atop it.
The man flicked the blood clean from the blade with a sharp motion, his eyes already tracking his next move. He was moving too fast for the human eye to process, a ghost of silver and white.
He rushed the Champion of Magic, forcing Shazam to defend against a flurry of strikes, before spinning just in time to raise his blade. The metal sparked and shrieked as it blocked a twin beam of heat vision from a bleeding, furious Superman. The vampire Man of Steel growled, his eyes glowing like dying stars, but the masked man didn't give an inch.
"You," Clark growled out.
Everything happened in a matter of seconds.
Barbara realized she hadn't breathed. A chance. She didn't waste the gift. This was the opening she shouldn't have had, a miracle in a white mask.
"Move," she snapped to Harley, her voice like a whip.
She didn't know who the man in the mask was, or why he was fighting for them, but she wasn't going to let his intervention go to waste. They vanished into the chaos of the shifting battlefield while gods fought behind them.
Nightwing's building loomed ahead. He was waiting. Of course, he was. He wouldn't have tried to stop her at the door, he wanted her here after all.
Dick didn't bother hiding when they breached the upper floor. He stood by the window, his back to them, watching his city tear itself apart with the detached air. The room was deathly quiet, the chaos outside muffled by the thick, reinforced glass.
"Barbara," he said softly, his voice echoing in the hollow space. He smiled as he turned, looking as handsome as she remembered him. "It's good to see you."
She said nothing, her hand tightening on the grip of her weapon, her teeth gritted so hard her jaw ached.
"I missed you."
She backed away as he began to approach, his stride easy and confident. He stopped, let out a soft chuckle at her defensive posture, and then he was gone. In a blink, faster than her eyes could follow, he was behind her.
Barbara's body went rigid. His fingers caught a stray strand of her red hair, pulling it gently, his breath warm and smelling faintly of copper against her ear.
"I've waited a very long time to see you again, Barbara."
She shoved him away hard, her training kicking in to create the necessary distance. She didn't care about his speed.
"I had to kill an awful lot of your kind to get here," she said, her voice like ice.
He hummed, pacing a slow circle around her like a predator inspecting a prize. "Did you come here to kill me, then? "
"No. I came to stop you. To end this nightmare you've forced on the world."
He paused, taking a casual sip from a crystal cup. The liquid inside was a dark, viscous crimson. Blood. He savored it for a moment before looking back at her.
"Make it make sense," Barbara demanded, her voice cracking with the weight of her grief and anger. "How could you do all this? You were the one Bruce trusted most. You were the heart of the family."
"How could I not?" he replied calmly, as if explaining a simple math problem. "We always surround ourselves with people who decide what's right and wrong for everyone else. We enforce our will with strength and call it justice. Tell me, Barbara, how am I any different from Superman? From Bruce? I just stopped pretending that we weren't the ones in charge. I chose to lead, rather than wait for the next disaster to strike."
Her chest tightened.
"Perhaps I've been a bit aggressive about my takeover," he admitted, his eyes softening as he looked at her, just enough to make it hurt, then his eyes hardened. "But from the beginning, I believed in this, even if I didn't have the courage to say it, that's why we needed you, Barbara. Your conscience. Your compassion. think of how many people would have still been alive… if you had only joined me at the start."
Barbara found herself speechless, the sheer arrogance of his gaslighting hitting her like a physical blow. He was trying to shift the weight of a genocide onto her shoulders.
"Don't listen to him, Red!" Harley shouted from the doorway, her mallet ready. "It's dead guy mind tricks! He's just trying to rot your brain with that high-school philosophy bullshit!"
"I wanted you to help me find a way for us to coexist, Barbara," Dick said, his voice dropping to a whisper that felt like a caress.
Wanted?.
His eyes suddenly flared a brilliant, predatory red. The mask of the "gentle king" slipped, revealing the monster beneath.
"But recent events have made me change my mind. I've realized that I've been a bit too nice in my approach. Well, not any more."
A series of massive explosions rocked the building, the shockwaves shattering several of the smaller window panes.
"What did you do?" Barbara asked, a cold dread pooling in her stomach.
Dick smiled, and it was a jagged, dark thing.
"After our recent losses, I decided to raise the stakes. The Justice League vault has so many interesting toys that were just gathering dust. I thought it was time for a field test."
Barbara rushed to the window. Below, a massive suit of armor, crackling with lightning around it, was tearing through the fleeing resistance fighters like they were made of paper.
"You should recognize," Dick added pleasantly, standing right beside her, as he put his hands on her shoulder. "After all, you helped Bruce design the prototypes. It's poetic, don't you think?"
She did recognize it. But it was just a prototype at the time, and no use for it came up, so it was left long ago, but how, it needs a....they should be all dead, unless....she froze.
Barbara turned back to him, her fury finally burning through the shock. She understood now.
"You really have become a monster," she growled out at him before charging at him as he laughed.
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